IF SCIENCE fiction be the ultimate in escape literature, in RUNAWAY it comes full circle. For the protagonist in this story finds he cannot escape himself even by running faster and farther than man had run before. Science or no science, man carries his universe with him. This is a bit of a departure for Leigh Brackett, though it still embodies the wonderful color and imagery which is the hallmark of her talent.

—The Editor

It took a trip to Ganymede to prove to Reid that the one thing he couldn't escape was himself ...

RUNAWAY

I

Anthony Reid sat on his sun-deck and stared at the city. He had a splendid view of it, for the housing unit in which he lived—a charming structure of white plastibrik with solaray glass throughout and the latest in reactor heating—was built on a ledge of the low hills above Sunset Boulevard. There were others, above and below and beside it on both sides as far as he could see, so that the hills had taken on the appearance of stiffly serrated cliffs.

And to the east and west and south and north was the city, pink and white and yellow, pale blue and green and gray, squares and cubes and pylons, flowing into every crevice of the hills, inundating the crests, pouring back into the valleys and filling their flat immensity and going on, until it was stopped by two barriers it could not overleap, the desert on one side and the Pacific on the other.

It was still a horizontal city, with few skyscrapers. Old Earthquake, as rough and primitive as ever, still lived beneath it, and the underlying shale and sandstone were no firmer than they had ever been for the bracing of deep foundations. But it was big. It used the Pacific Ocean for a reservoir, and the hydroponic tank farms that grew its food had a total area of three hundred square miles. Its name was still Los Angeles.

"It's incredible," said Anthony:

His wife glanced at him from the chaise where she was lying. "What is ?"

"To think that once this was all open country. Just cattle range, from the desert to the sea."

Fern Reid finished her cocktail—a mildly stimulating synthetic with none of the deteriorating effects of the old-fashioned alcohol—and rose, stretching her soft pale arms. "It seems like an awful waste of good land," she said, yawning. "There's a program on. Will you get it while I fix the supper?"

Anthony seemed not to have heard her. He was still looking at the city.

"There used to be droughts," he said. "Years with no rain—they depended on rain, then—and all the grasses and things dried up. They had to drive whole herds of animals over the cliffs, so that the rest could have enough to eat. That must have teen very hard on the ranchers to do."

"Well, fortunately, nobody has worries like that any more. For heaven's sake, Anthony, will you stop mooning and get that program? The children have to see it for their homework, and I can't do everything around here."

He got up and followed his wife into the living area. The floor was resilient under his feet, warm in winter, cool in summer. The walls were done in soft pastels. He crossed to the one that was opposite both the living and the dining areas and pushed a button. A panel slid hack, revealing the large screen. He pushed two more buttons, and full automatic tuning brought the picture in clear and steady, in three dimensions and true color. Inevitably, it was the middle of a commercial.

"—ignore the warning signs of emotional disturbance," the earnest announcer was saying. "At the first symptoms of nervousness, moroseness, or any abnormal reaction, take Passif for that mild, non-habit-forming sedation prescribed by the medical profession—and see your psychiatrist at once. Remember, Passif is not a cure. But for the relief of—"

Anthony started, and listened with a curiously furtive interest.

Phyllis, aged nine, was setting the table. From behind the plasti-glass screen that closed off the kitchen area came the clicking of control buttons and the low hum of the electronic rapid-heat units. In a corner of the room, at a low, broad shelf littered with games and toys, young Tony was building a complicated structure of plastic blocks. He was rising twelve. "Your program's coming on," said Anthony.

"Homework," said young Tony sourly. "I don't see why they have to load us down after school, too." He pushed the blocks petulantly aside and went over to the table.

"By the way," said Anthony, "I've been. meaning to ask you. Have you learned to read yet?"

"Now stop devilling the boy!" said Fern, coming in with a tray of bright containers. "You know perfectly well what it does to a child's emotions to he forced. He just isn't adjusted to reading yet."

"Besides," said young Tony, "who reads any more?"

"I can," said Phyllis. "And spell my name, too."

"Huh," said Tony. "That doesn't prove you're so smart."

"Supper's all ready," said Fern, in her most musical voice, looking daggers at Anthony. "There, the program is on. Let's all watch it as we eat, and then we can discuss it later."

Automatically, Anthony opened his individual sterile containers and pecked at what was in them, a high-protein jelly and various processed vegetables, topped off with a synthesized sweet. Between bites he watched the program. It was in the "Earth's Proud Heritage" series, and it told the story of SC-3, the little ship that was afraid to go into space. SC-3 ran away from its launching rack and took shelter in a museum hangar, where Lieutenant Wajert's great Luna VI related to it in vivid flashbacks the mighty story of man's first successful flight to

the Moon. Backgrounds and model work were superb, and it was intercut with some of the actual films taken by Wajert. SC-3's final release from fear and its joyous flight along the space-trail blazed by Luna was movingly done. But Anthony glowered at the screen, unsatisfied.

"They might," he said. "have mentioned the five other rockets that crashed with everyone aboard before Wajert finally made it. And I remember reading that two of Wajert's crew died on the Moon."

"Why should they mention it?" said Fern. "It's unpleasant, and it had nothing to do with the story, anyway."

"Because it isn't honest, that's why. If they're going to tell a thing, they ought to tell it.""

"Oh, you're always finding fault," said Phyllis. "I thought it was lively."

"Who cares, anyway?" said young Tony. "History. Phooey." He rose and went dourly back to his blocks.

"Honestly, Anthony, I don't know what's got into you," Fern said. "Nothing seems to suit you any more. And look there. you've hardly touched your dinner again."

"I'm just not hungry," he said, andadded hastily, "Nothing about the food, it was fine." He grabbed a book and went out on the sun-deck, hearing Fern muttering behind him something about as hard as she worked to get the meals the least people could do was eat them, and Phyllis asked with shrill and ghoulish interest. "What's the matter with Daddy, is he starting to have a breakdown?''

Again Anthony started, this time quite violently. "No!" he thought. "No, of course I'm not."

He sat down and resolutely opened the book. It was a best-seller and one he had wanted to read for some time, but he could not keep his attention on the story in spite of the top-notch art-work. Captions and dialogue blurred before his eyes. His mind swirled, not producing anything in particular but a vague sense of unease and frustration. At the first symptoms of abnormal reaction, take Passif....

Suddenly, he was afraid.

Fern finished her task of pitching the used containers down the disposal chute and came to join him. "Your hands are shaking," she said. "Yes they are, look there! You're not eating, and you've done nothing but toss and turn all night for a week. Now, we might as well have it out, Anthony, you know as well as I do that evasions are unhealthy. What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing," said Anthony, choking down an alarming impulse to yell at her.

"Now, dear. A week, perhaps a day or two more. Yes, I remember it was Tuesday, because you quarrelled with the children over what their history teacher said about dirt-farming, and you told them their great-great-grandfather was a dirt-farmer, and Phyllis cried. Now, what happened last Tuesday? I'm trying to think—wasn't that the day Mr. Jennings was taken ill?"

"Perhaps it was. What difference does it make?" Anthony flung down the book. "There's nothing the matter with me, except you won't leave me alone!"

"There!" said Fern triumphantly.

"That got a reaction. It is Mr. Jennings!"

"Mr. Jennings, Mr. Jennings!" Anthony sprang up, and there was no

possible doubt now about his nervous. quivering. "What's he got to do with anything? I've worked for him for fifteen years, but I never saw him and he never saw me. I'm still working for him, and if he spent the next century in the Recreation San it wouldn't change anything for me or any of the two-thousand-and nine other employees of the Jennings Accounting Service. No matter who lives or dies these days, it's all the same."

Fern nodded. "Exactly. That's why I can't understand why you're so upset about it."

"Oh, Lord," said Anthony. "I'm going down to the com-room and play a game of ball with George."

"All right," said Fern stiffly to his retreating hack. "But if you don't straighten out pretty soon I'm going to call Dr. Eckworth."

The automatic lift took him down to the basement area where the community room. was, and as usual in the evenings George Grosset was there, drinking a Peppy and waiting for someone to play with him. They solemnly tossed for ends, and then sat down at the glassed-in case. "I get first play," said George, and punched a row of buttons. The light metal ball began to dance as the magnetic impulses caught at it.

Anthony pushed his own buttons, but it was no use. George shook his head. "Off our game tonight," he said. "Really off. Try another?"

"Sure," said Anthony savagely, and scowled at the ball.

"Better relax a little first," said George. "You're all tensed up. Here, have a Sootho."

Anthony accepted the cigarette. He glanced furtively at George, seized with a desire to talk. George smiled at him. "Go ahead," he said. "I've been waiting for it all week."

"You've noticed, too?"

"No timing, no co-ordination. I could tell by your game."

Anthony leaned forward. "I did tell you about Mr. Jennings."

"Your boss? Sure. Had a breakdown—personal fulfilment trauma."

