_Space_Secret

I am sending this report by special courier; I am personally unable to deliver it, because I wish to be on hand to forestall any possible repercussions which might yet arise from the charges made by Dr. John Lassiter, of the Rand Corporation, that the original video tapes taken by the successful American moon rocket yesterday had been stolen during the night and a substitute put in their place.

- As you know, the successful moon shot was made with a rocket that carried an electronic camera, operating with photoelectric cells which transmitted pictures onto electronically sensitized tape. The rocket made the run to the moon and swung around, photographing the far side which had never been seen from earth. Then continuing on around, executing a vast figure eight, the rocket shot back toward earth, circled it and finally made a successful reentry into the Pacific Ocean.

Although it was anticipated that the far side of the moon was in no way different from the near side, the prestige of being the first to have taken close-up pictures of it was enormous. And quite naturally the Air Force made every effort, once the nose cone was recovered, to keep the video tapes secret. They were rushed by special jet to the research and development building in Santa Monica known

as Rand Corporation. There they were processed by Dr. Lassiter.

After the tapes were processed, apparently Lassiter had viewed them privately (a breach of security). What he saw caused him to send urgent summonses to the top echelons of the Air Force and Rand Corporation. I was able, because of my position at Rand, to be among the four or five who were permitted to view the second showing.

John Lassiter, Ph.D., a theoretical physicist, topflight mathematician and electronic expert, is in his early forties, tall, rather thin, with penetrating eyes. He is a standout, intellectually, in a building full of geniuses. Rand Corporation, the Air Force's research and development center in Santa Monica, consists of about eight hundred brilliant people: scientists, economists, mathematicians, physicists, cybernetics and electronic experts and the like. Also, they have a list of another two hundred and fifty consultants on the outside on whom they draw from time to time for expert advice.

For the record: The business of Rand Corporation is that of evaluating any given idea and projecting its inherent possibilities into the future. They have come very close on a great many occasions. For example: Working from known data concerning the U.S.S.R.'s rocket potential, they accurately forecast the first Sputnik—an event of some importance, you will agree.

We assembled in the viewing room in the Rand building, with Air Force police outside the door and scattered about throughout the entire building and grounds. Security was complete.

Before he showed the tapes, Lassiter made an impromptu speech which I consider well worth repeating:

"Gentlemen," he said quietly, "history has always interested me. Not the history of the textbooks but the history of legends, of primitive peoples; the stories handed down through the millenniums. And among these, without fail, in any civilization, we come across a strangely similar belief—a legend of gods who descended from the sky to walk the earth like men."

He held up a hand, ticking off on his fingers as he talked. "On the American continent we have the Mayans, the Aztecs, with their beliefs that bearded white gods would once more come back—gods who taught them their science, their mathematics, how to smelt ore, cut rocks, gods who came from the sky. And there are the Polynesians, surrounded by the vast Pacific, who worship the redheaded bearded white god who landed on Easter Island—the 'Eye to Heaven,' as they call it. Everywhere throughout the world primitive men lifted their eyes to the skies for salvation, longing for the return of those kindly, brilliant far-travelers whose science so far outstripped their own."

He paused. "The pattern continues down to our time. Only now it appears to be one of watching—and waiting. But I won't bore you with flying saucers or Fortian proofs of visitors from other worlds. We have here"—he touched the kinescope—"our own proof; proof that our planetary system teems with life, with science that is to our atomic piles what they are to bonfires; proof that we are not alone, not lost in the immensity of the infinite universe. We are not alone—and here's the proof in living color"—he became suddenly wry—"as they say on ail the networks."

He switched on the kinescope.

Instantly the screen came alive, showing the brilliant blue-black velvet of outer space, the stars, glowing in colors seen only outside the earth's atmosphere: greens, yellows, fiery reds, icy blues, burning steadily without a flicker. The men in the room gasped. The rocket was approaching the moon, closer and closer, the chilling whites and dead blacks looming closer and clearer.

"Now," Lassiter whispered. "Now you'll see. It's going to the far side—the side never before seen by man."

The scene on the screen moved along. Formidable mountains; sheer, fantastic, slender needle spires, defying even the faint gravity of the moon. Immense pits, filled with the rubble of ancient disasters. More pits, more mountains, slashing crazy patterns of eye-hurting light and utter black of shadow without depth—and slowly, slowly, the ground moved under the rocket until, visible faintly, the swollen, greenish-blue rim of earth appeared off in space. The rocket began leaving the moon and approaching the earth again. The tape came to an end. The lights came up. We turned as one and stared at Lassiter.

He was seated, motionless, eyes unblinking, only his large, sensitive hands tightly clenched. He stared at the screen.

"It's beautiful," I said, "but no more so than we'd expected. Other than the prestige of having been first— well, really, Lassiter, the far side is no different from the side we've seen since the beginning of time."

"It's not the same!" He stood up, and his voice was a terrible broken shout in the soundproof room. "That's not the tapé I saw last night!"

There was an immediate stir in the room, and some of the Air Force people looked alarmed.

"Listen to me! Please!" He stood up, his face gray, his eyes stricken, like a man who has seen glory suddenly leave him forever. "Listen—"

We quieted. Already I heard one of the Air Force officers muttering something about "Crazy as a hoot owl—"

"Last night," Lassiter began, pointing to the screen, "last night on that screen—" His voice trembled slightly, as though in despair at ever being able to convey what he'd seen. "How can I begin to explain what I saw?" he whispered. We sat tensely, watching, listening. "How can I tell of the buildings there; the colors; the smoothly flowing lines of architecture, slim, airy, yet full of strength? Serene, mature. Yes, that's it—mature. Water, trees, parks. And the spaceships."

He paused, and when he repeated it, it was more a groan than a phrase. "The spaceships. One of them was taking off. Rising straight up, gently, swiftly, like a huge iridescent bubble. Light, incomparably lovely—" His voice was suddenly subdued. "They have a source of power so far beyond us. So far beyond us—"

An Air Force man came to his feet. "Are you telling us that someone has had access to this room during the night and switched tapes on us?"

Lassiter turned and looked at him, his eyes peculiarly inward-looking. "Yes," he said.

"And the . . . the original tapes showed a ... a civilization on the other side of the moon?" There was frank disbelief in the officer's voice.

"A civilization compared to which we're still savages crouching over a fire in a cave," he said.

The room was a hubbub of noise. I stood up and shouted for silence. When I got it, I looked at Lassiter. "Isn't the manufacture of that electronic tape a Rand Corporation top-secret process?"

He nodded. His mind was obviously far away.

"Who could possibly duplicate that process, then use the tape to take these obviously authentic shots of the moon approach, steal the original and substitute the duplicates—and all in one night?"

There was a murmur in the room, subdued laughter even.

Lassiter looked at me, and suddenly his eyes became keen, blazing with that truly great intelligence of his. "The same ones who are living on the other side of our moon."

There was a sudden silence in the room.

His glance swept us. "They're here—in this building. They switched the tapes. I repeat: The tapes you saw just now are not the ones I saw last night. And yet this substitute is authentic. // shows an actual moon-rocket approach"

"Whom do you suspect—Martians?" I said gently, giving the others in the room a significant look. They looked back, nodding slightly. One of the officers scribbled a hasty note and went to the door.

"Call them Martians if you wish," Lassiter said softly. "Those ancient ones who visited here so many millenniums ago, who out of pity or kindness—or maturity—taught the savages they found here the rudiments of civilization. Those far-travelers who still watch—and wait."

"You can't be serious, Lassiter," one of the Rand men said unhappily. "Even if there were such space people, why would they try to keep us in ignorance?"

"Because we're still savages!" he shouted. "Clever, murderous children, developing our brains, our skills, but never our emotions. How could they permit us to join them, the society of other worlds, until we achieve adulthood—genuine maturity? That's why they switched these films—so we couldn't really know"

He said more. Much more. He pointed out the consistent pattern of failures that had harassed man's burgeoning space hopes. Failures he now understood to be deliberate stumbling blocks placed in mankind's path as it clawed—prematurely—for the stars.

An altogether remarkable synthesis.

After exhaustive chemical analysis of the tape, it was proved to be of the same composition as stock still on the lab's shelves, which of necessity ruled out its being a substitute. After a few more reruns of the tape, the Air Force announced itself as well pleased with the brilliant success of the moon shot.

Lassiter, it was decided, had suffered a mental collapse because of overwork and the disappointment at discovering that the other side of the moon was no different from the side the earth had always seen. He is, as of this writing, undergoing a series of psychiatric examinations which ought to disclose (bat in all likelihood won't) that he is more sane than most of mankind. He is a remarkable individual, and I suggest that he be placed on the list of those to be watched most closely in the future.

Also, I recommend that steps be taken hereafter to intercept all camera-bearing rockets from earth while in flight and prepared films or tapes substituted, thus avoiding another untoward incident such as developed here.

For the archives: Enclosed, herewith, is the original video tape which the U.S. moon rocket took of our lunar base. Though I've made the journey from earth to moon and back innumerable times, I found Lassiter's description of this tape strangely moving. Especially his remark concerning the rather good shot of my own ship rising from the moon as I left with the substitute tape last night. He is right; it does indeed resemble an iridescent bubble.

among the astronauts was keen to be the first to make the deep-space flight around the moon and back.

Vehicle, as you know, was the Saturn C-l, with high-energy propellant second stage and steerable Centaur last stage. The capsule was a modified three-man re-entry vehicle command module, with the extra space taken up by an over-size stop-and-start solid-fuel rocket engine. All checked out perfectly during the forty-eight hour countdown. During the final countdown, when Davenport was being strapped into the contour chair in the capsule, he showed no symptoms of undue strain. He completed his check-off list with calm precision.

Launching went according to schedule and the Saturn lifted off smoothly. The shot was programmed to make a high-speed run to the moon—something under thirty-four hours. Synergic ascent was to the southeast, out over the so-called Capetown Anomaly, the known gap in the V.A. radiation belt. As the capsule approached the moon at high speed, it would reverse itself, retro-rockets fired to slow it enough to enable it to slip into a tight orbit about the moon. As it began its transit of the far side, it would release a brilliant sodium-vapor flare visible on earth. Transit of far side to take about fifty-one minutes. As it again came into earth view, it was to release a second flare, after which full thrust would be applied by the solid-fuel engine and the capsule would begin its sixty-hour journey back to earth and re-entry.

All stages functioned as planned; signals came in loud and clear, including those checking the vital life-support system of the capsule. Every tracking station on earth followed it; the powerful radio-telescope at Sugar Grove locked on the capsule's special signal which would only cease for the fifty-one minutes during which the capsule would be on the far side of the moon.

Exactly as programmed, thirty-four hours, fourteen minutes after all-burnt, the brilliant flare was seen on earth, and Davenport's calm voice, delayed two seconds by distance, announced he was beginning transit of the far side of the moon, relaying technical information about TV cameras, electronic image-storers, etc. His voice faded and was silent for forty-nine minutes, twenty seconds, and then he came on again, still calm, loud and clear: "I have earth in sight. Firing flare." And the brilliant pinpoint of light was clearly visible in all telescopes.

"Full thrust." His voice came across cislunar space. "Hello, you blue, beautiful old—" And at that instant his voice cut off. Simultaneously, all life-support system telemetering data ceased sending. His signal vanished from both the powerful Sugar Grove telescope and the Jodrell Bank receiver in England. Every device aboard the big capsule which had been sending smoothly, efficiently, stopped abruptly.

Every effort to contact the capsule failed. Various emergency devices were triggered, including additional powerful flares stored in the capsule's skin. No results. The thought of the million-to-one accident—meteor collision—was uppermost in all minds. It would take a total and instantaneous disintegration of the capsule to destroy every emergency sender built into it.

All tracking stations were kept on the alert. Until the sixty hours planned for the return journey were over, there was no thought of giving up.

And suddenly, five hours and fifty-four minutes after the capsule's disappearance, it began sending loud and clear; its pip was once again picked up by the Sugar

Grove telescope, and Davenport's voice finished the sentence which had abruptly been cut off nearly six hours ago: "Hello, you blue, beautiful old earth; here I come."

The tapes clicked over smoothly, efficiently; the instruments recording perfectly, every one of them taking up where they'd left off five hours and fifty-four minutes earlier.

Questions were immediately put to Davenport—and it was then the puzzle deepened. He insisted there'd been no interruption whatsoever, that the return flight was exactly on schedule. He expressed astonishment when told he'd disappeared completely for nearly six hours. He could not explain the disappearance of the capsule from all tracking stations or what had occurred during those lost six hours when his own voice had been silent.

Approaching earth sixty hours later, Davenport quietly announced he was making the delicately precise maneuvers for slipping into the re-entry corridor, and exactly as programmed, the big capsule was seen drifting down well within the impact area in the South Atlantic.

Davenport and the capsule were snatched from the ocean by 'copter, deposited aboard a carrier, from which they were flown by special jet to Patrick AFB.

Again Davenport insisted that at no time had he ceased sending, nor had he missed any contact from Earth. He had slept some hours—but long after the mysterious disappearance had been reported. The instruments and tapes aboard the capsule corroborated Davenport's firm denial that anything had gone wrong. They all showed uninterrupted identical data: speeds, times, orientation in space, a continuous functioning of the UHF tracking signal—no break whatsoever in any of the life-support systems.

A capsule, moving at speed, does not suddenly cease sending and disappear from every tracking station on earth and just as suddenly reappear—all unknown to its occupant—without good and sound reason. A persistent and patient survey of all the telemetered data finally disclosed that the capsule had undergone an intense "storm" of highly-charged subatomic particles—of what sort, unknown. A storm of this magnitude must have existed as a long band stretching between the moon and earth.

Furthermore, the capsule had apparently drifted within this enormous ribbon of high-intensity magnetic forces for the exact length of time the capsule had disappeared from the tracking scopes, dropping out of it six hours later.

It was thought that radar beams and radio signals must have simply been "bent" around this field and, instead of bouncing back to disclose a blip, would have gone on uninterrupted, thereby causing the observers to believe that the capsule was not there.

A field of this intensity would also, of course, cause instantaneous stoppage of all electrical instruments—including that most sensitive electrical instrument of all, Davenport's brain.

This somewhat tenuous theory is now the officially accepted explanation of the dramatic disappearance and reappearance of America's first successful manned orbit of the moon.

However, it was an alert film technician, Harry Wyckoff, who discovered the curious discrepancy which led to my being called into the case. As you know, within the manned capsule, and focused so as to cover the entire capsule interior, there is a spring-operated, high-speed microminiature camera, geared to take films at certain intervals in order to record the various body positions the astronaut might assume under zero gravity conditions.

In developing this film, Wyckoff noted what appeared to be a discontinuity in the series of tracks which were placed on the edges of the film as correlating data to be used in conjunction with other instrument readings. These tracks, instead of continuing in even series, terminated with one set of co-ordinates and abruptly started with another, much later, series.

He ran the tiny film through a magnifier and immediately discovered that there had been a break in the film, a break which had been spliced so expertly as to be unnoticeable to the casual inspection.

Wyckoff ran the film at an exceedingly slow speed and discovered that four of the tiny frames showed not the bulky figure of Davenport floating in space but, rather, an empty capsule interior. Four frames, just before the splice, which seemed to indicate that for at least a short time Davenport had been absent from the space capsule.

Obviously this was impossible. A man encased in bulky spacesuit, dependent for his very life on the umbilical cords tying him to his life-support system—such a man does not disengage those cords, breach his sealed hatch and crawl out of a capsule moving through a hard vacuum at speeds of many thousands of miles an hour. And then, after all that, crawl back in, resealing his hatch—a job which must be done by techs from outside—and survive. No, no.

The only solution appeared the obvious one—there'd been a mix-up. A double exposure, either during camera-loading or after the camera had been off-loaded. But both jobs had been done by Wyckoff. That film had been whole and unspliced prior to blast-off. It looked very much as if someone had edited that film and missed those last four frames. But how? And—why? He shrugged it off; the whole shot had been a weirdy. Nevertheless, he did mention it to Colonel Friend, project co-ordinator, a deeply worried man at the moment.

Colonel Friend viewed the film in slow motion, stopping the camera on the four views of the empty capsule interior. Several of the "umbilical cords," wires that led to Davenport's body, were plainly visible, hanging loose, floating in the zero gravity of outer space.

It was then the colonel requested that Davenport be questioned under hypnosis in an attempt to discover what really had occurred, two hundred thousand miles from earth, during those six hours of silence.

Colonel Friend's request was channeled through Rand Corporation, the Air Force's research and development facility at Santa Monica, and through Rand (and your good offices, Jim) I was contacted and asked to perform the deep hypnosis and subsequent questioning of Davenport.

At first glance Captain Paul Davenport didn't appear a promising subject for hypnosis. About five feet ten inches tall, alert green eyes, he moved with the poise of a fine athlete.

He hadn't been told the reason for this hypnosis attempt—only that it was hoped he'd have made some subconscious observations during his six-hour blackout which might reveal themselves under hypnosis; observations which could be of inestimable value to the astronauts to follow.

I was surprised at the ease with which he slipped into a light trance. It seemed to indicate that he'd undergone prior hypnosis, though I'd been told he never had. A person once hypnotized achieves initial trance rather quickly.

Davenport lay back on the couch, concentrating intently on the whirling spiral disk I held before him, and within a few minutes he was in the very deepest trance known as "somnambule." In this state Davenport would actually relive and re-enact any incident in his past at my bidding.

I told Davenport he was back in the space capsule, preparing for final countdown. Immediately he stretched out on the couch in the reclining position he assumed within the capsule. In a conversational tone I then read the long list of items to be checked off by an astronaut about to ride a spaceship into deep space.

And quickly, eyes blank and indrawn, Davenport reached here, there, above him and to the side, making twisting motions, snapping imaginary switches, turning dials, reading instruments off to me, reliving, totally, the last moments prior to launch.

"Fire!"

At the moment of blast-off he sank down into the couch, jaw slack, eyes receding deeper and deeper into his head. He actually flattened under the force of his relived gravity pull of the Saturn's million and a half pounds of thrust. He grimaced, groaning slightly, holding his abdomen.

"What is it, Davenport?"

"Pain. Pressure hurts here." He touched his right abdomen.

Finally, the g-pull eased; he resumed his normal reclining position, eyes flicking from one imaginary instrument to another, speaking coolly, a look of growing elation on his face. Suddenly a wide grin split his face. "A-okay," he murmured. "Booster separated on course, on altitude." He listened to an unheard voice, nodding. "It looks good."

"Captain Davenport—Paul," I said quietly, "what's happening?"

Instantly the elation dropped from his voice, and in the flat tones of the submerged personality he said, "In synergic ascent above the tip of Africa and heading for the hole. Altitude—"

I snapped my finger softly, and he ceased speaking. "This is thirty-five hours later," I told him. "You have transited the far side of the moon; have released the second flare. The earth is coming into view again. What's happening now?"

Again he assumed the alert position, checking his nonexistent instruments. "Full thrust," he said crisply. He peered ahead, and grinned. "Hello, you blue, beautiful old—." He froze, staring into space ahead of him, a surprised look on his face.

"What's happening?" I said quickly.

"Gravity," he murmured. "I—I'm feeling gravity, and there's been an interruption from Sunnyvale monitoring station—" He stared before him, blinked hard, a look of utter disbelief on his face. "No," he said. "No!"

"What do you see, Davenport?" I snapped.

"It's a—a ship. Dead ahead. As though I'm tailing it. And now—" He punched savagely at something in front of him.

"Engine," he gasped. "Burping."

He waited, a look of helplessness on his face. "It's cut out," he muttered, still staring ahead, as though through the capsule window. "The engine's not firing. I'm moving up on it." His eyes bulged. "There's a hatch opening— and—I'm going into it. The spaceship;—I'm inside it!"

He waited, rigid, then slowly his head swiveled to one side. "Don't open that hatch!" He was trying to roar, but it came out a faint, breathless shout. He watched in horror as something—the hatch apparently—was dropped out of the capsule. He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. He suddenly lashed out, slowly, awkwardly, as though retarded by a clumsy spacesuit. "Stay away— My oxygen!"

He stiffened for a moment, as though having difficulty breathing; then slowly he took a tentative breath, then another. Surprised, he breathed deeply. "Air," he said. "There's air on this."

"Where are you, Davenport?" I asked sofdy.

"Big spaceship," he said. "Like a small hangar. Empty? No—those are people?" This last questioningly.

"Describe them," I said sharply.

He shook his head. Squinting his eyes as though peering beyond a brilliant light. He put a hand up to shade his eyes. "Can't see a thing. Blurred." Suddenly he lifted both elbows as though fighting something off. He flailed ineffectively.

I snapped my finger and abruptly he was quiet. 'What's happening, Captain?"

"Taking me out of the capsule—" He stopped, staring, amazement on his face. "We're moving up on another ship—" His voice dropped, became awestruck. "My God! This is a spaceship?" His head moved slowly from side to side, as though surveying a great bulk. "This thing is bigger by far than the Forrestal. It's like a mountain of metal. We're going into it. It's immense. Immense. What sort of power do they use? Why doesn't it register on our trackers? A thing this size, no matter how distant—stop!" He lashed out, slowly, dreamily, like a man moving under water.

He closed his eyes, shuddering slightly. "God! Don't touch me. Don't." He shrank away; then he lashed out, swinging his big fists violently. Gradually he relaxed, arms down.

"What's happening, Paul?"

"They're talking to me. Soothingly. Quietly. One of them—" his face wrinkled in disgust. "He's patting me on the head like I'm a scared dog or something. An infant."

"He's patting you? Then you can see them? Describe them."

He shook his head, his limbs moving slowly. Walking motions. "I can't see them," he mumbled.

"Try, Davenport. Look at them closely. Closely. You can see them perfectly, can't you?"

"No," he whispered, after a moment's intense straining. "No. I can see everything else. This wall. Metal. Warm. And this room—low table, bright lights, like a lab, maybe? Wall with a big chart or graph on it. But not them. I can't see them." He squinted painfully. "Blur. Just a blur."

He thrashed about again, making those same slow-motion fighting actions. He grunted, sweat pouring off his face.

"What's happening, Paul?"

"Taking off my suit. My clothes. Tape. Naked." The perspiration vanished, and suddenly he shivered, teeth clicking. "Man, it's colder than hell now. Naked. Standing alongside—" A puzzled frown on his face, and then the clearance of sudden recognition. "Like a police line-up," he muttered, scowling. "There's a chart or outline hanging on the wall. I'm standing next to it. Light coming through it. Smell of electricity—ozone." He remained rigid, arms at his side. Then, reluctantly, his arms spread out, his fingers apart. He opened his legs. He scowled.

"Some sort of fluoroscope. They're measuring me, taking pictures of my insides."

"Who are they?" I snapped my fingers. "Paul. Listen. I want you to see them. Look right at them. Look at them"

He half sat up, peering as though through blinding lights. "Nothing," he said softly. "Can't see them. Just a blur."

"All right. You're up against a screen. You feel that it's a fluoroscope of some sort—an X-ray machine. Go on."

He shivered again, goose flesh popping out all over his arms. "Counting my ribs," he said. "Toes, fingers, teeth. What is this—hey!"

