His predecessor had kept tape recorders running in every room, catching his "thoughts" as he paced. But then his predecessor, Rogers, had always been a flamboyant action-man leader, the first Secret Service agent to be elevated to the position he guarded with his profile. His career spanned a few headlines:

GBM SAVED FROM SHOOTING

HERO BODYGUARD TO RUN FOR SENATE

SEN. ROGERS WILL RUN

ROGERS WINS!

ROGERS ASSASSINATED

Before the assassin could confess, the police station at which he was held blew up, along with a fair piece of Mason City surrounding it. The FBI found the cause to be a gas leak of an unusual type. On succeeding to the office of Great Seal, our man promoted the investigating agent, K. Homer Bissell, to bureau chief.

Our man kept his thoughts on specially printed forms:

Presidential Notes PN/1/1776

President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Date: . . . . . . . . . . . . . ., 199. . . .

General

Subject:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Committee/

Commission/

Cabinet Referral:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Presidential

Remarks:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There were also memoranda, agenda, briefs and résumés always stacked on top of the elegant polished* desk. The Great Seal liked to be well supplied with business at hand. It enabled him to expedite and finalize things with obvious efficiency at any time, ready to deal with work and get it out of the way before he relaxed, working hard to play even harder, making his guiding principle Throughput.

MEMO: From the President

I do not tolerate noisy press conferences. If possible, the next press conference should be arranged to maximize silence.

I, the State, further do not like science fiction cops. If it is really necessary for them to wear those helmets, plastic visors, tunics, gauntlets, and jump boots, will they please keep out of my sight.

"I can see how this is going to build up into something," Filcup warns. "Remember when he didn't like certain news analysts? My God, remember when he didn't like brown eggs?"

Karl Wax brought up the subject of uniforms at the Tuesday meeting of Special Advisers. His "birthday cake" suggestion was voted down ("We have to make a pleasing offering to the President, but this is ridiculous. Anyway, a naked guard is just the kind of thing that could backfire. We all know how He feels about nakedness."), and Dan Foyle gained the upper hand with "a uniform of evening clothes, slightly modified in some distinctive manner—anyone who's seen Turhan Bey and Susanna Foster in The Climax will know what I mean. This has been a long and bloody war—though not pointless or without compensations—and He sorely needs a little formal relaxation."

Agenda for Wednesday

Commission stamps to commemorate Walt Disney, Louisa May Alcott, Ty Cobb; provisionally Billy Mitchell, Ralph Nader. Check figs on Indochina: Gen. H. claims 2,250 megatons reqd for reconditioning, Op. Orpheus. Check position on Tanzania vis-à-vis South African bloc. Could recredit our reputation in Brazil, renew Arab franchise.

Presentation of award from Mothers of American Insurrection (blue suit). Read speech of Q's for decontamination efforts, constitutional loopholes. Lunch with leading blacks. Press conference on Martha's blood clot. Important: P.M. conference with Bissell, psychologists, police reps on physical/mental reconciliation of disaffiliatees, dealing with radical element.

While Tichner and Groeb arrange his urgent memos, he runs over the morning mail résumé, made up as a composite letter:

Dear Mr. President:

While 47% of me would like to congratulate you on your courageous stand on the Chile question, 21% of me also wonders if you've lived up to our expectations regarding … and though 17% of me disagrees, a massive 36% thinks you handled the Moral Pollution bill wisely, and for the rest, I can't make up my mind.

Sincere good wishes,

Your friend,

J.Q. Public

Suggested Uniforms for White House Police

Brocade, knee breeks, and periwigs

Minutemen, "dressed for Sunday"

Student Prince

Uncle Sam

Henry Clay gaiters, panamas

Christy's Minstrels

Custer's cavalry

Commodore Perry

Rough Riders

The Climax

Mysterious Island

Dickensian ragamuffins (struck off, replaced by "Leopard tuxes and light-up bow ties")

Texas A & M

Diamond Horseshoe

Each Night I Die

Zoot blues

Nice neat business

The GS follows no suggestions, however. For a time, while he reads a digested condensation of the life of FDR, the palace guards are persuaded to imitate that eminence. Bang seven-thirty every morning the guardroom doors slide back and out rolls a parade of large-jawed men in gleaming wheelchairs, champing their cigarette holders and assuring the president that he has nothing to fear but fear itself. And even that phase is preferable, they all agree, to his Peter Stuyvesant period.

After the mail, his condensed news digest:

Wednesday, February 12th

PRESIDENT SIGNS CONTROVERSIAL DUCK BILL

Conservation leaders praise forward-thinking leader. President disclaims, says only small step forward, but "little strokes fell great oaks."

President To Announce New Peace Plan

President's Wife Feared Ill

Cabinet Changes?

He was vaguely aware that the real press hardly ever mentioned him; these items had been gleaned from the Rood City Post, the Oslo (Nevada) Times and the Budget Junction O'erseer. He knew the press laughed at him for his sincerity, for his supposed vanity, for the way he conducted the war. They crucified him if he looked solemn, and when he smiled there were unkind remarks about his woodenness. The press! What did they know? Let them go on calling him an unsaleable commodity, a snap, an empty suit. They would one day look the ape!

Not a Gem

During morning coffee, he felt like a visit to the Reagan Room, but curbed it (PRESIDENT MASTERS OWN CONDITION). There was still the award ceremony (The confounded press! More pix with eyes closed, mouth open) and the luncheon with its precarious handshakes. And first of all there was Operation Orpheus and fat, freckled General Hare.

"We call it Orpheus, sir, because there's no turning back. We thought of calling it Operation Lot, but people might get it confused with Operation Sandlot, our talent-recruiting program, and with Operation Big Sandy. Operation Sodom was even worse. So we—"

"Get to the point, Hare. Where do you get this figure of 2,250 megatons?"

The general set down his coffee cup carelessly, so that the cookie fell from its saucer perch. Disorder. Reagan Room. Operation. Or Free Us. The music of the nukebox means a dance with China. I'd like to get you. On a slow boat. China, angina, regina, vagina.

"Let's see now." General Hare jotted figures on the edge of a soggy paper napkin. "We have North Zone, South Zone, Countries Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog …"

Slow bull to china.

"That makes 1,939,424 square kilometers, and that comes out to only 749 megatons. Allowing a 300 percent margin for error, we get 2,250 megatons, say 150 warheads. We wouldn't hardly miss it."

"Haha! Oh, excuse me, General, I just thought of something. What kind of—ha—boat would a slow boat to China be? Eh? Eh?"

"I don't exactly get you, sir. You mean—?"

"It's a riddle, man! Just tell me the answer to that, and I may give you the green light on one of these operations."

"Mr. President! I—"

"Give up? Give up?"

There was some argument about whether the general had actually given up before the president told him the answer. To placate him, it finally became necessary to okay Operation Big Sandy, both phases.

A Lexicon of Governmental Report Terms

alienatee: person not sympathetic to the government

bugs: demonstrators (hence swatting a swarm: riot control)

dealienation: brainwashing

decontamination: shock therapy used in dealienation

disaffiliate: anarchist

maverick: businessman who defects to radical side

opinion analyst: police agent

rationalizing an increment: stopping a demonstration

reconciliation: interrogation with extreme force

rodeo: suspect roundup and intensive reconciliation

social therapist: interrogator

technicality: prisoner

Souplines

The president has a rich dream life. It soaks through his skin like a rich soup and arranges the wrinkles in his "sober" business suit. Examination of the seat of the president's business pants reveals inmost desires, claims psychologist. A relief map of Indochina, perhaps.

His dreams boil up in projects, plans, operations, advisory committee schemes. His dreaming eye is on the donut, says aide. Operation Big Sandy, for instance. It may seem crazy to wall off Mexico (phase one), but there you are. "It's so crazy," says General Hare, "it just might work. Or not."

The lunch with leading blacks goes even worse than he'd feared. The press conference is cancelled and he disappears for half an hour into the Reagan Room. Later, before he goes to meet concerned psychologists and policemen, he checks his chin for lines of sin.

Major Operation

Operation Big Sandy was born on the littered conference table of the Great Seal's team of "creative" advisers. Karl and Dan were cuffing and folding maps to rearrange the world. Filcup sought truth in the depths of black coffee.

"A door-to-door instant welfare program? Let me call it Streetheart."

"A national idea bank—"

"Yes, but unemployment."

"Unemployment, sure, but Social Security deficits."

Filcup held up an atlas. "Think of the United States as a sheep or cow, marked into cuts of meat."

"The United Steaks?"

"Don't laugh, it's the body politic. About to be invaded by hostile germs, coming up the anus from Mexico—"

"Now just hold on a minute!" Texas Dan Foyle demanded that Filcup apologize.

"What we need is antiseptic. Make the Rio Grande radioactive. Build a wall," he continued.

"A wall to write on!" Karl said. "A challenge for our painters."

"Sell off advertising space."

Dan cracked his knuckles with unrestrained excitement. "This could be great for the old folks. Give them something to look at, a new interest in life. You realize that there are over a hundred retirement ranches in that area, and that more than half our retired folks live within a hundred miles of Mexico."

Filcup seemed convulsed by a private joke. "Wait till I tell you the rest, Dan. There's something in this for the old folks, all right, in phase two. But for now, we'll not only sell space to advertisers, we'll build gas stations, highways, concessions. A view of the wall. A view over it. Visit the gun emplacements. Amazing plastic replicas of the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem! It'll take up the slack in Mexican tourism, giving our vacationers a new place to go. And of course it'll be a sop for unemployment."

"The Great Wall!" They toasted it in cold coffee.

· · · · ·

2. Technicalities

At Fort Nixon Retraining Center

Dr. Veck was explaining the routine to the new man, Lane. "I know youngsters like you are chock-full of theory, itching to try everything out," he said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Fort Nixon is just the place for it. The normal routine isn't too irksome because most of ours are politicals, as you know. Not much trouble except security—they will try to escape—but I'm afraid they make dull cases."

He slid open a panel depicting the death of Actaeon (or some other deer) to show, through the back of a one-way glass, a dozen retrainees at work on handicrafts. "As you see, dull."

"Oh, I don't know. Who's the old-timer over in the corner? The one doing leather work."

"Old Hank? He's pretty well beyond treatment. I'll show you his record sometime. Looks as if he's making another bridle. He's made three already, one white, one red, and one black. This one seems to be beige. Of course he has no idea what he'll do with them. In fact, he told me he knows nothing at all about horses. Poor old Hank!"

Oblivious to their concern, Hank was kicking a water pipe under his bench, tapping out a message to his one friend.

"The government apparently has contingency plans to use some of our people for a work camp. Some construction project. I'd guess it's either another retirement ranch or else a dam on the Rio Grande. But of course they never tell us anything, We only have to deal with the extra security that will mean."

"Do you have many escapes?" asked Dr. Lane.

"We always catch them. And then we give them a taste of the random room. Little invention of my own. The occupant doesn't know what will happen to him, or when—all he knows is that it will be unpleasant. At perfectly random intervals he gets cold water, hot water, shock, strobe lights, whistles, drones, a shower of shit, whispers, heat, cold, and so on. Life in the ordinary ward seems pretty good to them after that. They're grateful for a secure, comfortable routine, and escape is—well—remote."

"Ah, yes, I noticed your paper on it in Political Psychopath, though I didn't have a chance to read it yet. Sounds interesting."

Dr. Veck acknowledged this half compliment with half a smile. "Your praxis was at Mount Burris, was it not?" He found his hair hurt, and his breath had to be forced.

"Yes, but not with politicals. I worked mainly with the children of malcontents. Primary adjustments, corporation workshop. Tame stuff compared to political deviation, which has always been my first love. Are you all right, Doctor?"

"Ah, it's nothing. I experience these symptoms, shortness of breath and so on, whenever I leave my office for any length of time. What say we go up to my office now, and I'll show you some typical case histories."

Entering Veck's office, the two men were arrested by a throbbing desert sunset. Dr. Lane sighed. Breaking off in the middle of a discussion of pattern attrition, he murmured:

"Who captains haughty Nature in her flaming hair

Can ne'er rest slothy whilst some lesser groom—"

"What was that?" Veck snapped the blinds shut and turned up the decent office light.

"Nothing, really. I wrote it for a class in Environmental Humanities."