"Yes. But why, George? He has pots of money, a flourishing business, a nice wife and kids, and no worries. Why should a successful man like him get a fulfillment trauma?"

"The stresses and strains of modern living," said George heavily. "Fortunately, it's not too serious. He'll be right as rain in a year or two. And as for you, Tony, take my advice, as a friend. Go and get yourself pysched. It's better to nip these things in the bud." He patted his ample middle and grinned. "I've had the widgets too, Tony boy, I know all about it. But I just toddle myself right off to the doctor, and look at me. Contented as a baby."

"That's it, though," said Anthony; suddenly crystallizing the vague thought that had been tormenting him. "That's the thing. Listen, George. You and I—we both have good jobs. Good pay, regular promotions, all that. We live well. We're comfortable. We don't have to worry about the future. Now why, why, George, you tell me, should you and I have any reason to be psyched? What are the causes?"

"The stresses," said George firmly, "and the strains of modern living. It's just a part of it, that's all. No use fighting it, boy. Just roll with the punch, and you'll get along."

He smiled, nodded wisely, and went to the dispenser for another bottle of

Peppy.

That night, determined to sleep, Anthony took double his usual dose of slumber pills. It didn't do any good. For a long time he lay awake in the quiet dark, thinking of Mr. Jennings in his palatial office bursting suddenly into tears and wailing like a lost child,-"Who am I? Tell me who I am and what I'm doing here!"

"If," thought Anthony into the unre- sponsive night, "that can happen to a man like Jennings—what hope is there for me?"

II

OVER breakfast, a hollow-eyed and irritable Fern said grimly, "I'm going to make an appointment for you today. Now there's no argument about it, Anthony, I simply refuse to put in any more nights like the last one, with you groaning and yelling and thrashing about. You're making a nervous wreck out of me."

Anthony nodded. "I suppose you're right. Make it for next Thursday, if you can. That's my full day off."

He went down and got into his car, feeling tired and submissive. After all, getting psyched was no more awful than taking a purgative. He supposed it rather alarmed him simply because he'd always been well adjusted and had never felt the need of it before.

"I guess George was right," he thought. "Stress and strain. Oh, well. I'll get some of that Passif stuff on my lunch period."

He pushed the Engaged button on the dash, and the automatic buried-cable system picked him up and fitted him smoothly into the stream of traffic. It was a blazing hot morning, but he never noticed it. The car, like the apartment and the office building to which he was going, was perfectly air-conditioned.

Usually he watched the car video during the drive downtown, but this morning, for some reason, the songs and gay chatter of the personable young lady who starred in the "Commuter's Hour" left him sulkily unresponsive. He looked out the window instead, smoking a Sootho and trying not to fidget.

He stared at the bright storefronts and the advertising displays until he tired of them, and then gradually his attention was drawn to the cars that flowed in massed lines on either side of him. The relay systems, operating from the buried cables to control centers in the cars, kept the vehicles exactly spaced apart, moving the traffic smoothly, slowing it individually or in the mass as needed and speeding it up again, all so gently that not a shock or a jar disturbed the passengers. Most of the people in the cars were watching the "Commuter's Hour." A few were reading. A few more were talking together. and here and there one was just sitting, not doing anything. Anthony looked at them, idly at first and then with a growing fascination, and a notion began to circle around his brain that frightened him into a conviction that he did indeed need a psychiatrist, and as soon as possible.

"They're all like one person," said the notion. "They look the same—not superficially, but really. Do I—"

Unable to resist the impulse, he peered at himself in the dashboard mirror. He looked for a long, long time in a kind of quivering horror, only rousing himself at the last minute to press the Right Turn button that took him off the freeway and into the parking area of the Jennings Accounting Service, Certified Accountants to the Solar System.

Like a man in a dream, and not a very pleasant one, Anthony left his car for the automatic parking system to take care of, and entered the building.

It was a very large building. The halls were very long, cool, polished, and softly lighted, so that the lines of people moving through them seemed almost to swim in a liquescent gloom, trailing their shadows beside them. Anthony knew only a few of them even by sight. Suddenly he was no longer sure of those. He took the escalator up to the third floor, darted around a corner, and achieved the solitude of his own calculator room. He was breathing hard. Sweat prickled on his skin, and his heart was pounding. Abnormal reactions. George was right...

Work. That was the best thing. Get to work and forget about it. He took off his jacket. Automatic relays had already activated the calculator, and the morning's work was piled under the delivery tube. He prepared to get busy.

Anglo-Martian Enterprises, semi-annual account, a vast thick spool. How many Anglo-Martians did this make for him? He counted on his fingers. Twenty-nine. Or was it thirty? Too many, anyway. He pushed a button on the calculator, and then pressed the on switch on the electro-scanner and started the tape feeding in. The calculator began to hum.

Anthony sat down and watched the metal ribbon glide slowly in. Code dots and holes. Holes and code dots. He got up and went hack to the stack again. He looked at other spools. Finally he picked one up and went out of his room and down the hall to the next door. He rapped and opened it.

Bill Stocker laid down the picture magazine he was looking at and said, "Come on in."

Anthony went in. Stocker had been here, in this same room, four years longer than Anthony. It was his boast—untrue—that he had worn out six calculators. The one beside him now was quietly devouring the data passed to it by its scanner, cerebrating with a scarcely audible hum. Stocker looked at Anthony and frowned.

"You look ragged this morning. What's on your mind?"

"This," said Anthony, pointing to the account in his hand.

"Is it wrong some way?"

"I don't know. How, when you come

right down to it, would anybody know?" "Then what—?"

"All these code dots, Bill. These long columns of little holes, with the squiggles in front of them. I've been running them into the scanner for fifteen years, and it never occurred to me to wonder before. What are they? What do they stand for, monsters? Women's underwear? Martian rubies, fire opals from Venus, six thousand vitamin-enriched candy-bars? What?"

"For the love," said Bill Stocker, "of the eternal Mike." And he stared.

"But don't you know? Didn't you ever wonder?"

"Look," said Stocker. "Are you crazy or something? Who knows, who cares? It comes out right on the total, and that's all that matters."

"Yes," said Anthony. "I suppose it is."

He went back to his own room and shut the door. He sat and watched the calculator. When it had eaten up all of Anglo-Martian he pushed the OFF switch on the scanner and then punched a couple more buttons. The original spool was returned to him, together with a second containing complete calculations of Anglo-Martian's debits, credits, interest, investments, and et cetera, more dots and holes that only another machine could read. He placed both spools in the OUT tube, picked up the next account, and returned to the scanner. He reached out to push the switch again, and then it happened. Something snapped.

"That," he said, staring at his ex- tended forefinger, "is the only part of me that's really necessary. It pushes buttons. The rest is just waste material."

The account he was holding fell with a reproachful thump on the floor. "Just a great big bunch of trash," Anthony muttered, and began to shake. There was a roaring in his ears, and a suffocating tightness in his chest. The calculator leered at him, with its banks of little glowing eyes. It laughed, quite audibly, in a soft humming undertone. Its rows of buttons mocked him. They extruded themselves, became enormous, and danced horribly before his face. The wisdom of the calculator was greater than his, and it knew it. It understood the secrets of the metal tapes, and it could pass them on to others of its kind, and he was shut out. Anthony's lips pulled back, baring his teeth.

He struck at the buttons. He struck them again and again, but the circuit-breakers that guarded against the small human-fallibility quotient left in the world immediately disengaged those relays activated out of sequence. The calculator continued to laugh. He kicked it, and its shielded front repelled his foot. A small feral whine came out of Anthony's mouth. He grabbed up the account he had dropped and threw it at the thick protective glass that covered the maze of circuits. Panting, he went to the pile and gathered it all up and hurled the spools one by one after the first. He cursed them.

"Fine things for a man to spend his life at. Dots. Holes. Abstractions. Nothing. Columns of nothing, totals of nothing, and nobody even cares if there is a reality behind them, and I have trouble adding two and two myself, in my own head, because why learn, the machines can do it faster and never make a—"

The phone rang. He turned on it and cursed it, too, but it kept on ringing and the insistence of long habit and the necessity of answering it made him calm down, at least enough to force a semblance of normality. His face ached. He rubbed it a few times with his hands, and then cast a look of guilty horror at the mess he had made. When he answered the phone he stood close to the screen so that his body would block any view of the room.

It was Fern. "I called Dr. Eck-worth," she said. "You're to go at two o'clock this afternoon."

"But I told you Thursday!"

"Now don't take that tone with me, Anthony Reid. Dr. Eckworth is a very busy man, hut simply because he's a personal friend he managed to work you in on a cancellation. He says it's imperative to get started on these neuroses—"

"Fern!"

"Don't interrupt me, Anthony, this is important. He—"

"Fern, how many times have you been to Dr. Eckworth

"You know perfectly well I go twice a year for a regular check-up. And well it would have been for you, too, but you never would listen."