He went on, describing in great detail what appeared to be a very thorough physical examination. Nothing external, apparently, was left unnoticed. He described the feeling of a viscous, slimy substance which hardened over him. At this point his body assumed a slowly stiffening position.

"What do you feel now, Captain?"

His voice was choking, panicky. "It's like a tight pressure suit," he gasped. "Tight. Tighter. I can't breathe." He went rigid, arms down at his sides, fingers extended, toes stretched out, chin back. He remained that way for long seconds, and then he relaxed, took a deep breath.

"Paul? What's happening?"

"Ah, feels good. Thought I'd had it." He winced slightly. "Peeling it off. I'll be—" He got up on an elbow and stared. "It's me—a mold of me. Split in half. It looks like ... a mummy case. Soft material, a little like foam rubber. A mold of my body." His muscles bulged again, and he made frantic flailing motions.

"What is it?"

"It's an operating room," he said, and his voice was flat, dead, filled with suppressed terror. "They're putting me on a table. No!" He half rose, mouth wide open in a scream.

I snapped my finger, and he subsided, looking up at the ceiling, eyes wide, staring.

"Tell me, Paul. What's happening now?"

"Something—They're putting something on my temples. Wires. Electricity again."

I watched him intently. Suddenly on each side of his head the hairs stood straight out; the skin over the temples became completely white, bloodless.

He went limp, and his arms lay at his sides, unresisting, palms out, fingers curled slightly. He was apparently in a deep, electrically-induced coma. He breathed slowly, evenly. I took his pulse. It had dropped to nearly a quarter of normal. His temperature was also way down. He remained, unmoving, looking at the ceiling, but I noticed a curious horripilation, a spasmodic shudder of his stomach muscles, and on impulse I opened his shirt.

I stared. A fine red line ran from his breastbone down to his lower abdomen. Even as I watched, the vivid red streak faded until it became a thin white scar line that might have been only a creased imprint from the couch. And in a moment even that vanished; nothing remained but matted hair.

Gradually his pulse and heartbeat returned to normal. He began breathing heavily again. Eventually, he opened his eyes, and I saw the pupils expand, then begin a slow circling movement, exactly as they'd done when I'd been putting him in trance.

"Davenport," I said sharply. "Quick! What's happening?"

"They are telling me—" his voice seemed dragged from deep within. "When I return to flight, I will not remember. I—will—not—remember." He nodded agreement.

I snapped my finger. He relaxed. "What's going on now?"

He came up on one elbow, then swung off the couch, a look of pleased surprise on his face. "My spacesuit. My clothes. They're trying to dress me. Okay, okay." He made irritable brushing motions. "I can get the damned things on."

He put his hands up over his head and made careful wriggling motions, as though slipping into a tight-fitting suit. He adjusted various clips and snaps and finally reached up and guided something down over his head and onto his shoulders, obviously his helmet. "Careful," and he nodded again. "That's good. That does it."

"Paul?" I said questioningly.

"They're taking me back. There's the capsule."

"Where are you now?"

He craned his head around, slowly, awkwardly, as though fully encased in space gear. "Looks like the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier," he murmured, "if there could be a carrier this big, that is. Gad! It looks like the runway at Patrick. Miles long." He made curious twisting contortions.

"What's going on now, Paul?"

"Back in the capsule," he said, his voice straining as he grunted and adjusted himself. He glanced around. "One thing, they know the manual as well as anyone."

He sucked in a breath and sank down onto the couch, seeming to flatten as he did so. He remained that way for a long moment, his cheeks sunken, eyes receded, and slowly, slowly, his features began to fill out again, bis breathing became regular, and he opened his eyes. Instantly a grin came on his face, and he said, "Hello, you blue, beautiful old earth."

"Paul," I said, "where are you?"

He looked at me, then quickly glanced beyond, as though still staring at a far-distant, but rapidly approaching, earth. "In the can heading for home," he said matter-of-factly. "Sixty hours to re-entry."

"How about the big spaceship?" I said. "The operating room?"

He flicked switches and exarnined dials. "I don't follow you at all, friend," he said impatiently.

Obviously the experience, and it was a valid one, was over. He'd been put into flight once again and all memory of the past six hours obliterated at the conscious level. I snapped my finger. "When I count three, Captain Davenport," I said slowly and distinctly, "you will come back, with no memory of anything you have said here. One, two, three—"

He sat perfectly still, then he said, "All over?" I nodded, and he said, "Funny. I don't remember any of it."

"There's nothing to remember, Captain," I told him.

Afterward I compared notes with Colonel Friend. I asked him if Davenport had undergone a fluoroscopic examination after the space flight. Friend shook his head.

"I'd like a complete gastro-intestinal series," I said. "As soon as possible."

"But why the G.I. series?" he asked. "Has Davenport complained of anything?"

"No, he hasn't," I said. "And that's just the point—he should have."

The series was made. Davenport was given the usual dosage of chemicals which are used to make the internal organs visible to X rays. Under the fluoroscope two very strange things were noted: From breastbone to lower abdomen a long thin line glowed noticeably. Also, in the cecum—the first portion of the large intestine located in the lower right part of the abdomen—the entire area glowed with the same pulsant light.

Davenport's medical records show that he has never had an appendectomy—or surgery of any kind, in fact.

Close interrogation elicited the admission from Davenport that just after his having been selected to take the "big ride" (as he puts the moon shot) he had felt some nasty pains and a slight rigidity of the right lower quadrant of his abdomen. In other words, he'd been exhibiting definite symptoms of appendicitis. He attributed the pains, however, to nervous excitement.

He admitted that the pain was quite bad directly after the rocket lifted; the strain of the heavy g-pull pressing down on his abdomen undoubtedly would have aggravated this condition. But he says that after he'd orbited the moon and come in sight of the earth again, the pain vanished.

An exploratory operation was performed on Davenport in order to ascertain the source of the strange glow within his body cavity, and it was then we discovered that Davenport's appendix had been expertly removed—and apparently quite recently. Fresh pink tissue covers the incised area.

But odder still, there is a long row of regular geometrical figures or designs, triangles, loops, dots and dashes, outlined in pale blue on the cecum, just above where the appendix had been. I would say it is a tattoo in inert, ineradicable ink.

The source of the glow has been unidentified to date, but I feel certain it is the residual effect of some radioactive process used to regenerate tissues, to heal incisions instantaneously.

Some very faint scar tissue did remain inside, however, enough to show beyond doubt that Davenport's abdomen had been opened at one time.

My conclusions are these: Davenport actually underwent the traumatic experience he so vividly relived for me.

By some beings, species unknown (attracted by the flares?), the space capsule was snagged in mid-flight and taken aboard a huge spaceship of some kind, obviously equipped with radar-deflection devices, as well as the powerful subatomic forcefields which completely stopped all instruments (but not the spring-operated camera as they discovered, necessitating editing the film).

This ship, doubtless a scout, then transferred Davenport to an immensely greater "mother" ship, and there Davenport was subjected to a thorough physiological examination, complete to having a mold made of his body.

In the course of internal examination (the opening undoubtedly made with an instrument operating on the principle of the electron scalpel which makes a microscopically thin incision) Davenport's diseased appendix was discovered and removed and the queer "tattoo" placed on the conveniently broad cecum.

He was then closed up and the incision treated by some process which virtually instantaneously regenerated the tissues. Davenport was revived, put into a deep trance, given a post-hypnotic command to forget everything that had occurred since his capture, then placed back into the capsule and put into flight at the precise spot his schedule called for.

His inability to describe his captors seems to have been due to some brilliant emanation that came from them,

not usually mentioned) that an unprecedented pall of radioactive material is orbiting the earth at a considerable height above the atmosphere (1,025 miles, to be exact) as though a thermonuclear device had been detonated, something on the order of five megatons or so.

That and what I know about Von Seigert:

I was awakened one freezing, dark predawn by a continuous but soft knocking on my door. I hesitated. After all, American Embassy officials in Russia have been known to disappear. But after a few moments, I shrugged and padded barefooted to the door,-drawing the latch. Instantly the door flew open, and a short, slim man popped in and shut the door behind him, one finger on his lips for silence. I stared at him, astonished, and then I recognized him. It was Kurt Von Seigert, but not the Von Seigert I'd known when, after the collapse of Germany during World War Two, I'd tried to persuade him to join the other rocket experts who were coming to the West. That Von Seigert was husky, shrewd-eyed, secure in the knowledge that his genius would assure a comfortable living wherever he sold his services. He'd gone to Russia.

But this Von Seigert was shrunken, thin, his face so darkly tanned as to be nearly black. His eyes glowed with the familiar sharp intelligence; there was even the same faint arrogance there. And something else.

"Listen," he said sharply, "only listen. I have no time for arguments. Listen, and remember. I was a fool not to have gone to America—I know that now. But—" he made a typical gesture. I fumbled for cigarettes, lighting them, staring at him. He was even more incredibly sun-tanned in the light of the match.

He stood before me, and even (I know now) with the possibility of imminent death hanging over his head, he couldn't help a faint grin as he said, "Last night I returned from the planet Mars."

I gaped at him, and he nodded seriously. "So now, either one of two things will occur, the first directly dependent upon the failure of the second to happen." He held up two fingers. "A: The Russians will claim possession of the planet Mars by right of exploration and show video tapes, quite excellent ones, and complete—or nearly complete—aerial photographic maps of the entire globe, as well as photos of Lenin I, a nuclear-powered spaceship I personally designed and built—" He waved me off as I grabbed his arm.

"To continue with A" he went on, his voice calm and unhurried, "they will go on to say that Mars is uninhabited, but a fertile, mineral-rich planet which they claim wholly and in toto. And they'll express regret that upon his return from that historic flight one of the members of the four-man expedition—Kurt Von Seigert—became insane and fled from Russia. That his journey through space has caused his complete mental collapse, and he is dangerous, both to himself and others and should be immediately returned to Russia for 'hospitalization'." He paused; his faint grin widened. "Or—" He stopped.

"Or—?" I said, intensely curious, the biting cold forgotten. I knew this man. I knew how desperately his serv-ices.had been wanted by the West, how badly he'd harmed our prestige time and again by his series of brilliant rocket advances made in the name of the dark god communism.

"Or B"—his voice dropped and became regretful— "there will be an explosion on the order of five megatons about one thousand and twenty-five miles above the earth" —he glanced at his watch—"in about four hours from now. In which event the Russians will say absolutely nothing about Mars or the Lenin I—their proof will have been vaporized. And my life will then be worth even less than it is at this moment; they know of what value I can be to the West."

I stared at him. His eyes held mine, keen, unwavering, definitely sane. He took a small plastic pouch from his pocket and opened it. "Here are some photographs in color I managed to salvage," he said. "In the event A happens, you must somehow manage to convey to the United Nations, indeed to all civilized people of good intentions throughout the world, that Russia has no claim on Mars because Mars is inhabited; that it has a civDiza-tion—backward in most respects but flourishing—and that this civilization came from earth nearly seven hundred years ago."

I reached numbly for the little packet of pictures, but he held them away, his face intent, his eyes piercing in his near-black face. "Above all," he said solemnly, "Russia must not be permitted to return to Mars without supervision. It is their intention, using my Lenin I, to destroy those brave, struggling villages that dot that lonely planet. I repeat—Mars is inhabited and by children of Earth. Mars belongs to them by prior right of colonization no matter how accidental it might have been."

"Accidental?" I caught him as he sprang toward the window, peered out, then quickly returned. "What is this, Von Seigert?" He rubbed his eyes, sat down on my bed and began to talk.

The Lenin I, Von Seigert told me, was a nuclear-powered spaceship built in total secrecy far above the Earth. Generating a thrust of some ten-million pounds, continuously—it was designed to operate only in outer space; the exhaust from its engines was highly lethal in an atmosphere. It carried a large payload: besides the four-man crew there were a small two-man hypersonic glider for atmospheric flights, several monoatomic ramjets—scout and survey ships, each equipped with sub-miniaturized TV and audio equipment, as well as wide-angle precision cameras. There were also several tiny robot tanks for geological survey work.

But the Lenin /'s most precious cargo by far was the hundreds of spools of extremely sensitive electronic tapes and fine-grained film—all packed carefully into heavy lead-lined boxes vitally necessary to deflect the damaging impact of the high-energy radiation encountered in space flight.

The pictures these tapes and films were meant to record, of course, would be Russia's sole proof of the success of the expedition. A powerful rocket glider, designed and built by Von Seigert and manned by a crack crew, would be waiting on a launching pad in Russia, waiting to go into orbit alongside the Lenin I upon its successful return from Mars, specifically to take off this precious load of tapes and film for re-entry and landing on Earth.

Operating on an exceedingly tight schedule, the Lenin I had completed the flight to Mars in a little over forty-four days, a bit behind schedule. The intention had not been to land men at all on this flight but merely to map the globe, pick up samples of minerals, etc., by means of the remote-controlled robots and, finally, to return to Earth after two days of orbiting Mars. A very tight schedule made necessary by the steady accretion of ash on the fuel rods in the nuclear engines.

The first results of the aerial survey exceeded their wildest hopes. The planet had an atmosphere, thin but eminendy breathable. While the Lenin I orbited above this atmosphere, they launched their mono-atomic survey ships, unique gold-catalyst ram-jets which operated by recombining "stripped" nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere, thereby gaining thrust and unlimited fuel.

The first few passes showed that Mars was a rich prize indeed, far from the barren, airless planet the astronomers pictured. Near the poles were great belts of trees, forests in all stages of growth, with pleasant streams meandering through broad meadows. Further down the globe were huge rolling prairies, covered with rippling vegetation resembling grain. There were immense areas near the equator that were bare bleak deserts of sandstone and reddish sand. But mainly, the planet was fertile.

On the fourth pass over a vast desert area, one of the ram-jets showed a picture of something that looked too square and regular to be a mere outcropping of rock. The picture was zoomed up, and the men in the Lenin I cried aloud. It was a building, large and square, with curiously familiar towers and flying buttresses about it. And surrounding the building, they observed under extreme magnification, were upright stones, laid out in ordered precision. About the building were walks and meager decorations, also orderly in appearance.

All in all it looked remarkably like a graveyard about a church. A medieval church, long abandoned. Desolate.

It was decided to land at once, using the hypersonic glider. In Mars* reduced gravity it would be possible to return to the Lenin Fs orbit even with the comparatively feeble thrust the small glider possessed. Because he was the smallest, Von Seigert was one of the two chosen to go. The expedition commander, EvekofT, remained on the Lenin I. The men wore spacesuits with direct communication and no switch-offs.

The landing was fast but uneventful. When they approached the great sandstone edifice, sharp and clear in the dry, dry air, Von Seigert gave a gasp of disbelief. There was a single word and a date chiseled above the doorway—in writing he understood. And on each side of the word-—-a frieze depicting an unmistakable animal, the most common creature on Earth.

Inside they paused, staring. The building was a shrine, a shrine covering a crumpled, battered, metallic object, perhaps three hundred feet in diameter, that even then, pitted with ancient rust, disintegrating slowly under what must have been the impact of many hundreds of years of time's slow passage, was obviously a spaceship of incredibly advanced design.

A spaceship.

"What is it?" EvekofTs harsh Russian jarred in Von Seigerfs cars. Calmly, as quickly as he could, Von Seigert told what he was seeing, while his companion recorded it all with a minature TV transistorized camera. And from the Lenin I came the muffled gasps of surprise. It was all going into the tapes, he knew.

But one thing didn't go into the tapes—the crudely lettered words, carved deeply into the rough, red sandstone base which supported the shattered remains of the spaceship. The camera recorded the words on electronic tape but only their image. Von Seigert stood for long moments, puzzling over the inscriptions, reading the archaic language with difficulty, but reading it. To himself.

They walked about the silent, empty shrine, their footfalls causing tiny tinkling sounds as bits of the spaceship fell to the ground under their tread. Outside there were names chiseled on all the many upthrust stone monuments. Names with a familiar ring to Von Seigert, in writing he understood. He looked again at the animals carved above the door and the name chiseled there, and suddenly he shook with silent laughter. Incredible, but it was all in the books. A matter of record for all who chose to delve deeply enough—and put the pieces together.

They stopped, peering about. As far as they could see stretched the barren desert of middle Mars. Nothing moved. Above, the "dazzling sky arched overhead, blue, deep, dark blue, approaching black. But empty. Empty.

He stared once again at that enigmatic building. At that one word, that date and those identical animals. His mind whirled back through the centuries, imagining their fear, their total terror. Those who had survived the crash of that ship within this building, being young, little by little had regained their courage. Perhaps even he—the pilot— perhaps he had survived long enough to give them some of his great knowledge. Perhaps not. In any event they'd survived; they'd build this edifice in memory of their friends, their home—and that animal which had led to their tragedy. Was it possible, after all these centuries, that some of them, their descendants, still survived?

Through his earphones he heard some rapid talk from Evekoff and an inarticulate cry from the navigator still aboard. Then the distinct words: "My god—look! A town! Houses! People!" After that, a harsh word from Evekoff and stillness. Then the order, "Return to the ship."

Evekoff listened carefully to Von Seigert's rapid description of the shrine below, of the spaceship within, and he merely nodded curtly. Von Seigert said nothing about the inscription around the base of the platform supporting the spaceship. When he'd finished talking, Evekoff waited for long moments, staring piercingly at him. Then he said softly, "You understand, comrade, that what you have seen is to go no farther than us four?" And looking into the hard, black eyes, Von Seigert remembered a fact he'd attached no significance to—until now: Evekoff spoke and read and wrote German fluently.

After forty-eight hours of intensive mapping, photographing via camera and TV electronic tape hookup through the survey ships, during which time Von Seigert had no access to the monitors, the Lenin I abandoned her tiny robots to whirl endlessly about Mars, turned her sleek nose toward the sun and began the long inward plunge back to the Earth. And forty-four days later it began its Earth orbit as silently and secretly as it had left, with only the Kremlin aware of its successful flight and the landing on Mars.

But during those forty-four days, snatching the opportunity whenever Evekoff and the others slept, Von Seigert managed to view some of the video tapes which had been kept from him by Evekoff. After viewing those tapes and hearing the open comments of the others concerning those tapes and what they meant to Russia's hopes pertaining to Mars, Von Seigert knew what he had to do.

As the Lenin I orbited the Earth, they were told by rocket base that it would be a given number of hours before the special rocket-glider and crew, poised for final countdown on a launching pad far below, could achieve their orbit and maneuver alongside to take off her precious cargo of heavy lead-lined boxes, each marked now with map co-ordinates.

Evekoff and Von Seigert were ordered to land immediately, using the hypersonic glider. The remaining two crewmen were to assist in the transfer of the cargo and return with the rocket-glider.

And so just before they prepared to leave the huge

Lenin I to drift in silent orbit 1,025 miles above the Earth, while awaiting the arrival of the cargo-glider, Von Seigert quietly made certain adjustments to the nuclear engines, converting them into high-yield thermonuclear bombs—bombs primed to detonate in a given number of hours—if left unchecked.

When the two-man hypersonic glider put down at the great rocket base at Tyuratam near the Aral Sea, the KGB —State Security Agents—were waiting to fly them, via special fast jet, to Moscow. And as they landed at Moscow, Evekoff bluntly informed Von Seigert he was under arrest "for withholding vital information."

"He knew who they were on Mars—and where they came from," Von Seigert told me softly, there in that freezing-cold room in Moscow. "He knew I would not remain silent about what the Kremlin intends to do."

"What do they intend to do?" I asked him, shifting my freezing feet.

"They plan to return to Mars, this time with a load of small atomic bombs," he said. "That's why they want me out of the way, so there'd be no one to tell the world what I'm telling you—Mars is inhabited. I saw them: villages, on the tapes the ram-jets took by video. And on the film. Villages—modest villages by any standards, but still civilization. Narrow crooked streets, cobbled, with overhanging brick and wood-beamed homes. Churches with crosses."

He looked steadily at me. "Do you understand? Churches, surmounted by the crosses of Christianity—on Mars."

I searched his eyes again. Utter sanity there. He looked at me, then slowly drew a photograph from the plastic packet. "This is the door to the shrine of the spaceship."

I reached for it but he held me off, looking intently into my face.

"Listen," he said. "There are many of them, these little medieval towns. Near either pole. All with that same curiously familiar architecture." He laughed reminiscently, then went on. "Under extreme magnification the video showed people walking around, fair, tall people. And relaxed somehow. Unhurried. No mechanization whatsoever. A few pushing handcarts or objects resembling wheelbarrows, so they have the wheel. They had metal, obviously, but no machines. The wheel but no domestic animals. In fact, in all the myriad passes over Mars, under extreme magnification no animals of any kind were observed. Of any kind—not even a rodent." He smiled enigmatically at this.

"But they had a spaceship once," I said.

Again that faint smile. "Agriculture they know. Those forests were obviously being harvested and reforested at the same time. There were canals for bringing down the irrigation waters from the melting polar caps. And yet nothing at all sophisticated mechanically. Why? It was as if a group of people with a certain experience but no real knowledge had been thrown into an environment beyond their capacities—like children."

He cocked his head and looked sharply at me. I stared back, puzzled. "The date on the door above. that shrine reads: Anno Domini 1284—in Middle Low German script."

"But that's impossible," I whispered, shivering, but not from the cold this time. "What people in Germany, what nation on Earth, in 1284 A.D., had spaceships?"

"No people, no nation on Earth," Von Seigert said. "But think. Throughout the ages, even biblical times, the stories, the endless stories, of objects in the skies. Charles Fort records hundreds of them, newspaper clippings, going back for centuries. And think of the people who have vanished without a trace. Ships at sea found deserted, abandoned. Whole races known to have existed but gone. And think of one group in particular. In Germany. A calamity so great that to this day it is still commemorated. A tragic group disappearance in the year 1284 A.D."

I shook my head slowly, watching him closely. "I thought I knew my history," I said, "but that one escapes me."

"You know it, perhaps, from another sort of history book," he said quietly. He looked beyond me to the window, where the sky was turning a bitter gray.

"It was all in the inscription around the base of the smashed spaceship," Von Seigert said. "How he came to their little town in Germany, a tall, curiously dressed stranger, in search of treasure—a treasure he'd come from beyond the sun to seek. And how this stranger had performed a service for the townspeople, erasing a rodent plague that threatened them, only to learn they were unworthy of the treasure they'd possessed all along: their children."

He handed me the photograph, but for an instant I didn't look at it. I couldn't. I stared, fascinated, at Von Seigert.

"The children," he said. "This stranger told them of a wonderful place, beyond the farthest sun, where children were rare and precious—and wanted. The inscription tells how the stranger had an instrument that sang an irresistible song, so they followed him into the mountain. And how the ship had taken off, softly, easily, rising up and beyond the Earth, outward from the sun, and still they had no

His professional eye moved over the figures, his mind racing, trying to place the sculptor and failing. It was of no known period. It might have been done yesterday; it might be millenniums old. Only one thing was certain: no catalogue on earth listed it.