"Good for you! We social engineers can use a smattering of culture around the place. Gives us new perspective on our problems. Like this one, for instance." He threw a dusty folder on the desk. "Mr. C. was a Communist, and he liked being a Communist. We tried damned near everything. Finally we learned that a fellow party member had seduced C.'s wife. We simply told him about this, allowed him to escape, and bingo!"

"Bingo?"

"By killing the seducer, C. proved that he thought of his wife as a piece of property. It was the first beachhead of capitalism in his commie brain. With our help he became vitally interested in other possessions, in getting and spending. His socialism fell away like an old scab. Today C. is a Baptist minister and a Rotarian."

"Amazing!"

"Or take this case, Mr. von J. Von J. was a malcontent, a hater of authority. Arrested for vandalism, jaywalking, nonpayment of taxes, contempt of court. Here we used aversive methods to great effect. The first step was to teach him self-discipline. We made him hold his urine twenty hours at a time, memorize chapters of Norman Vincent Peale, and so on. Now, I am given to understand, von J. is more than a model citizen; he does some work for the FBI.

"Mr. B. was an anarchist. We placed him in a controlled work situation. Among those who worked around him we removed everyone of competence and replaced them with indecisive idiots. They looked to B. for guidance; he became a straw boss, then a real boss. We rewarded his responsibility with more pay and privileges. He became a trusty.

"Naturally he escaped. On his return, B. learned that R., one of the idiot workers who had worshipped him, had, left on his own, committed suicide.

"In this way B. was brought to see that running away doesn't bring liberty, but slavery. He now realized that the truly free aren't rebels and anarchists, but those who have submitted their will to a Higher Authority. The way I put it to him in a little talk was: 'Democracy is like a spaceship. It may seem stuffy inside, but you can't just step out for a breath of outer space!'"

Dr. Lane saw his cue, and chuckled. "But how did you really arrange it? What actually happened to R.? A transfer?"

"Oh, dear me, no." Veck laughed. "We had to string him up in his room, for real. To make it look good. B. was nothing if not skeptical."

Remorse Code Message

O Hank! You have turnt your face to the wall again. Or anyway you've stopped acknowledging my messages. And you won't talk to the other retrainees. Sit there then in the common room, silent and obscure as Gun.** Trying perhaps to etch out a certain territory in the room by exposing it to the acid of your silence. One by one the others move away to far parts of the room where they can kibbitz at Ping-Pong or pretend to study the paper autumn leaves pinned to the bulletin board, wishing all a HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY. Perhaps you can empty the room itself, even the wing, or the whole of Fort Nixon, driving away all life and plastering over the crevices with thick hostile silence.

But you just couldn't have such an unconstructive notion. Not to say such an asocial, dangerous notion. Because whatever they say about there being no punishments here, extremely uncomfortable things can happen to the asocial. And your silence can hardly be construed as "making an honest effort" at retraining, can it?

Your obstinate silence. Suppose they feel it necessary to counter it? To bring in the Fort Nixon Silver Band to fill the void? And then certain select retrainees (the "doctors" staying out of it) might hold you to a chair while the Silver Band marches past, playing "Under the Double Eagle" and "Them Basses." Certain select retrainees, known somehow to one another, might hold you to a chair while the Silver Band sharpens up. They sharpen the edges of the bells of their trumpets and sousaphones. Then they extend your tongue and hold it while they saw it off with their shining instruments. Then they pin it to the bulletin board, among the autumn leaves.

Listen, Hank, you have friends in high places. One phone call and you can be out of here, long gone before they put you to work on the Great Project. Just admit that God is pretty first-rate and God's Own Country is, gosh, not so bad either, when you get right down under it. Or say anything, say howdy to your friends and neighbors, the other inmates. Otherwise I hear the Silver Band massing in the anteroom; I see a wet pink leaf upon the bulletin board, HAPPY COLUMBUTH DAY, end of Message.

Dr. Lane's Secret Journal (I)

… the question of who he thinks he is trying to contact. Veck claims he was in prison before, tapped out morse code on the water pipes with other prisoners and just couldn't break the habit. Though no one here seems to listen to his tapping.

Yesterday, I tried immobilizing Hank with s.p. and restraints. As I predicted, he keeps messages going even then, by nearly inaudible tongue clicks.

A challenging case. Hank evidently was some kind of painter and sculptor at one time. Later he made a series of animated cartoons of which I saw only one example. It seemed particularly sadistic to me. The main story seemed to be a quarrel between dogs, cats, and mice. This version differed from others mainly in that it strove for realistic violence. Thus when an animal was struck by an enormous wooden mallet, he did not go dizzy with X X eyes and tweeting birds and a pulsating red lump. Instead he screamed, staggered, fell, gushed blood, vomited, lay quivering, and died, defecating. I believe the car toon was called "Suffering Cats." It was seditious.

A challenging case. Today we talked.

LANE: Good morning, Hank. Feeling okay today?

HANK: Try a synthesis of that.

LANE: I'd like to try—

HANK: They're out of it. No good. (Indistinct murmur) Pricks! (Or "bricks")

LANE: I'd like you to look at these cards and tell me what the story is on each. What they remind you of.

HANK: Listen, I'm the pope around here. I'm the mural man and I'm the muracle man …

LANE: What does this remind you of, Hank? (Overturned car)

HANK: It's a picture that's supposed to remind me of the next picture. It reminds me a little of a car accident. And a mural I once did, about fifteen hundred miles long. Incorporated a white line, nothing nicer.

LANE: Do you think doing murals is nice, Hank? Isn't it more fun building things up, painting, than tearing them down?

HANK: Why choose? They don't. It's all part of the same thing, the seduction of the construction. If you're looking for anarchist bombers, arrest God, eh? There's the destruction of the destruction for you!

Anyway, it's too late. You can't exactly make an omelette, can you? One of these days, "Up against the wall, robot!" and it's good-bye Mexico. Their symbol the cockroach, the meek little bastard that inherits the earth.

I gather he's talking about building walls, painting murals on them and then tearing them down. This doubtless symbolizes his whole life, a tension between creation (art) and destruction (anarchy). A long and wasted life! It's hard to believe, but Hank was born before the great Chesterton died.

A Harsh Physic (I)

The roomful of psychologists and police officials paid little attention when the president entered. Some were gossiping, and those who noticed his scurrying figure turned away with disgusted expressions: "That slick bastard … Let's talk about something else …"

It was different when they saw Bissell of the FBI coming straight from the door to the lectern. The admiration, envy, and affection they felt for the little guy could not be expressed in ordinary terms—though perhaps Freemasons had a word for the stirring beneath the apron.

Bissell gave his report on surveillance. On the whole, random search and arrest techniques had not proved productive of info on subverts. Intensive infiltration was being tried with more success, but it took time, men and money.

"We managed to infiltrate one group of anarchist bombers in the Southwest, for example, only by an indirect method. Our man on the inside is not actually known to us—we couldn't risk direct contact. Instead he passes information to the Bureau and receives orders from it through a neutral man. We call him a 'circuit-breaker,' because he can break contact in case of trouble.

"Our 'Listening Post' program has been very successful," he continued. "This means bugging public and private places where we hope dangerous subverts might meet. Originally we had planned to use computers to sort through the vast amount of tape we collected this way. The computers would search for key words like black, power, liberation, revolution, and government, and select these portions for further study.

"But we have recruited instead a large number of personnel to do this sorting job for us. These recruits are trustworthy, keen listeners, naturally suspicious and absolutely loyal. Best of all, they work for free."

The president raised his hand. "Just who are these dedicated personnel?"

"I was about to explain, sir, that they are elderly people living in retirement homes. As they have little to do, listening gives them pleasure. Many are retired military men, only too glad to still be of service to their country."

That concluded Bissell's report. Flanked by two of his enormous agents, the little man marched out of the room. The rest realized they had been holding their breaths. Now the place seemed empty, as though it had lost some great dynamic presence—some modern Wilhelm Reich.

At the Rocking R

Brad Dexter peered out of his water-cooled window at America Deserta. As always, hot and quiet. Fifty degrees out there, or so the ranch authorities said, and a laborious calculation told him that this was "a hundred and twenty-two real degrees, Irma! Think of that!"

He propped her up so she could see the shimmering desert. "You know, in the old days, they used to fry an egg on the sidewalk on a day like this. No, I guess they only pretended to fry it. I found out later it was a fake, in Unvarnished Truth magazine. I got the issue here someplace."

Much of the small room was taken up with towering stacks of magazines. The ranch authorities hadn't liked it, but Brad had insisted on not parting with a single issue of Unvarnished Truth. If a man couldn't live in comfort at a retirement ranch, just where in hell could he relax? Just tell Brad that, and he would ask no more.

It wasn't much of a ranch. No horses, cattle, barns, corrals, or pastures. In fact, it wasn't a ranch at all, except for being stuck out here in the blazing desert. The Rocking R Retirement Ranch consisted of thirteen great hexagonal towers called "bunkhouses," each named after some forgotten child star. Brad and Irma resided on the twentieth story of Donald O'Connor.***

"Now where is that article?" Brad leafed through tattered, yellowed issues containing the latest on the Kennedy assassinations, "I Killed Martin Bormann," "Her Hubby Was a Woman," "Eyeless Sight," "Birth Pills Can Kill!" and "How Oil Companies Murdered the Car That Runs on Water." "I know I had that danged thing someplace— What are you looking at, honey?"

There wasn't much to see outside. Everything was so still it could have been a hologram. The electric fence that marked the future location of the Wall made a diagonal across this picture, starting in the lower right corner and disappearing over a dune at the upper left. Next to it an endless sausage curl of barbed wire followed the same contour. Somewhere beyond the dune lay the work camp where they were building the Wall. Once a week, Brad had been lucky enough to see a great silver airship carrying equipment and supplies to the camp, and now he hoped Irma had spotted another. It was funny about Irma. Even though her eyes never moved, Brad could always tell when she was intent on something.

Now he saw it, a tiny figure trudging along next to the barbed wire coil, coming this way. From here, Brad couldn't make out much except the gray uniform.

"Escapee from the work camp, Irma. And there goes the danged lunch bell. Well, to heck with that—this is worth missing lunch for!" He took out his teeth for comfort.

The work camp prisoners were all political agitators, commies, anarchists, and others who had tried to overthrow the government by force. Brad had got to see some of them closer up when they came to do some work on the roof of Shirley Temple. They had built an enormous black box up there—something to do with the security system for the Wall. Brad guessed it was radar. The prisoners had all looked well fed and contented, probably better off than a lot of people that had worked hard all their lives, like Brad.

"This should be good," he said, breaking wind with excitement. "That fool has been slogging along God knows how many miles in this heat, and all for nothing. They'll get him. Always do, or so they tell me. I figure they won't even bother looking for him until they've let him bake his brains a little. They know what they're doing, all right. There, what did I tell you?"

A helicopter cruiser had now come over the hill. It moved slowly along the barbed wire as though tacking the fugitive, though he was in plain sight. Looking back, he speeded up his walking movements, though his progress was still hopeless. Gradually the spray of dust raised by the rotors advanced, erasing his footprints.

As the cruiser closed in, the pedestrian threw himself down and tried to dig in like a crab. But the magic circle of blowing dust overtook and enclosed him. The helicopter paused, turning, poking its rear in the air, excited by the kill.

When it rose, the man was flopping in a net, a neat package hanging from the insect belly. Brad watched it out of sight.

"By Godfrey, Irma, wasn't that something? Our boys really know their stuff. It made me proud to be living here in the greatest country on earth. And to think that our boys are building our First Line of Defense right here where we can see it! God, it's grand, old girl!"

The second lunch bell rang, and Brad decided to eat after all. At least today he'd have something to tell Harry Boggs, instead of the other way around. Harry thought the world revolved around him and his Listening Post work. Gossip-gathering was all it really amounted to.

"Only, today I've got better gossip!" Brad slipped in his teeth and grimaced them into position, then off he went. Irma, being an inflatable, had of course no need to eat.