"Stated in plain English," said Anthony curiously, "what reason have you got to run twice a year to a psychiatrist?"

Her voice took on that hard whining edge he knew so well. "I suppose you think that taking care of a home and two children—"

"You know something?" said Anthony, interrupting her for the fourthand last time. "That is all one big lot of bull." He was quite calm now, and his Mind, or at least a part of it, was in a state of icy clarity. "You and I, and George, and the rest of us—we're not even people any more, we're just a gang of mass-produced zombies living in a dream world, and not doing one damn thing to justify our existence. And we know it. You ask Dr. Eckworth about that, and if he tells you different, he's a liar." just before he cut her off he added thoughtfully, "I think young Tony is smarter than I realized. Tell him to stick to his blocks. At least they're tangible."

The screen went blank. Immediately the bell began to ring again, but he let it, standing where he was with a look of profound wonderment.

"I don't even like her. All these years, and two kids, and I don't even like her."

He turned and picked up his jacket. The calculator still watched him, unscathed and derisively humming. Anthony walked over to the steel-and-plastic chair in which he had been wont to sit out his working day. His frenzy had left him. This was something quiet, and pleasurable. He lifted the chair over his head and let it fall crashing through the glass dust shied. Then he went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

The long cool corridors were empty now. He was conscious of the hundreds of people behind those hundreds of doors, pushing their hundreds of buttons. He began to run, not making any noise on the cushioned floor. Fern would call Macklin, his supervisor, to check on him. The building was a trap. He must get out of it.

H E WAS winded and lathered when he reached his car, but even after

he was on the highway again he breathed no easier. He realized now that

the whole city was a trap, a vast faceless formless entity that held him and all its other millions, in a sly and subtle bondage, like a mother who lavishes every care and luxury upon her children and asks nothing in return but their individuality. No wonder that so many, even as Mr. Jennings had, sank into it without a trace. He was sinking himself. He had to escape.

"Escape," said the top one-quarter of his brain, functioning tightly over chaos. "But there are only other cities. Between them are the hydroponic and synthetics and processing plants that feed them, and the reservoirs a county broad that water them, and the atomic plants that power them, and the breeder-reactor plants that feed them. The cities have swallowed up the land."

"There are the deserts."

"Nothing lives there. Cattle used to live on some of them, until the water was used up and the land blew away in dust. Now there is nothing."

"All right. Then I'll go out. Listen, I want to go on being Anthony Reid and it's hard because there isn't much to ne, only a name and a set of memories as flat as your hand. The only real thing I ever did was just now, and you know what that means if I stay. Dr. Eckworth, and a Recreation San, and after that—like George, contented as a baby. Only a baby grows up, but you never do. You just lie there, rolling between contentment and the Dr. Eckworths. I'm getting out."

"Money," said that top, tight bit of sanity. And Anthony stopped at the bank.

While he was there he sent a 'gram to Fern, telling her not to worry. Take care of the kids till I get back—I'm all right, I just have to do this. Then, with half his savings in his pocket, he headed eastward to Mojave and the spaceport.

III

There were always sightseers at the port. There was a feeling of expectancy and change, a quiver of thunder in the air, a vicarious thrill in the far-off flashing of a silver flank and the bursting roar of a launching. It was especially fine at night, with the rocket flames, arcing against the desert stars, and Anthony had brought the family outto dine in the Pylon Room and watch. The kids had been bored with it after the second look and Fern had complained about the noise. He had not come back.

Not until now.

The interval of the drive had not been good. Things had had time to force their way up out of that submerged three-quarters of chaos into the light of his conscious mind. Doubt. Fear. Panic. Strange emotions, strange and new.

He had broken the pattern. For thirty-six years he had lived inside it, enlarging it slightly to include Fern and then the children, but never deviating from its main outlines. The city. The apartment. The schools, the amusements, the job, the amusements, life. Now he had smashed it, literally, and it dawned on him that he did not exist outside of it.

Paradox. Who are you, why are you? Break free, stand alone, find out. But when you do, where are you? You have disappeared.

He crept furtively among the sightseers, feeling ashamed and helpless. There were things he had not thought of in his first fine flush of inspiration. Passports. He didn't have one, and all the money in the world wouldn't buy you a ticket to anywhere without it. So how was he going? And what was he going to do when he got there—things like eating and sleeping went on and had to be paid for. In the glare of. the desert sun, among the chattering spectators, he felt cold and very naked.

He wanted to go back. He wanted to run to Fern and the apartment, to the warm and familiar and comfortable. He wanted the pattern around him, a shelter and a guide. Maybe they were right. A good psyching, and he'd be right as rain again, contented as a baby.

No.

There we are again. Mother-image, back-to-the-womb. No. Thirty-six going on thirty-seven is too old for that, if you're not a man now you never will be. Besides.

Think of Fern. Clacketyclack, poke and pry and watch. It could never be the same again. She wouldn't leave you alone a minute, peering into your face, sniffing like a hound after symptoms, drawing the swaddling bands tighter and tighter, until...

People did have breakdowns that were permanent.

And yet...

Anthony teetered on the sharp knife edge and wished that the police would come and find him so that the decision would not be his. But they didn't, and the time was growing short, and that top one-quarter of his mind that had steered him this far jeered and said, making decisions is maturity. You made this one. You were passionate about it. If you can't abide by it you'd better quit. And it added, Coward.

How, asked Anthony reasonably of himself, would I know whether I'm a coward or not? I've never had any occasion to find out.

Here's your chance, and you'll never do it younger. But run back if you want to. Fern will love it.

Anthony stiffened his back and began to walk. The balance- swung sharply over. Now instead of wishing for capture he was frantic lest it should happen...

But what could he do—stow away? Steal a passport? Sign on as a crew member? Impossible, all of them. Anthony thought bitterly that once civilization had laid hold of you it was mighty hard to get loose from it.

He had reached the stage of desperation where he would have tried anything when his eye fell upon a sign over a doorway. EMIGRATION. He went in.

Some ninety or a hundred people, counting children, were inside in a big bare room, grouped around their separate islands of luggage, waiting. They glanced at him, or the nearest ones did, incuriously, and then forgot him again, sunk in their own thoughts. Anthony looked at them. Family groups, couples, a few unattached men standing sour and solitary by a single bag. Bankrupts, failures, people who could not cope even with the mild complexities of push-buttons.

The Government paid their passage to the colonies, and gave them some kind of a start after they got there. Anthony didn't know much about it, but he did know you' had to prove necessity before you could get emigration papers. So that way too was closed to him.

Unless-

Anthony's heart began to pound again. His nervous system was getting a workout today such as it had never had before, and at any other time he would have worried about the harmful effects of all the various secretions his glands kept pumping into him. Just now he was too excited to care. He examined the single men, discarding one by one the impossibly large or small or dark or fair. Anthony himself was on the medium side all round. He settled at last on a sulky-looking chap who fitted the same description well enough, and went up to him.

"You don't look," he said, "as though you really wanted to go out."

The sulky man glared at him. "What the hell is it to you?" Anthony thought, "He's a hum. The video-houses, the pleasure-pools, the amusement parks—that's where he's done all his living. He doesn't want to work." His hopes began to rise. He said aloud, "I want to buy your papers."

The man stared at him for a long moment, quivering. Then he said, "Come over here, over by the window. All right, what's your proposition?" He glanced nervously at the huge clock face over the far door. "Make it fast. We're almost due to go aboard."

Anthony made it fast. But before he had finished the warning hell rang and the groups of people began to he agitated, attacking their heaps of luggage like so many ants. A babble of voices rose and filled the room. That was good. It was perfectly timed. Nobody noticed that it was Anthony who joined the stream of people moving out onto the field, carrying the sulky man's hag in his hand, and his papers in the pocket where once the Wad of bills had been.

There was a line of buses drawn up. They were funneled into them and driven Out across the wide field in the glaring sun toward a ship that loomed more huge and frightening with every second. Again the pendulum of Anthony's mind swung back, and he thought, Oh God, I'm going, I'm really going, and I can't, I'm scared.

The movement of people caught him up again and took him toward a gangplank that went up and into a dark hole in the ship's side. A man in uniform, with another one beside him, stood at the foot of it and asked in a monotonous voice for papers. The dark hole fascinated Anthony with the horrid fascination he had read about snakes having for birds. He was fairly up against it now, and the inside of his-head had become a blank emptiness. He fumbled automatically for the papers and never thought to worry whether or not he would be found out.

The uniformed man gave them a cursory glance and shoved them back into Anthony's hand, and the upward-moving stream carried him in through the hold. There was a corridor clangorous with the sound of boots on iron and crammed with the sound of voices. Then there was a large room odorous of disinfectants, with a table and benches bolted down. in the middle and tiers of curtained bunks around the sides.

"Stow your luggage and strap in," bawled a metallic voice from a speaker overhead. "Stow your luggage and strap in. Take-off in twenty-nine minutes."