Kyle had found this island by pure chance. He'd taken passage on a decrepit Greek caique that plied the Aegean, nudging slowly and without schedule from island to island. From Lesbos to Chios to Samos, down through the myriad Cyclades, and so on about the fabled sea, touching the old, old lands where the gods had walked like men. The islands where occasionally some treasure, long-buried, came to fight, and if it pleased Kyle's eyes and money obtained it, then he would add it to his small collection. But only rarely did anything please Kyle. Only rarely.

The battered caique's engine had quit in the midst of a small storm which drove them south and west. By the time the storm had cleared, the asthmatic old engine was back in shape, coughing along. There was no radio, but the captain was undisturbed. Who could get lost in the Aegean?

They had been drifting along, a small water bug of a ship lost in the greenish-blue sea, when Kyle had seen the dim purple shadow that was a tiny island in the distance. The binoculars brought the little blob of land closer, and he sucked in his breath. An incredible wall, covering a good quarter of the miniature island, leaped into view: a great horseshoe of masonry that grew out of the sea, curved, embraced several acres of the land, then returned, sinking at last into the sea again where white foam leaped high even as he watched.

He called the captain's attention to it. "There is a littie island over there." And the captain, grinning, had squinted in the direction of Kyle's pointing finger.

"There is a wall on it," Kyle said, and instantly the grin vanished from the captain's face; his head snapped around, and he stared rigidly ahead, away from the island.

"It is nothing," the captain said harshly. "Only a few goatherders live there. It has no name even."

"There is a wall," Kyle had said gently. "Here," handing him the binoculars, "look."

"No." The captain's head didn't move one iota. His eyes remained looking straight ahead. "It is just another ruin. There is no harbor there—it is years since anyone has gone there. You would not like it. No electricity."

"I want to see the wall and what is behind it."

The captain flicked an eye at him. Kyle started. The eye seemed genuinely agitated.

"There is nothing behind it. It is a very old place, and everything is long since gone."

"I want to see the wall," Kyle said quietly.

They'd put him off finally, the little caique pointing its grizzled snout to sea, its engine turning over just enough to keep it under way, its muted throbbing the only sound. They'd rowed him over in a dinghy, and as he approached, he noticed the strangely quiet single street of the village, the lone taverna, the few dories with patched lateen sails, and on the low, worn-down hills, the herds of drifting goats.

Almost he might have believed the captain; that here was an old, tired island, forgotten, out of the mainstream of the brilliant civilization that had flowered in this sea— almost, until he remembered that wall. Walls are built to protect, to keep out or keep in. He meant to see what.

After he'd settled in the primitive little taverna, he'd immediately set out for the wall, surveying it from the low knoll_t surprised again to note how much of this small island it encompassed.

He'd walked all around it, hoping to find a gate or a break in the smooth, unscalable wall that towered up. There had been none. The grounds within sprawled on a sort of peninsula that jutted out to where rock, barnacled, fanged, resisted the restless surf.

And coming back along the great wall, utterly baffled, he'd heard the faint musical sound of water dropping within and peering carefully at the wall had seen the small aperture, no bigger than a walnut, just above his head.

He looked through the aperture and so stood, dazed at so much beauty, staring at the woman and child, unable to tear away, knowing that here at last was the absolute perfection he'd sought throughout the world.

How was it that the catalogues failed to list this master work?

These things were impossibly hard to keep quiet. And yet not a whisper, not a rumor had drifted from this island to the others of what lay within those walls. Here on this remote pinprick of land, so insignificant as to go unnamed, here behind a huge wall which was itself a work of genius, here was this magic mother and child, glowing all unseen.

He stared, throat dry, heart pumping with the fierce exultation of the avid connoisseur who has found something truly great—and unknown. He must have it. He would have it. It wasn't listed; possibly, just possibly, its true worth was unknown. Perhaps the owner of this estate had inherited it, and it remained there in the center of the gently falling water unnoticed, unappreciated.

He reluctantly turned away from the chink in the wall and walked slowly back toward the village, scuffling the deep, pale, immemorial dust. Greece. Cradle of western culture. He thought again of the exquisite perfection of the motfier and child back there. The sculptor of that little group deserved to walk on Olympus. Who was it?

Back in the village he paused before the taverna to take some of the dust off his shoes, thinking again how oddly incurious, for Greeks, these few villagers were.

"Permit me?"

A boy, eyes snapping, popped out of the taverna with a rag in one hand and some primitive shoe blacking in the other and began cleaning Kyle's shoes.

Kyle sat down on a bench and examined the boy. He was about fifteen, wiry and strong, but small for his age. He might have, in an earlier era, been a model for one of Praxiteles' masterpieces: the same perfectly molded head, the tight curls, two ringlets falling over the brow like Pan's snubbed horns, the classic Grecian profile. But, no, a ridged scar ran from the boy's nose to the corner of the upper lip, lifting it ever so slightly, revealing a gHmmer of white teeth.

No, Praxiteles would never have used him for a model, unless, of course, he had a slightly flawed Pan in mind.

"Who owns the large estate beyond the village?" he asked in his excellent Greek. The boy looked up quickly, and it was as if a shutter came down over his dark eyes. He shook his head.

"You must know it," Kyle persisted. "It covers the whole south end of this island. A big wall, very high, all the way to the water."

The boy shook his head stubbornly. "It has always been there."

Kyle smiled at him. "Always is a long time," he said. "Perhaps your father might know?"

"I am alone," the boy said with dignity.

"I'm sorry to hear that." Kyle studied the small expert movements of the boy. "You really don't know the name of the persons who live there?"

The boy muttered a single word.

"Gordon?" Kyle leaned forward. "Did you say 'the Gordons'? Is it an English family that owns that property?" He felt the hope dying within. If an English family owned it, the chances were slim indeed of obtaining that wonderful stone pair.

"They are not English," the boy said.

"I'd like very much to see them."

"There is no way."

"I know there's no way from the island," Kyle said, "but I suppose they must have a dock or some facilities for landing from the sea."

The boy shook his head, keeping his eyes down. Some of the villagers had stopped and now were clustered about him, watching and listening quietly. Kyle knew his Greeks, a happy, boisterous people, intolerably curious sometimes; full of advice, quick to give it.

These people merely stood, unsmiling, watching.

The boy finished and Kyle flipped him a fifty-lepta coin. The boy caught it and smiled, a flawed masterpiece.

"That wall," Kyle said to the spectators, singling out one old man. "I am interested in meeting the people who own that property."

The old man muttered something and walked away.

Kyle mentally kicked himself for the psychological error. In Greece money talks first. "I will pay fifty—one hundred drachmas," he said loudly, "to anyone who will take me in his boat around to the seaward side of the wall."

It was a lot of money, he knew, to a poor people eking out a precarious existence on this rocky island with their goats and scanty gardens. Most of them wouldn't see that much cash in a year's hard work.

A lot of money, but they looked at one another, then turned and without a backward glance they walked away from him. All of them.

Throughout the village he met the same mysterious refusal, as difficult to overcome as that enigmatic wall that embraced the end of the island. They refused even to mention the wall or what it contained, who built it and when. It was as though it didn't exist for them.

At dusk he went back to the taverna, ate Dolmadakis, minced meat, rice, egg and spices—surprisingly delicious —drank retsina, the resinated astringent wine of the peasant, and wondered about the lovely mother and child, standing there behind that great wall with the purple night clothing them. A vast surge of sadness, of longing for the statues, swept over him.

What a rotten break! He'd run into local taboos before. Most of them were the results of petty feuds, grudges going back to antiquity. They were cherished by the peasants, held tight, jealously guarded. What else was there of importance in their small lives?

But this was something entirely different.

He was standing on the outskirts of the darkened village, gazing unhappily out to sea, when he heard a soft scuffling. He turned quickly. A small boy was approaching. It was the shoeshine boy, eyes gleaming in the star-shine, shivering slightly though the night was balmy.

The boy touched his arm. His fingers felt icy. "I—I will take you in my boat," he whispered.

Kyle smiled, relief exploding within him. Of course, he should have thought of the boy. A young fellow alone, without family, could use a hundred drachmas, whatever the taboo.

"Thank you," he said warmly. "When can we leave?"

"Before the ebb tide, an hour before sunrise," the boy said, "only," his teeth were chattering, "I will take you, but I will not come any closer than the outer rocks between the walls. From there you must wait until the ebb tide and walk—and walk—" He gasped, as though choking.

"What are you afraid of?" Kyle said. "I'll take all the responsibility for trespassing, although I don't think—"

The boy clutched his arm. "The others—tonight when you go back to the taverna, you will not tell the others that I am rowing you there?"

"Not if you don't want me to."

"Please do not," he gasped. "They would not like it if they knew—after that I—"

"I understand," Kyle said. "I won't tell anyone."

"An hour before sunrise," the boy whispered. "I will meet you at the wall where it goes into the water to the east."

The stars were still glowing, but faintly, when Kyle met the boy, a dim figure sitting in a small rowboat that bobbed up and down, scraping against the kelp and barnacles that grew from the base of the monolithic wall. He realized suddenly that the boy must have rowed for hours to get the boat this far around the island. It had no sails.

He climbed in and they shoved off, the boy strangely silent. The sea was rough, a chill predawn wind blowing raggedly. The wall loomed up alongside, gigantic in the mist.

"Who built this wall?" he asked, once they were out on the pitching water, heading slowly around the first of a series of jagged, barnacled rocks thrusting wetly above the rapidly ebbing tide.

"The old ones," the boy said. His teeth were chattering. He kept his back steadfastly to the wall, glancing only seaward to measure his progress. "It has always been there."

Always. And yet, studying the long sweep of the wall beginning to emerge in the first light, Kyle knew that it was very old. Very old. It might well date back to the beginning of Greek civilization. And the statues, the mother and child. All of it an enigma no greater than the fact that they were unknown to the outside world.

As they drew slowly around until he was able to see the ends of the thick walls rising out of the swirling, sucking sea, he realized that most certainly he could not have been the first—not even the first hundredth. This island was remote, not worth even being on a mail route, but surely over the many, many years that wall had towered it must have been visited by people equally as curious as he. Other collectors.

And yet not a rumor.

The boat rasped up against an enormous black rock, its tip white with bird droppings, startlingly luminous in the half light. The boy shipped his oars.

"I will come back here at the next tide," he said, shaking as though with a fever. "Will you pay me now?"

"Of course." Kyle took out his billfold. "But aren't you at least going to take me further in than this?"

"No," the boy said shrilly. "I cannot."

"How about the dock?" Kyle surveyed the considerable expanse of shallow, choppy surf between the rocks and the narrow, sloping beach. "Why, hell—there isn't a dock!"

There was nothing between the walls but sand dotted with huge rocks and, inland, a tangled growth of underbrush with an occasional cypress rearing tall.

"I'll tell you what—I'll take the boat in, and you wait here," Kyle said. "I won't be long. I just want to get a chance to meet whoever owns the place and arrange—"

"No!" There was sharp panic in the boy's voice. "If you take the boat—■" He half rose, leaning forward to shove off from the rock. At that instant a swell raised the boat, then dropped it suddenly out from under the boy. Overbalanced, he swayed, arms waving wildly, then went over backwards, hitting his head on the rock. He slipped under the water like a stone.

Kyle made a quick lunge and missing, immediately dove out of the rowboat after him, rasping his chest on the barnacled shelf of rock a few feet beneath the boat. He got a good handful of the boy's shirt, but it tore like paper. He grabbed again, got a firm grip on his hair and stroked for the surface. He held him easily, treading water, looking for the rowboat. It was gone, kicked away by his powerful dive, perhaps behind one of the other rocks. No time to waste looking for it now.

He swam to shore, pulling the boy easily. It was only a hundred yards or so to the smooth white beach, curving between the two arms of the wall that sloped out and down into the ocean. When he came out of the water, the boy was coughing weakly, salt water dribbling from his nose.

Kyle carried him well above the tide mark and sat him down on the sand. The boy opened his eyes and peered at him, puzzled.

"You'll be all right," Kyle said. "I'd better get your boat before it drifts too far." He walked back down to the surf line, kicked off his shoes and stroked off to where the boat rose and fell, nuzzling another of the large rocks that littered the space between the towering walls. He rowed the boat back, facing the sea and the swift-rising sun. The wind had dropped to a whisper.

He beached the boat and gathered up his shoes. The boy was leaning against a rock, looking inland over his shoulder in an attitude of rigid watchfulness.

"Feeling better now?" Kyle called cheerfully. It occurred to him that their little mishap was an excellent excuse for being here, on property belonging to someone who obviously valued his privacy highly.

The boy didn't move. He remained staring back into the tangle of trees, back to where the massive walls converged in the distance, stark, white, ancient.

Kyle touched him on the bare shoulder.

He pulled his hand away, fists tightiy clenched. He looked at the sand. Here were the marks where the boy had risen, here the dragging footsteps where he'd come to lean against this rock. And here he still stood, glancing over his shoulder toward the trees, hps barely parted, a look of faint surprise just starting on his face.

And there, coming out of the tangled trees, a delicate tracery of footsteps led toward this rock and behind. Footsteps slender, high-arched, as though a woman, barefooted, scarcely touching the sand, had approached for just an instant. Looking at the strange footprints, Kyle understood completely what he should have guessed when first he'd peered through that chink in the wall, gasping at the unimaginable perfection of the woman and her child.

Kyle knew intimately all the ancient fables of early Greece. And now, looking at the footprints in the sand, one of the most terrible leaped into his mind: The Gorgons.

The Gorgons were three sisters, Medusa, Euryale and Stheno, with snakes writhing where their hair should have been. Three creatures so awful to look upon, the legend said, that whosoever dared gaze upon them instantly turned to stone.

Kyle stood on the warm sand, with the gull cries, the restless Aegean sea sounds all about him, and he knew at last who the old ones were who'd built the wall; why they'd built it to lead into the living waters and whom—what—the walls were meant to contain.

Not an English family named the Gordons. A much more ancient family—the Gorgons. Perseus had slain Medusa, but her two hideous sisters, Euryale and Stheno, were immortal.

Immortal.

Oh, god! It was impossible. A myth. And yet— His connoisseur's eyes, even through the sweat of fear, noted the utter perfection of the small statue that leaned against the rock, head turned slightly, an expression of surprise on the face as it peered over one shoulder in the direction of the trees. The two tight ringlets, like snubbed horns above the brow, the perfect molding of the head, the classic Grecian profile. Salt water still flecked the smoothly gleaming shoulders, still dripped from the torn shirt that flapped about the stone waist. Pan, in chalcedony.

But Pan had a flaw. From the nose to the comer of the upper lip ran a ridge, an onyx scar that lifted the edge of

make up his mind. Schenk, the expedition leader, was arguing with the guides again, his breath spurting litde puffs of vapor, waving his arms, pointing down.

Obviously Schenk was calling it quits. He was within his rights, Ed knew; two months was all Schenk had contracted for. Two months of probing snow and ice; scrambling over crevasses, up rotten rock cliffs, wind-ravaged, bleak, stretching endlessly toward Tibet and the never-never lands beyond. Two months of searching for footprints where none should be. Searching for odors, for droppings, anything to disclose the presence of creatures other than themselves. Without success.

Two months of nothing. Big, fat nothing.

The expedition was a bust. The goofiest assignment of this or any other century, as Ed felt it would be from the moment he'd sat across the desk from the big boss in the picture magazine's New York office two months ago, looking at a blurred photograph, while the boss filled him in on the weird details.

The photograph, his boss had told him gravely, had been taken in the Himalayan mountains, at an altitude of twenty-one thousand feet, by a man who had been soaring overhead in a motorless glider.

"A glider," Ed had said noncommittally, staring at the fuzzy, enlarged snapshot of a great expanse of snow and rocky ledges, full of harsh light and shadows, a sort of roughly bowl-shaped plateau apparently, and in the middle of it, a group of indistinct figures, tiny, lost against the immensity of great ice pinnacles. Ed looked closer. Were the figures people? If so, what had happened to their clothes?

"A glider," his boss reiterated firmly. The glider pilot, the boss said, was maneuvering in an updraft, attempting to do the incredible—soar over Mount Everest in a homemade glider. The wide-winged glider had been unable to achieve the flight over Everest, but flitting silently about seeking updrafts, it cleared a jagged pinnacle and there, less than a thousand feet below, the pilot saw movement where none should have been. And dropping lower, startled, he'd seen, the boss said dryly, "Creatures— creatures that looked exactly like a group of naked men and women and kids playing in the snow—at an altitude of twenty-thousand five hundred feet." He'd had the presence of mind to take a few hasty snapshots before the group disappeared. Only one of the pictures had developed.

Looking at the snapshot with professional scorn, Ed had said, "These things are indistinct. I think he's selling you a bill of goods."

"No," the boss said, "we checked on the guy. He really did make the glider flight. We've had experts go over that blow-up. The picture's genuine. Those are naked, biped, erect-walking creatures." He flipped the picture irritably. "I can't publish this thing. I want closeups, action shots, the sort of thing our subscribers have come to expect of us."

He'd lighted a cigar slowly. "Bring me back some pictures I can publish, Ed, and you can write your own ticket."

"You're asking me to climb Mount Everest," Ed said carefully, keeping the sarcasm out of his voice, "to search for this plateau here," he tapped the shoddy photograph, "and take pix of—what are they—biped, erect-walking creatures, you say?"

The boss cleared his throat. "Not Mount Everest, Ed. It's Gauri Sankar, one of the peaks near Mount Everest.

Roughly, it's only about twenty-three thousand feet or so high."

"That's pretty rough," Ed said.

The boss looked pained. "Actually it's not Gauri Sankar either. Just one of the lesser peaks of the Gauri Sankar massif. Well under twenty-three thousand. Certainly nothing to bother a hot-shot ex-paratrooper like you, Ed."

Ed winced, and the boss continued: "This guy—this glider pilot—wasn't able to pinpoint the spot, but he did come up with a pretty fair map of the terrain, for a pretty fair price. We've checked it out with the American Alpine Club; it conforms well with their own charts of the general area. Several expeditions have been in the vicinity but not at this exact spot, they tell me. It's not a piece of cake by any means, but it's far from being another An-napurna or K2 for accessibility."

He sucked at his cigar thoughtfully. "The Alpine Club says we've got only about two months of good weather before the inevitable monsoons hit that area, so time, as they say, is of the essence, Ed. But two months for this kind of thing _fcought to be plenty. Everything will be first class—we're even including these new gas guns that shoot hypodermic needles or something similar. We'll fly the essentials in to Katmandu and airdrop everything possible along the route up to your base,"—he squinted at a map—"Namche Bazar, a Sherpa village which is twelve thousand feet high."

He smiled amiably at Ed. "That's a couple of weeks march up from the nearest railhead and ought to get you acclimatized nicely. Plenty of experienced porters at Namche, all Sherpas. We've lined up a couple of expert mountain climbers with Himalayan backgrounds. And expedition leader will be Dr. Schenk, top man in his field."

"What is his field?" Ed asked gloomily.

"Zoology. Whatever these things are in this picture, they're animal, which is his field. Everyone will be sworn to secrecy. You'll be the only one permitted to use a camera, Ed. This could be the biggest thing you'll ever cover, if these things are what I think they are."

"What do you think they are?"

"An unknown species of man—or sub-man," his boss said, and prudently Ed remained silent. Two months would tell the tale.

But two months didn't tell.

Oh, there were plenty of wild rumors by the Nepalese all along the upper route. Hushed stories of the two-legged creature that walked like a man. A monster the Sherpas called Yeti. Legends. Strange encounters; drums sounding from snow-swept heights; wild snatches of song drifting down from peaks that were inaccessible to ordinary men. And one concrete fact: a ban, laid on by the Buddhist monks, against the taking of any life in the high Himalayas. What life? Ed wondered.

Stories, legends—but nothing else.

Two months of it. Starting from the tropical flatlands, up through the lush, exotic rain forest, where sun struggled through immense trees festooned with orchids. Two months, moving up into the arid foothills, where foliage abruptly ceased, and the rocks and wind took over. Up and ever up to where the first heavy snow pack lay. And higher still, following the trail laid out by the glider pilot. (And what impelled a man, Ed wondered, to soar over Mount Everest in a homemade glider?)

Two months during which Ed had come to dislike Dr.

Schenk intensely. Tall, saturnine, smelling strongly of formaldehyde, Schenk classified everything into terms of vertebrate, invertebrate.

So now, standing on this wind-scoured ridge with the shadows falling into the abysses on either side, Ed peered through ice-encrusted goggles, watching Schenk arguing with the guides. He motioned to the ledge above, and obediently the Sherpas moved toward it. Obviously that would be the final camping spot. The two months were over by several days; Schenk was within his rights to call it quits. It was only Ed's assurances that the plateau they were seeking lay just ahead that had kept Schenk from bowing out exactly on the appointed time—that and the burning desire to secure his niche in zoology forever with a new specimen: biped, erect-walking—what?

But the plateau just ahead and the one after that and all the rest beyond had proved just as empty as those behind.

A bust. Whatever the unknown creatures were the glider pilot had photographed, they would remain just that—unknown.

And yet as Ed slogged slowly up toward where the porters were setting up the bright blue and yellow nylon tents, he was nagged by a feeling that the odd-shaped pinnacle ahead looked awfully much like the one in the blurred photograph. With his unfailing memory for pictures, Ed remembered the tall, jagged cone that had cast a black shadow across a snowy plateau, pointing direcdy toward the litde group that was in the center of the picture.

But Schenk wasn't having any more plateaus. He shook his head vehemently, white-daubed lips a grim line on his sun-blistered face. "Last camp, Ed," he said firmly.

"We agreed this would be the final plateau. I'm already a week behind schedule. If the monsoons hit us, we could be in serious trouble below. We have to get started back. I know exactly how you feel, but I'm afraid this is it."

Later that night, while the wind moved ceaselessly, sucking at the tent, they burrowed in sleeping bags, talking.

"There must be some basis of fact in those stories," Ed said to Dr. Schenk. "I've given them a lot of thought. Has it occurred to you that every one of the sightings, the few face-to-face meetings of the natives and these, these unknowns, has generally been just around dawn and usually when the native was alone?"

Schenk smiled dubiously. "Whatever this creature may be—and I'm convinced that it's either a species of large bear or one of the great anthropoids—it certainly must keep off the well-traveled routes. There are very few passes through these peaks, of course, and it would be quite simple for them to avoid these locales."

"But we're not on any known trail," Ed said thoughtfully. "I believe our methods have been all wrong, stringing out a bunch of men, looking for trails in the snow. All we've done is announce our presence to anything with ears for miles around. That glider pilot made no sound; he came on them without warning."

Ed looked intently at Schenk. "I'd like to try that peak up ahead and the plateau beyond." When Schenk'uttered a protesting cry, Ed said, "Wait—this time I'll go alone with just one Sherpa guide. We could leave several hours before daybreak. No equipment, other than oxygen, food for one meal—and my cameras, of course. Maintain a strict silence. We could be back before noon. Will you wait long enough for this one last try?" Schenk hesitated. "Only a few hours more," Ed urged.

Schenk stared at him; then he nodded slowly. "Agreed. But aren't you forgetting the most important item of all?" When Ed looked blank. Schenk smiled. "The gas gun. If you should run across one, we'll need more proof than just your word for it."