Captain Middlemass

That week the residents of Donald O'Connor bunkhouse were treated to an official lecture on the Wall. Captain Mallery Middlemass turned out to be all they could have hoped, a well-burnished young man, glowing with health. They all savored the depth of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, the rich timbre of his voice. So unlike the usual visitors, either down-at-heels entertainers like "The Amazing Lepantos" or else retired folk from other bunkhouses, people with frail lungs, uneven shoulders, and thin, dry hair. The captain's hair was shiny black as patent leather, and his eyes were dark-glowing garnets.

He explained that the Wall was a population barrier. While our own population was increasing at a reasonable rate, that of Mexico was completely out of control.

"For years the slow poisons have been seeping across the border: marijuana, pornography, VD, and cheap labor. They have seeped into America's nervous system, turning our kids into drug addicts, infecting their minds and bodies with filth and stealing away American jobs. Poverty and its handmaidens, crime and vice, are spreading across the nation like cancer. They have one source: Spanish America!"

He showed them the model and explained some of the Wall's special features. It would incorporate (on the Mexican side) sophisticated electronic detection equipment and weapons, capable of marking the sparrow's fall, and (on our side) part of a new highway network connecting retirement ranches with new Will Doody Funvilles.

Brad and Harry got in line to shake the captain's hand. Up close they could see that he was not so young, after all. The sagging patches of yellow skin around his eyes really were a case for Unvarnished Truth.

· · · · ·

3. The Bang Gang

A Harsh Physic (II)

After Bissell, a police training expert spoke on riot control. "The first step is knowing when and where a riot is going to start. We can often control this factor by 'priming the pump,' or staging a catalytic incident ourselves."

"Just a minute!" The Great Seal looked concerned. "Isn't that provocation? Is it legal?"

"It is, the way we do it, yes, sir. We just have one man dressed as a demonstrator 'attacked,' 'brutally beaten,' and 'arrested' in sight of the mob. All simulated, of course. My department has never been against using street theatre in this way—and it's legal.

"Once things are in motion, we have other choices: We can contain, control, or divert a riot. Sometimes we even 'de-control' it, or let it get out of hand. If a mob does enough damage, we usually find public opinion hardened against them.

"Our actual techniques are too numerous to describe—the menu of gases alone is enormous. I might mention one experiment: giving tactical police a rage-inducing drug prior to their going on duty. A related experiment is hate-suggestion TV in the duty bus. On their way to the scene of action the boys are given a dose of King Mob at his ugliest. This has produced a nine percent increase in arrests, and a whopping seventeen percent increase in nonpolice casualties! It seems worth further investigation.

"A lot of riot work is the job of the evidence and public-relations squads. The evidence squad guarantees convictions for riot crimes: conspiracy to disorder, incitement to riot, and unlawful assembly. One way of doing this is to issue what we call 'black' publications. These are posters, leaflets, and newspapers made to look like real 'underground' items, but we've added to them certain incriminating articles. After all, the real intentions of these radicals are to bomb and shoot the ordinary, decent citizens into submission, and it's time we exposed them for what they are! Our evidence squad is headed by a man with considerable experience, the former editor of Unvarnished Truth magazine.

"The public-relations squad helps edit film and TV tape of riots, to help the public understand what we are doing. They remove portions that might be used to smear our tactical police forces. The national networks have all been very cooperative in this effort to close the 'communications gap' and keep the American public informed. It all adds up to a whale of a lot of work for us, but we like it that way. We believe that there's no such thing as a terrible riot—just bad publicity."

Up the Sleeves

"The question is, why is it legal to be a cop?" Chug asked. The crowd, gathered to watch him and Ayn performing, were caught off balance. "The cop is clearly employed by the criminal, to spread crime and disorder."

"Commie!" A bottle crashed at Chug's feet.

"Another vote for law and order," he remarked, and went right on. "Ever see a cop eat a banana?"

Ayn and Chug usually got a crowd by doing tricks. Ayn, in pink spangled tights and with her black hair flowing free, would swallow fire. Then Chug would take over. In immaculate evening dress, he'd stride about the cleared circle, producing fans of cards and lighted cigarettes from the air. Now that they had Ras to sell pamphlets down front, it became a smoother show. The crowds were bigger, but nastier.

Someone threw another bottle. Ayn picked up a big piece of it and took a healthy bite. The crowd was so quiet that all could hear her crunching glass. After a moment Chug resumed his speech, whipping them up to such wild enthusiasm that one or two reckless citizens bought nickel pamphlets from Ras.

"Why is our corporation government so worried about Mexico?" Chug asked. "Why are they willing to spend more money on building a wall against the Mexican poor than has been spent on the welfare of our own poor in fifty years? Could it be that mere humanity is becoming an embarrassment to our standard oil government?"

"Go back to Russia!"

"Russia is a state of mind. Why don't we all go back to a human state of mind? Why is it more illegal now to blow up an empty government office building, hurting no one, than to drop tons of bombs and burning gasoline on civilian farm families? Is it because the first is something the people do to a government, while the second --"

The next missile was a tire iron. It spun high against the lemon Jell-O sky and down, knocking off Chug's silk hat. Grinning desperately, he produced two bouquets of feather flowers. Under cover of this misdirection, Ayn escaped to get the car. She picked up Ras first, then circled the crowd to get Chug as the rocks and bottles started reaching for him. Ras opened the door and a brickbat clipped Chug in.

"The crowd wasn't angry," he said, mopping blood with a string of bright silk squares. "Someone started that. Someone in back."

"I know, I saw them," said Ras. "Lambs.**** Four of them. I noticed when they got out of their Cadillac, with coats over their arms to hide the tire irons and bats. I tried to warn you, but they were too quick."

"Well, it shows they care."

Ayn, Chug, and Ras

Although various people drifted in and out of the group centred on OK's Bookstore, Ayn and Chug were its constant twin nuclei. Formerly "The Amazing Lepantos," they had fallen into revolution as a new gimmick, an addition to their repertoire. What a show-stopper, to finish with government for good! But now the gimmick had ensleeved them. Ayn ran the bookstore, which specialized in the occult and so drew those hungering for utopia.

But instead of the indigestible stone of Marxist tracts, Ayn gave them the bread of poetry. OK Press produced pamphlets calling no one brother, exhorting none to rise up or join in, making no demand to stand up and be counted. The Garden of Regularity was a spirited defence of cannibalism on the grounds of its "natural laxative effects," while Think Again, Mr. Big Business! was a pornographic radio play. One unaccountably popular item was a movie scenario by "Phil Nolan" called The U— S— of A—.

Chug was a spare-time anarchist, as he had been a spare-time Lepanto. His real job was mechanical designer for Will Doody Enterprises. It was Chug who choreographed the antics of the robot animals that made up each Doody Funville show.

Bison and beaver were programmed to dance and sing the stories of famous Americans, all of them Unforgettable Characters. A caribou related the musical story of the invention of the telephone by "Mr. Ring-a-ding-dingy Bell." Otters caroled of Abner Doubleday's game. The pleasanter parts of the legend of John D. Rockefeller were repeated by a shy, long-lashed brontosaurus.

In the Doody world it was always Saturday afternoon in a small Midwestern town of 1900. Science was represented by Tom Edison, poetry by Ed Guest, painting by Norm Rockwell and Grandma Moses, literature by Booth Tarkington and Horatio Alger, culture by the ice-cream parlor and politics by the barbershop. And all was interpreted by cuddly robots.

Currently Chug was arranging the linkages of a duck to enable it to duckspeak of Thomas Paine:

Yup, yup! He was a firebrand

And his brand of fire

Was more than old King George could stand.

The song omitted mention of how Paine had died: old, lonely. and so despised by the Americans whose freedom he'd labored for that they could not suffer him to sit in a stagecoach with decent folk. In spare moments at work, Chug drew sketches for impossibly elaborate singing bombs.

Ras became the third steadfast member of the group. He was an unemployed high-school teacher who apparently drifted to them and stuck. Running the press, minding the store, handing out pamphlets—nothing was too much trouble for him. That's because he was, as everyone knew perfectly well, a police spy.

Ras found it hard to infiltrate them, not because they were secretive, but because they seemed to have no secrets at all. They were careless about publicity, and indeed, the group had never been given a name. Baffled by their openness, Ras kept digging. He never doubted for a moment that they had concealed a sinister purpose, like Chesterton's anarchists, under a cloak of jolly anarchy.

"Where do we keep the bombs?" he would ask.

"Up here," Ayn would say, tapping her head with solemn significance. "Truth be our dynamite."

"And Justice our permanganate," Chug would add. "And our blasting caps be Freedom, Honor, and—"

"No, really. The real bombs."

They hated to disappoint him. "You'll know soon enough, Ras. It's just that we hate to tell you too soon, in case you fell into the hands of the police or anything."

Then Chug and Ayn would go off somewhere and laugh, while Ras went to report. It never occurred to them to "deal with" him in any way, or even to withdraw their friendship. He was, after all, a needed romantic figure, an Informer. Without him the group would have been dull indeed.

The Circuit Breaker

Ras was supposed to be giving old Mr. Eric von Jones tuition in mathematics. Shortly after each lesson, Mr. von Jones would take a piano lesson from an FBI agent. In this way Ras and the agent communicated without knowing each other's name or face.

"Have you completed the problems I assigned?"

Somehow asking Mr. von Jones the simplest question set off in him an elaborate cycle of clockwork twitches and tics: hand to mouth, roll of eye, lift of brow, and shrug of shoulder. The cycle took a full minute to complete.

"Yes … here." The old man slid across the dining table a dozen sheets of carefully written equations. On the last page were Ras's orders.

"Fine. Now here's your corrected work from last time." Ras slid back to him a report on the OK's Bookstore group. "Now, shall we go over some trigonometric ratios?"

The twitches unwound once more. "Yes … I'd like that." Squaring his notebook with the corners of the table, he selected one of a dozen pencils all sharpened to the same length and headed the page "Notes."

"You don't need to really take notes," Ras whispered.

"I'm very … interested in ratios."

Ras looked at him: a corpse at attention. No doubt Mr. von Jones made the FBI man teach him scales too. That parsnip-colored face seemed to glow only at the prospect of some tiresome duty. Probably he would go on from one chore to another, carrying himself through routine motions for a few more years, until at last he was called to the great treadmill in the sky.

Dr. Lane's Secret Journal (II)

I can't understand how Hank knew they were going to build a wall along the border. One with a "white line … fifteen hundred miles long," which is a highway! It all seemed just babbling at the time, but now even the "good-bye Mexico" makes sense. I have also just learned that a Will Doody Funville is to be built somewhere in the area, against the wall. No doubt "Up against the wall, robot!" refers to Doody's robot animals!

This seems to be a genuine case of clairvoyance. There is just no other rational explanation!

Harry Boggs on Life

Harry gave an after-dinner lecture on the subject "Is There Life on Other Planets?" to a dozen other residents of Donald O'Connor bunkhouse. He concluded that there certainly was, and that it was of the utmost importance to get in contact with the Uranians.

"That's the real reason they're building this wall," he said. "With powerful telescopes, the Uranians will be able to see it."

Another important means of communication could be telepathy, he went on, but most of us had our telepathic equipment damaged by a lack of vital sea kelp in our diet. When he'd finished, four or five white heads in the audience nodded, as if in agreement. Brad Dexter's was among them; Harry bad seen bundles of Unvarnished Truth on a cart, bound for the incinerator. And draped over the top bundle, what looked like a deflated rubber dolly …

No time for such thoughts now, of course. Time for Harry's important government work. Red-faced and breathless with vision, he hurried to his room and tuned in on Listening Post.

"Number 764882. Number 764882," said an announcer slowly, so he could copy it down. Two women's voices came on the air.

"… a slipped disk. But all in all, it wasn't bad."

"Haven't they got any forjias? No? Okay, bring me the roast sud. What did you say his name was?"

Harry was happier talking about his important government work than actually doing it, but he soldiered along. The FBI expected him to listen to an hour a day of this:

"Impinging upon my career. The great chain of buying, that's what it is. Impinging and impugning … impugn sort … Sri Mantovani … Einstein and people like Einstein said that the world was flat … reliance … bargain jay or meep …"

Harry vowed that he would never again say anything dull or unimportant in a public place.