Anthony stumbled into a bunk, shoving his bag into a metal bin underneath that was labelled in red letters for the purpose. He found straps and fastened them with cold hands. After that he merely lay there and shook, very quietly.

The voice from the speaker overhead began to count. " three two one zero."

A wave of wild excitement rose in Anthony, amid the stupendous and horrifying blast of take-off. I've done it, he thought, I've really done it, and I'm free!

IV

SPACE might; or it might not be, all the things it was said to be on the TV programs, from Miss-Out-There-in-her-starry-dress to the veritable face of God. Anthony didn't know. He didn't see it. The emigrant hold was not provided with an expensive and fabric weakening viewport. And if it had been it would hardly have mattered. Like everybody else there, Anthony was spacesick, and most of the voyage passed him by in a haggard dream of misery.

The papers he had bought said that his name was Joseph Rucker, that he could operate a stamping press, and that he was bound for Venus. Anthony said that last bit over to himself quite often, but it seemed not to have any real meaning. Venus itself had never seemed very real to him, in the way that-places like-India and Timbuctu had not seemed very real to his middle-western ancestors. It was a long Way off. He remembered a lot of talk about man's conquest of savage nature, and his engineering genius and his courage, and he knew that it was hot on Venus, and that the air was bad. He knew that Venus was important because it produced very large amounts of uranium, thorium, germanium, and a lot of other things that Earth was using up too fast. And that was all he knew, except that people had to live there under domes, and that it never rained.

"Whatever it's like," he thought, "things are moving there, growing. It's still the wilderness, the- frontier, still untamed—at least a lot of it. There ought to be something there for a man to-do, something real."

Among the papers was a long and detailed certificate affirming that Mr. Rucker had been examined, processed, and inoculated for and against a frightening number of things. Anthony worried about that because he wasn't, and then he passed on to worrying about being caught for his 'small but growing list of felonies. He knew he was going to have to go back sometime and face the music, but not...Well, not until.

Then the ship's thin pseudo-gravity got in its evil work again, and he ceased to worry about anything.

After the long blank interval of flight there was the roaring convulsion of a landing, and he tottered out with the others into a sealed tube that had been connected to the ship's lock, and along that into an airtight monstrosity that ran on huge grinding tracks. There were windows in it. Anthony got his first authentic look at the face of the Morning Star.

There was a reddish gloom, partly cloud and partly dust, so intermingled that it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. It was in a state of constant turmoil, rolling and boiling in a wind that was blowing strong enough to rock the vehicle on its mighty tracks, and things moved in it, portentous shadowy shapes of carriers and mobile machinery peering their way with glaring headlights. Here and there, made strange and enormous by the mantling clouds, were the ships, the last link with Earth and home. One by one they vanished. Dust and cloud and wind took over, and the lines of dismal faces pressed to the windows turned gradually away. Some of the women were crying, and one little girl kept demanding with monotonous insistence, "Where's the sun?"

The vehicle ground and grunted over a drifted road for perhaps three miles, and then Anthony saw a cluster Of squatty domes in the murk ahead, transparent except for the webbing of girders. Presently the vehicle trundled in through a lock door that closed behind it, and a little while after that Anthony found himself in a long and very hot shed with a lot of signs about immigrants and procedure. He took his turn obediently at a battered table with an old, hard, weary man behind it, a man who had seen too many immigrants come and go.

"Joseph Rucker," he said, making notes off the papers Anthony handed him. "Stamping press operator—"

Anthony coughed nervously. "I—uh—I'd like some other kind of work. Something manual."

The immigration man stared at him. Then he leaned back and stared some more. Finally he asked, "Are you crazy?"

"N-no. I just—"

"Listen, mac. The government is not interested in what you'd like to do, it's only interested in what you can do. Something manual, huh?" He looked at Anthony's hands and snorted. "You better stick to the cities, you'll find 'em tough enough here." And he wrote down, "Stamping press operator."

Anthony quivered like a trapped animal. "Look, I—well, I'm afraid I lied about that." Stamping presses ran by push-button, but they were different from calculator buttons and utterly beyond his ken.

"Oh lord," said the immigration man. He picked up a damp and dirty handkerchief and wiped off the sweat that was running down his jowls, and muttered something about his sins. Then he said to Anthony, "You could go to jail for that."

"I was tired of my job," said Anthony desperately. "I wanted a change, something different—"

"Something manual. Yeah. All right, let's stop wasting time. What was your job?"

Anthony twisted from left to right, searching for some escape, but there was none. He whispered, "I ran a calculator."

"A calculator," said the immigration man, and smiled. "Now we're getting at it. What kind of a calculator, Mr. Rucker? Technical, astronomical, financial? Come on, Mr. Rucker, it's an honest occupation, you don't have to be ashamed of it."

Anthony gave up. "CPA."

"Calculator operator, CPA," said the immigration man, and wrote it down. "This is how I earn my living, but sometimes I don't think it's worth it." He turned to a card index. "Associated Mines needs a man in the accounting department. Interview at ten A.M. tomorrow, and don't miss it. Here's your card, and here's your ticket to the hostel. You can stay there till you find quarters of your own, limit four weeks. If for any reason you're turned down on the job, report here to me immediately. We've got a check system to make sure you don't lounge on the taxpayers, so don't try it. And don't accept any kind of employment from unauthorized persons. Got it? Right through that door there for decontamination—Next!"

Anthony picked up his hag and crept away through the indicated door. Amid a pandemonium of shrieking children and protesting adults he allowed himself to be rayed, dusted and gassed, to kill what external bacteria he might be carrying. Then there was an ultimate door and he was through it, standing half dazed in a street so narrow and so full of people and trucks and heat under the low dome that the simple act of breathing became a conscious labor.

He stepped to one side, out of the way of the other immigrants coming through. The hostel, marked by a huge sign, was just across the street, but he made no move to go there. His face was red and his eyes were unnaturally bright. He looked at the card he still held in his hand. Calculator operator, CPA. Couldn't you get away from it, wouldn't they let go of you? Suddenly he tore the card in pieces and threw it away. Then he walked swiftly down the street.

In half a block he was drenched with sweat and ready to fall. Man's conquest of savage nature had not been as complete as he had been led to believe. The outside temperature stood around the boiling point of water, and the dome was refrigerated, all right—to a point where existence was possible, but not much more. The people on the streets wore so little clothing that Anthony felt conspicuous. The air was stale, like spaceship air, re-used and stagnant in spite of manufactured oxygen, in spite of blowers and conditioners, in spite of the masses of huge coarse broad-leaved plants that grew in every crevice, in islands in the streets, in holes and alleys. A use had at last been found for the terrestrial burdock.

It was a nightmarish kind of a city. The flimsy buildings huddled and crowded and overlapped one another, and the dome pressed down on top of them, a thin and claustrophobic harrier against death. The ocherous half-light was depressing and hard on the eyes. Most of the buildings were white or bright metal, but they only looked dull and dingy. Anthony walked slower and slower.

He came to a corner. Traffic, wild and jerky, filled the streets before him. He guessed at electric motors—exhaust fumes would be an impossibility here—and after he had stared for a minute or two he realized that the vehicles were manually operated. A lifetime of mental conditioning aroused in him a terror of these ill-controlled juggernauts that had slaughtered over two million people in the United States alone before they were finally tamed by the cable systems. He looked for a pedestrian underpass, but there didn't seem to be any. How did you get across?

Then a wave of furious shame at his own helplessness came over him. He gritted his teeth and stepped off the curb. In the next second a hand closed on his collar and wrenched him back, and a truck went by. so close that he felt it brush him. Shaking, Anthony turned around. "Let go," he said, "I'm going to do it myself."

The man who had hold of him nodded. "Sure, sure. But you'll live longer if you watch the lights. See there? Primitive, but we can't afford a cable system here yet, or at least everybody says we can't. All right, it's green our way. Make sure everything's stopped, watch that slob sneaking around the corner—okay, now run like hell!"

They made it.

"Don't feel that way about it," said the man, grinning. "We're all like that when we first get here." He was short and barrel-shaped, dressed in rumpled shorts. His pale, body gleamed with sweat, and there was more of it on his

cheeks and the bald top of his head. He had an affable face, with eyes in it like two little blue marbles.

"My name's Crider," he said. "Listen, I saw you tear up your card back there—"

Anthony began to walk again, fast. Crider's short thick legs carried him right alongside.

"Easy, boy. Easy does it, you don't run any foot-races in this climate. You want a job?"

Anthony slowed down.

"Right around the corner here," said Crider. "There's a place we can talk."

There was a narrow six-story shack I squeezed in between a string of video-houses and a place that sold mining equipment. The ground floor was a bar, and the upper windows were painted with the signs of assay offices, mining company agents, and small outfitters.