There was very little wind, no moon, but cold, the cold approaching that of outer space, as Ed and one Sherpa porter started away from the sleeping camp, up the shattered floor of an ice river that swept down from the jagged peak ahead.

They moved up, hearing only the squeak of equipment, the peculiar gritty sound of crampons biting into packed snow, an occasional hollow crash of falling ice blocks. To the east a faint line of gray was already visible; daylight was hours away, but at this tremendous height sunrise came early. They moved slowly, breathing through woolen masks, the thin air cutting cruelly into their lungs, moving up, up.

They stopped once for hot chocolate from a thermos, and Ed slapped the Sherpa's shoulder, grinning, pointing ahead to where the jagged peak glowed pink and gold in the first slanting rays of the sun. The Sherpa looked at the peak and quickly shifted his glance to the sky. He gave a long, careful look at the gathering clouds in the east, then muttered something, shaking his head, pointing back, back down to where the camp was hidden in the inky shadows of enormous boulders.

When Ed resumed the climb, the Sherpa removed the long nylon line which had joined them. The route was comparatively level, on a huge sweeping expanse of snow-covered glacier that flowed about at the base of the peak.

The Sherpa, no longer in the lead, began dropping behind as Ed pressed eagerly forward.

The sun was up, and with it the wind began keening again, bitterly sharp, bringing with it a scent of coming snow. In the east, beyond the jagged peak just ahead, the immense escarpment of the Himalayas was lost in approaching cloud. Ed hurried as best he could; it would snow, and soon. He'd have to make better time.

But above the sky was blue, infinitely blue, and behind, the sun was well up, although the camp was still lost in night below. The peak thrust up ahead, near, with what appeared to be a natural pass skirting its flank. Ed made for it. As he circled an upthrust ridge of reddish rotten rock, he glanced ahead. The plateau spread out before him, gently sloping, a natural amphitheater full of deep smooth snow, with peaks surrounding it and the central peak thrusting a long, black shadow directly across the center. He paused, glancing back. The Sherpa had stopped well below him, his face a dark blur, looking up, gesticulating frantically, pointing to the clouds. Ed motioned, then moved around, leaning against the rock, peering ahead.

That great shadow against the snow was certainly similar to the one in the photo, only, of course, the shadow pointed west now, when later it would point northwest as the sun swung to the south. And when it did, most certainly it was the precise— He sucked in a sharp, lung-piercing breath.

He stared, squinting against the rising wind that seemed to blow from earth's outermost reaches. Three figures stirred slightly and suddenly leaped into focus, almost per-fectiy camouflaged against the snow and wind-blasted rock. Three figures not more than a hundred feet below him. Two small, one larger.

He leaned forward, his heart thudding terribly at this twenty-thousand-foot height. A tremor of excitement shook him. My god, it was true. They existed. He was looking at what was undeniably a female and two smaller—what? Apes?

They were covered with downy hair, nearly white, resembling nothing so much as tight-fitting leotards. The female was exactly like any woman on earth except for the hair. No larger than most women, with arms slightly longer, more muscular. Thighs heavier, legs out of proportion to the trunk, shorter. Breasts full and firm.

Not apes.

Hardly breathing, Ed squinted, staring, motionless. Not apes. Not standing so erectly. Not with those broad, high brows. Not with the undeniable intelligence of the two young capering about their mother. Not—and seeing this, Ed trembled against the freezing rock—not with the sudden affectionate sweep of the female as she lifted the smaller and pressed it to her breast, smoothing back hair from its face with a motion common to every human mother on earth. A wonderfully tender gesture.

What were they? Less than human? Perhaps. He couldn't be certain, but he thought he heard a faint gurgle of laughter from the female, fondling the small one, and the sound stirred him strangely. Dr. Schenk had assured him that no animal was capable of genuine laughter; only man.

But they laughed, those three, and hearing it, watching the mother tickling the youngest one, watching its delighted squirming, Ed knew that in that marvelous little grouping below, perfectly lighted, perfectly staged, he was privileged to observe one of earth's most guarded secrets.

He should get started shooting his pictures; afterward, he should stun the group into unconsciousness with the gas gun and then send the Sherpa back down for Dr. Schenk and the others. Clouds were massing, immensities of blue black. Already the first few flakes of snow, huge, wet, drifted against his face.

But for a long moment more he remained motionless, oddly unwilling to do anything to destroy the harmony, the aching purity of the scene below, so vividly etched in brilliant light and shadow. The female, child slung casually on one hip, stood erect, hand shading her eyes, and Ed grinned. Artless, but perfectly posed. She was looking carefully about and above, scanning the great outcroppings of rock, obviously searching for something. Then she paused.

She was staring directly at him.

Ed froze, even though he knew he was perfectly concealed by the deep shadows of the high cliff behind him. She was still looking directly at him, and then, slowly, her hand came up.

She waved.

He shivered uncontrollably in the biting wind, trying to remain motionless. The two young ones suddenly began to jump up and down and show every evidence of joy. And suddenly Ed knew.

He turned slowly, very slowly, and with the sensation of a freezing knife plunging deeply into his chest he saw the male less than five yards away.

It was huge, by far twice the size of the female below. (And crazily Ed thought of Schenk's little lecture, given what seemed like eons ago, six weeks before, in the incredible tropical grove far below where rhododendrons grew in wild profusion and enormous butterflies flitted above: "In primitive man," Schenk had said, "as in the great apes today, the male was far larger than the female.")

The gas gun was hopelessly out of reach, securely strapped to his shoulder pack. Ed stared, knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do to protect himself before this creature, fully eight feet tall, with arms as big as Ed's own thighs and eyes (My god—blue eyes!) boring into his. There was a light of savage intelligence there—and something else.

The creature (man?) made no move against him, and Ed stared at it, breathing rapidly, shallowly and with difficulty, noting with his photographer's eyes the immense chest span, the easy rise and fall of his breathing, the large, square, white teeth, the somber cast of his face. There was long sandy fur on the shoulders, chest and back, shortening to off-white over the rest of the magnificent torso. Ears rather small and close to the head. Short, thick neck, rising up from the broad shoulders to the back of the head in a straight line. Toes long and definitely prehensile.

They looked silently at one another across the abyss of time and mystery. Man and—what? How long, Ed wondered, had it stood there observing him? Why hadn't it attacked? Had it been waiting for Ed to make a single threatening gesture such as pointing a gun or camera? Seeing the calm awareness in those long, slanting blue eyes, Ed sped a silent prayer of thanks upwards; most certainly if he had made a move for camera or gun, that move would have been his last.

They looked at one another through a curtain of falling snow, and suddenly there was a perfect, instantaneous understanding between them. Ed made an awkward, half-frozen little bow, moving backward. The great creature stood motionless, merely watching, and then Ed did a strange thing: he held out his hands, palm out, gave a wry grin and ducked quickly around the outcropping of rock and began a plunging, sliding return, down the way he'd come. In spite of the harsh, snow-laden wind, bitterly cold, he was perspiring.

Ed glanced back once. Nothing. Only the thickening veil of swift glowing snow blanking out the pinnacle, erasing every trace, every proof that anyone, anything, had stood there moments before. Only the snow, only the rocks, only the unending, wind-filled silence of the top of the world.

Nothing else.

The Sherpa was struggling up to him from below, terribly anxious to get started back; the storm was rising. Without a word they hooked up and began the groping, stumbling descent back to the last camp. They found the camp already broken, Sherpas already moving out. Schenk paused only long enough to give Ed a questioning look.

What could Ed say? Schenk was a scientist, demanding material proof. If not a corpse, at the very least a photograph. The only photographs Ed had were etched in his mind, not on film. And even if he could persuade Schenk to wait, when the storm cleared, the giant, forewarned, would be gone. Some farther peak, some remoter plateau would echo to his young ones' laughter.

Feeling not a bit bad about it, Ed gave Schenk a barely perceptible negative nod. Instantly Schenk shrugged, turned and went plunging down into the thickening snow, back into the world of littler men. Ed trailed behind.

On the arduous trek back through that first great storm, through the snowline, through the rain forest, hot and humid, Ed thought of the giant, back up there where the air was thin and pure.

"Commander Elliston?" I nodded, and he produced the familiar flat card case, flipped it open, then shut, but not before I saw the usual identification card. Naval Intelligence.

"I'm Captain Blankenship." He gestured toward the other tall man. "This is Captain Trumbull, security officer from the A.E.C. lab in Livermore." He pointed to the man, naked under the trench coat. "This is our patient, Mr. Joseph Vitali."

The phone rang, and Trumbull scooped it up and began talking in a guarded voice. Captain Blankenship leaned toward me. "We'll want maximum security on this," he said. "This man is sick—or rather, we have good reason to believe he's going to be sick. Very sick. And what he has is classified. Highly."

I looked with greater interest at Joe Vitali. He looked back, teeth clenched, and I saw then that he was holding himself in control with a great effort.

"Look, Commander—maybe you'll listen," he said. "All right, I was feeling a little sick and dizzy, but I feel fine now. And I've got a load of produce waiting to be picked up in Tracy and brought back to San Francisco before the market opens. A few more hours and they'll wilt on me."

He spread his hands wide, big hands, capable, strong-looking. "I've already paid for those vegetables. I stand to lose a lot, and I can't afford to lose that kind of money. I've got a wife, a child. Payments on the truck."

I turned to Blankenship. "He seems all right. What's the nature of his ailment?"

The agent glanced at Lieutenant Mclntyre, then leaned closer to me and said softly, "Prolonged exposure to radioactive material."

I stared at him, then back at Joe Vitali. Truck owner, small businessman. He stood, shifting uncomfortably on the carpet. What possible connection could he have with the top-secret by-products of an atomic pile?

"That's right; in Livermore," Trumbull, the officer on the phone, was saying. "Tell him it is an extreme emergency." He listened, and there was total silence in the room for an instant. "Preferably Dr. Klemmer. I know it's four in the morning. Ring him and tell him this: there was an accident concerning the waste material. An accident in transit. Yes, a man was exposed. Captain Blankenship is handling. Naval Intelligence. He'll be here."

He hung up. He began dialing again. "Radiation control," he said flatly, and I reached for the forms Mclntyre had been filling in. I slowly began tearing them up, listening to the security officer telling someone at Hunter's Point Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco to have an entire decontamination unit rushed to a spot on Oakmont Road, a lonely little road some miles between Livermore and Oakland.

I looked at Joe Vitali. He stared back, clear-eyed, handsome, thick, curly hair matting his head. It was then I noticed a fine sprinkling of some coarse gritty material, a little like powdered charcoal, or ashes, on his hair and in his ears. He was perspiring.

Trumbull left for the Oakmont area immediately. Dr* Klemmer arrived within the hour. Tall, spare, an intent, serious man, he was not a medical doctor. He was a physicist, nuclear physicist, an advance researcher working at the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Livermore, California. He carried some complicated apparatus in a square carrying case. He took Joe Vitali into a corner and went over him with a wand connected to the apparatus in the case—a scintillation counter. He made careful notes, questioning Joe. Then he came over to the rest of us, still holding the wand and apparatus.

He glanced at his dials, made more notes. Then he said to me, "Will you make arrangements for Mr. Vitali to be kept here for—" he glanced at Joe—"for observation? You understand about security?" I nodded. He glanced at his watch, his forehead wrinkling. "We have a team of specialists. I called them. Should be getting here soon."

I made arrangements for Joe Vitali to be sent up to one of the new private wards, high up on the hill above the cluster of hospital buildings in the hollow below. It had a magnificent view of the San Francisco Bay complex— and privacy. The Marine guards would see to that. Then I called for the corpsmen to take Joe.

"Tell them to wear masks and gloves," Klemmer said. "Destroy them by burning immediately afterward. Bury the ashes."

They took Joe away, and Dr. Klemmer, sounding somewhat agitated, said to Blankenship, "The accident happened only a little after midnight. It's now nearly five o'clock. Do you understand what this delay might mean?"

"Trumbull notified me less than an hour ago," Blankenship said. He took out his notebook. "I'll give you the details as he gave them to me." He broke off and turned to me. "Would you ask the lieutenant to leave the room, Commander?"

When Mclntyre left, the agent closed the door behind him and locked it. He came back. "You'll need to know anyway, Commander," he told me. He rubbed his face tiredly and began talking.

"There is an Atomic Energy Commission installation at Livermore, California, a small, pleasant town in the hills east of San Francisco Bay. Like every plant, they have waste products, but their waste is radioactive: tools which become contaminated, rags, empty containers and fission products, such as 'hot' fuel elements no longer usable and by-products of experiments that must be discarded.

"Some of the more dangerous material is stored in specially selected areas, diluted in millions of gallons of water in huge underground concrete tanks. The rest is carefully gathered together, put into shielded containers, filled with concrete, and when enough of them have accumulated, they are loaded onto trucks and driven to one of the ports on San Francisco Bay—usually Oakland— loaded onto barges, taken far out to sea and dumped."

"Last night," Klemmer interrupted, "the waste was a special load—the residual ash of an experiment we felt too dangerous to continue. Dumping at sea was the quickest and least risky method of disposal available to us. So the load was sent late at night in a single fast truck by the back roads." He looked at the counter. "In this case Oakmont Road."

"As I got the story," Blankenship continued, "there is a railroad underpass along Oakmont Road that dips down. It had been raining heavily, as you know, and as the truck driver approached the underpass, he saw a man at the entrance waving at him. And beyond, in the underpass, a stalled truck. The man, Joe Vitali, was barefoot, with his trousers rolled up; there were a couple of feet of water in the underpass, and he'd removed his shoes."

Klemmer gave a muffled groan, and the agent hesitated. Then he went on: "It was a narrow road; the driver was going pretty fast. He skidded, hit the side of the underpass and some of the containers bounced out of the truck and smashed on the concrete support. One of them split open, and apparently the contents sprayed over Vitali."

There was a silence, and I looked at Dr. Klemmer. He was shaking his head slowly.

"The driver, a tech from the plant, wasn't hurt," the agent continued, "and of course he warned Vitali about touching anything and asked him if any of the stuff had gotten on him."

The agent, frowning, turned a page of his notebook. "Vitali told him not to worry; he was okay; there was a lot of spraying water, and he might not have felt the material sifting over him. In any event, it was a lonely road after midnight and both trucks inoperable. So Vitali remained there while the tech walked to the first farmhouse he could find. It took a long time. He called the plant. Trumbull was on duty, so he came out with another truck and crew. They brought a Geiger counter and found then that the water in the underpass, the concrete supports, both trucks and especially Vitali were highly radioactive."

Blankenship closed his notebook with a snap. "They took what measures they could." He smiled grimly. "It wasn't easy to persuade Vitali to take off his clothes and scrub himself in a nearby ditch. He's a pretty strong person. But he did it. Then they brought him on here."

"Is he badly contaminated?" I asked Klemmer.

"I'm afraid he is," he said shortly. "The level of radiation in this room is well above normal background count just from his expelled breath." He pointed to the rug. "Where he walked, where he stood, the rug is contaminated beyond the safety level." He turned to Blankenship. "Your hands should be thoroughly scrubbed with hard soap; nails trimmed and cleaned to the quick. Discard your clothing."

"My god!" I said. "What was in the containers? What is it?"

"I can't tell you," Klemmer said. "That's classified."

"What about his chances?" Blankenship said.

Klemmer shook his head. "If I knew the amount of total-body ionizing radiation he'd absorbed, I could answer that. I don't. It'll take time to compute it. And meanwhile—"

He hesitated. "There's a man at Berkeley. Klein. Really one of the best in the world on acute radiation sickness. I understand he has a completely new approach to the treatment. Something to do with controlling the free radicals in the cells. Of course he'll come over. This will be his first opportunity to try it. It could be of immeasurable importance—"

Klein, sharp-eyed, easily the youngest professional in the group, brought with him a team of radiation specialists. They had some elaborate equipment from Stanford for substituting whole blood, while withdrawing the contaminated blood. He also had a list of consultants. Two of them were in Japan. One in Switzerland. One was in the antarctic.

After several showers and hard-soap scrubbings, they cut all of Joe Vitali's hair off. They shaved his body. He was given enemas, protesting furiously. He felt fine. Excellent. All he wanted was out, so he could pick up bis load of produce and get home to the family.

Suddenly he turned pale, vomited, and felt not so fine. After an hour or so, he was feeling fit again.

By noon a crack Navy crew had set up direct lines to the Navy main communications center. From there the calls from the hospital would be relayed to Switzerland, to Japan, to the antarctic if necessary.

That was the first day—the beginning.

On the second day other crews came in: sober, quick-moving men, carrying much equipment. They burned Joe's hair and clothing and made a series of tests of the ashes. They looked at one another, serious-faced. The first calls went out soon after that to Washington for all the data accumulated on the three other comparable cases which had occurred at Los Alamos: two, some years ago; one, only a year or so ago.

On the third night after Joe's admission I went in to see him, to get his signature on some papers. I hadn't seen him since the first night.

He was sitting up, banked in pillows, bald head gleaming under the dim night light. He was staring sadly out the window. Beyond, the lights of the Bay Bridge gleamed, a double strand of amber pearls. Between two towers the green-lighted clock of the Ferry Building was clearly visible, and beyond that Coit Tower thrust up a luminous beckoning finger from Telegraph Hill.

I came closer; he turned, and I tried to keep the shock out of my voice as I greeted him. He was red. A deep, violent shade, frightening to see.

He recognized me and smiled, his teeth flashing white in his boiled-pink face. He saw the expression in my eyes and he held out his arms. The fingers looked puffy, the wrists greatly swollen.

"It's crazy," he whispered. "They told Madge, my wife, I'd had an accident, and they had me here for observation." He grimaced wryly. "She thinks I hit my head or something. But she'll know different next time she visits me. Look—I'm like I'm all sunburned or something." He looked at me, and suddenly, for a brief instant, his eyes widened. He seemed to look beyond me, far, far beyond. "I'm kinda hot, all inside."

"That's only natural," I told him with all the cheerfulness I could muster in the face of that shocking, that indescribably obscene red skin. I looked at his chart. The temp showed a slowly accelerating rise.

A jet fired up from Alameda Naval Airfield, and he looked out the window, listening as the jet roared louder and louder, until suddenly its afterburner kicked in. There was a loud babloom! that shook the windows, then the receding echoing roar of its progress up and over the bay.

He smiled, still looking out of the window. "I used to want to fly the jets," he said, "but I got the life now." He pointed, raising his muscular arm rather painfully, gesturing to the myriad lights of San Francisco. "Ever see the old produce market in San Francisco?"

"Never," I told him, studying his face. He was far away again.

"You'd laugh," he said softly. "All night long the big rigs come in from the valley. Artichokes, lettuce, spinach, carrots. Fresh, still wet from the fields. They dump them on the sidewalks and those crazy paisanos run around bidding on the stuff. Yelling, waving their hands, lights shining down from those old buildings that have been there since before the fire and earthquake. And by six o'clock the street's empty again." He shook his head, grinning. "I'll be glad to get back."

On the fourth day his temperature reached 103. Antibiotics were administered intravenously. Sternal punctures were made frequently: small samples of bone marrow drawn from the chest area. They showed the first sign of deterioration of the bone marrow, the red-blood cell manufacturers. The white blood cells, the infection fighters, though still seriously depleted, showed a definite rise in count. The strong body was marshaling all its forces.

And the Navy was mustering all its forces. A constant stream of specialists was flown in from all over the nation. There was a twenty-four hour radio set-up, and the most brilliant and experienced men in the field were consulted. A continuous check was kept on all Joe's bodily functions; a great mass of charts and data was being accumulated.

And through it all he suffered. He was packed in ice; his body, one great burn, an impossible fuchsia shade.

On the fifth day they moved his wife, Madge, into a room in an adjacent ward. She wasn't allowed to see him anymore, but she wanted to be near him. I met her; a plain girl, hollow-eyed, but controlled, with great sweetness of spirit. And quick-minded. Intelligent.

They'd told her about the true cause of Joe's condition, and I noticed on the table in her room several books and government pamphlets, all dealing with atomic radiation. She must have picked them up at the hospital library.

"Joe mentioned you a lot," she said to me. "He thinks you're a gentleman." A smile, brief but lovely, passed her lips. "Joe's finest compliment."

"I'm honored," I said, and I was, genuinely. "The Naval Academy made me a gentleman by congressional act," I told her, "but Joe—he comes by it naturally."

Suddenly she sat down, her face averted. "He really is, you know," she said finally. "He's—he's kind and gentle. He's strong, and he knows it, but he never takes advantage of his strength."

She put her hand on one of the pamphlets which had been stamped "Secret," crossed out and re-stamped "Declassified." A treatise on the effect of gamma rays on bioplasm—living cells.

"The cause of this accident," she said. "This—this unnatural substance— Were they really going to dump that into the ocean?"

"Yes," I told her. "We're still earthbound, Mrs. Vitali. Until they find some way to launch this stuff into outer space, dumping it into the ocean is one way to dispose of it."

She looked troubled. "How can they deposit it on the ocean bottom and be certain it will remain there? Something unexpected might corrode it. An upheaval might wash it ashore where people swim. Or break it up and contaminate fish life, and through fish, us. How can they be so certain it's safe?"

"It's in heavily shielded containers," I said, "filled with concrete. They dump it far out, into deep holes. Eventually the silt buries it; the material loses its radioactivity and becomes harmless—given enough time."

On the sixth day there was a sudden ominous drop in Joe's white blood cell count. His temperature was 104. Symptoms of acute jaundice appeared, along with the accompanying liver and spleen breakdown. He had lost much weight. He lay there, the focal point of a network of tubes: tubes in his nostrils, tubes in his arms, ankles. Klein was hard at work.

Along with Klein's new treatment, others had been tried. The most promising, the injection of uncontaminated bone marrow taken directly from donors, had proven unsuccessful. He was unable to tolerate it.

On the seventh and eighth day Joe Vitali seemed to rally. It was only comparative, of course. Packed entirely in ice, he was a shrunken travesty of the man who had stood before me a week before, clad only in an old trench coat. A good deal of his skin was gone, sloughed away.

His eyes were mucus-filled, blind. His tongue, a raw billet filling his mouth.

But still he moved. He made sounds. The precipitous decline in red and white blood cells momentarily halted. He rallied, fighting, his will to live surging in one last magnificent struggle.

In the annex to the private ward where Joe Vitali lay, the doctors and specialists concerned with him had set up a sort of headquarters. Because he was intimately familiar with all the facts in hand, Dr. Klemmer had been made co-ordinator of this group.

On the evening of the eighth day when I went off duty, I found a note asking me to see Dr. Klemmer. I found him in the annex with several other physicists. They had sheets of paper covered with the weird hieroglyphics of their science. He nodded at me, and I noted how drawn, tired he looked.

An attempt had been made, he told me, to evaluate the relative dose of radiation Vitali had absorbed, by computing the original amount of material in the total experiment from which the waste had originally come. The mass, rate of emission of neutrons, gamma rays, and so on and finally the amount in each waste container. A tremendously difficult problem, and only now had some sort of a result been arrived at.

"Is it very high?" I asked.