MEMO: From the desk of A. Lincoln

I generally find that a man slow to get a joke is slow to win a battle. That is why I like to see my generals piss-eyed with laughter at all times. General Ned Allison tells me he knows of three soldiers, who had been imbibing, and were sent to a certain address in Gettysburg—but I expect that this is just one of Ned's "leg-pullers." Hope you and Martha are well. I and the missus are tolerable.

The Séance

Chug and Ayn had wanted to go, so much so that Ras suspected a secret meeting. Perhaps this "séance" was really the place where they received their orders from the Central Council of Anarchists. He'd volunteered to go with them, and they'd insisted he go in their place. There was his dilemma: Were they getting him out of the way while they went elsewhere, or were they trying to bluff him out of the séance?

He went, still vaguely expecting the Central Council, men in beards and dark glasses, calling themselves Breakfast, Coffee Break, Lunch, Tea, Dinner, Supper and Midnight Snack …

The medium was an anemic old lady with knotty flesh hanging from her arms, Mrs. Ross. The others were Hank James (an old man with mad eyes), Dr. Lane (looked like a young optician), Mrs. Paris (a plump old lady with an asthmatic Pekingese and a hat of similar material), and Steiner, a young man with erupting skin.

As soon as the lights went out, Ras felt another presence, an enormous fat man who almost filled the room. In the deep blind blackness it was terrifying, for Ras dared not move for fear of touching the fat man.

The medium did not speak. After a moment, Ras said, "I thought it wasn't supposed to work with a skeptic in the room."

A deep, fat voice came back at once: "Don't be an ass. That's what these fraud mediums tell you, but don't listen to them. Actually it only works when there is at least one skeptic in the room."

"Who are you?"

"Some call me God, Allah, Jaweh, the All, the Other, the Great Imponderable, Bingo, Mammon, the Light, names like that. Call me what you like, but call me in time for dinner."

Ras shuddered at the use of that particular noun. "Are you the chief of the anarchists, then?"

"Why must there be a chief? Maybe we all walk shoulder to shoulder, shank to shank. No leaders."

"Not your kind. You need kings to kill, at least. And presidents and bishops and gods—all targets for your bombs."

"Go on. I find it fascinating the way reactionaries assume all the bombs and guns are turned against them. Who raises the armies, builds the rockets, buys the bombs, draws the border and declares war, if not your kings and presidents?"

"I should warn you," Ras said through gritted teeth, "I am an agent of the FBI." The time for caution was past.

"That is obvious, and needs no warning. But you'd better warn me if you feel a change of heart coming on."

"No danger of that, my fat friend!"

"Ah! But if you say that, you are on the very brink of conversion to anarchy!"

"But you are the forces of anarchy. You are they who hate and fear the light, they who hate order because it is orderly, life because it is alive."

"Am I?"

Suddenly it was all wrong. Ras felt as if he had betrayed himself, to himself. He was the anarchist, and this voice the spirit of Law and Order, of J. Edgar Hoover, of—

"Damn you!" he shrieked. "Damn you, Chesterton!"

"Chesterton?" said the voice as the lights came up. "But my dear chap, Chesterton is simply other people."

Mrs. Ross opened her eyes and beamed. "My, how successful we have been!" she said. "Two strong emanations! I think I liked the one called Chesterton best, though the late FBI agent was nice too."

Dr. Lane's Secret Journal (III)

Dr. Veck has refused to accept my parapsychological explanation of Hank's predictions. He's refused to even discuss them. But I tried Hank out at a séance and also with ESP cards, with interesting results. At the séance I actually spoke with the spirit of Chesterton and heard him curse himself! This may not be Hank's influence, of course. Still, there are the ESP scores. His psychosis seems to have brought him near to some crack in the fabric of futurity so that his inner eye sees through! If Dr. Veck continues trying to suppress this discovery of national importance, I may have to unleash Hank's terrible power upon him.

Hank's terrible power is that he knows the future—which means the future is in some way here already! We need only ask him what to do, and receive the awful impress of his ESPing reply.

PS. I find my concentration on receiving ESP messages is much keener when I restrict my diet to brown foods—brown eggs, bread, sugar, and rice—and to iron-rich foods such as molasses. Perhaps the iron sets up induction currents. But I must retain control. Hysteresis is the path to hysteria.

Ratio

"I haven't got any 'corrected problems' for you this time. In fact I feel like giving all this up. Why don't you just tell your piano teacher that I can't find out any more about their bombs. About anything. And I'm not sure I care."

"I … see. Well, then, how about the lesson?"

"The lesson?"

"I've already learned some of it." To Ras's horror, the old man closed his eyes and began reciting from memory the tables of sines and cosines.

Maybe I am an anarchist. The anarchist. But is this law and order? Sitting here listening to a mad old man?

At 4° 15', Ras lurched from the table.

"I … haven't finished."

"I know, excuse me, I feel a little sick." He stumbled into the dark hallway and snatched at a doorknob at random.

"No, wait! Don't open that!"

Ras crashed into a closet full of glass gallon jugs. As he recoiled, one jug tipped and fell, splattering its contents. The smell of stale piss rose about him. "My God!"

"I'm sorry. I'm … very retentive, you see."

When Ras had slammed out of the house, Mr. von Jones shrugged, cleared his throat, curled his right foot around a table leg, lifted an eyebrow, coughed. A terrible scene. A terrible young man. Damage had been done and repairs were needed. Mr. von Jones counted to ten thousand, to the metronome.

Resist; A Plot Is Brought Home; The Tour

Ras cornered Chug in a café. "Listen, I have a—" He meant "confession to make," but finished "plan." His voice shook, and his eyes reflected the peculiar disagreeable yellow of the Formica tables. "We'll blow up the White House and kill the president."

Keeping his face straight, Chug nodded. "Okay. I've got an idea for the bomb to do it with." On the yellow Formica he sketched his design for an enormous steam-driven duck that could sing "Taking a Chance on Love" while delivering an explosive egg.

Harry Boggs could hardly believe his good luck. But, by jingo, there was no doubt about it. This "Ras" and his pal "Chug" were plotting assassination. This was the real thing!

Countdown

The piano teacher had brought along a piano tuner. "Listen, Mr. von Jones, we're making the raid today. We have to know the name of our contact man on the inside. I mean, is he still working for us? We haven't had a report for weeks."

"I … a report?"

The two men leaned over him. "Mr. von Jones? Are you all right?"

"Look at this, Don. Pupils are different sizes. This guy's had a stroke."

"I'm … fine, really. And I know the young man you mean. But his name just … I didn't retain it."

The raid proceeded. The FBI succeeded in arresting all members of the gang except the one called "Ras," who they suspected was the ringleader. The rest were interrogated and packed off to Fort Nixon for retraining as good citizens.

My Struggle

Late that night, the president worked at his memoirs in the small office attached to his bedroom.

… and all of the Negroes wanted to shake my hand!! Combined with the rest of the day's defeats, the pressures of responsibility for this heaviest office in the land, it was almost enough to shake my faith in my own destiny. But not quite.

I had much to be weary about. Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska were virtually a dustbowl. South Africa and its satellite nations were getting tough about Tanzania. The War still dragged on. The steel and rail strikes still dragged on. The cities—better not spoken of. Yet I had time in the midst of the storm to share a quiet joke with General Hare. I asked if he knew what kind of boat would be a slow boat to China? The answer was, a gravy boat!

The Great Seal enjoyed his joke all over again. It was the only one he'd ever made, unless you counted the Great Wall of Mexico.

The Reagan Room

"What I want to know," said one of the Roosevelts to another as they went off duty, "is what he does in the Reagan Room? I've seen trays of food go in there, and a doctor."

The other smiled the famous Roosevelt smile. "I thought you knew. He keeps a wounded soldier in there. Some say he just sits and chats with him, gives him encouragement. But others say it's very odd that he particularly asked for a soldier with a belly wound."

"Just a minute!" The first FDR scowled. "That's the president you're talking about, mister. Watch yourself!"

"Now calm down. Listen, even the president might do something he's not very proud of now and then, right? I mean, he's only phocine, for Christ's sake. Try to see this thing in the greater perspective of his brilliant career."

"Okay, okay. I just said watch it, that's all."

· · · · ·

4. The Cockroach

Dr. Lane's Secret Journal (IV)

Hank has tapped out his ESP message in no uncertain terms. I see that Dr. Veck is an obstacle to science. My task is clear, for Hank has sent me a picture of Dr. Veck lying in a pool of blood. It must be done. I am but the instrument of fate, or of G. K. Chesterton. Perhaps they are one and the same. O my restless, questioning soul, thirsting for truth!

Later. I did it. I killed Veck in the middle of his work on a very interesting paper on socialism and epilepsy. Hank took the news calmly, considering that he is now off drugs.

"We're all of us doomed anyway," he said.

"Doomed?"

"The Wall. The Wall was my idea in the first place."

"You influenced future ev—"

"I influenced my nephew. A long time ago I told my nephew an idea of mine for a Great Wall of Mexico. It was to be a giant decorated sculpture. My nephew much later became a special 'creative' adviser to the president. Obviously he has put my idea into effect. Young Bill Filcup was always very enterprising."

"But the doom?"

"Well, you and I, and this hospital-prison, and a lot of other people and places, are the decoration."

I said I didn't understand. He laughed.

"We just haven't been applied yet," he said.

The meaning of all this escapes me. It may be clear one day. From my window I can see the Wall, and the magnificent sunset. I

Harry

Harry thought he smelled something burning.

The U— S— of A—

A movie scenario by "Phil Nolan":

Scene I. A peak in Darien. Cortez stands gazing upon the Pacific, which, it is clear from the way his men exchange glances, he has just named. He is silent.

Scene II. Rapidly turning calendar pages: November 28, 29, Brumaire, 1666, Aries, November 30, 31, Ventose, 6379, 125, Thursday, 5427, New Moon.

Scene III. The Delaware River. Washington approaches, throws silver dollar across.

Scene IV. Old Glory flutters in breeze. Offscreen voices hum "God Save the King."

Scene V. Japanese diplomats walking out of League of Nations. Offscreen lugubrious voice: "The treacherous Japanese insisted they were a peace-loving people, and we believed them. Then—the stab in the back that brought Mr. and Mrs. America to their senses. On December 7, 1941—(cut to atomic bomb explosion)—Pearl Harbor!"

Scene VI. Statue of Liberty, holding up a sword. Same voice: "At last, just as Britain has its Neptunia ruling the waves, just as France has its 'La belle dame sans merci,' now America has Mrs. Liberty, welcoming the storm-tossed aliens." (Karl Rossman passes.) "Welcome! Welcome to the melting pot!"

Scene VII. (Animation) Cauldron marked MELTING POT. Ladle pours in liquefied "masses." Cauldron slowly sags and melts.

A Special Message from the President

The president's black-and-white image appeared on the television screen surrounded by a black condolence border. He seemed almost too humble to have a clear image. Instead the fuzzy, bleached patches of his face, oddly patterned by liver spots and furrows, gave him the look of a soiled etching.

"My countrymen, it is a grave announcement that I must make to you this evening. What I am about to say is a block of sadness and grief in the neighborhood of my heart, as I am sure it will be in yours.

"Tonight several nuclear explosions occurred at different places along the population barrier between the United States and Mexico. These explosions, let me make this perfectly dear, were accidental. No one is to blame. No one could have avoided them. Certain technical failures in our security system set off a chain of events—and Nature took its course.

"Still, there's no denying that many thousands, millions, rather, of people have been killed. Since these bombs were located on top of high-rise retirement ranches and on top of mental hospitals, they have killed many unfortunate persons, and that is to be regretted. It is also regrettable that a lethal zone has been created along our border."

The black border vanished. Jubilant music swelled behind his voice as our leader intoned: "On the positive side, very few of our troops in the area were injured. The army reports only a dozen casualties. Some of Will Doody's Funville projects have been destroyed, but I am going to ask Congress to compensate Mr. Doody for this terrible loss. As for the Wall itself, it has been badly burned and cratered in spots. Luckily it protects our border yet with a barrier of radiation. For the present, we are vigilant but safe. And for the future?"

Suddenly the air about the grey President was filled with tiny, bright-colored figures: animated elves, fairies, butterflies and bluebirds, tiny pink bats in spangled hose, flying chipmunks and dancing dragonflies. Smiling, he too burst into color. "The future is ours, my countrymen! We will rebuild our Wall taller and stronger and safer than ever, so secure that it will last a thousand years! Come! Help me make this country strong!" He extended an arm upon which doves and butterflies were alighting already. And as the chorus sang "… from sea to shining sea," twittering bluebirds modestly covered the scene with a Star-Spangled Curtain.