"Everything's mining here," said Crider. "People only come out for two reasons, because they want to or because they have to, and money's at the back of both of 'em, and there's money in mining. This stinking planet's made of money. All you have to do is dig it out."

The bar was small and badly lighted. There were as many women in it as men, drinking the synthetic stimulants that gave them the illusion of liquor without the effects. Crider motioned Anthony into a private cubbyhole at the back.

"If," he said, "anybody could manage to make some honest old-fashioned whisky like I've read about, he'd have his fortune made without digging a spoonful of ore. Notice all the video houses and pleasure halls? More to the square foot here than any city on Earth. Know why?"

Anthony shook his head. He was looking hard at Crider, trying to figure him, trying to understand why he felt uneasy.

"Because," said Crider, "people need the relief, the relaxation. They go psycho here a lot." Drinks had appeared on the table, and he pushed one toward Anthony. "Really psycho, not just fancy neurotic. I'm a little that way. Got a fire phobia. I saw fire in a dome once, and now a lighter flame can send me screaming. Why'd you tear up your card?"

Anthony shook his head.

"Okay, so it's none of my business. But you do want a job?"

"Depends on what it is."

"Oh," said Crider. "Picky. Don't exactly trust me, do you?"

"It's not that," said Anthony, lying. "It's just—"

"I know. They warned you at Immigration not to accept employment from `unauthorized persons." Crider swore. "Sure, they've got a tie-up with the big companies, and us little guys never get a chance. Listen, how do you suppose I happened to be there just when you came out? How do you suppose I happened to follow you?"

"I suppose," said Anthony slowly. "you wait there to look over the new bunch as they come through." I want a job, a real job, he thought, but do I want it from him? Am I being wise to hesitate, or only cowardly?

"I have to do it," Crider said, pounding the table, "or I'd never get anybody. And I'm not the only one. Labor's at a premium here, and the big boys have got it all sewed up. Now look, fella. just hear me out, that's all I ask, and then you can make up your own mind. I represent a small outfit. We don't have maybe the last word in equipment and so on, but we're taking out uranium, more than I've ever seen before, and I've been around here a long time. We're growing. We have something to offer for the future, where these big companies just want a gang of little wage slaves. We—say, you're feeling the heat, aren't you? Have another drink, it's as cold as you'll ever get here. Good for you. Like I was saying—"

It was hot in the cubbyhole. Crider's voice droned on. Anthony's lungs lifted and labored against the close air. Crider got farther and farther away until he was just a voice with two bright hard little eyes. A pulse of alarm began to beat in Anthony, a presentiment that this strange withdrawal was not due to the heat, or the suffocating air, or the aftereffects of space-sickness. He got up, pushing the table over. And suddenly Mr. Crider's smiling face was close to his, and a great pale fist came floating toward him with a terrible deliberation that he could not by any means evade.

V

Somebody was screaming.

Anthony heard it from a long way off, a fleck of sound in a thick blank nothingness. It didn't have anything to do with him. It wasn't Fern, or one of the kids. Somebody in the next building, maybe.

Deep. Down. deep. How many slumber pills had he taken? Too deep,

It was a man's voice screaming. George? It was coming closer. George running down the hall screaming...Out, got to get out, for God's sake let me out. Nightmare? Fire? Earthquake?

Earthquake.

Everything shaking, the bed lurching, the long ominous sliding rumble of the thing rolling down the fault, sounds of the building falling, got to get out, get Fern and the kids. Fern . Fern . FERN .

"—isn't one of 'em enough? Listen. Listen, you! Shut up!"

Anthony choked on his voice, staring into a dizzy vortex where vague Ferns and Georges and apartments spun round and round on top of another image, a little iron box with men in it. The Ferns and the Georges and the apartments went away, but the iron box stayed, and the men. One of them was trying to butt his way headfirst through a wall. The sounds stayed too, the rumbling and clattering and screaming. It was not George who was screaming. It was the butting man.

Crider was looking into the box through a square hole covered with wire mesh. "Quiet him down, can't you?" he was saying. "He'll have us yammering, if that keeps up."

There were six men beside Anthony. Some were still stuporous, but two of them were struggling with the butting man. They kept dragging him back from the wall and he kept springing at it again, shrieking to be let out.

"A claustro," said Crider disgustedly, "Who brought him in?"

Anthony could see the shoulder of a man who was sitting next to Crider. It was bare and glistening with sweat. "I did," said the owner of the shoulder in a you-want-to-make-something-out-of-it tone. "How the hell was I to know? Anyway, he'll be okay when he's out of the truck."

"Sure," said Crider gloomily, "for a while. And then the dome gets too small for him." He spoke again to the two who were trying to keep the claustrophobe from battering his own head in. "Quiet him down! What's the matter, can't you think of a simple thing like knocking him out?"

One of them, a tall lean man with a face like white leather, seamed and creased, glanced at Crider and called him a name. The other one, shorter and thicker but with that same washed leathery look, muttered, "Yeah, but I guess we better do it." He was the one who had told Anthony to shut up.

"I guess so," said the tall man. "Hold him." He doubled up his fist and swung. He swung again. The screaming stopped, and the butting. Reminded of something, Anthony put his hand to his own jaw.

The shorter man laid his burden on the iron floor. "He's better that way," he said. "He'd only drive himself nuts."

"And us," said Crider, mopping his face. "Whew! That's a relief."

The tall man flung himself at the wire-mesh screen. He tried to pull it loose to get at Crider. Crider watched him, and the man who was driving the truck turned and watched too, and they both laughed. After a while the tall man gave up.

"Crimpers," he said, to everybody.

"Dirty lousy crimpers. They don't run mines, they run death-traps. They have to drag men in doped and hog-tied to work for 'em." He turned on Crider again and cursed him until the tears ran out of his eyes. "I had a good job. In a year or two I could have gone back to Earth. Why couldn't you let me alone?"

"Ah, cool down," said Crider, not unkindly. "Things are tough for everybody around here, and I got to live too."

"Why?" asked Anthony.

Crider looked at him. "I don't know," he said quite seriously.. "It's just a habit you get into."

The sealed truck rumbled and jolted along, pitching up and down over the drift dunes. The furnace wind outside gnawed at it, whining, as though it wanted to get at the men inside and drown them in the waste products of their own lungs. Anthony's fingers touched again and again the painful lump on his jaw. He watched Crider, safe behind the wire-mesh screen.

AFTER a time the truck slowed, lurched on again, and then stopped. The wind-sound ceased. Crider and the driver struggled with the door and got out, and then a heavy flanged hatch was opened in the back of the truck. "All right," said Crider. "Everybody out."

They clambered down. The claustrophobe had not come to yet. Anthony helped to lift him through the hatch, recoiling inwardly from the sodden weight of him, the limpness and the lolling head.

There was light outside, the smoky furnace glow of the long day that broke men's hearts with a hunger for the night—until the night came, too long and too black, and they yearned for day again. Anthony was conscious of a very small, very low dome, intensely hot and filled with the racket of machinery, but his attention was all on Crider. A knot of men had collected to see the new arrivals, and Crider had stepped aside to speak with two of them. Anthony went up to him and hit him as hard ashe could in the face.

Crider's eyes popped open in anguished surprise. A small trickle of blood came out of his right nostril. A strange fever burned suddenly in Anthony. He lifted his hand again, but it was caught and held and wrenched around, and he was thrown to his knees in the native dust that was all the paving the dome had. He whimpered a little from the pain and looked hungrily at Crider.

"Well, I'll be—" said Crider between his teeth, and then hastily to the hard-looking men who held Anthony, "No, don't ruin him! Men are too hard to get." He kicked Anthony gently to his feet. "Just don't try that again, see? Now get over with the others."

They stood in a hang-dog little group, resentful, frightened, furious, but not knowing what to do about it. Crider spoke to them briskly.

"Let's face it, you're here, and you can't get away unless I take you. But I'm going to be fair with you. I'm going to give you regular working contracts with guaranteed wages and a specified term of employment. When it's up you'll be taken back—"

"Feet first," said the tall man. "Wages!" He pointed at the machinery, at the mine head, at the four or five ancient collapsible shacks. "Who's gonna get paid with what? Junk, that's all you got here. junk machinery, junk buildings, and all you're mining is copper."

"Copper," said Anthony, and glared at Crider. "But you told me—"

"So I lied," said Crider.

The claustrophobe, who had managed to get on his feet again, whispered, "I can't go down in a mine. Not any more." He looked at the low dome over his head, and the narrow circle of it around him, and licked his lips.

Anthony said, "He only wants us to sign up so it'll look legal."

"Sign 'em or not," said Crider, "just as you please. I'm not forcing you."

One of the other men said suspiciously, "What's the catch?"

"Starvation," said the tall man. "He's got all the food."