"Enormously so," he said. "Allowing for even a twenty-five per cent error in computation, he still received an amount of total-body radiation that should have been fatal three days ago. The last comparable case, at Los Alamos incidentally, resulted in death in a little over seventy-two hours after exposure."

"Then Klein's treatment is succeeding."

He gave me a quick look. "We'd like to think it can succeed—in less extreme cases, of course. In connection with this, Klein is setting up some highly sensitive experiments to be made immediately upon demise, and—"

"Demise? But he's rallying—"

He took a paper from his pocket and looked at it broodingly. "His vital force, his will to live, is overwhelmingly powerful. But he's only flesh and blood, Commander, like the rest of us." He handed me the paper. "I'd appreciate it if you would obtain Mrs. Vitali's signature on this. We'll need this permission before Klein can go ahead with his final experiments. It's best to have it in advance."

I unfolded it and glanced at it. It was a request for permission to perform a special autopsy upon the remains of Joe Vitali.

"Are they this certain?" I said.

"They are," he said bleakly. "You might explain to her that it will be of inestimable value to perform the experiments as soon after demise as possible. I believe she'll understand." He hurried off.

Holding the paper, I walked slowly over to the next ward. Passing the nurse's desk I asked if Mrs. Vitali was in her room.

"She's in the chapel, sir," she said. "You can probably find her there." She lifted the cover on a small gold lapel watch and consulted it. "Nine thirty. She's usually there until after ten."

"Thank you," I said. I looked at the paper in my hand. "If you see her when she returns, tell her I'll drop in about ten thirty to see her. It's important."

"I'll make it a point to do so, sir."

At ten thirty I knocked on Madge Vitali's door, and she opened it immediately. She held the door open, darting a quick glance at the paper I held as I walked into the room. She was thinner; her eyes seemed much larger, with great, dark circles under them.

She sank down on a chair, and I sat across the table from her. The books and pamphlets were still there, a carafe of water, two large red pills in a transparent box. I put the paper, still folded, next to the pill box.

"I'm sorry to have to bring you this," I told her. "Before you read it, may I explain why I'm here; why your signature on this paper is so necessary to us now?"

She darted another glance at the paper, then clasped her hands tightly, moistening her lips. She nodded slowly.

"You've been reading these pamphlets. You know, I'm sure, about roentgens, the unit of measurement for radiation. And I believe you know that the body can stand only so many roentgens at one time—about six hundred roentgens in one dose to the total body is usually fatal."

I hesitated. She slowly closed her eyes, but said nothing.

"They know now, Mrs. Vitali, that your husband absorbed over his entire body many times that amount."

She opened her eyes. The pupils were huge, black. She looked steadily at me, still not speaking.

"Mrs. Vitali, do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

"Yes," she said. "Joe is dead." "No," I said, "but—"

"Joe is dead." Her voice was low, oddly controlled. "His heart still beats. He can feel pain, deep inside. He breathes. But he's dead. He died eight days ago, standing on a road trying to get help so he could push his truck out of a puddle. Because he was proud of his job. Because he felt it a point of honor to bring back the vegetables fresh and crisp and green. To feed people. It pleased him. He liked people."

She stopped. Two tears glistened on her cheeks.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Vitali," I said. "I don't mean to be callous. But what you say is true. From the amount of total-body ionizing radiation your husband absorbed— yes. Death is inevitable. In all truth, he should have died several days ago. They believe your husband has lived this long because of a new treatment devised by one of the specialists. A Dr. Klein. If this is true, then it means great hope for any future victims of radiation sickness."

I slowly unfolded the paper, slid it over in front of her.

"But they can't be certain until they perform final and very delicate experiments. The equipment to do this must be set up in advance, because the sooner these experiments are completed, the more certain they can be of the results of Klein's work. But of course they'll need your permission. Your signature on this paper."

She picked up the paper, read it swiftiy, then folded it carefully and placed it back alongside the pill box. Her face was very pale.

"No," she whispered, "no more."

"Mrs. Vitali—"

"No." Her voice shook, that odd control slipping away. She put a hand on the pamphlets. "I haven't seen him since the third day, but I know what agonies he's suffered. The indignities. The distortions, the eating away. God gave him a perfect body. Strong. Strong and beautiful and filled with love. Love for me, our child. For life. This was what kept him alive—his love. And my prayers."

Suddenly her eyes were burning. "Do they think they can find that with their instruments? Have they learned how to measure a man's immortal soul? They? They who defiled God's perfect gift, just as they're defiling the earth, pouring their filth into the ocean beds, contaminating the very womb of life."

Tears, slow, great tears, began rolling down her face. But still she sat upright, facing me, and the words came faster.

"With every rain their pollution comes down. With every breath we take we draw into our vulnerable tissues their greatest gift to us—Strontium 90; reducing our life span, blasting our genes, dooming our progeny to monstrous, twisted lives."

She stopped, biting her lips. Her hands were trembling. I poured some water into a glass, took one of-the pills out of the box and held it out.

"Take it, please, Mrs. Vitali. It'll help."

She shook her head, and suddenly she was shivering. "They've had him. For eight days they've had him. But when he dies, he's mine. And I won't let them touch him again. Ever."

She snatched up the paper, crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket alongside the table. Then she put her hands over her face and began sobbing, her shoulders jerking convulsively.

I sat there. She cried with tiny muffled gasps, the sounds falling like weights into the quiet room. Finally she finished, took a deep shuddering breath, then began wiping her face with the palms of her hands. She looked very young at that moment.

"Mrs. Vitali," I said, "please don't think I'm pressing you to sign that paper. You have every right to refuse. But I want to say this: The material your husband was exposed to is a by-product of one of the primal forces of the universe. The potential for evil locked in these forces is too awful even to contemplate—and yet, Mrs. Vitali, you believe in a good and just God, as we all do. You cannot believe He gave us our inquisitive, searching minds only to enable us to discover new and more horrible ways to destroy one another. There has to be another, a nobler purpose behind this force. And there is. That is what they were doing at Livermore with the material Joe was exposed to—seeking new ways to develop the power of that force for the good of all people."

I stood up, leaning over her. "But this is a divided world, Mrs. Vitali. Another nation also has this force, and they deny there is any God but their own might. And because of them, we all stood on that road eight days ago with your husband. And whatever Dr. Klein can learn from Joe's tremendous struggle we, the people he liked so much, we will be the ones to benefit. We who still survive."

I waited, but she made no move, sitting upright, arms resting limply on the table, looking straight ahead. When I left, she was still in that position.

I went over to the ward annex to report my failure to Dr. Klemmer. But he was gone. The tiny cubicle the physicians had used was already dismantled. The place was clean, antiseptic-smelling again.

A new medical team was present: pathologists, men who specialized in minute examination of dead bone and tissue. Theirs would be the final report.

In the room with Joe, Klein and the others were hard at work, trying to sustain the feeble flutter of life that still pulsed within the ravaged body, a flutter that had weakened perceptibly iri the past hour.

Dr. Klemmer had said it: Joe Vitali was flesh and blood like the rest of us. His blood count plummeted; white blood cells, red blood cells, all the marvelously complex interacting system now a watery solution of dead and dying cells. The bone marrow throughout his body was disintegrating, torn apart under the ionizing impact of hard radiation. Liver breakdown was now complete. Spleen and kidneys failing rapidly. He lay quietly, unmoving, deep in the final coma.

Klein took the news of Madge Vitali's refusal to sign the authorization with a thoughtful frown.

"It's possible," he said, "that she still feels there's some hope; that this request is premature. Perhaps later she might agree." He hesitated, looking suddenly tired. "I'll make you out another request for authorization."

"Then you want me to try—later?"

"If you will, Commander." He looked at his watch. "It could be some hours yet. You might as well try to get some sleep. I'll call you."

I waited for the new permit for Madge's signature; then I left.

Once again I swam up from a deep sleep, groping instinctively for the ringing phone before I came fully awake.

It was Dr. Klein. Joe Vitali was dead.

I glanced at the clock. Twelve minutes past two. In the a.m. The ninth day almost to the hour since Joe Vitali had stood on a lonely road, watching an approaching truck, arms waving in man's immemorial gesture for assistance.

"Has Mrs. Vitali been notified?" I asked Dr. Klein. She had, he said. "Give me twenty minutes," I said.

I dressed and stepped outside. A chill wind blew gustily. Clouds, black and low, were scudding across the bay, obscuring the bridge lights. I walked slowly up the winding road toward the private ward where lights flared brilliantly and shadows moved against shuttered windows.

I went into the adjacent ward. The only light was the dim night light above the nurse's desk. She rose swiftly as I came in, her starched uniform rustling in the stillness.

"Mrs. Vitali?" she asked. I nodded, and she said, "She's not here, sir. She left right after they told her the news— about her husband, I mean."

"Left? Did she say where she was going?"

The nurse gave me an odd look. "Why, to the chapel, sir."

"Yes, of course," I said.

Outside a fine mist was falling. I hurried down the road. The mist became a light rain, a steady, silent downpour by the time I reached the chapel. And then I saw her. She was standing outside the chapel, her back to me, her forehead pressed against the chapel door. She turned when I approached, her face a pale oval in the dimness.

"Mrs. Vitali," I said, "the door is open. The chapel is never locked."

"I know," she said, her voice calm, very soft. "I was waiting. I hoped you'd come."

Standing there in the murmuring rain, I said, "I very deeply regret Joe's death, Mrs. Vitali."

She was silent for a moment; then she said, "After you left last night, I finally understood what you were trying to tell me. And I'm grateful to you. I know now there is a meaning, and purpose, in Joe's death. To deny that would be to deny—" She stopped and touched the chapel door with her fingertips. Then she opened her bag and handed me an envelope. "I wanted you to have this before I go inside."

She turned and opened the door. A warm gust of air,

when I casually handed him my solid silver (plated) cigarette case (the one our grateful alumni gave me several seasons ago when I uncovered the flagrant case of prosely-tism going on at B.U.), he fumbled with it and acted generally like someone who's never even seen a cigarette, let alone a solid silver (platea¹) case. But, as I say, no fingerprints. Keep this in mind.

Bama, I might add in passing, speaks rather cultured English with a strong Oxford accent. His eyes are somewhat pinkish and his hair quite white. Albino characteristics.

However, I've never before met an albino somewhat over seven feet tall, lightning fast and weighing three hundred pounds. He has no neck to speak of, massive sloping shoulders and arms surely no thicker than my thighs. Also, he has a pronounced body odor—something like a musk ox. (They have one at the zoo, and for purposes of comparison I went around there. Oddly enough, after some hours of sniffing, I discovered the closest similar odor came not from the musk ox, but from a yak. The significance of this failed to dawn upon me until just last night.)

Pacific's phenomenal athletic record this season can be laid at the door of one man—Professor Harold Crimshaw. You may well ask what a professor of physics has to do with, your being unmercifully trounced in the bowl last New Year's but the facts, as uncovered by me, are these:

Professor Crimshaw, a bachelor in his late forties, is a specialist on cosmic-ray research. He often spends his spare time and what funds he can drum up trudging about the higher mountains of the globe, capturing cosmic rays and measuring their intensity. As you might guess, very few people are interested enough in captured cosmic rays to finance expeditions, so up until the winter before last Professor Crimshaw operated on a strictly low budget.

I say up until the winter before last, because after that, things suddenly changed. He arrived back on the campus shortly after the holidays, accompanied by a small dark man with a beard and a huge box, punched with air holes, which must have weighed well over three hundred pounds.

Also, the box (as I was able to ascertain myself) gave off a powerful odor. In fact investigation disclosed that Professor Moriarty of biology inquired if perhaps Professor Crimshaw hadn't brought back a live musk ox. The question remained unanswered. The small bearded man was equally inscrutable.

Shortly after that, Moriarty, Dr. Evans (president of P.U.) and Dr. Smythe-Smythe, head of the language department, on loan from Oxford University, were all seen going into Professor Crimshaw's bachelor quarters; I have since managed to gain entry by a ruse and can testify that even to this day a strong odor, as of a pen-ned-up musk ox or yak, still permeates the atmosphere.

By careful (and guarded, of course) inquiry I have learned that shortly thereafter one Oscar Grossgudt, a wholesale butcher and one of the few alumni of P.U. worth a line in Dun & Bradstreet, was seen lingering about Crimshaw's quarters. Subsequently, one of his delivery trucks made daily deliveries to Crimshaw's home; but whatever was delivered was concealed beneath a canvas wrapper. Suffice it to say, however, that discreet queries disclosed the fact that quantities of bones were carted away daily—say, about that left over from half a haunch of well-gnawed beef.

George Sneedely, P.U.'s football and wrestling coach, along with his assistant, Daniel McGurk (known to you as "Goon" McGurk), were seen entering and leaving Crimshaw's quarters frequently. On one occasion McGurk was seen noticeably limping and holding his shoulder, although Sneedely seemed in the best of spirits. In fact he was smiling, something he hasn't done since '45, the year Pacific won one and tied one (although losing twelve).

It was less than a month afterward that Sam Bama was enrolled officially at P.U. as Crimshaw's protégé. He was (and is) amiable, quick-witted, with an I.Q. of 128. (Rorschach not available.) Well-liked by all, including the girls, most of whom preferred not to date him.

In his first football game, as the alumni of State well know, he scored every time he was given the ball, which, mercifully, was only seventeen times. Sneedely is a kind-hearted chap, retiring Bama to the bench only after he was informed during the half that two of the opponent defenders suffered severe skull fractures, incurred as Bama stepped on their heads. Fortunately he was not wearing shoes.

After the game Bama gladly granted press interviews, winning the scribes' hearts with his easy banter. He skillfully parried all queries as to his prep school, although hints were dropped by Sneedely that Bama was a transferee from "overseas."

It was directly after this first game that Crimshaw's great expedition to measure cosmic rays was announced. He was given special leave of absence. Where he was going was left unmentioned, however. Clippings enclosed.

I can tell you that after considerable checking I was able to learn that money for this expedition (a large sum in fact—please note) had been advanced by a small clique of P.U. alumni, consisting in the main of Oscar Grossgudt and one Pete DeLassio, a gentleman connected with a gambling syndicate, the same syndicate which took all bets in advance on the entire schedule of P.U. and which really cleaned up, as doubtless you know.

The expedition was organized with great secrecy, but I have since learned that the entire staff of the manual arts department worked overtime building ten stout packing cases, complete with air holes.

The expedition returned last summer, slipping quietly into town late one evening. However, there were frequent complaints that evening by the citizenry that howls and roars were coming from the direction of the freight yards. A sound, as one local put it, exactly like feeding time at the zoo.

And last autumn, of course, P.U. fielded their incredible "Terrible Titans" which remained unscored upon—but why am I telling you this? You know what they did to the rest of the league.

To a man, the Terrible Titans all look amazingly alike —each a little over seven feet tall, each weighing well over three hundred pounds. They are all albinos, I can say positively, even though (as I can prove) they wear colored contact lenses. Also, in order to further conceal their identical appearance, each has his hair dyed a different shade, and some even have their skin darkened. They use prodigious quantities of deodorants and are quite popular with the girls.

Earlier I mentioned that Professor Crimshaw, winter before last, had returned with a small dark man with a beard and a huge box. This little man vanished about the time of the great expedition and just as mysteriously reappeared when the expedition returned.

By great good luck I ran across the little dark man only last night. He was in a pub, unnoticed, morose, drinking whisky sours and obviously disliking them. I fell into deep conversation with him, and what he had to say was startling indeed; no amount of whisky sours could account for it. It has to be true. It all fits.

He is a Sherpa: one of those breed of slight, tough men who make a business of climbing the high mountains of the Himalayas. Between whisky sours he sobbed out his desire to go back; he says he is one of the few men alive who knows the haunts of the Yeti—the abominable snow men, so called; those giant, strangely manlike creatures of myth (or mystery?) who roam the inaccessible peaks. He speaks their language, he says. They are shy, nimble creatures but extremely intelligent withal. Loyal to a fault, they would follow him anywhere, he assures me.

Many were the times, he says, they spent bounding about the great peaks, chasing yaks for food and fun. But, alas, all too human-like, once they tasted the dubious joys of civilization, they forgot the old ways. They became decadent; they looked upon him, their old friend, as old-fashioned—in a word, a cornball (an epithet much favored at P.U. this season).

He longed to go back, he sobbed. Back to his yaks and untutored Yeti.

And so we're going back, Mr. Papadoukalis. Fortunately, I have my credit card. I'm writing this from San Francisco International Airport. We expect to reach Katmandu, India, on or about the twelfth of the month.

Please wire sufficient funds to outfit a good-sized expedition to reach an altitude of approximately twenty-six thousand feet. Also, make sure you include enough to

I N V A S I ON .97

"Nine hours from target," navigator said. "Two hours from enemy territory."

"Fuel, sixteen hours. Power, eighty-five," engineer said.

"They're still tagging," radar said. "Another group at five o'clock below."

"What's on the hom?" Levitt asked plaintively.

The radio man turned a dial and suddenly soft music flooded the plane. Dave Brubeck's piano, cool and infinitely remote. Abruptly it cut off, and a hasty-voiced announcer came in.

"Further word on the invasion of West Germany. At Geneva the American ambassador has just handed an ultimatum to the invaders. They are ordered immediately to start withdrawal of all troops within two hours. That is twelve o'clock midnight, Pacific Standard Time. If the troops have not started withdrawing by that time, the ambassador states, swift and terrible retaliatory action against the heartland of the invaders will be taken by the United States. Of what nature, he did not disclose. However—" Radio flipped the dial. More excited chatter on short-wave station after station.

"Nothing but talk," radio said.

The big bomber climbed. Below and to the left the wing of MIG fighters matched her speed, following, making no moves. As one group peeled off and drifted away, another came from ahead to take its place, pacing the swift bomber.

"They'll put in the varsity the second we're inside their territory," the skipper said. He glanced at his watch. "Forty-five minutes ETA."

Beneath a brilliant moon the plane raced along incredibly fast, a gleaming arrow pointed straight at the heart of the ice-locked nation. The navigator climbed down from the solar bay after shooting for position. He bent over his plot board.

"We're into their territory," he said.

"So now they can stop guessing," skipper said.

"Bogies at seven o'clock," radar said. "Nine o'clock."

"Pilot to crew," skipper said sharply, "check your MC-3's. We're going on top." One by one he called off the men, each in turn murmuring a quiet "Roger" as he checked his MC-3 decompression suit and equipment. At their maximum operating level, a rupture of the plane's fuselage could cause explosive decompression, immediate death to any man unprepared.

"Tallyho! One o'clock ahead!"

The bomber rocked in violent evasive action. A volley of high-velocity rockets swooshed below, and an odd-winged, stubby fighter shot past beneath, vanishing immediately astern.

"It's their hot one," copilot said. "Handling a little mushy. Do you think it's in our league?"

Skipper glanced calmly at him, and his eyebrows waggled above his oxygen mask. "We'll throw them a curve and see," he said. "All power."

The bomber climbed. The intercom came alive as the gunners shouted excited warnings.

"Tallyho! Six o'clock. Levitt! Levitt!"

The bitter, acrid smell of cordite drifted through the long bomb-bay tunnel. There was a clatter, clatter, a brilliant flare as a high-velocity rocket zoomed past, missing, then another brighter flare and a bellow from the waist gunner.

"Got him! Got him!"

"How lucky can you get?" from DeNapoli. "Bogies, six o'clock below."

"Power, ninety-five," engineer said. The bomber climbed. Below, one by one, the odd-looking jets pointed blunt, open-nosed snouts at them, poised delicately on stubby wings, clawing ineffectually at the rarified air, firing off rockets which curved in swift spitting arcs, falling short, to disappear into the darkness.

"Aw, come on, fellows," Levitt muttered. There was a sudden hard silence as the fighters dropped away and vanished.

"That's right, go home and tell poppa," skipper said. He called to the flight engineer, now back near the tail, crouched in a miniature armored vault. "You got the monster warmed up, kid?"

"We're in business, skipper."

Within seconds and miles away, a sudden eye-hurting light dimmed the moon and threw harsh shadows on the land below. The skipper made a motion as though wiping sweat from his brow. Copilot nodded, waggling eyebrows happily.

"Surprise, surprise," DeNapoli said.

Even as he spoke another burst of brilliant light and explosion, soundless to the bomber hurtling along faster than the waves of sound, lighted the ground below into a weird moonscape. The monster was doing its super-secret radar-jamming work well. Guided missiles began bursting prematurely about them with monotonous regularity.

"Twenty-four fifty," navigator said. "Bogies, four o'clock, seven o'clock, below," radar said.

The bogies swept up, huge even at that great distance. They were four jet bombers, dead-black, like destroying angels. Skipper glanced over to the copilot.

"Here comes the Sunday punch."

"Things are tough all over," copilot murmured.

The sinister black bombers in tight formation headed up. The great silver bomber tilted its sharp nose and climbed. There was a long thin line of fire from the lead bomber far below, a brilliant arc of flame and then the plane-to-plane guided missile exploded prematurely and behind the silver bomber. Again the monster had done its job. From all the black bombers below the long; sizzling trails shot up toward them to end abruptly, far short, in dazzling explosions, soundless, throwing the bogey bombers into brilliant relief.

"So now they know," the skipper said softly.

"Back to the minors for your guys," DeNapoli said.

The bomber swept on, unbelievably high and fast, gleaming nose pointed unswervingly for the hearüand of the country.

"Hello, Snapdragon, Hello, Snapdragon. Big Bear One calling Snapdragon."

The skipper and copilot exchanged swift glances. "Go ahead, Big Bear One," skipper said. "This is Snapdragon."

"Snapdragon/' the voice was clear but faint, "stand by to take a message. Do you read me well? Over."

"Hello, Big Bear One. Read you well and clear. Over."

"Snapdragon: Bittersweet. Bittersweet. Acknowledge."

"Hello, Big Bear One. This is Snapdragon, acknowledging Bittersweet. Over and out."

The great silver bomber heeled over, swept around in an enormous arc and headed back in the direction it had come, the contrails flaring out behind the eight jet engines like the wake of a mighty fleet in a smooth sea. Spread out below, the bogey bombers paced it all the way to the border.

"O-one-hundred," navigator said.

"What's on the horn?" Levitt demanded. "We ought to get Armed Forces out of Elmendorf. Real crazy stuff, dad."

A crackle of static sounded on the intercom as radio switched to an international channel. An excited civilian voice came in strongly. "... capitulated in a highly dramatic personal plea from the premier himself, begging the U.S. Air Force to call back their bombers and agreeing immediately to withdraw all invading troops from—"

There was a crash of static as radio flipped the dial. " . . . totally unable to check the bombers reported to have been converging on the invader's homeland from all points of the globe. Apparently the premier waited until the last possible moment before accepting the ultimatum delivered earlier by the U.S. ambassador—"

Another crash of static as radio twirled the dial. "... steady stream of troops and equipment pulling out of West Germany. To repeat the bulletin of thirty minutes ago: The invasion of West Germany has ended. In a highly dramatic personal plea to the U.S. ambassador at Geneva, the premier of—"

More static, more excited voices. Silence.

"No music anywhere," radio said. "Nothing but yakitty-yak."