Epilogue

Ras turned up again in Red Square, conspicuous in a black cape and a tall silk hat. The cane in his hand was a sword cane, naturally, and the whiskers hooked over his ears on spectacle bows. A tourist gaped for a moment as Ras harangued a crowd of pigeons.

When he'd finished, he produced a round black bomb, lit it, and tossed it into the crowd. Its small pop was enough to attract the notice of two yawning policemen, who came over to examine the three dead pigeons.

As, still stifling yawns, they escorted him away, Ras shouted slogans into the faces of other tourists. Probably they knew no English, for they stared sullenly, all but one man, who sought an explanation in his guidebook.

The End

Annotations

* And bulletproof, another legacy of poor Rogers.

** War god of the Fon.

*** The other bunkhouses were Shirley Temple, Margaret O'Brien, Butch Jenkins, Baby Leroy, Bobby Driscoll, Jackie Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Luana Patten, Mickey Rooney, Dean Stockwell, and Skippy Homeier.

**** Lambs: a vigilante group borrowing rhetoric and enthusiasm from late "silent patriot" S. Agnew: "They call us pigs, but we are really sacrificial lambs. We will not bandy epithets, but gladly give our lives to sweep this country clean of its plethora of pusillanimous liberals and their drug-pushing, parasitical radical associates."

© John Sladek 1977. The Great Wall of Mexico first appeared in Bad Moon Rising, 8 1973, Thomas M. Disch.

* * * * *

Star Light, Star Bright

by Alfred Bester

The man in the car was thirty-eight years old. He was tall, slender, and not strong. His cropped hair was prematurely gray. He was afflicted with an education and a sense of humor. He was inspired by a purpose. He was armed with a phone book. He was doomed.

He drove up Post Avenue, stopped at No. 17, and parked. He consulted the phone book, then got out of the car and entered the house. He examined the mailboxes and then ran up the stairs to apartment 2-F. He rang the bell. While he waited for an answer, he got out a small black notebook and a superior silver pencil that wrote in four colors.

The door opened. To a nondescript middle-aged lady, the man said, "Good evening. Mrs. Buchanan?"

The lady nodded.

"My name is Foster. I'm from the Science Institute. We're trying to check some flying saucer reports. I won't take a minute." Mr. Foster insinuated himself into the apartment. He had been in so many that he knew the layout automatically. He marched briskly down the hall to the front parlor, turned, smiled at Mrs. Buchanan, opened the notebook to a blank page, and poised the pencil.

"Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Mrs. Buchanan?"

"No. And it's a lot of bunk, I—"

"Have your children ever seen them? You do have children?"

"Yeah, but they—"

"How many?"

"Two. Them flying saucers never—"

"Are either of school age?"

"What?"

"School," Mr. Foster repeated impatiently. "Do they go to school?"

"The boy's twenty-eight," Mrs. Buchanan said. "The girl's twenty-four. They finished school a long—"

"I see. Either of them married?"

"No. About them flying saucers, you scientist doctors ought to—"

"We are," Mr. Foster interrupted. He made a tic-tac-toe in the notebook then closed it and slid it into an inside pocket with the pencil. "Thank you very much, Mrs. Buchanan," he said, turned, and marched out.

Downstairs, Mr. Foster got into the car, opened the telephone directory, turned to a page, and ran his pencil through a name. He examined the name underneath, memorized the address, and started the car. He drove to Fort George Avenue and stopped the car in front of No. 800. He entered the house and took the self-service elevator to the fourth floor. He rang the bell of apartment 4-G. While he waited for an answer, he got out the small black notebook and the superior pencil.

The door opened. To a truculent man, Mr. Foster said, "Good evening. Mr. Buchanan?"

"What about it?" the truculent man said.

Mr. Foster said, "My name is Davis. I'm from the Association of National Broadcasters. Were preparing a list of names for prize competitors. May I come in? Won't take a minute."

Mr. Foster/Davis insinuated himself and presently consulted with Mr. Buchanan and his redheaded wife in the living room of their apartment.

"Have you ever won a prize in radio or television?"

"No," Mr. Buchanan said angrily. "We never got a chance. Everybody else does but not us."

"All that free money and iceboxes," Mrs. Buchanan said. "Trips to Paris and planes and—"

"That's why we're making up this list," Mr. Foster/Davis broke in. "Have any of your relatives won prizes?"

"No. It's all a fix. Put-up jobs. They—"

"Any of your children?"

"Ain't got any children."

"I see. Thank you very much." Mr. Foster/Davis played out the tic-tac-toe game in his notebook, closed it, and put it away. He released himself from the indignation of the Buchanans, went down to his car, crossed out another name in the phone book, memorized the address of the name underneath, and started the car.

He drove to No. 215 East Sixty-Eighth Street and parked in front of a private brownstone house. He rang the doorbell and was confronted by a maid in uniform.

"Good evening," he said. "Is Mr. Buchanan in?"

"Who's calling?"

"My name is Hook," Mr. Foster/Davis said. "I'm conducting an investigation for the Better Business Bureau."

The maid disappeared, reappeared, and conducted Mr. Foster/Davis/Hook to a small library where a resolute gentleman in dinner clothes stood holding a Limoges demitasse cup and saucer. There were expensive books on the shelves. There was an expensive fire in the grate.

"Mr. Hook?"

"Yes, sir," the doomed man replied. He did not take out the notebook. "I won't be a minute, Mr. Buchanan. Just a few questions."

"I have great faith in the Better Business Bureau," Mr. Buchanan pronounced. "Our bulwark against the inroads of—"

"Thank you, sir," Mr. Foster/Davis/Hook interrupted. "Have you ever been criminally defrauded by a businessman?"

"The attempt has been made. I have never succumbed."

"And your children? You do have children?"

"My son is hardly old enough to qualify as a victim."

"How old is he, Mr. Buchanan?"

"Ten."

"Perhaps he has been tricked at school? There are crooks who specialize in victimizing children."

"Not at my son's school. He is well protected."

"What school is that, sir?"

"Germanson."

"One of the best. Did he ever attend a city public school?"

"Never."

The doomed man took out the notebook and the superior pencil. This time he made a serious entry.

"Any other children, Mr. Buchanan?"

"A daughter, seventeen."

Mr. Foster/Davis/Hook considered, started to write, changed his mind, and closed the notebook. He thanked his host politely and escaped from the house before Mr. Buchanan could ask for his credentials. He was ushered out by the maid, ran down the stoop to his car, opened the door, entered, and was felled by a tremendous blow on the side of his head.

· · · · ·

When the doomed man awoke, he thought he was in bed suffering from a hangover. He started to crawl to the bathroom when he realized he was dumped in a chair like a suit for the cleaners. He opened his eyes. He was in what appeared to be an underwater grotto. He blinked frantically. The water receded.

He was in a small legal office. A stout man who looked like an unfrocked Santa Claus stood before him. To one side, seated on a desk and swinging his legs carelessly, was a thin young man with a lantern jaw and eyes closely set on either side of his nose.

"Can you hear me?" the stout man asked.

The doomed man grunted.

"Can we talk?"

Another grunt.

"Joe," the stout man said pleasantly, "a towel."

The thin young man slipped off the desk, went to a corner basin, and soaked a white hand towel. He shook it once, sauntered back to the chair, where, with a suddenness and savagery of a tiger, he lashed it across the sick man's face.

"For God's sake!" Mr. Foster/Davis/Hook cried.

"That's better," the stout man said. "My name's Herod. Walter Herod, attorney-at-law." He stepped to the desk where the contents of the doomed man's pockets were spread, picked up a wallet, and displayed it. "Your name is Warbeck. Marion Perkin Warbeck. Right?"

The doomed man gazed at his wallet, then at Walter Herod, attorney-at-law, and finally admitted the truth. "Yes," he said. "My name is Warbeck. But I never admit the Marion to strangers."

He was again lashed by the wet towel and fell back in the chair, stung and bewildered.

"That will do, Joe," Herod said. "Not again, please, until I tell you." To Warbeck he said, "Why this interest in the Buchanans?" He waited for an answer, then continued pleasantly, "Joe's been tailing you. You've averaged five Buchanans a night. Thirty, so far. What's your angle?"

"What the hell is this? Russia?" Warbeck demanded indignantly. "You've no right to kidnap me and grill me like the MVD. If you think you can—"

"Joe," Herod interrupted pleasantly. "Again, please."

Again the towel lashed Warbeck. Tormented, furious, and helpless, he burst into tears.

Herod fingered the wallet casually. "Your papers say you're a teacher by profession, principal of a public school. I thought teachers were supposed to be legit. How did you get mixed up in the inheritance racket?"

"The what racket?" Warbeck asked faintly.

"The inheritance racket," Herod repeated patiently. "The Heirs of Buchanan caper. What kind of parlay are you using? Personal approach?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Warbeck answered. He sat bolt upright and pointed to the thin youth. "And don't start that towel business again."

"I'll start what I please and when I please," Herod said ferociously. "And I'll finish you when I goddamned well please. You're stepping on my toes, and I don't buy it. I've got seventy-five thousand a year I'm taking out of this, and I'm not going to let you chisel."

There was a long pause, significant for everybody in the room except the doomed man. Finally he spoke. "I'm an educated man," he said slowly. "Mention Galileo, say, or the lesser Cavalier poets, and I'm right up there with you. But there are gaps in my education, and this is one of them. I can't meet the situation. Too many unknowns."

"I told you my name," Herod answered. He pointed to the thin young man. "That's Joe Davenport."

Warbeck shook his head. "Unknown in the mathematical sense. X quantities. Solving equations. My education speaking."

Joe looked startled. "Jesus!" he said without moving his lips. "Maybe he is legit."

Herod examined Warbeck curiously. "I'm going to spell it out for you," he said. "The inheritance racket is a long-term con. It operates something like so: There's a story that James Buchanan—"

"Fifteenth president of the U.S.?"

"In person. There's a story he died intestate leaving an estate for heirs unknown. That was in 1868. Today at compound interest that estate is worth millions. Understand?"

Warbeck nodded. "I'm educated," he murmured.

"Anybody named Buchanan is a sucker for this setup. It's a switch on the Spanish Prisoner routine. I send them a letter. Tell 'em there's a chance they may be one of the heirs. Do they want me to investigate and protect their cut in the estate? It only costs a small yearly retainer. Most of them buy it. From all over the country. And now you—"

"Wait a minute," Warbeck exclaimed. "I can draw a conclusion. You found out I was checking the Buchanan families. You think I'm trying to operate the same racket. Cut in … cut in? Yes? Cut in on you?"

"Well," Herod asked angrily, "aren't you?"

"Oh God!" Warbeck cried. "That this should happen to me. Me! Thank you, God. Thank you. I'll always be grateful." In his happy fervor he turned to Joe. "Give me the towel, Joe," he said. "Just throw it. I've got to wipe my face." He caught the flung towel and mopped himself joyously.

"Well," Herod repeated. "Aren't you?"

"No," Warbeck answered, "I'm not cutting in on you. But I'm grateful for the mistake. Don't think I'm not. You can't imagine how flattering it is for a schoolteacher to be taken for a thief."

He got out of the chair and went to the desk to reclaim his wallet and other possessions.

"Just a minute," Herod snapped.

The thin young man reached out and grasped Warbeck's wrist with an iron clasp.

"Oh stop it," the doomed man said impatiently. "This is a silly mistake."

"I'll tell you whether it's a mistake, and I'll tell you if it's silly," Herod replied. "Just now you'll do as you're told."

"Will I?" Warbeck wrenched his wrist free and slashed Joe across the eyes with the towel. He darted around behind the desk, snatched up a paperweight, and hurled it through the window with a shattering crash.

"Joe!" Herod yelled.

Warbeck knocked the phone off its stand and dialed Operator. He picked up his cigarette lighter, flicked it, and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. The voice of the operator buzzed in the phone. Warbeck shouted, "I want a policeman!" Then he kicked the flaming basket into the center of the office.

"Joe!" Herod yelled and stamped on the blazing paper.