Crider shook his head. "Not me. You can have all the grub you want, I wouldn't see a dog starve." He looked around at them, spreading his hands. "It's just a matter of necessity. We've got a well here, but it isn't the best on Venus. It doesn't make all the water in the world, and if a man isn't working for me I can't afford to supply him, that's all." He turned around and walked toward the shack that had a sign on it, CRIDER MINING COMPANY, OFFICE. "When you make up your minds, let me know."

Anthony thrust his hands in his pockets. "I won't sign."

The tall man cursed Crider and came and stood beside Anthony. "If we hang together he can't make us. What's he going to do with seven bodies? That's too many to take chances with. If we hang together—"

"He'll have to take us back," said Anthony.

The five other men stood irresolute in the dust, talking to each other, glancing around, moving their hands emphatically. Mechanics and miners passed by them, men impregnated with the rufous soil, leached with sweating and boiled stringy with the heat, looking at the newcomers, some with a vague sympathy, some with a savage pleasure that somebody else was going to suffer too, some with no emotion at all. One of them said, "I'll give the hold-outs three work-periods." And another answered sadly, "Two."

"Well?" said Anthony.

The claustrophobe shook his head. "I know when I'm licked. It'll be bad enough without making more trouble."

He started away toward the office shack. Another one said disgustedly, "Oh, what's the use, Crider holds all the cards." He went along with the claustrophobe. The three that were left hesitated, and then two of them went, leaving the shorter man who had yelled at Anthony in the truck. He came and joined the hold-outs.

"My name's Linson," he said. "I'm with you."

"Holfern," said the tall man. He cursed Crider again, repeating himself with undiminished emphasis. "Two years. Only two little Venusian years, and I could have gone home again."

"Reid," said Anthony, Without thinking. He walked over and sat down by the curve of the dome wall, beside a clump of the inevitable burdocks. The others sat with him. Their attitude said they were going to stay there till Venus froze over.

For a while they talked, angrily and excitedly, passing. from the personal to the general and back again. Gradually their voices got lower and their speech slower, until at last they pinched out and were gone. Holfern brooded, and Linson seemed to sleep.

Outside the dome Anthony could see a narrow strip of desert and then a wall of red rock. The killing wind and the scouring dust had taken out geologic ages of their spite on the helpless stone, torturing and tearing it into shapes of static agony. It seemed to Anthony that the whole cliff was one great frozen shriek. He shivered and turned his back on it.

It was hot. He had thought that only hell could he hotter than the city, but this was. He opened his shirt. After a while he took it off. Next to him, the sleeping Linson had his head bent forward. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose, monotonously, like a leaking faucet.

Suddenly Anthony said, "It's crazy. It's absolutely insane."

Holfern started. "What is? "

"This. The city. Venus. Domes and refrigeration and canned air—" He fumbled for words, his head reeling a bit in the heat. Artificiality, that was it. Artificiality carried to its nth power. "Isn't anything real any more? What is the human race trying to do to itself?"

Holfern stared at him. "You nuts, or something? How could we live here if it wasn't for those things, and how would Earth get along without us?" He grunted_ "You sound like my old lady. She was always honing for the good old times she couldn't remember either, when people did their own cooking and kept their own little houses. Real!" He passed his hands over his face. "What's realer than this heat?"

The machinery clanked deafeningly, crushing ore and feeding it through hatches into giant bins outside the dome. Men drooped at huge control panels, or went up and down in the creaky mine. lift. One rusty crusher was inoperative, and three mechanics peered and poked. in it, banging it now and again with pneumo-hammers.

"It's the same on Mars," said Holfern dreamily. "Domes and all, only there it's the cold and the thin air instead of heat and carbon dioxide. I was there once. Wish I was there now. Seemed like you never got warm."

"I'm thirsty," said Linson, out, of his stupor.

"Shut up," Holfern told him.

Anthony swallowed, and his mouth and throat were as parched as the ground he sat on.

Silence again, and time. Time intolerable under an unchanging sky. He could feel the dome quiver in the wind. He dozed, and started awake, and dozed again. Thirst became a private fire, an internal holocaust. A whistle shrilled. Men came from the mine head and the machines. They sat down beside the shacks and ate and drank while others took their places. Linson had waked. He watched them and groaned, and Holfern cursed. Anthony sat, and thought with a vague surprise, "This is torture."

"Look." said Holfern, and began to laugh. "We've beaten him. See? Look at him come."

Crider was walking toward them. He carried a sack in one hand and a bucket in the other. Drops of water slopped over the sides of it, leaving a little moist trail in the dust. His partners, or fore: men, or whatever they were, walked behind him. The men at the table watched covertly.

"Beat him," said Holfern exultantly, and got up. He started for the bucket.

The foremen pushed him away. Crider tossed the sack down in front of Anthony and Linson. Squares of food concentrates fell out-of it. "Dinner," said Crider, and smiled. "How you feeling?" Linson made a grab for the bucket.

Crider sidestepped. He shook his head and poured the water carefully around the roots of the burdocks. "Sorry," he said. "I really am. But we have so many needs for water. Take these docks. We breathe out carbon dioxide and they take it in and give us back oxygen. We can't let them die. You see how it is."

Anthony's eyes were fixed on the wet spot soaking into the ground. He didn't see what happened. He heard a scuffle and a thud, and when he turned around Holfern was lying flat. Limon beat his hands together. "All right," he moaned. "I'll sign your bloody contract." He avoided meeting Anthony's gaze. "It's no use, you can see it isn't."

Anthony crossed his arms stubbornly. The dome was beginning to waver in front of his eyes, and Crider looked like something painted on water. Presently he and Linson and the others were gone, leaving only Holfern lying on the ground. After a while Anthony lost track of Holfern.

He dreamed of water. He dreamed of the reservoirs, the enormous man-made lakes that drowned the land between the cities. Billions of gallons of water rushing out of them along the mighty aquaducts, through the pumping stations, into the pipes, into' the apartments. Millions of. people turning taps, drinking, taking showers, running washers, flushing tanks at five gallons a flush. Millions upon millions of people, wallowing in water and never thinking about it. He woke up in a kind of weak hysteria.

Holfern was gone.

Anthony sat a while longer, alone, light-headed and suffering. Two or three times he started to get up, and each time he stopped, muttering, "I won't."

Nobody came near him. Once he saw Linson and Holfern pass by at a distance. They seemed not to want to look at him. There was a bad taste in Anthony's mouth, along with the burning and the swollen dryness. After a time he understood that it was the taste of defeat.

He began to drag himself toward the office.

Crider was coming toward him. Crider and a foreman. They picked him 'up. "I'll sign," he told them, and added, "Water."

Crider was hauling him along. "Water. Yeah; give him water, put a couple of cans in the truck. Round up those other birds, fast, and tell Jim to have another truck ready---"

His voice had a strange sound. It was the voice of a man upon whom disaster has fallen so suddenly and swiftly that the inevitable effects of it are still obscure to him.

The foreman said, "There's Everett, too. He was driving."

"Sure, Everett. Oh God, what a mess. Here, damn you, into the truck. Get him some water. Oh damn you, damn you—!"

Out of the awful lethargy of heat and thirst, Anthony asked, "What is it?"

"What is it? You, you—" Crider's anguish was so great as to be beyond any further profanity. "And I was sore at Everett about that claustro! Will he get a laugh!"

Water came. Water, life heaven. Anthony sucked it down. "What did I do?"

"You came in illegally, that's what you did. They've got the guy you bought your papers from. It's on a general broadcast, all over Venus. You didn't have your shots, you didn't have anything. You're a walking menace. And I've got to take you back alive and in one piece so they can find out what you're carrying and keep the rest of us from getting it."

"But I'm healthy," said Anthony, laving himself with water. "I haven't even had a cold for years."

Crider groaned. "Do you know how much UV we get through the cloud blanket? Almost 'exactly none. Most places have UV equipment, but mine is busted, and anyway it isn't enough. Do you have any idea how germs can breed under these domes, in this heat, with everybody packed in together and using the same air over and over again? Do you know—" His voice cracked: "Do you know you've probably ruined, me?"

"Is that so?" said Anthony, arid a light flickered briefly in his red-rimmed eyes. Over Crider's shoulder he saw Holfern and Linson and the others being loaded into another truck.

Crider leaned forward. With a plaintive earnestness that bordered on the tragic, he asked, "Why did you do it?"

Anthony told him, still looking over Crider's shoulder, at the dome and all that was under it.

"You mean you didn't have to come? You weren't broke, or in trouble with the law? Nobody made you?"

"No."

"My God," said. Crider: And again; "My God!"

"And it wasn't any use," said Anthony. "This isn't any escape, it's the same thing only more so, pressed down and running over, reductio ad absurdum. Not even on the other planets—" He wanted to cry, but he had no moisture left in him to make tears. "Isn't there any place?" he asked desperately of Crider. "Isn't there any place a man can go?"

Crider told him.