"Eight million bucks Uncle pays for this wagon and not even a lousy little hi-fi," Levitt complained.

"Angels, six o'clock ahead," radar said.

"Fuel, thirteen hours; power, sixty-five," engineer said. "The monster sealed and secured."

"Listen, DeNapoli," the skipper said, "what about these three women that were fighting over you? Wha' hoppen?"

"Can't talk to you now," he murmured. "I don't want them to know about you. Not yet."

"Who?" I swung around and stared up Market. A lot of people brushed by, coming and going. But just people as far as I was concerned. "What's the deal, Don? Trouble?"

He smiled, a bitter flash of white in his lean face. "I'm in it—up to my ears." He smiled again and looked closely at me. I began to feel a trifle uneasy. The man seemed hepped on the subject of ears. "I need your help, Jerry," he said swiftly. "But not here. Where you located?"

I gave him my office address, he nodded and took off without a good-by. I watched him stride away, and I felt certain he wasn't entirely sane. In view of what I learned later, he was more sane than any man ought to be. . . .

I thought back to our college days when I'd first known Don Masterson. He was some sort of science major, a really brainy person. Odd, when I thought of it, that I hadn't seen him mentioned in some governmental capacity what with all the projects and goings on. But then he'd always been a solitary type as I recalled. Independent.

He called a couple of days later, made an appointment, then hung up. I'm no big-time operator, but I do keep busy, so I had to postpone dinner and see Don Master-son after quitting time. It was dark, and the foghorns on the bay were booming when Don finally slipped in, looking haunted, or hunted, and clutching a large manila folder. He got right down to business.

"In the first place, Jerry," he began, "I want you to know I can pay—and pay all you want—for publicity." He brought out a wallet and laid some bills on the desk. Thousand dollar bills. "But I want real publicity. The biggest magazines. TV. Radio. Make them laugh, if they must. Call it crackpot. But let them know!"

He put the wallet away, leaving a lot of the bills on the desk. "Eventually, somewhere, some one of us who counts is going to wonder and ask to see for himself, just for ducks. He'll get the brush-off and he'll wonder some more. He'll see people. Pull strings. And it'll snowball. It'll get too big for them to suppress any longer and then —then we'll have them on the run."

He opened the manila folder and spread out some ten-by-ten glistening, slick photographs on the desk, covering the big-denomination bills. I looked at the pictures. Buildings. People. I looked closer.

"Undersea pictures?" Most of the persons in the pix were in what appeared to be diving suits. The buildings, on closer examination, looked a little like the delicate fairy-castles and odd structures one sees in fishbowls or garden fishponds. Unreal and able to remain upright only in the lesser gravity of underwater.

He got up, shot the bolt on the door, peeked into the secretary's room, then came back. I watched him narrowly. His face was stern, his eyes hard, but he seemed sane enough. Only his actions were theatrical, you might say. People act that way in B dramas.

"I'll start at the beginning," he said, slumping down in a soft leather chair. I looked again at the pictures. One of them was of several submarines lying side by side, while over them spiraled the impossibly fragile spires of a lacelike structure. The subs appeared to be resting on a sandy bottom. Beyond them were a scattering of myriad pinpoints like a sequin-sewn curtain.

"I sold patent rights to several new glass-annealing and lens-grinding processes," Masterson said quietly, his voice loud in the after-dark silence of the building. The wind shook the window, and from beyond the foghorn cried its bass warning. "I won't get technical, but I will say it's revolutionary—and it sold for a lot." He smiled bitterly again. "Only the patent holders aren't using the processes, even though it makes obsolete the finest electron microscopes and the largest Schmidt—or even the two-hundred incher on Palomar."

"What's this Schmidt?" I asked.

"An astronomical camera—and a very good one considering the limitations of the lens. The best in the world next to mine."

"Let me get this straight," I put in. "You invented some way of making glass for the lenses of microscopes or cameras?"

"Anything that requires the focusing of light," he said. "Coupled with my new grinding methods, the results are unbelievable." He sagged in the chair, and suddenly his face was weary. "I made several excellent reflectors and telescopes before I applied for the patents." He smiled wryly. "It's a good thing I did. At least I got a few good shots before they moved in."

"They?" I looked at him curiously. He sat up, his keen eyes holding mine.

"Look, what I'm about to tell you will seem insane, of course. But you'll have to believe me. You'll have to remember my background, my reputation in school. And I'll say this—I'm not insane, and these photographs are real"

He pointed a long finger at the array of pix on my desk. "Those first three shots were taken with my fourteen-inch camera. Mars. The others are later shots, taken with the twenty-four incher. Remarkably good close-ups considering atmospheric problems at the time. Brings the surface of the planet to within a quarter of a mile."

"Did you say Mars?" I said. I felt the first crawling in my stomach as I searched his face intently. He seemed sane, but Mars.

"Imagine what abysses of space I could penetrate with even so small a lens as forty inches," he said somberly. "But they're afraid of us. They hold my patents, and they're too entrenched for us. Too clever."

I stared at the pictures again. Not submarines but spaceships, Masterson was saying. Not undersea fairy castles supported by the dense water but needle-pointed towers of Martian civilization, with no heavy gravity to tumble them to the red ground.

"Look, Don," I finally said. "This is terribly interesting, but what about the two-hundred incher on Palomar? Wouldn't that have shown some evidence of all this? How come nobody knows of this?"

He nodded impatiently. "Remember those pictures released last year in that picture magazine, showing the moon from a distance of two hundred miles—blurry, with jagged shadows and deep black pits?" His lips twisted in disgust. "Faked. Every damn bit of it. The two-hundred incher on Palomar, bad as it is, is good enough to pick up anything on the moon over nine feet high!" He slipped another picture out of the envelope and tossed it to me.

The first thing I noted were the contrasts. Blinding white and inky shadows. Anything in the shadows was cut off, so that I had a little trouble at first making out just what the picture depicted. Gradually things came into focus. And I mean things. Great spidery ramps, like infinitely high shoot-the-chutes at the beach. More of the submarine-looking objects, poised at the top of one of the great swooping ramps. Buildings, burnished and gleaming like miniature suns, were scattered all over in the background. And beings, plainly discernible, were swarming over the spaceship. Beings which looked remarkably human.

"The fourteen-inch camera," Don said, his cool voice penetrating my brain like a dash of ice water, and only then did I realize how tense I'd become. His long finger reached past me and pointed at one of the human-like figures in the foreground.

"Want to see a Martian?" He slid another photograph from his manila folder and handed it to me. "Same setting, same figure, only with the twenty-four, and not a full magnification either. After all, it's only on the moon."

I looked at the pale, aesthetic-looking face that stared at me, photographed, so Don claimed, from across hundreds of thousands of miles of black, cold space. The eyes were quite human; the features fairly regular; the nose a little more snubbed than ordinary. No hair .at all—and no ears.

"Very little air to carry sound on Mars," Don's voice echoed in my ears. "I imagine their ears atrophied in time. They're a very ancient race."

I stared at the creature from another world. It didn't look at all like a bug-eyed monster. Rather mild and definitely intellectual looking.

"An interplanetary refueling station," Masterson said calmly, and the strangeness of his conversation in my prosaic office, wtih the foghorn booming outside, washed over me in a prickling chill. The pictures couldn't have been faked. They were too—too natural. I can't explain it. In my business I handle hundreds of pix. I can spot a phony from here to there. These weren't phonies.

"I went to Palomar," Don was saying. "I didn't bring along any of"—he waved at the photos—"those. I was curious. I wanted to know why, with the almost unlimited reflecting power of the two-hundred incher, none of the structures on the moon, at least, had been seen and reported."

Again he grinned, that same wry grin. He ran a hand through hair like tangled copper wire. "I saw Professor Elliot. A big wheel. I showed him my academic qualifications and asked for permission to use the smaller telescope. He told me I'd have to wait several years, that other and more important persons and institutions were ahead of me." He rose and stood looking down at me, his hands jammed deep in his pockets.

"I knew that before I went up there, but I got what I wanted: a close look at the people in charge of the telescopes, the reflectors, the observatory as a whole. The people responsible for the big eye of the world, our only window, outside the ones I'd made, that can show to the world that there actually is civilization, thriving and brilliant beyond our wildest dreams, on the other planets."

He took a deep breath. "They were Martians. Every damn one of them." He waited, his head cocked to one side, looking at me. But the night had held too many shocks. I merely sat, numbly, and nodded.

"It figures," I said feebly. He obviously expected something a little stronger, and for the first time he grinned, a relaxed, frank smile of approval.

"You're ahead of me, Jerry," he said. "But it's the only answer. It had to be. They're centuries ahead of us. They've had time to infiltrate, to get into every center of learning, of industry. Every place where they can take over and misdirect or stifle any advance. Copernicus,

Newton, Galileo. Look at the difficulty our rocket programs are experiencing. And why?"

"Their ears," I said, interrupting his train of thought. "They don't have any ears."

"That's how I knew," he said absently, staring down at the close-up. "Plastic surgery. But their ears show a definite ridge, or line, where they join the head. If you're looking for it, you can spot it a mile away." He swung toward me. "And their bodies, they're fight." His eyes smoldered like twin welding arcs.

"Don't you see why they fear us? They move with difficulty here. Only their strongest and most powerful men and women can even survive on the triple gravity of earth." He knotted his hands into big fists. "On Mars we'd be supermen! Imagine a person on earth able to take sixty-foot leaps at a bound. To uproot a mighty oak. Tear down a building with one shove. And warlike. Filled with boundless energy, a lust for power. Eager, yearn-mg.

His voice dropped to a whisper. "Picture such a person, and you'll know why they fear us—those brilliant but pitifully weak Martians. Once we learn there is civilization on the planets; once we learn to fling ourselves into the voids of space and journey to their planet, it'll be the old, old story of mankind repeated. They'll go the way of the buffalo and Indian, too weak to survive in a battle that goes to the young and the terribly strong. To us."

I swallowed and got a grip on my senses. "We could set up your telescopes and reflectors and have a sort of planetarium like they have in Golden Gate Park," I began. "Free—"

"Do you think they'd miss getting at those?" he interrupted irritably. "They must have suspected when one of them obtained the rights to my patents. Every part I ordered must have been noted and a record of my progress kept. I scattered the orders as much as possible." Once again that bitter smile twisted his strong face. "But they're everywhere. Switzerland. Italy. Even South Africa." He slumped in the chair again. "I didn't have the fourteen and twenty-four inchers assembled for more than a week before they came. I was out of town. I should have guessed." His voice became a harsh, pain-filled whisper. "Smashed. Broken. Years of work—gone."

"You mean they destroyed all this, these cameras that took these?" I motioned to the photographs. He nodded, wordlessly. "But you can rebuild can't you?" I said. "It's a big country, Don. You've got money. Get guards. Set up a—"

A wave of his hand cut me off. "I ordered an electric furnace," he said dully. "A simple electric furnace. It never came. I went personally to the plant, right here in San Francisco." He shrugged. "Priorities, they said. I tried to rent a building in Los Angeles with adequate power inlets. Not for rent—to me." He spread his hands. "Do you think I haven't tried? They're everywhere. Chairman of the board of this, chief consulting engineer of that. Nothing—I repeat, Jerry, literally nothing in this world that requires technical devices and services can be assembled once they're aware of it unless they permit it."

I stared at his dejected figure, while outside the fog closed in and the long-short, long-short of the foghorns boomed. "If all this is true, aren't you afraid for your life?" I said. "I mean, you know so much. And these pictures."

He smiled ironically. "Why kill me? What can I do now? Without machinery and tools I couldn't cast another lens, let alone grind and assemble the reflectors. And besides," he sat up and his eyes were boring into mine. "Besides, they don't know yet about these photographs." He leaned toward me. "They think it's just my word against theirs. But these photos are something else. They'll arouse interest, talk, speculation, if nothing else. That's why I'm here. These are mankind's ace in the hole, and I'm banking on you, Jerry," he added softly.

I pushed the thousand dollar bills about with one finger. Twenty of them. Then I looked again at the pictures. Clear, wonderfully detailed prints.

"Can you leave these with me?" I said. He nodded.

"I took the negatives off the plates before smashing them." He patted his jacket near the heart. "They're as safe here as anyplace," he said dryly. "What do you plan?"

"Right now, dinner," I said, "Let's—" He shook his head.

"I've got to run," he said. He stood up and towered over me. "Do you believe any of it? Do you believe me?"

I leaned back and studied him. "It's a screwy story, Don. These pictures are wonderful, of course. And I don't see how they could be faked—but the whole world under the domination of super-scientists? Everything controlled by them?" I shook my head. "It's so—"

"Corny?" he finished for me bleakly.

"Look, Don," I said, "if you want to buy my services, okay. I'll promise to do the best I can for you. I mean, sure, I'll get you publicity. All you want. I'll even get you a spread in a national weekly, pix and all, with this kind of dough."

"One thing." His voice was chilly. "Regardless of whether you believe me or not. Before you give those pictures to anyone, make certain you remember what I told you. Be sure he's . . . human."

"I don't know what your game really is, Don." I gave him a wink. "A movie coming up? No? Anyway, I'll guarantee this: one look at these"—I waved the thousand dollar bills—"and everyone I know, but everyone, is all too human."

I held out my hand and he crushed it in a paw like a vise. He hesitated, shrugged, then walked out, a tall, somehow noble figure. The moment the door closed I ripped the pictures into tiny shreds, piled them in a large bronze ash tray and set them afire. They were curling into black ashes when the door opened silently, and he bounded back in, his face white, his eyes blazing terribly.

He reached across the desk and lifted me with one mighty arm clear above the chair top.

"Too late," I gasped. Even though his grip was slowly killing me, I couldn't keep the triumph out of my voice.

"You!" Slowly, slowly, he let me down and his shoulders sagged. "I'd never have known," he said, staring at my ears with hypnotic fascination. "Except for your handshake."

"A new technique," I said, feeling the fluid coming back into my shoulder, easing the terrible pain where his fingers had nearly met about the bone. I watched him closely. His eyes flickered.

"So now you know," he said slowly.

"We never dreamed," I murmured, "that you had perfected your lens to obtain such results." I gestured to the heap of ashes. "But it doesn't matter anymore."

"I'll have to kill you," he whispered. His eyes flickered again. And again. His head rolled.

"You could have but no longer. Your handshake—this

trol, spinning it all the way over. The noise roared at him, senseless, chaotic. He winced and spun the dial, searching out known channels, and from all of them came the tremendous roaring crackling bursts of sheer gibberish. He cut down the volume and glanced again at the button on the wall opposite; the perspiration gleamed on his face.

He left the submerged block house, locking the thick Monel metal door behind him, the door to which only he had the key. He walked slowly through the frost-covered tube that connected these underground warrens sunk far below the ancient ice of the polar cap. This was Advance Kickoff, the Army's supersecret guided-missile base. Advance Kickoff was here for one purpose and one purpose alone: the big punch. Behind that control panel in the concrete room was a deep ceramic-lined pit. And in that

pit-

Jim tried not to think of that pit and what it contained. He glanced at his watch again automatically. Nine twenty-five. Twenty-five minutes past the time when the inevitable check signal should have come from the master-control base. The signal that came every three hours without fail, night and day. The signal that told Captain Jim Henderson, commander, Advance Kickoff, that everything was as usual in the United States of America, Canada and Mexico. A signal that must come without fail—and should it fail to come, he had his orders.

He walked along one of the connecting tunnels deep beneath the ice and stepped through the door into the main bunker. All the men were there, all thirty of them; bearded, gaunt, each a fine, intelligent soldier trained to do a demanding job, psychologically picked for this nerve-racking, supersecret assignment just below the North Pole. Good men, but now they stared with oddly distorted faces, and only the crackling hum of the powerful radio filled the room with sound.

"No signal yet," Honicker, warrant. officer and chief radio tech, murmured to Jim.

"It's over three hours, sir," Sergeant Ivers, the ICBM technician, said, face strained, beard quivering as his lips trembled. "Do we kick it off?"

The question to end all questions. The question that only Captain Jim Henderson could answer—and act upon.

He was here because of the new army, the army of white-jacketed, brilliant men, of graphs, of exhaustive analyses, of cunning computing machines that filled whole buildings and dealt only in probabilities, integrating, sorting, sifting ream upon ream of information to finally come up with answers that were accurate to the hundredth decimal place.

Before the Army had given Captain Jim Henderson this lonely, terrible responsibility, they'd subjected him to a battery of tests. They'd reviewed every inch of his background, his personality, all his little idiosyncrasies. They'd asked questions, innumerable, apparently unconnected questions, and finally all these findings had been carefully correlated into a series of blank punch cards. The cards, hundreds of them, had fed into the maw of a computing machine that whirred, blinked multicolored lights and in brief seconds had disgorged a long tape, punched in series of rows like a player-piano roll.

In a matter of seconds the great impersonal machine had digested his life and come up with an answer, an answer an equally impersonal technician had deciphered and passed along to the Pentagon: Captain Jim Henderson was suitable in every detail for the job.

But the machine had been wrong, Jim knew, staring at the thirty tense, bearded faces, Ustening to the garbled static coming from the radio. Now the moment of decision was already past, and he was afraid. Afraid of the consequences of that act of pushing the button in the missile control room.

"Do we kick it off?" Within that pit behind the control panel was poised the sum total of the finest minds in the western world. A tall, gleaming rocket, ninety feet high, fueled with a revolutionary nonliquid pfopellant, sleekly powerful, capable of thrusting its many-tonned lithium-cobalt warhead hundreds of miles into the sky, then tilting and streaking at better than fifteen thousand miles an hour to pinpoint over a certain section of the great nation that lay on the other side of the globe. It bore within it antimissile missiles, radar-scattering deflection devices, every cunning artifice known to enable it to penetrate the tightest warning network on earth.

It was the Big Punch. A doomsday weapon made of lithium-cobalt, carrying fifty megatons of controlled hell, hotter than the interior of the sun, more deadly than all the A-bombs in the world. The Big Punch, electronically controlled to explode high over a section where jet winds would carry the instantaneous death of radioactive cobalt dust to an entire nation, drifting down over hundreds of thousands of square miles of earth, blighting it, killing everything living—humans, livestock, plants, transmuting genes, changing forever whatever lay in its path, leaving it a radiating death trap for centuries, a ravaged no-man's land where none could enter and survive.

This was the Big Punch. The hell bomb. This was the responsibility that was his. He'd never dreamed in his wildest nightmares that they would be insane enough to start it, to bring this ultimate doom to their nation.

But something terrible must have happened. The signal hadn't come. He'd signaled "condition yellow" and no response, an eventuality for which he had his orders.

"No," he said coldly to Ivers, "we don't kick it off. Not until I know"

He looked at Warrant Officer Honicker. Honicker stared back, and behind his eyes something crawled. He'd seen that look before in men's eyes, and he knew it was the prelude to violence. These were all good men, but he'd seen good men crack under conditions of less strain. Advance Kickoff might as well be on the moon if trouble struck at main base. They were isolated without radio, even their snow buggies useless without radio directional signals. Without radio they were alone up here in the arctic dark, alone with the end of the world poised in a pit, waiting for the press of a button.

"There hasn't been a signal that makes sense since the last security check at 0600 from base," Honicker said, his voice a dry croak. "Thule, Fistclench, Sierra, Skyline —I've tried them all. They're dead. None of them read me." His eyes gleamed in near panic. "What more do you want, captain—an invitation in writing?"

"Haven't you picked up anything from the States?" Jim asked, ignoring the hysterical sarcasm. "What about that ham in Philly you're always spieling with?"

"Negative," Sergeant Ivers interrupted hoarsely. "There's nothing from anywhere in the world. No planes, no hams —nothing but static, static—" His strong fingers bit into Jim's shoulder. "I tell you, Captain, they've hit us first— and we're standing around doing nothing. You've got to kick it off."

"No." Jim stared at Ivers, forcing himself to be cold and nerveless, forcing the trembling out of his legs. ("We're not and never will be aggressors," the general had said with firm conviction. "It's in the very nature of our kind of government that we'll have to be hit first, and then— and only then—do we hit back. And that's where you come in, Captain.")

"Keep trying," he said implacably. "VHP, UHF—try them all." He spun and left the room, throwing on his heavy parka. Behind he heard the men shuffling, murmuring, their voices rumbling. His hand tightened on the key in his pocket.

He went up the wooden stairs to the "penthouse," the main entrance to the underground units, flung his hood over his head and wrestled the door open against the eternal wind. It was cold, cold as only the arctic can be cold. Forty-eight below zero the thermometer read. He glanced up at the sky and was stunned at the unbelievable magnificence of the aurora borealis. The lights flared all across the sky like a gleaming, sparkling curtain. He'd never before seen it in such spectacular magnitude.

He looked south, straining his ears for any sound, hoping to hear the distant thunder of jets or the dry barking of diesels—anything. He couldn't believe, wouldn't believe, that the base had been attacked, that the United States lay smoking under mushroom clouds.

But his orders were explicit. Every contingency had been foreseen, even to sabotage smashing every radio at base control—"condition yellow." There was a special power-packed short-wave radio in the missile fire-control room, controlled directly from underground centers in the Colorado Rockies. He'd used that radio when the signal from base was overdue. They should have responded instantly, but they hadn't. Only the static had leaped out at him, and he'd known then that the final contingency had arisen: the deadly decision was his and his alone to make.

He walked over the hump that was the roof of the missile launching pit. A flick of the toggle switch from safety to ready and that roof would open smoothly, easily, exposing the immense nose of the missile. A touch of the black button and it would leap out into the arctic night, spitting fire and fury, up, up into the absolute cold of outer space before tilting and assuming its path of death for hundreds of millions. Such an easy act, pushing a button. But the consequences were irrevocable. It meant, he knew, the doom of the planet. Who could say with certainty that the cobalt cloud wouldn't circle the entire globe?

He looked up at the flaming lights, and his lips moved as he prayed for guidance. It was inconceivable, he told himself again, that they would have launched World War Three, knowing we possessed the hell bomb, knowing we had the means to deliver it. People, even they, just weren't that suicidal.

He glanced at his watch. Nine forty-five. Forty-five minutes since the signal was overdue. What had happened? Had they assembled their subs off every major city and at a given signal launched their H-missiles? Had their saboteurs struck at dams and power plants, radio stations, telephone exchanges simultaneously with small A-bombs? It seemed incredible that at least the hams, those ubiquitous, garrulous characters who never failed in a crisis, wouldn't have had a message or two on the air.

He walked over to their two snow buggies, huge-tired diesel tractors, listened to the low mutter as the engines turned over. Those diesels were never turned off. To do so meant they'd instantly freeze, and without those buggies they'd be in a serious fix. He leaned into the cozy, warm cab and flicked on the short-wave transmitter.

"Hello Big Punch," he said hoarsely, "anything yet? Over." He pressed the button and static, savage, ear-blasting, leaped out at him. He hesitated, then called again. Again, when he pressed the button, the noise blared out of the speaker, garbled, frightening in its intensity.

The penthouse door burst open, and a man leaped out, wearing only his thin barracks clothes. His face was pale behind his beard, his eyes glaring.

"Captain! Captain!" He grabbed Jim's shoulders with terrific strength, bellowing in his ear, pulling him into the penthouse. "You've got to kick it off. They've hit the States!"