Warbeck grinned. He picked up the phone. Squawking noises were coming out of it. He put one hand over the mouthpiece. "Shall we negotiate?" he inquired.

"You sonofabitch," Joe growled. He took his hands from his eyes and slid toward Warbeck.

"No!" Herod called. "This crazy fool's hollered copper. He's legit, Joe." To Warbeck he said in pleading tones, "Fix it. Square it. We'll make it up to you. Anything you say. Just square the call."

The doomed man lifted the phone to his mouth. He said, "My name is M. P. Warbeck. I was consulting my attorney at this number and some idiot with a misplaced sense of humor made this call. Please phone back and check."

He hung up, finished pocketing his private property, and winked at Herod. The phone rang, Warbeck picked it up, reassured the police, and hung up. He came around from behind the desk and handed his car keys to Joe.

"Go down to my car," he said. "You know where you parked it. Open the glove compartment and bring up a brown manila envelope you'll find."

"Go to hell," Joe spat. His eyes were still tearing.

"Do as I say," Warbeck said firmly.

"Just a minute, Warbeck," Herod said. "What's this? A new angle? I said we'd make it up to you, but—"

"I'm going to explain why I'm interested in the Buchanans," Warbeck replied. "And I'm going into partnership with you. You've got what I need to locate one particular Buchanan … you and Joe. My Buchanan's ten years old. He's worth a hundred times your make-believe fortune."

Herod stared at him.

Warbeck placed the keys in Joe's hand. "Go down and get that envelope, Joe," he said. "And while you're at it you'd better square that broken window rap. Rap? Rap."

· · · · ·

The doomed man placed the manila envelope neatly on his lap. "A school principal," he explained, "has to supervise school classes. He reviews work, estimates progress, irons out student problems, and so on. This must be done at random. By samplings, I mean. I have nine hundred pupils in my school. I can't supervise them individually."

Herod nodded. Joe looked blank.

"Looking through some fifth-grade work last month," Warbeck continued, "I came across this astonishing document." He opened the envelope and took out a few sheets of ruled composition paper covered with blots and scrawled writing. "It was written by a Stuart Buchanan of the fifth grade. His age must be ten or thereabouts. The composition is entitled: "My Vacation." Read it and you'll understand why Stuart Buchanan must be found."

He tossed the sheets to Herod who picked them up, took out a pair of horn-rim spectacles and balanced them on his fat nose. Joe came around to the back of his chair and peered over his shoulder.

· · · · ·

My Vacatoin

by Stuart Buchanan

This sumer I vissited my frends. I have 4 frends and they are verry nice. First there is Tommy who lives in the contry and he is an astronnimer. Tommy bill his own tellescop out of glass 6 inches acros wich he grond himself. He loks at the stars every nihgt and he let me lok even wen it was raining cats & dogs …

"What the hell?" Herod looked up, annoyed.

"Read on. Read on," Warbeck said.

cats & dogs. We cold see the stars becaze Tommy made a thing for over the end of the tellescop wich shoots up like a serchlite and makes a hole in the skie to see rite thru the rain and everythinng to the stars.

"Finished the astronomer yet?" Warbeck inquired.

"I don't dig it."

"Tommy got bored waiting for clear nights. He invented something that cuts through clouds and atmosphere … a funnel of vacuum so he can use his telescope all weather. What it amounts to is a disintegration beam."

"The hell you say."

"The hell I don't. Read on. Read on."

Then I went to AnnMary and staied one hole week. It was fun. Becaze AnnMary has a spinak chainger for spinak and beats and strinbeens—

"What the hell is a 'spinak chainger'?"

"Spinach. Spinach changer. Spelling isn't one of Stuart's specialties. 'Beats' are beets. 'Strinbeens' are string beans."

beats and strinbeens. Wen her mother made us eet them AnnMary presed the buton and they staid the same outside onnly inside they became cake. Chery and strowbery. I asted AnnMary how & she sed it was by Enhv.

"This, I don't get."

"Simple. Anne-Marie doesn't like vegetables. So she's just as smart as Tommy, the astronomer. She invented a matter-transmuter. She transmutes spinak into cake. Chery or strowbery. Cake she eats with pleasure. So does Stuart."

"You're crazy."

"Not me. The kids. They're geniuses. Geniuses? What am I saying? They make a genius look imbecile. There's no label for these children."

"I don't believe it. This Stuart Buchanan's got a tall imagination. That's all."

"You think so? Then what about Enhv? That's how Anne-Marie transmutes matter. It took time, but I figured Enhv out. It's Planck's quantum equation, E=nhv. But read on. Read on. The best is yet to come. Wait till you get to lazy Ethel."

My frend Gorge bilds modell airplanes very good and small. Gorg's hands are clumzy but he makes small men out of moddelling clay and he tels them and they bild for him.

"What's this?"

"George, the plane maker?"

"Yes."

"Simple. He makes miniature androids … robots … and they build the planes for him. Clever boy, George, but read about his sister, lazy Ethel."

His sister Ethel is the lazyist girl I ever saw. She is big & fat and she hates to walk. So wen her mother sends her too the store Ethel thinks to the store and thinks home with all the pakejes and has to hang around Gorg's room hiding untill it wil look like she walked both ways. Gorge and I make fun of her becaze she is fat and lazy but she gets into the movees for free and saw Hoppalong Casidy sixteen times.

The End

· · · · ·

Herod stared at Warbeck.

"Great little girl, Ethel," Warbeck said. "She's too lazy to walk, so she teleports. Then she has a devil of a time covering up. She has to hide with her pakejes while George and Stuart make fun of her."

"Teleports?"

"That's right. She moves from place to place by thinking her way there."

"There ain't no such thing!" Joe said indignantly.

"There wasn't until lazy Ethel came along."

"I don't believe this," Herod said. "I don't believe any of it."

"You think it's just Stuart's imagination?"

"What else?"

"What about Planck's equation? E=nhv?"

"The kid invented that, too. Coincidence."

"Does that sound likely?"

"Then he read it somewhere."

"A ten-year-old boy? Nonsense."

"I tell you, I don't believe it," Herod shouted. "Let me talk to the kid for five minutes and I'll prove it."

"That's exactly what I want to do … only the boy's disappeared."

"How do you mean?"

"Lock, stock, and barrel. That's why I've been checking every Buchanan family in the city. The day I read this composition and sent down to the fifth grade for Stuart Buchanan to have a talk, he disappeared. He hasn't been seen since."

"What about his family?"

"The family disappeared too." Warbeck leaned forward intensely. "Get this. Every record of the boy and the family disappeared. Everything. A few people remember them vaguely, but that's all. They're gone."

"Jesus!" Joe said. "They scrammed, huh?"

"The very word. Scrammed. Thank you, Joe." Warbeck cocked an eye at Herod. "What a situation. Here's a child who makes friends with child geniuses. And the emphasis is on the child. They're making fantastic discoveries for childish purposes. Ethel teleports because she's too lazy to run errands. George makes robots to build model planes. Anne-Marie transmutes elements because she hates spinach. God knows what Stuart's other friends are doing. Maybe there's a Matthew who's invented a time machine so he can catch up on his homework."

Herod waved his hands feebly. "Why geniuses all of a sudden? What's happened?"

"I don't know. Atomic fallout? Fluorides in drinking water? Antibiotics? Vitamins? We're doing so much juggling with body chemistry these days that who knows what's happening? I want to find out but I can't. Stuart Buchanan blabbed like a child. When I started investigating, he got scared and disappeared."

"Is he a genius, too?"

"Very likely. Kids generally hang out with kids who share the same interests and talents."

"What kind of a genius? What's his talent?"

"I don't know. All I know is he disappeared. He covered up his tracks, destroyed every paper that could possibly help me locate him, and vanished into thin air."

"How did he get into your files?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe he's a crook type," Joe said. "Expert at breaking and entering and such."

Herod smiled wanly. "A racketeer genius? A mastermind? The kid Moriarty?"

"He could be a thief-genius," the doomed man said, "but don't let running away convince you. All children do that when they get caught in a crisis. Either they wish it had never happened or they wish they were a million miles away. Stuart Buchanan may be a million miles away, but we've got to find him."

"Just to find out is he smart?" Joe asked.

"No, to find his parents. Do I have to diagram it? What would the army pay for a disintegration beam? What would an element-transmuter be worth? If we could manufacture living robots, how rich would we get? If we could teleport, how powerful would we be?"

There was a burning silence, then Herod got to his feet. "Mr. Warbeck," he said, "you make me and Joe look like pikers. Thank you for letting us cut in on you. We'll pay off. We'll find that kid."

· · · · ·

It is not possible for anyone to vanish without a trace … even a probable criminal genius. It is sometimes difficult to locate that trace … even for an expert experienced in hurried disappearances. But there is a professional technique unknown to amateurs.

"You've been blundering," Herod explained kindly to the doomed man. "Chasing one Buchanan after the other. There are angles. You don't run after a missing party. You look around on his back-trail for something he dropped."

"A genius wouldn't drop anything."

"Let's grant the kid's a genius. Type unspecified. Let's grant him everything. But a kid is a kid. He must have overlooked something. We'll find it."

In three days Warbeck was introduced to the most astonishing angles of search. They consulted the Washington Heights post office about a Buchanan family formerly living in that neighborhood, now moved. Was there any change-of-address card filed? None.

They visited the election board. All voters are registered. If a voter moves from one election district to another, provision is usually made that a record of the transfer be kept. Was there any such record on Buchanan? None.

They called on the Washington Heights office of the gas and electric company. All subscribers for gas and electricity must transfer their accounts if they move. If they move out of town, they generally request the return of their deposit. Was there any record of a party named Buchanan? None.

It is a state law that all drivers must notify the license bureau of change of address or be subject to penalties involving fines, prison, or worse. Was there any such notification by a party named Buchanan at the Motor Vehicle Bureau? There was not.

They questioned the R-J Realty Corp., owners and operators of a multiple dwelling in Washington Heights in which a party named Buchanan had leased a four-room apartment. The R-J lease, like most other leases, required the names and addresses of two character references for the tenant. Could the character references for Buchanan be produced? They could not. There was no such lease in the files.

"Maybe Joe was right," Warbeck complained in Herod's office. "Maybe the boy is a thief-genius. How did he think of everything? How did he get at every paper and destroy it? Did he break and enter? Bribe? Burgle? Threaten? How did he do it?"

"We'll ask him when we get to him," Herod said grimly. "All right. The kid's licked us straight down the line. He hasn't forgotten a trick. But I've got one angle I've been saving. Let's go up and see the janitor of their building."

"I questioned him months ago," Warbeck objected. "He remembers the family in a vague way, and that's all. He doesn't know where they went."

"He knows something else, something the kid wouldn't think of covering. Let's go get it."

They drove up to Washington Heights and descended upon Mr. Jacob Ruysdale at dinner in the basement apartment of the building. Mr. Ruysdale disliked being separated from his liver and onions but was persuaded by five dollars.

"About that Buchanan family," Herod began.

"I told him everything before," Ruysdale broke in, pointing to Warbeck.

"All right. He forgot to ask one question. Can I ask it now?" Ruysdale reexamined the five-dollar bill and nodded.

"When anybody moves in or out of a building, the superintendent usually takes down the name of the movers in case they damage the building. I'm a lawyer. I know this. It's to protect the building in case suit has to be brought. Right?"

Ruysdale's face lit up. "By Godfrey!" he said. "That's right, I forgot all about it. He never asked me."

"He didn't know. You've got the name of the company that moved the Buchanans out. Right?"

Ruysdale ran across the room to a cluttered bookshelf. He withdrew a tattered journal and flipped it open. He wet his fingers and turned pages.

"Here it is," he said. "The Avon Moving Company. Truck No. G-4."

The Avon Moving Company had no record of the removal of a Buchanan family from an apartment in Washington Heights. "The kid was pretty careful at that," Herod murmured. But it did have a record of the men working truck G-4 on that day. The men were interviewed when they checked in at closing time. Their memories were refreshed with whiskey and cash. They recalled the Washington Heights job vaguely. It was a full day's work because they had to drive the hell and gone to Brooklyn. "Oh God! Brooklyn!" Warbeck muttered. What address in Brooklyn? Something on Maple Park Row. Number? The number could not be recalled.