VI

The room was high up in the Justice building. The windows were discreetly barred, and the door had a magnetic lock on the outside but none inside. Anthony sat in the corner. He had a stubbornly closed-off look. Beyond the windows and far below he could hear the city, purring softly. It had got him back and it was pleased.

"Just a few more questions," said Dr. Eckworth persuasively. "We're almost through."

Anthony inspected his shoes.

"Really, Anthony!" said Fern, from across the room. "There isn't any reason to be rude." She looked expressively at Dr. Eckworth, and from him to the state alienist, Dr. Hinojosa, and then to Mr. Horst, the special officer from Immigration. "You see what I've had to put up with."

"Well," said Dr. Hinojosa, "we've made a pretty thorough examination, and I don't think there's any disagreement in our conclusions, Dr. Eckworth. If Mr. Horst is satisfied."

"My department," said Horst, "is willing to he guided by your opinion as to the degree of responsibility involved. Fortunately there were no serious consequences of the violation—matter of fact, the local authorities were able to get hold of Crider because of it. So if you say Mr. Reid was—"

Anthony sprang up. His face was red and his voice was loud. "I was responsible, I am responsible. I knew exactly what I was doing, and why, and I'm perfectly willing to pay the penalty."

"Anthony!" cried Fern. "I know you don't care about me, but think of the children. Think what it would do to them, to have their father in prison!"

"A nuthouse is considerably more respectable," said Anthony savagely, "and I suppose it doesn't matter what that does to me." He glowered at Fern and Dr. Eckworth. "A conspiracy, that's what it is. That's one reason I went away, because you were trying to make me think I was crazy."

"Now, now, we don't use that word any more," said Eckworth kindly. "We simply say emotionally disturbed. Let me ask you one final question. Do you feel that you are willing and able, at this moment, to return to that place in organized society from which you felt it so necessary to escape?"

"No," said Anthony. "No, I won't, and you can't make me!"

Dr. Eckworth turned to Dr. Hinojosa and smiled. Dr. Hinojosa nodded and looked at Mr. Horst. Mr. Horst said that whatever they said was good enough for him. And Fern remarked with a certain tragic satisfaction, "If you had listened to me in the first place, Anthony, none of this would have happened."

"I'm glad it did," said Anthony. "In one way, it was worth it, well worth it." He looked at them all with a proud and tremendous satisfaction. "There were seven of us at Crider's. And I held out the longest."

"Ah," said Dr. Eckworth, and made a notation. He turned to Dr. Hinojosa. "What would you say to Rustic Rest?"

"Perfect. I'll make the arrangements today."

"Good. And now, Mr. Reid, please try to understand that we're—"

"You can skip the speech," said Anthony wearily. "I'm not going to make any trouble. It doesn't really matter where I go."

He had learned something else at Crider's. He knew when he was licked. They took him to Rustic Rest that afternoon. It was a pleasant madhouse, and not at all what Anthony had expected. It was located on the extreme northern rim of the city, just before it touched the great central reservoir. There were many acres of wooded land there, carefully preserved, and once you were inside the high wire fence that enclosed them you could almost imagine that the city was not there at all.

The main building was a rambling unfunctional old structure that did not look at all like an institution. The resident psychiatrist was a pleasant bronzed young man in a sport shirt who did not look at all like a psychiatrist. Everybody talked a little while, and then Fern and the kids went away, and Anthony was surprised to find himself not wanting them to go, and asking them to be sure and come every visiting day. Then Eckworth and the resident, Dr. Buerhle, walked with him down a gravel path that wandered away among the trees.

"I think," said Dr. Buerhle, "you'll find the accommodations quite pleasant here."

Scattered here and there, with a no attempt at order, each with its individual plot of ground and its individual picket fence around it, were innumerable tiny cottages. They were painted every color under the sun, and decorated in every possible way. The little gardens flourished, and men worked in some of them, or tinkered with old-fashioned hand tools, or simply sat in the sun.

"The reality-image is so often bound up in men's minds with things like this," said Buerhle quietly. "We give it to them here."

Oh lord, thought Anthony, oh no! Maybe this was what I was looking for, but not like this, not like this!

"We may have come away a little too fast from the old tradition of the soil," said Eckworth. "After all, we were peasants and husbandmen a long while before we were urbanites. Dig in the ground, Anthony. Paint your house. Work with your hands. It does wonders for cases like yours."

Anthony did not answer. He was filled with a terrible regret for—for what? For everything. For the past, the future, himself. His feet dragged in the gravel.

"Your time is your own here," said Buerhle, "outside of what you spend with your doctor, or with me. Occupational Therapy will supply you with any tools or materials you want. Books, music, scientific apparatus, anything within reason, we will he happy to get for you."

"Thanks," said Anthony bitterly. "It ought to be fun."

"I think you'll like your neighbors," said Eckworth blandly, ignoring his tone. "I have some other patients here, and I've got to know the boys pretty well. By the way, your ex-employer is one of them—better caution him about Jennings, Buerhle."

"Jennings," said Anthony, and laughed. "Well, why not?"

"He grows vegetables," said Buerhle, pointing to the nearby garden patches. "You may have noticed that tall plant with the tassels on it?"

Anthony had not. He didn't care. "It's corn," said Buerhle. "He's got

them all doing it now. Jennings grows all kinds of things, even potatoes. The—ah—point is, Mr. Reid; he eats them."

Anthony looked up with a faint flicker of interest. "Right out of the ground?" "It does seem too much of a return to the primitive, I'll admit—but he was so insistent about it. Anyway, please,no adverse comment. It upsets him."

They rounded a turn in the gravel path. There was an unoccupied cottage ahead, and a little group had gathered by the open gate. "Welcoming committee," said Buerhle. They joined the group. "Mr. Reid, Mr. Haggerty, Mr. Perez, Mr. Jennings—"

Mr. Haggerty, a small bright-eyed man, rushed forward and caught Buerhle's sleeve. Don't you think I could go home now, Doctor? My circuits are working perfectly, they don't hum any more, not at all. I mean, I'm not conscious of them, so that's the same as being sure I haven't any, isn't it? Oh, bother!" he added suddenly, as Mr. Perez reached out and tried gently to detach him from Buerhle. "Now look, you've shut off the switch." Mr. Haggerty stood stiff as a plank.

"I'm sorry," said Perez, and punched him on the other shoulder.

Mr. Haggerty moved again. He looked sheepishly at Buerhle, and Buerhle laughed. "Relax," he said. "I recommended you for another year this morning. Well, Reid, I'll leave you to get settled. If you want anything there's a phone in your cottage. Coming, Eckworth?"

"No, I'll stay a while."

Buerhle went away. Haggerty looked at Eckworth. "I guess I laid that on a little thick."

"A little."

"What's the difference?" said Jennings. "You got your year." He held out his hand to Anthony. "Glad you're here. Throw your bag inside and come on over to my place. We'll give you a real Rustic Rest welcome."

Anthony glowered at Eckworth. don't know what goes on here, or who's crazy—I think you all are. But I--""

"You'll figure it out," said Perez. "Come on. You too, Doc."

"Thanks," said Eckworth. "Jennings is inviting you to dinner, Anthony. Don't you want to taste some real, unprocessed, unsynthesized food?"

"All right," said Anthony defiantly, "yes, I do."

Perez made a wry face. "You won't like it."

"Matter of fact," said Jennings, "I found I didn't like it myself. But I'm stuck with it now."

Tjey took Anthony away down a narrow path that ended at a white cottage. Inside, the place was not too neat, but comfortable, fitted with an antique electric-range and crammed with books—the old-fashioned thick hard-bound books that were all type and no pictures to speak of. Jennings moved a big chair and began to pry at the floorboards. From a hole underneath he lifted up a lopsided ceramic contrivance with a stopper in it.

"Made it myself," he said, "in Occupational Therapy."

"What is it?" asked Anthony. "A jug?"

"A jug," said Jennings. "And it's full of whisky. Real old honest-to-God whisky. Made it myself, out of my own corn." He chuckled. "I've got everybody growing the stuff now. That's why I'm stuck with the potatoes and the rest of the junk. Cover-up."

Haggerty had brought out glasses. Jennings began to pour. "You won't like this, either, at first gulp. But stay with it. It has its points."

Anthony stayed with it. And it did have its points, but he wasn't sure they were good ones. He could feel the hot raw stuff creeping through his brain, burning away barriers, doing queer things to his emotions. The others talked, but after a while he lost track of what they were saying. He only heard their voices, vigorous and cheerful, full of hope. The voices began to grate on him. It seemed unthinkable that these men could accept the shame that had been put upon them, and not only accept it but apparently thrive on it. Sane men, making a deliberate pretense of insanity so that they could cling to this ridiculous, this pathetic and unutterably sad imitation of a way and a world that were vanished and could never come again, a world they wouldn't even want to live in if it did come again. It was. He told them what it was. Or at least he thought he was telling them. His tongue didn't work properly, and his thought-processes were confused. And then all the tension of disappointment and frustration that had been growing in him since—when? All his life, maybe. Or did it just seem that way? Anyway, it all clapped down on him at once in a wave of utter futility.