Jim dove down the steps and made for the radio room, the sergeant who'd called him tumbling down after him, babbling wildly about ". . . terrific explosions over Phil-ly—"

Jim burst into the radio room, and the thirty other men of Advance Kickoff were huddled there, staring at him as he entered. Warrant Officer Honicker was bent over the main radio, listening intently, fiddling with the dials. An enormous howling rose from the set, eerie, frightening.

"Too much interference," he muttered.

"Probably from the bomb," another sergeant, a cook, said.

"Use your head," another tech said. "No fusion bomb could disturb the atmosphere like that." The rest of the men looked at one another, tense, bearded faces glistening.

"The base?" Jim choked, unable for an instant to ask the question. "Did you get the.... the word?"

Honicker looked up from the set, turned down the volume, and there was a strange, wild look in his eyes.

"I got that ham out of Philly," he said. "All I could hear were the words, 'An enormous fireball, big enough for two worlds,' and then"—he swallowed and ran a tongue around dry lips—"nothing."

Jim stared at Honicker, trying to comprehend the enormity df what the ham had said, sick to his stomach as though he'd been kicked there.

"It's not enough," he said. "The base. Did you raise anything from the base?"

"What more do you want?" Ivers bellowed, tears streaming down into his handle-bar mustache. "They've started it. Give them what they've been asking for! Kick it off! Kick it off!"

He began screaming, weeping, and suddenly he brought around a terrific right, bouncing his knuckles high off Jim's head. Jim went against the door, and the rest of the men surged forward. But they didn't run for the missile room. Instead, several of them wresded with Ivers, panting, falling over a Primus stove, kicking over beds, stools, struggling to get the powerful sergeant under control.

"He's gone ape—"

"Flipped his wig—snow-happy."

They had him under control finally. He crouched on a cot, weeping softly, and Honicker came forward, eyes wild, lips drawn back from yellowed teeth.

"Do we kick it off, or don't we?" he demanded. "I'm telling you I got the ham plain and clear. He mentioned this big fireball, and—"

"No." Henderson stood up, wiping away the blood that trickled down from his slashed forehead. "There's something here I don't understand. All these radios out—"

Honicker came closer, his eyes glittering. "I tell you, I heard it."

So simple, his job. He had his orders. The signal hadn't come through. The button. Walk into that concrete room into which only he was authorized to go, to which only he had the key. Walk up to that button. Press it.

"No." The word was a hoarse whisper. "It's not enough." He saw Honicker's eyes go wild, his face pale under his heavy beard. "Get back to that radio," he snapped.

"You're yellow!" Honicker screamed. "Whose side are you on^-theirs?"

Instinctively Jim brought up a right, all his force behind it, knocking Honicker against the cot on which Ivers lay. He bounced, rolled over and lay still.

He stood there, fighting the trembling, breathing hard. It was true, what Honicker said. He must be yellow. Now that the moment was here, he couldn't do it. If his life depended upon it, he couldn't walk into that room and flick the switch that would roll the roof back. Couldn't press that ominous black button that would send the missile up on a tower of flame and thunder, carrying mankind's doom with it.

"Listen to me, all of you," he said hoarsely. "I tried to raise you down here from one of the buggies. Did it come through?"

One of the techs shook his head. Jim nodded slowly. "I want a couple of squads topside right now. Something's happened, something big. It's completely blanked out all radio." He pointed to one of the meteorologie men. "Take a look at the aurora and see what I mean."

The tech shook his head doubtfully, "The aurora might affect us, but the whole world? Not a chance, sir."

"I know that," Jim said impatiently. "I'm saying that whatever has caused the aurora to act up has stopped all radio, and undoubtedly base knows that, too. They'll have sent planes by now."

"But—" The tech stared. "Without radio they'll play hell rinding us in this dark. Our directional signal, radar, the works—none of it's being received."

"Get out there on the double," Jim ordered. "I want flares lit; start the oil fires. I want light up there and plenty of it."

When the silent men had bundled up and hustled out, he slapped Honicker awake. "Get on that radio," he said. "If anything comes through, I'll be in the control room. Use the intercom."

He turned and left before Honicker could answer him. And in the missile control room he was face to face with the firing button again. He looked at his watch. Nearly two hours since the signal was overdue. Two hours. All he loved, San Francisco, New York, the great and proud cities of America might at this moment be a horrifying mass of radioactive flame and rubble.

He stared at the button in bitterness and self-loathing. ("Order No. 20: In the event of failure of Central Control to respond to 'condition yellow,' the commanding officer of Advance Kickoff shall, after correlating all known facts, use his own discretion in firing.")

He had correlated all known facts. No signals of any kind had been received for nearly two hours. A ham had gotten out a garbled message which, according to a semi-hysterical operator, had mentioned a giant globe of flame "big enough for two worlds—"

He had his orders: Fire upon his own discretion.

He couldn't.

The responsibility was his, and now that the moment was here, he could think only of the millions of souls on the other side of the globe, the target to which the gleaming missile would roar in flame and sound, tilting over, blossoming fiery white, spreading a cobalt cloud of death wider and wider on the jet stream, a deadly retaliation that would only be a dying gesture hastening the inevitable end for all.

Why had they picked him for this job? The elaborate psychological tests, the impersonal computing machines. What a joke! What a bitter mockery. He looked at the button, knowing that he could no more press it now than he could pick up a gun and blow his own brains out. Either was suicide, only the button was world suicide.

He was calm when he heard the roar of a low-flying transport plane overhead. The intercom came to life and announced the colonel was entering the base. Jim was prepared for anything but the look of absolute relief on the old man's weathered face when he hurried through the heavy door and saw that the switch was still on safety.

"Thank the lord. Oh, thank the dear, sweet lord!" the old man said. He gave Jim a keen scrutiny. "This has been the hairiest, absolutely the worst two hours of my life, Jim. We thought we'd covered every contingency—but who'd have foreseen an explosion to end all explosions on the sun!"

"The . . . sun?"

"The goddamnedest, most unbelievable flare-up of sun-spots ever known, Captain. Completely knocked out reception on all lengths throughout the entire arctic circle."

Jim sagged into his seat, the ominous button glittering, seeming to grow to enormous dimensions. "A fireball shooting up from the sun's surface," he said softly, "leaving a hole big enough to swallow two worlds—"

"What's that?"

"Nothing." Jim smiled wryly. "Just some ham's semi-scientific description of a sunspot."

"No joking matter, Jim," the colonel said, "believe it." He frowned, tugging at the thick door that led to the firing pit. "We sent a jet up here the minute we realized we weren't getting through. That was a mistake. He floundered around up here without radio until his fuel was nearly gone. Lucky to find his way back. I was in a bad way, my lad. I tell you no lies."

He folded his arms and inspected the missile, his breath a misty cloud in the cold chamber. The missile gleamed, a delicate rime of frost on its sides,

"Thank the lord," the colonel breathed.

"You were afraid I'd kicked it off?" Jim asked.

The colonel glanced at him, then fumbled for a cigar. "I—let's say I hoped you hadn't."

"You didn't have to worry about it, sir," Jim said quietly. "When the chips were down, I chickened out."

"I see," the colonel said.

They left the missile pit, the heavy fireproof door slamming shut with a solid thud. The old man fit his cigar.

"Did you consider all the facts as outlined in order twenty?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you arrived at the conclusion that the facts didn't warrant the firing?"

"No." Jim looked at his hands, then glanced once at the firing button. "I'd have fired, but I didn't have the guts."

"Put it this way, Captain," the colonel said softly, "you'd have fired, but you didn't have the heart"

Jim looked steadily at the colonel. The old man was smiling flintily. "If we wanted a man who could push a button, any damn fool would qualify," the colonel said. "Do you think we ever really intend to use that monster in there?" He put a hand on Jim's arm, and his face was deadly serious as he said, "What we needed here, Captain, was a man who would fight himself every inch of the way in the event the unforeseen arose. A man who would take all factors into consideration, decide they warranted firing and still not press that button."

"But that doesn't make sense, sir," Jim said. "Why have the Big Punch in there and then put a man in control who won't use it?"

"Because, Jim," the colonel said, "if we ever did use it, it would mean the end of the world for all of us. No one wins the next one. We know that for a moral certainty."

"We know it, but do they?" Jim asked.

The colonel pointed to the thick door that led to the firing pit. "So long as that hellish thing is in there, primed and ready to go—and don't think for one minute they don't know we've got it primed and ready—then they'll snort and bluster and raise fifteen different kinds of hell, but they'll never dare take that final step."

Jim shook his head dubiously. "I wish I could be as certain of that as you seem to be, sir."

"I'm a lot more certain of it now than I was two hours ago," the colonel said. "You see, the computing machines assure us that so long as we have the Big Punch, they'll never take that final step." He put a hand on Jim's shoulder. "The same machines, Captain Henderson, that guaranteed your love of humanity was so strong you'd never push that button."

air, watching them slam them into the holes and ram them home with jerking rivet guns.

He'd seen her, as the men had told him he would, framed in that window, slipping a filmy bra on, half bent over, long hair swaying down, a lush, dark curtain covering the smooth outlines of breast and belly, thighs hard, graceful, beautifully engineered. Every morning for weeks now, the men told him, she'd stood framed in the window, stretching, yawning, brushing her hair, flaunting her loveliness, secure behind the moat, the deep, deep moat of the ten-foot alley that lay between her window and the new building.

In all those weeks, the men said, she hadn't once glanced out at the project. Apparendy she didn't know, or didn't care, that she was entirely visible to the construction men outside the window.

But today she'd looked. She'd looked at him, a long, level look, a look that to him was a cry, loud, piercing. A demand. And he'd known.

Just a dream. A dream. Over and over the voice whispered in his ears as he squirmed along, then stood up, feeling the gusts of raw wind, adjusting his body, delicately, carefully, swaying hundreds of feet above the ground with nothing but the drip, drip of fog from the beams that checkered the faint light from the watchman's shack far below and to the front.

His mouth opened wide in a soundless grin. She was there beyond the darkness of the window. She had stood before that window, morning after morning, sliding on the silky nylons, running a voluptuous hand up the long length of her legs, adjusting the garter belt, knowing the others were watching, not giving a damn, tempting them, ignoring them, morning after morning, until today he had come. Then she had looked, and now he was here in a dream that might have been real.

He launched himself like a diver across the black abyss and was clinging to the window sill. It had been like flying, a sure, confident thing, that leap across the alley that separated her room from the project. An alley he'd never have dared jump across in broad daylight and awake. But now—

With a smooth flow of leg muscles he was up, one leg over the sill. Another second and he was in the room, her perfume all about him, her hair dark against the pillow.

He came near on cat feet, full of vast assurance, grinning lightly. This wasn't happening, of course. This was just a dream like all the others he'd had. The result of a traumatic shock, that psychiatrist had insisted a dozen years ago, after he'd been foolish enough to tell about the first dream. In time these dreams should pass. Meanwhile, work, play hard, get yourself tired enough to sleep. Sleep. Dreamless sleep.

He knelt beside her bed, studying the dim, pale face framed by the long hair. She stirred slightly, as though sensing his dream presence. He murmured to her, softly, insistently, telling her of her hunger, her need for him. Slowly, slowly, her eyes opened, then she was sitting bolt upright, hand pressed to her mouth, hair dark against her pale breasts, one shoulder gleaming like captured moonlight.

Urgently he pressed his mouth against her bare shoulder, and slowly she relaxed, not speaking, while his hands moved silently, knowingly, with a language of their own. Once she gasped slightly, then she whispered, and finally, her strong fingers biting deep into his shoulders, she was silent. Only her body spoke, a language eager and fiery, a dream language he understood too well.

Long after, he launched himself back across the gaping alley, raced along the beams, soundlessly laughing at the predawn sky, mouth wide, inhaling the fog-laden air, lungs moving easily, relaxed, certain of himself. This was a dream, and in it he was slipping down the scaffolding, dropping to the ground. Then he was running, running, on tiptoe, laughing, laughing. Why had he gone up there? And in his dream he answered himself: Because she had looked at him—and he'd known;

Neil Sheldon came up out of the deep, dark fog of sleep slowly, swimming up, half suffocating until with a jerk he was sitting up, the clatter of his old alarm clock loud in his shocked ears. He snapped it off and winced at the pain in his shoulders. He swung to the edge of the bed and slumped over, elbows on knees. He'd dreamed again last night. And again, like all the others, the running, the jumping, the girl.

And now he was tired. God, he was tired. This was too much. Too much. With stiff fingers he picked up the phone book. After a long search, he found what he wanted and began to dial a number. . . .

"Would you feel better if you were to lie down, Mr. Sheldon?" Dr. Eberhardt, the psychiatrist, said. "You look quite tired."

Neil glanced at the couch and smiled slightly. "I'm very tired," he said. "Had a hard night, but I'll sit here, if you don't mind."

The doctor nodded, flipped open a notebook and gave him a quick, shrewd glance. "I got your file from the Veterans' Administration. I studied the psychiatric report on you, so I'm fairly familiar with your initial traumatic shock."

Neil nodded. "A tank ran over my head," he said bluntly. "It was in the Hürtgen Forest. I was asleep, knocked out. I had on my helmet, otherwise—" He shifted nervously in the chair, a faint sweat on his upper lip. "The ground was muddy. You know, soft, deep mud. I must have heard the tank coming in my sleep. I woke up, rolled over and saw it; it loomed directly over me. The tracks looked about ten feet wide with sharp treads. Next thing I knew, it was on top of me." He stopped and lit a cigarette. "They tell me it mashed my head about two feet down in that mud. Some of the other guys in the patrol dug me out immediately, of course, expecting to find my head flat, but it wasn't." He grinned, his lips a bit white. "The old G.I. helmet saved my life. Stars and Stripes wrote it up. It was a big thing."

The psychiatrist wrote rapidly. Then he said quietly, "And shortly after that you began to have these realistic dreams."

"Realistic is a good word," Neil said.

The psychiatrist studied him closely. "Do you remember what your first dream was all about?"

"I remember them all," Neil said. "Who could forget— or want to?" The psychiatrist shot him a look, then scribbled in his notebook.

"The first dream," Neil said, "was in a station hospital in Le Mans, France. They took me there to X-ray my head and see if I still had all my marbles. There was a nurse—" He looked down at his cigarette and grinned. "She lived in a tent with three others at the time. In a very heavily guarded area, grassy, strictly off-limits to all male personnel—"

The psychiatrist wrote steadily as Neil talked. "Her name was Millie, and she was a genuine redhead. Green eyes, with freckled skin—a real sweet kid." He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. "She was the first woman I'd seen in a long long time." He shrugged. "To make a long story short, I dreamed that I got out of bed, somehow slipped through all those guards, got into her tent and—" He broke off and looked wryly at the psychiatrist.

"She submitted?" the psychiatrist said politely.

"Another good word," Neil said. "She was alone; the other two were on night duty. Somehow I'd known that before I went in. The funny part of it—I always have had the feeling that, that what was happening was real, actually happening, and furthermore, that I'd get away with it, all of it. And always would."

The psychiatrist nodded and scribbled away.

"The next day," Neil said, "there were grass stains on my pajamas, and Millie, the redhead, didn't show up. I was told she'd changed shifts with another nurse in a different section. And that night, well, I just didn't dream. No more dreams after that until I was in England. This time it was a Scotch gal."

The psychiatrist nodded encouragingly. "Same general tiling?"

"Yes," Neil said tiredly. "She lived on the second story of a dormitory building. In my dream I climbed up a vine and got into her room. She woke up and, well, there was no trouble at all." He stopped talking and looked at his hands. "Next morning when I woke up in my hospital bed, my hands were all scratched up, and there was a bit of bark still tangled on the button of my jacket." He looked soberly at the psychiatrist. "The bark matched the vine outside the nurse's dormitory exactly."

"Then you believe you actually walked in your sleep, climbed that vine into this Scotch nurse's room, and she seized the opportunity?"

"What else could I believe?" Neil said softly. "The next day the Scotch nurse didn't show either. Seems she requested a transfer to another section." He cocked an eyebrow at the psychiatrist.

There was the sound of a door slamming in the outer room, the reception room. The door to the doctor's office opened, and a woman's rich voice said, "I'm back, dear. Oh, sorry." The door closed, and the doctor smiled a bit stiffly at Neil. "Mrs. Eberhardt," he said briefly. "My wife is doubling for my receptionist while she's on vacation." He cleared his throat and glanced at his notebook. "These dreams," he said slowly, "you've had others besides the two you mention?"

Neil sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Plenty. I've knocked around—I'm a construction engineer. In college, after the war, there were several. Acapulco." He moved his shoulders and winced, frowning. "In one dream I swam a good half mile out into the ocean one night and boarded a yacht. The owner's daughter." The psychiatrist nodded, writing. "Carmel, I climbed a cliff from the beach up to a cottage. A world-famous fashion designer. And she was more than eager." He broke off. "Luckily," he said dryly, "they've all been one night only. It's crazy, I know, but it's all so true. And last night—" He began to tell the psychiatrist about his weird scrambling along the beams, hundreds of feet above the ground, the wet fog, the sheer danger of it.

When he was through, the psychiatrist was quiet for a time, then he said, "I can fully understand what these dreams of yours represent. They are imaginary escapes, libidinous to an extreme but, nevertheless, escapes from the deeper nightmare of that tank, the genuine horror of its bearing down on you, crushing your head down into the mud."

"But are they imaginary?" Neil asked quietly. "Look at me. I'm completely knocked out. I told you, after every one of these dreams I have proof: scratches, sore muscles, wet hair, torn clothes. Something happened to me when that tank ran over my head, Doctor. Something that's made me receptive, I suppose you'd call it. Receptive to some —some emanation from a longing woman that lets me know"

"And this knowing stimulates your nocturnal visitations?"

"How else to explain it?" Neil shrugged and winced again. "I've kept quiet since that first time because, well" —he grinned uncomfortably—"it wasn't exactly hard to take, the knowing a gal was eager and willing."

The psychiatrist looked at him, a noncommittal expression on his face. "Then you are convinced these dreams of yours are actual occurrences?" He stopped when Neil rose and began unbuttoning his shirt.

"I've tried to make a study of this in my own way," Neil said. "I realize fully how disturbed I sound, schizophrenic or worse, but I'm not kidding. Not even a little bit. If you want, I'll take you down to the job. I'll show you the room. The alley." He broke off, shuddering slightly.

"I'm not a kid anymore, Doctor," he said. "This Errol Flynn stuff has got to stop. That alley was every bit of ten feet across, with a drop of a couple of hundred, and during the dream it didn't even faze me." He shrugged out of the shirt. "But even that sort of thing isn't what bothers me. It's this—" He turned so that the doctor could see his back.

The psychiatrist sucked in his breath and came closer to examine the marks on both Neil's shoulders. Deep scratches, like claw marks, five of them on each side, as though something—someone—with sharp nails had clung to him with fierce strength. They were raw and sore-looking, and Neil winced when the psychiatrist touched them.

"They're certainly fresh-looking," the doctor said wonderingly. "And you say she . . . last night?"

"The worst one yet," Neil said wearily. "It seems that the desperate ones, the really, well, I look at them, I know, and in my sleep I go."

"Now, Mr. Sheldon," the psychiatrist said briskly, "I'm sure that in time we can completely rid you of these fantasies of yours. And as for these scratches, you probably got them on the job and—"

Neil swung around and buttoned up his shirt, a look of exhausted resignation on his face. "I don't give a damn whether or not you believe me, Doctor. All I want is to stop this, this power, I suppose you'd have to call it. I'm not a young man anymore. I'm tired. Completely. I need my sleep, and besides," he looked haunted, "they're getting worse and worse. Each one seems more desperate, more demanding. Stronger." He looked despairingly at the psychiatrist. "Can't you see, when I'm asleep I'm invincible, but when I'm awake, I pay for it."

The doctor patted him reassuringly, professionally, on the arm. He glanced surreptitiously at his watch. "We'll have you right as rain in time, Mr. Sheldon. If you'll cooperate, the thing is half licked. And I can see you're eager to co-operate. Fine. Fine." He pressed a buzzer on his desk and began scribbling on a prescription pad.

"You rang?" The doctor's wife, Mrs. Eberhardt, stood in the doorway. She was big. Even in low heels she stood six feet. Perhaps a dozen years younger than the doctor, she was big-breasted, long-legged, with swelling hips filling the too-tight uniform she wore to the bursting point. Her eyes were electric blue, wide, long-lashed, her ripe-wheat hair pulled severely back from a broad, calm brow. When she brushed a loose strand back from her forehead a set of rings winked and flashed on the third finger of her large left hand. She was a Valkyrie, heroic, massive, but perfectly proportioned for her size.

"Oh, yes, my dear," the psychiatrist said. "Will you give Mr. Sheldon an appointment, preferably as soon as possible." He saw Neil's quizzical glance, and he smiled proudly. "My wife, Mrs. Eberhardt. Mr. Sheldon."

She looked at him then. Their eyes met, and Neil wavered slightly, then straightened. "Mr. Sheldon," she acknowledged, her voice resonant, full of hidden power and depths. He nodded, shoulders stiff.

The doctor finished scribbling on the pad and tore it off. "I've made up a prescription for you, Mr. Sheldon. You're to take two of these each night, plenty of water," He smiled dryly. "They'll help you to stay in bed. Work hard, play hard, try to get to bed with a relaxed mind and the determination—"

He broke off. Eyes narrowed, Neil Sheldon was still looking at the big, blond Mrs. Eberhardt. "Mr. Sheldon," the psychiatrist said gently, "your prescription."

Neil started, his face suddenly pale. He tore his eyes from Mrs. Eberhardt, took the prescription from the doctor, and folding it thoughtfully, slipped it into his pocket.

"If you have another of these dreams," the doctor said,

netted in the South Atlantic Ocean two years, eleven months and six days ago. There may yet be time, if enough of you believe—and act—to forestall the rest of his prediction. . . .

Far-Traveler was the best kept secret in the world, up to and including the Manhattan Project which developed the A-bomb and led inexorably to MacPhee's decision one hundred miles above the earth, upon his return from the successful Venus flight.

I knew about the explosion, of course, as did the whole world: thermonuclear blasts on the order of five or six megatons, one hundred miles above the earth, are a bit difficult to conceal, even with the then imperfect radar satellites. What I didn't know, until Brigadier General Dunn's urgent call, was that the explosion had been the destruction of the Far-Traveler and that MacPhee had been found alive in the escape capsule off the tip of Africa.

They flew MacPhee in by special jet, and before I interviewed him, General Dunn gave me a quick briefing. We'd worked together before—on many occasions, in fact. Personnel connected with the Far-Traveler project tended to develop weird neuroses under the pressure of the crash program. As chief of the project, it had been General Dunn's thankless job to jar them back onto the track or remand them into protective custody. And as chief psychiatrist it was my job to advise him.

I looked long and hard at General Dunn. I was shocked at what I saw. His face was haggard with deep lines of fatigue and worry. The strong fingers gripping the edge of my desk were trembling with tension.