"Joe, buy a map."

They examined the street map of Brooklyn and located Maple Park Row. It was indeed the hell and gone out of civilization and was twelve blocks long. "That's Brooklyn blocks," Joe grunted. "Twice as long as anywhere. I know."

Herod shrugged. "We're close," he said. "The rest will have to be legwork. Four blocks apiece. Cover every house, every apartment. List every kid around ten. Then Warbeck can check them, if they're under an alias."

"There's a million kids a square inch in Brooklyn," Joe protested.

"There's a million dollars a day in it for us if we find him. Now let's go."

Maple Park Row was a long, crooked street lined with five-story apartment houses. Its sidewalks were lined with baby carriages and old ladies on camp chairs. Its curbs were lined with parked cars. Its gutter was lined with crude whitewash stickball courts shaped like elongated diamonds. Every manhole cover was a home plate.

"It's just like the Bronx," Joe said nostalgically. "I ain't been home to the Bronx in ten years."

He wandered sadly down the street toward his sector, automatically threading his way through stickball games with the unconscious skill of the city-born. Warbeck remembered that departure sympathetically because Joe Davenport never returned.

The first day, he and Herod imagined Joe had found a hot lead. This encouraged them. The second day they realized no heat could keep Joe on the fire for forty-eight hours. This depressed them. On the third day they had to face the truth.

"He's dead," Herod said flatly. "The kid got him."

"How?"

"He killed him."

"A ten-year-old boy? A child?"

"You want to know what kind of genius Stuart Buchanan has, don't you? I'm telling you."

"I don't believe it."

"Then explain Joe."

"He quit."

"Not on a million dollars."

"But where's the body?"

"Ask the kid. He's the genius. He's probably figured out tricks that would baffle Dick Tracy."

"How did he kill him?"

"Ask the kid. He's the genius."

"Herod, I'm scared."

"So am I. Do you want to quit now?"

"I don't see how we can. If the boy's dangerous, we've got to find him."

"Civic virtue, heh?"

"Call it that."

"Well, I'm still thinking about the money."

They returned to Maple Park Row and Joe Davenport's four-block sector. They were cautious, almost furtive. They separated and began working from each end toward the middle; in one house, up the stairs, apartment by apartment, to the top, then down again to investigate the next building. It was slow, tedious work. Occasionally they glimpsed each other far down the street, crossing from one dismal building to another. And that was the last glimpse Warbeck ever had of Walter Herod.

He sat in his car and waited. He sat in his car and trembled. "I'll go to the police," he muttered, knowing perfectly well he could not. "The boy has a weapon. Something he invented. Something silly like the others. A special light so he can play marbles at night, only it murders men. A machine to play checkers, only it hypnotizes men. He's invented a robot mob of gangsters so he can play cops-and-robbers and they took care of Joe and Herod. He's a child genius. Dangerous. Deadly. What am I going to do?"

The doomed man got out of the car and stumbled down the street toward Herod's half of the sector. "What's going to happen when Stuart Buchanan grows up?" he wondered. "What's going to happen when all the rest of them grow up? Tommy and George and Anne-Marie and lazy Ethel? Why don't I start running away now? What am I doing here?"

It was dusk on Maple Park Row. The old ladies had withdrawn, folding their camp chairs like Arabs. The parked cars remained. The stickball games were over, but small games were starting under the glowing lampposts … games with bottle caps and cards and battered pennies. Overhead, the purple city haze was deepening, and through it the sharp sparkle of Venus following the sun below the horizon could be seen.

"He must know his power," Warbeck muttered angrily. "He must know how dangerous he is. That's why he's running away. Guilt. That's why he destroys us, one by one, smiling to himself, a crafty child, a vicious, killing genius …"

Warbeck stopped in the middle of Maple Park Row.

"Buchanan!" he shouted. "Stuart Buchanan!"

The kids near him stopped their games and gaped.

"Stuart Buchanan!" Warbeck's voice cracked hysterically. "Can you hear me?"

His wild voice carried farther down the street. More games stopped. Ringaleevio, Chinese tag, Red-Light, and Boxball.

"Buchanan!" Warbeck screamed. "Stuart Buchanan! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

The world hung motionless.

In the alley between 217 and 219 Maple Park Row playing hide-and-seek behind piled ash barrels, Stuart Buchanan heard his name and crouched lower. He was aged ten, dressed in sweater, jeans, and sneakers. He was intent and determined that he was not going to be caught out "it" again. He was going to hide until he could make a dash for home-free in safety. As he settled comfortably among the ashcans, his eye caught the glimmer of Venus low in the western sky.

"Star light, star bright," he whispered in all innocence, "first star I see tonight. Wish I may, wish I might, grant me the wish I wish tonight." He paused and considered. Then he wished. "God bless Mom and Pop and me and all my friends and make me a good boy and please let me be always happy and I wish that anybody who tries to bother me would go away … a long way away … and leave me alone forever."

In the middle of Maple Park Row, Marion Perkin Warbeck stepped forward and drew breath for another hysterical yell. And then he was elsewhere, going away on a road that was a long way away. It was a straight white road cleaving infinitely through blackness, stretching onward and onward into forever; a dreary, lonely, endless road leading away and away and away.

Down that road Warbeck plodded, an astonished automaton, unable to speak, unable to stop, unable to think in the timeless infinity. Onward and onward he walked into a long way away, unable to turn back. Ahead of him he saw the minute specks of figures trapped on that one-way road forever. There was a dot that had to be Herod. Ahead of Herod there was a mote that was Joe Davenport. And ahead of Joe he could make out a long, dwindling chain of mites. He turned once with a convulsive effort. Behind him, dim and distant, a figure was plodding, and behind that another abruptly materialized, and another … and another …

While Stuart Buchanan crouched behind the ash barrels and watched alertly for the "it." He was unaware that he had disposed of Warbeck. He was unaware that he had disposed of Herod, Joe Davenport, and scores of others.

He was unaware that he had induced his parents to flee Washington Heights, that he had destroyed papers and documents, memories and people, in his simple desire to be left alone. He was unaware that he was a genius.

His genius was for wishing.

The End

* * * * *

The Man Who Never Forgot

by Robert Silverberg

He saw the girl waiting in line outside a big Los Angeles movie house, on a mildly foggy Tuesday morning. She was slim and pale, barely five-three, with stringy flaxen hair, and she was alone. He remembered her, of course.

He knew it would be a mistake, but he crossed the street anyway and walked up along the theater line to where she stood.

"Hello," he said.

She turned, stared at him blankly, flicked the tip of her tongue out for an instant over her lips. "I don't believe I—"

"Tom Niles," he said. "Pasadena, New Year's Day, 1955. You sat next to me. Ohio State-20, Southern Cal-7. You don't remember?"

"A football game? But I hardly ever—I mean-I'm sorry, but—"

Someone else in the line moved forward toward him with a tight hard scowl on his face. Niles knew when he was beaten. He smiled apologetically and said, "I'm sorry, miss. I guess I made a mistake. I took you for someone I knew—a Miss Bette Torrance. Excuse me."

And he strode rapidly away. He had not gone more than ten feet when he heard the little surprised gasp and the "But I am Bette Torrance!"—but he kept going.

I should know better after twenty-eight years, he thought bitterly. But I forget the most basic fact—that even though I remember people, they don't necessarily remember me …

He walked wearily to the corner, turned right, and started down a new street, one whose shops were totally unfamiliar to him and which, therefore, he had never seen before. His mind, stimulated to its normal pitch of activity by the incident outside the theater, spewed up a host of tangential memories like the good machine it was:

Jan. 1, 1955, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California, Seat G126; warm day, high humidity, arrived in stadium 12:03 P.M., PST. Came alone. Girl in next seat wearing blue cotton dress, white oxfords, carrying Southern Cal pennant. Talked to her. Name Bette Torrance, senior at Southern Cal, government major. Had a date for the game but he came down with flu symptoms night before, insisted she see game anyway. Seat on other side of her empty. Bought her a hot dog, 20¢ (no mustard)—

There was more, much more. Niles forced it back down. There was the virtually stenographic report of their conversation all that day:

("… I hope we win. I saw the last Bowl game we won, two years ago …"

"… Yes, that was 1953. Southern Cal-7, Wisconsin-0 … and two straight wins in 1944-45 over Washington and Tennessee …"

"… Gosh, you know a lot about football! What did you do, memorize the record book?")

And the old memories. The jeering yell of freckled Joe Merritt that warm April day in 1937: Who are you, Einstein? And Buddy Call saying acidly on November 8, 1939: Here comes Tommy Niles, the human adding machine. Get him! And then the bright stinging pain of a snowball landing just below his left clavicle, the pain that he could summon up as easily as any of the other pain-memories he carried with him. He winced and closed his eyes suddenly, as if struck by the icy pellet here on a Los Angeles street on a foggy Tuesday morning.

They didn't call him the human adding machine any more. Now it was the human tape recorder; the derisive terms had to keep pace with the passing decades. Only Niles himself remained unchanging, The Boy With The Brain Like a Sponge grown up into The Man With The Brain Like a Sponge, still cursed with the same terrible gift.

His data-cluttered mind ached. He saw a diminutive yellow sports car parked on the far side of the street, recognized it by its make and model and color and license number as the car belonging to Leslie F. Marshall, twenty-six, blond hair, blue eyes, television actor with the following credits—

Wincing, Niles applied the cutoff circuit and blotted out the upwelling data. He had met Marshall once, six months ago, at a party given by a mutual friend—an erstwhile mutual friend; Niles found it difficult to keep friends for long. He had spoken with the actor for perhaps ten minutes, and had added that much more baggage to his mind.

It was time to move on, Niles decided. He had been in Los Angeles ten months. The burden of accumulated memories was getting too heavy; he was greeting too many people who had long since forgotten him (curse my John Q. Average build, 5'9", 163 pounds, brownish hair, brownish eyes, no unduly prominent physical features, no distinguishing scars except those inside). He contemplated returning to San Francisco, and decided against it. He had been there only a year ago; Pasadena, two years ago. The time had come, he realized, for another eastward jaunt.

Back and forth across the face of America goes Thomas Richard Niles, der fliegende Holländer, the Wandering Jew, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Human Tape Recorder. He smiled at a newsboy who had sold him a copy of the Examiner on May 13 past, got the usual blank stare in return, and headed for the nearest bus terminal.

For Niles the long journey had begun on October 11, 1929, in the small Ohio town of Lowry Bridge. He was third of three children, born of seemingly normal parents: Henry Niles (b. 1896), Mary Niles (b. 1899). His older brother and sister had shown no extraordinary manifestations. Tom had.

It began as soon as he was old enough to form words; a neighbor woman on the front porch peered into the house where he was playing and remarked to his mother, "Look how big he's getting, Mary!"

He was less than a year old. He had replied, in virtually the same tone of voice, "Look how big he's getting, Mary!" It caused a sensation, even though it was only mimicry, not even speech.

He spent his first twelve years in Lowry Bridge, Ohio. In later years, he often wondered how he had been able to last there so long.

He began school at the age of four, because there was no keeping him back; his classmates were five and six, vastly superior to him in physical coordination, vastly inferior in everything else. He could read. He could even write, after a fashion, though his babyish muscles tired easily from holding the pen. And he could remember.

He remembered everything. He remembered his parents' quarrels and repeated the exact words of them to anyone who cared to listen, until his father whipped him and threatened to kill him if he ever did that again. He remembered that, too. He remembered the lies his brother and sister told and took great pains to set the record straight. He learned eventually not to do that, either. He remembered things people had said and corrected them when they later deviated from their earlier statements.

He remembered everything.

He read a textbook once and it stayed with him. When the teacher asked a question based on the day's assignment, Tommy Niles' skinny arm was in the air long before the others had even really assimilated the question. After a while, his teacher made it clear to him that he could not answer every question, whether he had the answer first or not; there were twenty other pupils in the class. The other pupils in the class made that abundantly clear to him after school.

He won the verse-learning contest in Sunday School. Barry Harman had studied for weeks in hopes of winning the catcher's mitt his father had promised him if he finished first—but when it was Tommy Niles' turn to recite, he began with In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, continued through Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them, headed on into Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and presumably would have continued clear through Genesis, Exodus, and on to Joshua if the dazed proctor hadn't shut him up and declared him the winner.