"No place to go," he muttered. "I've hit bottom."

"Good," said Eckworth. "At least you've stopped running away."

Anthony lifted his head. He must have leaned it on the table, because he had to lift it quite high. He snarled at Eckworth.

"You put me here. But I won't—I won't—" He had no real idea what he wouldn't. His voice trailed off, and Eckworth looked accusingly at Jennings.

"You didn't have to drown him in the stuff. If you're not more careful somebody is going to find out and take your still away."

"Made it myself," said Jennings. "Occupational Therapy is a wonderful thing." He chuckled, and then a doubt seemed. to strike him. "You wouldn't, would you, Doc?"

"I'm here unofficially," Eckworth said. "Just as a friend. Pass the jug, will you?"

"Friend," said Anthony, sobering a bit as he got madder. "Fine friend you are. Sending me here to play with old toys instead of new ones. Give me a saw and a hammer instead of a television set, and you think I'll be happy."

"That's what you-wanted, isn't it? Something manual."

"But not make-believe!" shouted Anthony. "I want to do something real."

"This boy," said Mr. Perez, "has a head start."

Eckworth nodded. "High I.Q. No genius, you understand, but intelligent. Too intelligent for the job he was doing, which of course is why he blew up. And a strong personality, extremely well integrated—which is why he didn't blow up sooner. Stability can be a handicap at times." He said to Anthony, "If you'd come to me when I wanted you to, I could have saved you a lot of trouble."

"I didn't want to be saved a lot of trouble. It taught me things."

"Um. Yes. About yourself. You found out that you have determination, and a normal amount of courage, and sense enough to know how far to push it. That's good. But you didn't find the other thing you were looking for—the important thing."

"Reality," said Anthony, and shook his head. He reached for the jug, feeling very sad.

"Of course you didn't," said Eck-worth, and grinned. "You weren't looking for it at all. You were running away from it."

Anthony stared at him. There was a brief, hard silence, and then Eckworth said. "Shut up and listen. I'm not going to give you a lot of psychiatric double-talk, and I'm not speaking right now as your doctor. Just as one reasonably intelligent man to another. Jennings, if he squawks, sit on him. I want to get this through his head."

"All right," said Anthony, between his teeth. "Go on."

"Before you can find reality, you have to define it—to your own satisfaction if not to anyone else's. How you define it is what makes the difference between the 'normal' social neurotic, which covers nearly everybody, including me, and the true psychopath. When your reality-concept equates more or less with the accepted norm, you're allowed to run loose. When it doesn't, you have to he locked up, and not in a place like this, either. So you want to he extremely careful."

"But—" said Anthony furiously.

Eckworth drowned him out.

"The most important thing is to be able to recognize a reality when you see it. That's what you refused to do. You ran all the way out to Venus to get away from having to recognize a few. But I think you're beginning to realize now that there isn't any escape."

Anthony got up. He started to say something, or to shout it, rather, and Jennings pushed him down again

"The calculator was a reality," said Eckworth. "You rejected it. Your job, the city, civilization. even your wife—you rejected them all. You said they were all artificial, and you wouldn't have anything more to do with them." He leaned forward, getting warmed up to his subject. "Look, Reid. Reality isn't something that happened a generation ago, or a thousand years ago. Reality is now, the contemporary matrix, the frame of reference you were born into. You may not like it. You may even think others would have been better. But it's real. You can't evade it, except by dying or retreating into genuine insanity."

Anthony took a vicious pull at the jug. "You're just playing with words. You can't tell me I haven't been living in a completely artificial environment."

"It is. It has to be, to feed, house, clothe, and employ the biggest population Earth has ever had. But how far back do you want to go? The first splayfooted human who made fire himself instead of waiting for the lightning to do it was exercising an artificial control over his natural environment. Clothes are artificial. So are houses. So were domesticated herds and agriculture. I guess if you really want to live in a cave we can fix one up for you, but it seems rather silly."

"Sit quiet there," said Jennings. "Listen to the doc. We can't have you punching his nose. We like him."

"I never wanted to go back," Anthony panted. "That's a lie." He glared at Perez and Haggerty and Jennings. "You all seem willing to do it, though."

"There's nothing wrong with going back-a little—far enough to get a new perspective and then start forward again on a different path." Perez nodded. "Dig in the dirt. Use a hoe and shovel. Get it out of your system. After you've done enough of it you'll think gratefully of those lazy but brilliant men who

invented the well-sweep and the wheel, and started us on our long ascent toward the push-button. The future belongs to the mind, not to the back."

"So," said Anthony, "what's the good of the future? It'll just be more of the same. More push-buttons, more fairy tales on bigger and better TN sets, more gadgets to make human beings unnecessary."

"I used to think so," said Perez slow ly. "But it isn't really so. We're awfully new in this universe as creation goes, but we're growing up pretty fast, all things considered. Infancy went on a long time, but our childhood was considerably shorter, say only about six thousand years, give or take a few centuries. Isn't that so, Doc?"

"We exhibited all the child traits.- Impatience, megalomania, tantrums, a very imperfect grasp of realities and a tendency to reject all the ones we didn't like. In other words, wars, aggressive nationalism, segregation, trouble."

"But now," said Perez, "no—damn it. Reid. let me talk. This is my one ewe lamb of wisdom, and I want to walk it around. Now we don't do those things any more. Maybe we've got softer, but we have sort of learned to live with ourselves, and that's a symptom of oncoming maturity."

"We had to learn that," murmured Haggerty, "way back in the Twentieth Century. Or else. I guess the doc would call that a survival mechanism."

"We licked a few other 'natural' things," said Perez, as though he hadn't heard, "things like famines and disease. That's why we've got so many people nowadays. Where are we going to put them all eventually, Doc? I haven't figured that vet. Will somebody finally crack that problem of the ultra-speed drive and let us get out even farther?

Anyway, Reid, we haven't reached dead end, not yet. We've just got into our adolescence. We're lazy, gadget-happy, easily distracted by every outside stimulus, trying on one fad and attitude after another—worthless, if you like, but only apparently, not potentially. We'll be dragged up just as we always have been, step by step, toward adulthood. Only I'm not going to wait to be dragged. I'm going to help do it."

A THOUGHT was beginning to percolate through the fumes that filled Anthony's head, but he was not ready to accept it yet, any more than he was ready to accept Dr. Eckworth as a friend.

"How?" he said. "In this place, with you all gibbering at doctors so you'll be let to stay?"

"Sure," said Haggerty. "I'm working on a technical problem, and it'll take me another year to finish it. I blew my fuses; you know, because as a technician I was only taught to understand the function of one particular circuit on one particular type of machine. The other forty million technicians had to eat, too. But I wanted to do more, and finally the frustration got me. I developed circuits on the brain, quite literally."

"Same with me," said Perez, "only it was pushing buttons in a factory. Same operation over and over."

"I know," said Anthony.

"With me," said Jennings, "I was living in a mental vacuum and never knew it till I fell in."

"There you are," said Anthony triumphantly to Eckworth. "That proves it. I still say what we've all been doing is piffling and--and unworthy."

"Which is quite a different thing from saying it isn't real. If you feel that way, do something about it, don't run away from it. Here's your chance. There isn't much room for individualists any more, there can't be, in an overcrowded society where everything has to be organized right down to the last decimal point. We try—we psychiatrists, Reid. in spite of what you think of us—to

keep the mediocre minds feeling important and happy, and weed out the exceptional ones so they can do some good. But there are so many that we can't do anything about until they show themselves by rebelling against the norm of mediocrity that social organization has forced upon them."

He waved his hand to indicate the acres outside, the trees darkening in the late twilight, the little separate houses with the lights burning in them.

"We try to give them a chance to dissociate themselves from the conditioned mass-consciousness and discover their individuality. We provide places like this, an oasis away from all the pressures and stimuli and distractions that keep people from thinking for themselves. We give them aptitude tests. We let them read, and putter, and play with anything they want—and finally something emerges. Something new, something real."

"Creative," said Jennings. "That's us. Breeding ground of the future." He patted his lopsided jug. "So far this is all I've created, but it's a start."

There was another silence. Anthony stared into his glass, and drank, and stared again. Finally he said, "All right, I'll go along with the gag. I still think it's crazy, but I'll go along." He looked at Eckworth. "I guess what you've been trying to put over to me is that the only true reality is right here, inside your own head."

"Something like that. Externals, above a certain basic level of necessity, aren't important. It's what you think, and how you implement the thinking, that matters."

Anthony put his head between his hands. "That doesn't sound nearly as exciting as running away to Venus."

"It isn't," said Jennings. "Not at first. But it's real." He laughed, and filled Anthony's' glass again. "Just as real as the old-fashioned hangover you're going to have tomorrow."