"MacPhee destroyed the Far-Traveler deliberately," he said hoarsely. "He admitted it. My God! Three years of unremitting work. Two billion dollars, culminating in the greatest triumph in man's history. Gone. Destroyed in a millisecond, and the reason he gives for doing it—" "What reason did he give?"

He told me, talking swiftly, at certain parts half choking with reluctance to even speak of such things here in the most advanced citadel of science on earth. When he finished talking, I stared at him for a long moment, then flipped quickly through the thick dossier on my desk— MacPhee's. I found what I wanted: religious classification. As I'd suspected, there was one word there in bold type: Atheist.

"There's absolutely no doubt," I said, "that he actually reached Venus? He's fantastically brilliant; perhaps he may have failed and devised this story as a means of deceiving—"

Dunn made a slashing, impatient gesture with his hands. "Impossible. He left on the planned orbit: circling the earth once, then out through the Capetown Anomaly so-called—the gap in the Van Allen radiation belt over the South Atlantic near the tip of Africa."

He looked at me broodingly. "He reached Venus. Every tracking station we have pinpointed him along the route outward bound: Sugar Grove, Jodrell Bank, Millstone Hill, Singapore. Sugar Grove followed him until his signal faded, seven million miles out. Right on schedule. Thirty-five days in flight. Six days on the planet. Thirty-seven days, seven hours return."

He shook his head despairingly. "No. He landed on Venus. He returned. Sugar Grove picked him up seven million miles out. Again on schedule. And one hundred miles above the earth he deliberately destroyed the Far-Traveler by removing the control magnets from the pinch-effect generators. He admits this. He set it up as a delayed action, then abandoned the spaceship in the escape capsule."

"Did he bring back anything from Venus?"

"No. Nothing but this . . . this madness—if it is." He leaned over the desk. "It's up to you to determine if he really is cracked, and if he is, what his chances of recovery are."

He straightened slowly, his haggard face twitching. "We need this man more than anyone on earth—we need Mac-Phee. Without his co-operation, there can't be another Far-Traveler. Not in our lifetime." He clenched his fists. "And MacPhee won't co-operate. Not in his present condition."

"I'll do everything possible," I said. "Send him in, and incidentally, it can't be as bad as all that. Some hundreds of fine minds worked on this project; no one man is indispensable, not even a MacPhee. It may take time, but we'll build another one."

He turned and looked bleakly at me. "No," he said, "MacPhee is an original; a man out of his time, like Leonardo was in his era. He used formulae with an entirely new math of his own invention. We have it, but who understands it? The pinch-effect generator he devised—in theory we have a couple of men who understand it—but only in theory, and that vaguely. But MacPhee built it, and it worked. He alone knows why or how. He alone was capable of piloting the Far-Traveler, of juggling a dozen constants in his head, of setting up the computers within the ship that guided it through an interlocking maze of gravitational forces."

Despair gripped his face. "Even if we had another Far-Traveler, who could operate it?"

He went to the door, opened it and beckoned. "Dr. MacPhee, will you come in, please?" Beyond him I could see two military police officers, majors, standing stiffly at attention. When MacPhee walked in, General Dunn stared at him, an eager, pathetically hopeful look on his face. MacPhee nodded impersonally to him, and Dunn, shoulders sagging, left the room.

"Sit down, Doctor," I said to MacPhee. As he walked to the chair and sat, I examined his every movement closely. He looked at me, jaw relaxed, eyes composed. His long frame was completely at ease. No different from the many other times, during the hectic days of the crash program, that I'd observed him. He was still the most completely self-possessed man I'd ever seen.

He looked intently at the small model of the Far-Traveler on my desk, and I studied him further. And suddenly, looking at him, I felt my skin pucker. This man, quietly inspecting the tiny model of his own creation, this man had walked on a distant world.

He had looked upon the void in utter solitude. He had rushed through vacuum, a vulnerable spark of animate life, hurtling across an abyss of cold, inimical space, a mystery whirling through mystery.

He had left a confirmed atheist. He had returned—

He caught my scrutiny, and he smiled pleasantly, the wrinkles around his eyes creasing deeply. Somewhat underweight, his unobtrusive suit hung loosely on his rangy frame. Crew-cut thinning hair, an ordinary man, it seemed. Only the brilliance of his gaze showed the luminous intelligence that burned in his brain. This man by every count was beyond genius. And yet—

I picked up the model of the ship he'd conceived, designed, flown to Venus and then destroyed. It was a smooth ovoid with no fins, points, protuberances of any ^ kind. I turned it over in my hands thoughtfully.

"A timeless shape," MacPhee said quietly. "An egg."

"Deceptively simple, also like an egg," I said. "Did you experience any difficulty during the . . . the flight?"

He crossed his legs and shook his head. "Actually, the principle of the Far-Traveler is simple once we had enough power to apply it. We got our power—thermonuclear power—with our pinch-effect generators. And with virtually unlimited power, we were able to utilize electromagnetic fields in space as an energy source."

He sat casually, completely at ease, not by a gesture, a twitch, a tremor of the voice did he show any abnormality. He talked easily still looking intently at the model.

"By particle-accelerating devices—one to accelerate negative particles, the other to accelerate positive particles— the ship is theoretically able to move at any speed in any field. And in an atmosphere the atmosphere directly about the ship would partake of its motion—no friction."

He said this last without any particular emphasis, though the first time he'd proven this in actual flight within our atmosphere, braking to complete stops, accelerating to thousands of miles without any noticeable gravitational effect, the space lab people had gone out of their minds with delirious joy,

"In outer space," he said, "in a cosmic field with the positive switched on, the ship gravitates toward negative charges in the field; and vice-versa. Direction of motion, of course, is controlled by changing the charge of the ship."

He shifted and smiled faintly. "I made the flight to Venus in forty-eight minutes, Earth time."

I clutched the smooth little model and stared at him. "How could that be?" I said. "The entire journey was programmed for a two and a half months' trip out and back. Isn't that so?"

He nodded. "Based on the assumed maximum velocity, which was limited by the amount of power it was thought we were able to generate, something on the order of twenty-eight thousand miles an hour."

He looked slightly apologetic. "Actually, with a few very minor adjustments, it was possible to attain any speed up to the velocity of the propagation of magnetic lines of force, the speed of light. Einstein was in error on that point. I did not achieve infinite mass as I approached the speed of light; I merely began to use power in geometrical progression, which made it necessary for me to slow to something a bit under ten per cent of the speed of light."

"But they tracked you for the first seven million miles and apparendy noticed nothing unusual."

"I held down the speed for^ the period of observation both going and returning."

"You mentioned this to General Dunn?"

He made a wry expression. "Not yet. But I will."

"Then this means you spent a considerable period of time unaccounted for—either going through space or on the planet Venus?"

He looked beyond at the blank wall behind my desk. In a slow, somber voice he began describing what the voyage had been like: the stars, burning, burning, blazing immensities of malevolent light, fixed immovably, unflicker-ing against a background of impenetrable black. The abyss of outer space, he said, is harsh, alien, terrifying in its utterly remote, its cold, dark magnificence.

The abyss of outer space. But Venus is not of that other, outer cosmos. Sharing a common creation with Earth, Venus is inextricably bound to the sun by the same interlocking fields of force that cradle the Earth in perpetual orbit.

Forty-eight minutes. But as the great spinning planet had approached, gleaming brilhandy, its tremendous cloud covering reflecting back the glory of the sun, through some inverse Einsteinian principle, he'd lived days, weeks, centuries. He'd seen the family of planets circling the sun. And beyond, the awful majesty of the cosmos, moving in ordered precision. And over it all, he said, he'd felt a presence that was divine.

I watched MacPhee intently. He returned my look, and I saw the deep sadness in his eyes.

"I spent nearly the entire two and a half months on the planet Venus," he said, "and now, at last, I understand Adam's grief at losing Paradise."

I said nothing. I searched his face. Conviction and absolute sincerity were there—and the sadness. My eyes dropped to the dossier on the desk before me.

"Venus is Genesis, the first step after Man's creation, repeated once again." His voice was low. "The clouds screen the close sun to a soft, indirect glow. And bathed in that pearly light lies a planet of warm shallow seas, with gentle winds, cool showers—and life, profligate, teeming, crowding the seas, the islands, the continents. Life as it must have been here in the beginning. Serenely joyful, divinely innocent."

"By life do you mean beings comparable to ... to us?"

He examined me searchingly; then he nodded. "Yes, as we were before the fall."

"I ... I don't quite understand, Doctor. The fall?"

"Intelligent beings, male and female, living in exquisite harmony," he said. "With one another, with the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air and the fish of the seas. In the two months I was there I saw no sickness. No one died. I moved from one hemisphere to the other, and everywhere it was the same. The people lived each day as though there had never been a yesterday and tomorrow would never come. Do you understand what I'm telling you? They wore no clothes and needed none. They had no laws, no rituals, and needed none. Even though their race is nearly as ancient as ours, none were old as we know age. These were innocents in a state of perpetual grace. Only I on all that planet knew the meaning of evil. Only I."

I heard the final bitterness in his words. He was staring down at the model of the Far-Traveler on my desk.

"I am not Lucifer," he said after a long silence, "and so I left. And when I approached the outer reaches of this green despoiled planet of ours, I destroyed the Far-Traveler." He gave me a sudden odd smile. "At least I'll take my chances with the rest of my own kind."

"But why? What was your motive in destroying the ship?"

He picked up the model of the Far-Traveler and cupped it in his hands.

"I give you planet Earth," he said sofdy. "Green, with fertile lands, equitable climates, vast seas. Earth, with blue sky, a vigorous, eminentiy wonderful planet. And I give you Man."

He stood up, towering over my desk. "I give you Man, possessed of a brain bursting with creativity, who chooses to conquer others but never himself. Who, possessed of free will, refuses to mature, emotionally, morally. Who chooses, rather, to rend the skies with radioactive bombs, polluting his seas, the very rains that wash his Earth. Who claims a soul but denies it in the name of war. Living with filth that never should have been. Bearing diseases easily eradicated if only enough cared. Growing enough food for all, but permitting most to starve. Man, crushing his brother, seeking bigger and better means to destroy himself, living out his days in hate and fear."

He held up the Far-Traveler model. "I give you arrogance: Man, certain that he alone is chosen to be in God's image; longing to swarm throughout the universe, an emissary of death, filled with the virus of pride, contaminated with original sin. I give you this creature, this sentient, brilliant, immature savage, landing on Venus, bearing his seeds of self-destruction. Man, with his bitter dark intelligence, running unchecked through the second Garden of Eden."

He threw the model violently to the floor. It smashed to hundreds of glittering pieces. There was a long silence.

I cleared my throat. "Let me see if I understand your motives in destroying the Far-Traveler," I told him. "You believe that were we to colonize Venus, we'd corrupt— perhaps destroy—a race of beings who are perfectly adjusted to their environment. And you feel this is wrong. Is that it?"

"It's not just a question of colonizing one planet alone," he said. "The universe lies beyond, planet after planet, each fertile, fecund—but empty. Each unique, capable of sustaining life richly; offering in abundance all of God's limitless gifts. Through unimaginable gulfs of time and space they've been waiting for the magic touch of intelligent life, and for what? For a repetition of the senseless savagery, the brutal, mindless, greedy plunder that the Earth has endured?"

He shook his head slowly. "I think not," he said gently.

"Man will never leave this Earth. I believe we lost that right long, long ago when the Life Force, the Creator, God, if you will, recognized that the first great experiment here had gone wrong. And so He tried a second experiment on Venus. And there it has succeeded."

I stared at him. "The implications of that, true or not, are appalling even for an unreligious person," I said. "However, there is one great flaw in your argument. You see, you did leave the Earth. If one man can do it, then another also can achieve it. And in time, millions."

He looked down at the floor, that odd smile on his face again. "I also believe," he said, "that the Far-Traveler— and I—are all a part of the . . . the second experiment." He looked at me, and again I saw the light of pure intelligence in his eyes. "They are divinely innocent on Venus but brilliant. They have remarkably advanced mental powers, but their knowledge encompasses the spiritual rather than the physical world. However, I believe that I was sent to implant the seeds of physical knowledge. And I did."

"That's rather a lot to accomplish in only two months or so, even for you," I said. "How did you do it?"

He smiled. "Among other things, I left them a completely finished working model of the Far-Traveler"

"But why? Of what use could it be to them?"

"I told you," he said, "that I believed the experiment here on Earth had failed and that it had succeeded on Venus. Logically, then, they are to be the rightful heirs to the universe. The universe that might have been ours. And when that time comes for them, they will be ready with the Far-Traveler"

"I fail to see the logic in that," I said. "Even assuming what you say is true, it would take many generations, surely, for the beings on Venus to attain the technical knowledge necessary to build and operate other Far-Travelers. Am I right?"

He nodded. "That's entirely possible."

I looked at him sympathetically. "However unworthy of it we might be, man, nevertheless, has the technical knowledge and capability for space flight right now. In a few years we'll be once again on Venus. It was most unrealistic of you to believe that by destroying the Far-Traveler it would deter us from further flights for more than a few years."

"A few years is the same as forever," he said. "With the Far-Traveler as a working model, it would have been merely a problem in engineering for us to make bigger and better ones. Immense, capable of sustained flights anywhere in the universe, carrying enough computers so that anyone could pilot them. But without the Far-Traveler it will take years to put even a small payload on Venus, and at that Venus would have to be in a favorable position, which is again only periodically. Using multistage reaction-engined rockets, the odds against success are very great indeed. And meanwhile, in only about three years—"

He hesitated. "One of my reasons in building the Far-Traveler/' he said, "is because ever since Los Alamos I've charted a trend on Earth, watching the lines converge. I'd hoped that before the inevitable climax—"

He broke off and moved shattered bits of the Far-Traveler model about with the tip of a shoe. "I will ask you, as a man intimately acquainted with the emotional processes of the human mind, if in about three years every man on Earth was suddenly asked to divide his wealth, to take all he owned that was superfluous and pass it on to those who had quite literally nothing, what would his response be?"

"It would depend upon the circumstances," I said, puzzled. "But what has this to do with the Far-Traveler?"

"It has everything to do with it," he answered. "I will ask you again. Suppose in about three years an enormous group of those who had nothing suddenly gained a position of equal power with those who had a superabundance of the world's goods? Suppose they then demanded the right to distribute their starving peoples about the face of the Earth, for each to have a bit of fertile land, a share of the natural God-given resources—minerals, timber, water power—to share all the wealth of this wonderful planet equally? What would be the result? Would those who had too much willingly give it over; agree to equitable division of the entire Earth?" He paused. "Or would they refuse?"

"It would depend upon the alternatives; that is to say," I told him, "what would happen should they refuse, under threat of force, to share their possessions even equally."

"The alternatives?" He looked steadily at me. "Your answer explains why the first experiment on Earth has failed. From the moment man walked erect, saw the stars, knew that he was alive, with all the blessings the term connotes, he has resorted to force and force alone to obtain his ends. He has lived the lie that the only alternative to force is force. And so he wasted his heritage seeking more and more powerful force until at last he achieved the ultimate: the force to which there can be no alternative. And when it burst in dazzling splendor above the New Mexico desert, the message it brought was overwhelmingly evident: Love one another—or die."

He walked over to the globe next to my bookcase and put his finger on a great land mass that sprawled over the shoulder of the globe. He gave me a grim look, and once again I was conscious of the sheer intelligence behind those eyes.

"In only about three years," he said quietiy, "this is where it will start: the final end of the first experiment on Earth. From this nation, this sleeping giant of incredible biological force. Long dormant, historically the mental equals of any others, but a nation so terribly bereft of the good things of Earth as to be reduced to the level of the beasts. This nation, practicing infanticide, yet swollen with the sheer weight of human flesh, propagating in direct geometric progression, until now it encompasses a full quarter of the Earth's swarming billions. Desperate for living room, for arable soil, for power to meet its increasingly pressing needs. Until finally, choked off by the fearful world powers only too aware of its mighty potential, this nation is forced to turn inward, to utilize all the brain power of its numberless masses. And one day, out of that massed brain, it will come, the only force that man truly respects: the bomb. And with the threat of that force this nation will put forth its demands."

I stared at that spot on the globe for long seconds; then I said slowly, "It's too bad that conditions on Earth merit even for an instant the consideration that such a situation could arise. But if it should, what do you think the outcome would be?"

He gave the globe a sudden spin, watching the myriad cities, mountains, lakes and oceans twist beneath him.

"Man will never leave this Earth," he said, "for the condition of man is this: Love or die. But he has lived the lie too long. And in the face of that threat, that desperate demand calling for the deepest outpouring of love, man will accept the alternative. He will meet force with force. And so—"

they left alone, he who taught me to speak English. It was he who told me of the stern God who was kind, who was just, who loved us all dearly. And of Eve, our first mother, who succumbed to the weakness within her and so banished us all from paradise. Truly I am a son of Eve.

And when the Americans came, the missionary told us that God was good to us for the Americans were our saviors. And they were.

They were kind; they were just, like their great white God who is my God. They rebuilt the homes, treated our sick, and always they laughed and smiled and were gentle to us. And so when many years had passed, when the ships began to come one by one into the lagoon, more and more of them, in greater numbers than even old Palinau, who remembers the Germans, ever recalled, we knew something tremendous was happening.

Then they called us together and the admiral, who is chief of all the islands, spoke to us. His voice was solemn ;is he told us that we must leave. Eniwetakuu would soon be kapu. The tall admiral, with his white hair waving in the steady wind, talked and old Palinau listened and told those who could not understand what he said.

"We know it is a hard thing to leave this lovely island," the admiral said, while the birds wheeled overhead and beyond the reef the mother sea thundered deep and slow.

"You have been through much grief, many hardships. I know how your people suffered under the Japanese and before them, the Germans. And yet you were firm and survived because you love this island."

Old Palinau stood straight and proud when he said this. All the old ones folded their arms and nodded, looking fierce and strong.

"I know how sacred your burial plots, your ancient villages are to you," the admiral said, "and yet we Americans have tried to be good governors, to make you feel that we are proud to be your protectors, your friends."

This was true, and we murmured, there in the cool windswept shade of the palms with the pigs rooting, fat and contented, the scurrying chickens scratching beneath the fine raised houses the Americans had built for us. They were good; they were kind. I know the God of the Americans who is my God is good and kind like the missionary says. But he is strong. He is angry when we do wrong; 1 tremble for what is yet to come, for I have done wrong.

"We hope that you will realize," the admiral said, "that what we are about to ask you is not only for the good of America; it is for the good of all—not only you on the island but the whole world. We have a power mightier than any known to man. It is a power that must be tested and tried, so that in the end the greatest ultimate good may come from it."

He stopped, and we looked beyond, out to the great lagoon where the marvelous ships from America lay, heavy, unmoving, even though the surf surged and swept into the lagoon. They are made of iron and yet they float like my little moku. They carry great guns, and I have heard them when they fought the little yellow men.

"We need this atoll." Speaking slow and deep, old Pal-inau uttered the words the admiral spoke. "It is here that we have chosen to test this God-given power that we may know how to control it so that the world will be a safer and happier place for all of us."

We looked at one another, wonder in our eyes. Was not the world already a safe and wonderful place? The great mother sea still murmured and moved ceaselessly, teeming with fish. The coconuts grew in heavy clusters in the myriad palms. The turtles laid their eggs each night and dragged their silly trails back to the sea to point the way to their nests. Life was good. And yet the Americans were kind. They were our friends. They would not tell us an untruth.

"You will be paid generously for your land," the admiral said, and already the murmuring rose as the old ones, who do not care for change, began to raise their loud laments. "We will move you to any other island you desire: Rongelap, Wotto, Rikieppu; you name it, and by God! the U.S. Navy will take you there, pigs, chickens, tin roof and all."

The old ones argued, loudly, bitterly, with Palinau, but I did not argue. To me it was as clear as the water in the lagoon. Was not Eniwetakuu the loveliest of all the islands? Was not this power given by God? Then what more fitting spot in all the world for this power to be tested could be found? It was shameful that they should argue, for this was an honor beyond all honors. What they requested, surely we should do.

"What is this power?" the old ones asked. "Why should we be removed? If the great white God says here is the place to test His gift, surely we can give them room in the hills. Why must the entire island be emptied? Are we not worthy to be near this testing? Are we not friends?"

Gently the admiral explained to Palinau, who told the old ones, that this power was great; greater than the erupting volcano as the volcano is greater than the cooking lire. The island must be empty of all men. I should have guessed then, for did not Moses leave the others behind when he climbed the mountain shrouded in clouds and mist? But I did not remember, and I did what no man has done.

The old women wept, but all the people were moved. I had no father to tell me to leave, so I remained behind. My father's mother chose to go to Aigigin-ae, which the Americans call Ailinginae,- and when she left, already our island was changed, with tall masts, higher than the palms, raised about the lagoon. The huge ships came in, filled with men and strange machines.

And all for the power. The power, mightier than anything given to man before. The power that would change the world. How would it be? Magnificent, of course. Filled with sparkling colored lights and sound, perhaps like the rockets the sailors fired on Independence Day, only infinitely more wonderful, for this was a gift from God.

In the lagoon, perhaps an hour's paddle away, there is a tiny island, a spit of rock and trees and sand. It was here I kept my little moku—what the Americans call a pirogue. I kept it hidden, covered with palm fronds, for I was consumed with the weakness of Eve—curiosity.

I wanted to see the power.

There were many of my people who remained to help the Americans, so I went unnoticed. I watched and waited, and when finally the flimsy little building in the middle of the island was ready, when the men had climbed the tall masts and checked the curious machines atop them for the last time, I knew the moment was near.

All the men were counted, drawn up in rows. Then they entered the ships which one by one slipped out of the lagoon, leaving a few, lifeless, behind. Then the strange flying 'copter flew over the entire island, over each little spit and rock in the lagoon, searching, searching. But my moku was well hidden beneath the palms. I crouched in it, tense and unmoving, and soon the machine went away.

All was quiet, a strange, waiting silence that filled my blood with water, and still I did not guess. The consuming desire to see the power held me as the hours slipped by and the darkness deepened. Once again the strange flying machine came over, dropping a huge white light that burned like the sun, turning the dark, empty night to day, but I had seen it before. That was not the power.

The moon went out; the mother sea was quiet, as though she knew what I should have guessed. Still I waited, stiff and cold, watching, straining, fearful that I might miss the sacred test of that which God had given the Americans.

And then it came. And I saw.

They say they found me the next day, still in my sturdy moku, but high and dry atop the little island. The island was bare, stripped by the power that sent the wave that swept me ashore.

They carried me to this ship, and never have they stopped their watching and working over me. They mention "practically ground zero" over and over, and "miracle," a word I know from the missionary. A word that makes me tremble for what is yet to come. I am blind. My hair is gone; my body is like the octopus, boneless. My tongue is shriveled and useless. I bleed, though I am not cut. I am on fire, but I cannot drink.

For I saw.

The mighty light that was without color, without sound. The swelling brilliance, shining in my bones, burning in my brain. The brightness deep within my soul, shining, glowing, searing my heart with dazzling flame. I turned my back and yet it grew, shining through my body, brighter, brighter, unbearable streaming light.

It was then I knew the full extent of my sin.