Barry Harman didn't get his glove; Tommy Niles got a black eye instead.

He began to realize he was different. It took time to make the discovery that other people were always forgetting things and that instead of admiring him for what he could do they hated him for it. It was difficult for a boy of eight, even Tommy Niles, to understand why they hated him, but eventually he did find it out, and then he started learning how to hide his gift.

Through his ninth and tenth years he practiced being normal, and almost succeeded; the after-school beatings stopped, and he managed to get a few B's on his report cards at last, instead of straight rows of A. He was growing up; he was learning to pretend. Neighbors heaved sighs of relief now that that terrible Niles boy was no longer doing all those crazy things.

But inwardly he was the same as ever. And he realized he'd have to leave Lowry Bridge soon.

He knew everyone too well. He would catch them in lies ten times a week, even Mr. Lawrence, the minister, who once turned down an invitation to pay a social call to the Nileses one night, saying, "I really have to get down to work and write my sermon for Sunday," when only three days before Tommy had heard him say to Miss Emery, the church secretary, that he had had a sudden burst of inspiration and had written three sermons all at one sitting, and now he'd have some free time for the rest of the month.

Even Mr. Lawrence lied, then. And he was the best of them. As for the others …

Tommy waited until he was twelve; he was big for his age by then and figured he could take care of himself. He borrowed twenty dollars from the supposedly secret cashbox in the back of the kitchen cupboard (his mother had mentioned its existence five years before, in Tommy's hearing) and tiptoed out of the house at three in the morning. He caught the night freight for Chillicothe and was on his way.

· · · · ·

There were thirty people on the bus out of Los Angeles. Niles sat alone in the back, by the seat just over the rear wheel. He knew four of the people in the bus by name—but he was confident they had forgotten who he was by now, and so he kept to himself.

It was an awkward business. If you said hello to someone who had forgotten you, they thought you were a troublemaker or a panhandler. And if you passed someone by, thinking he had forgotten you, and he hadn't—well, then you were a snob. Niles swung between both those poles five times a day. He'd see someone, such as that girl Bette Torrance, and get a cold unrecognizing stare; or he'd go by someone else, believing the other person did not remember him but walking rapidly just in case he did, and there would be the angry, "Well! Who the blazes do you think you are!" floating after him as he retreated.

Now he sat alone bouncing up and down with each revolution of the wheel, with the one suitcase containing his property thumping constantly against the baggage rack over his head. That was one advantage of his talent: he could travel light. He didn't need to keep books once he had read them, and there wasn't much point in amassing belongings of any other sort either; they became overfamiliar too soon.

He eyed the road signs. They were well into Nevada by now. The old, wearisome retreat was on.

He could never stay in the same city too long. He had to move on to new territory, to some new place where he had no old memories, where no one knew him, where he knew no one. In the sixteen years since he had left home, he'd covered a lot of ground.

He remembered the jobs he had held.

He had once been a proofreader for a Chicago publishing firm. He did the jobs of two men. The way proofreading usually worked, one man read the copy from the manuscript, the other checked it against the galleys. Niles had a simpler method: he would scan the manuscript once, thereby memorizing it, and then merely check the galley for discrepancies. It brought him $50 a week for a while, before the time came to move along.

He once held a job as a sideshow freak in a traveling carnie that made a regular Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia circuit. Niles had really been low on cash, then. He remembered how he had gotten the job: by buttonholing the carnie boss and demanding a tryout. "Read me anything—anything at all! I can remember it!" The boss had been skeptical and didn't see any use for such an act anyway but finally gave in when Niles practically fainted of malnutrition in his office. The boss read him an editorial from a Mississippi county weekly, and when he was through Niles recited it back word-perfect. He got the job, at $15 a week plus meals, and sat in a little booth under a sign that said: THE HUMAN TAPE RECORDER. People read or said things to him, and he repeated them. It was dull work; sometimes the things they said were filthy, and most of the time they couldn't even remember a minute later what they had said to him. He stayed with the show four weeks, and when he left no one missed him much.

The bus rolled on into the fogbound night.

There had been other jobs: good jobs, bad jobs. None of them had lasted very long. There had been some girls, too, but none of them had lasted too long. They had all, even those he tried to conceal it from, found out about his special ability, and soon afterward they had left. No one could stay with a man who never forgot, who could always dredge yesterday's foibles out of the reservoir that was his mind and hurl them unanswerably into the open. And the man with the perfect memory could never live long among imperfect human beings.

To forgive is to forget, he thought. The memory of old insults and quarrels fades, and a relationship starts anew. But for him there could be no forgetting, and hence little forgiving.

He closed his eyes after a while and leaned back against the hard leather cushion of his seat. The steady rhythm of the bus lulled him to sleep. In sleep, his mind could rest; he found cease from memory. He never dreamed.

· · · · ·

In Salt Lake City he paid his fare, left the bus, suitcase in hand, and set out in the first direction he faced. He had not wanted to go any farther east on that bus. His cash reserve was only $63, now, and he had to make it last.

He found a job as a dishwasher in a downtown restaurant, held it long enough to accumulate a hundred dollars, and moved on again, this time hitchhiking to Cheyenne. He stayed there a month and took a night bus to Denver, and when he left Denver it was to go to Wichita.

Wichita to Des Moines, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Milwaukee, then down through Illinois, carefully avoiding Chicago, and on to Indianapolis. It was an old story for him, this traveling. Gloomily he celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday alone in an Indianapolis rooming house on a drizzly October day and for the purpose of brightening the occasion summoned up his old memories of his fourth birthday party, in 1933 … one of the few unalloyedly happy days of his life.

They were all there, all his playmates, and his parents, and his brother, Hank, looking gravely important at the age of eight, and his sister, Marian, and there were candles and favors and punch and cake. Mrs. Heinsohn from next door stopped in and said, "He looks like a regular little man," and his parents beamed at him, and everyone sang and had a good time. And afterward, when the last game had been played, the last present opened, when the boys and girls had waved good-bye and disappeared up the street, the grownups sat around and talked of the new president and the many strange things that were happening in the country, and little Tommy sat in the middle of the floor, listening and recording everything and glowing warmly, because somehow during the whole afternoon no one had said or done anything cruel to him. He was happy that day, and he went to bed still happy.

Niles ran through the party twice, like an old movie he loved well; the print never grew frayed, the registration always remained as clear and sharp as ever. He could taste the sweet tang of the punch, he could relive the warmth of that day when through some accident the others had allowed him a little happiness.

Finally he let the brightness of the party fade, and once again he was in Indianapolis on a gray bleak afternoon, alone in an $8-a-week furnished room.

Happy birthday to me, he thought bitterly. Happy birthday.

He stared at the blotchy green wall with the cheap Corot print hung slightly askew. I could have been something special, he brooded, one of the wonders of the world. Instead I'm a skulking freak who lives in dingy third-floor back rooms, and I don't dare let the world know what I can do.

He scooped into his memory and came up with the Toscanini performance of Beethoven's Ninth he had heard in Carnegie Hall once while he was in New York. It was infinitely better than the later performance Toscanini had approved for recording, yet no microphones had taken it down; the blazing performance was as far beyond recapture as a flame five minutes snuffed, except in one man's mind, Niles had it all: the majestic downcrash of the timpani, the resonant perspiring basso bringing forth the great melody of the finale, even the french-horn bobble that must have enraged the maestro so, the infuriating cough from the dress circle at the gentlest moment of the adagio, the sharp pinching of Niles' shoes as he leaned forward in his seat …

He had it all, in highest fidelity. There are compensations, he thought. But oh, the price I pay for my Beethoven!

· · · · ·

He arrived in the small town on a moonless night three months later, a cold, crisp January evening when the wintry wind swept in from the north, cutting through his thin clothing and making the suitcase an almost impossible burden for his numb, gloveless hand. He had not meant to come to this place, but he had run short of cash in Kentucky, and there had been no helping it. He was on his way to New York, where he could live in anonymity for months unbothered, and where he knew his rudeness would go unnoticed if he happened to snub someone on the street, or if he greeted someone who had forgotten him.

But New York was still hundreds of miles away, and it might have been millions on this January night. He saw a sign: BAR. He forced himself forward toward the sputtering neon; he wasn't ordinarily a drinker, but he needed the warmth of alcohol inside him now, and perhaps the barkeep would need a man to help out or could at least rent him a room for what little he had in his pockets.

There were five men in the bar when he reached it. They looked like truckdrivers. Niles dropped his valise to the left of the door, rubbed his stiff hands together, exhaled a white cloud. The bartender grinned jovially at him.

"Cold enough for you out there?"

Niles managed a grin. "I wasn't sweating much. Let me have something warming. Double shot of bourbon, maybe."

That would be 90¢. He had $7.34.

He nursed the drink when it came, sipped it slowly, let it roll down his gullet. He thought of the summer he had been stranded for a week in Washington, a solid week of 97° temperature and 97 humidity, and the vivid memory helped to ease away some of the psychological effects of the coldness.

He relaxed; he warmed. Behind him came the penetrating sound of argument.

"… I tell you Joe Louis beat Schmeling to a pulp the second time! KO'd him in the first round!"

"You're nuts! Louis just barely got him down in a fifteen-round decision, the second bout."

"Seems to me—"

"I'll put money on it. Ten bucks says it was a decision in fifteen, Mac."

Sound of confident chuckles. "I wouldn't want to take your money so easy, pal. Everyone knows it was a knockout in one."

"Ten bucks, I said."

Niles turned to see what was happening. Two of the truckdrivers, burly men in dark pea jackets, stood nose-to-nose. Automatically the thought came: Louis knocked Max Schmeling out in the first round at Yankee Stadium, New York, June 22, 1938. Niles had never been much of a sports fan, and particularly disliked boxing- but he had once glanced at an almanac page cataloguing Joe Louis' title fights.

He watched detachedly as the bigger of the two truckdrivers angrily slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar; the other matched it. Then the first glanced up at the barkeep and said. "Okay, Bud. You're a shrewd guy. Who's right about the second Louis-Schmeling fight?"

The barkeep was a blank-faced cipher of a man, middle-aged, balding, with mild empty eyes. He chewed at his lip a moment, shrugged, fidgeted, finally said, "Kinda hard for me to remember. That musta been twenty-five years ago."

Twenty, Niles thought.

"Lessee now," the bartender went on. "Seems to me I remember … yeah, sure. It went the full fifteen and the judges gave it to Louis. I seem to remember a big stink being made over it; the papers said Joe should've killed him a lot faster'n that."

A triumphant grin appeared on the bigger driver's face. He deftly pocketed both bills.

The other man grimaced and howled, "Hey! You two fixed this thing up beforehand! I know damn well that Louis KO'd the German in one."

"You heard what the man said. The money's mine."

"No," Niles said suddenly, in a quiet voice that seemed to carry halfway across the bar. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself frantically. This is none of your business. Stay out of it!

But it was too late.

"What you say?" asked the one who'd dropped the ten-spot.

"I say you're being rooked. Louis won the fight in one round, like you say. June 22, 1938 , Yankee Stadium. The barkeep's thinking of the Arturo Godoy fight. That went the full fifteen in 1940."

"There—told you! Gimme back my money!"

But the other driver ignored the cry and turned to face Niles. He was a cold-faced, heavy-set man, and his fists were starting to clench. "Smart man, eh? Boxing expert?"

"I just didn't want to see anybody get cheated," Niles said stubbornly. He knew what was coming now. The truckdriver was weaving drunkenly toward him; the barkeep was yelling, the other patrons backing away.

The first punch caught Niles in the ribs; he grunted and staggered back, only to be grabbed by the throat and slapped three times. Dimly he heard a voice saying, "Hey, leggo the guy! He didn't mean anything! You want to kill him?"

A volley of blows doubled him up; a knuckle swelled his right eyelid, a fist crashed stunningly into his left shoulder. He spun, wobbled uncertainly, knowing that his mind would permanently record every moment of this agony.

Through half-closed eyes he saw them pulling the enraged driver off him; the man writhed in the grip of three others, aimed a last desperate kick at Niles' stomach and grazed a rib, and finally was subdued.

Niles stood alone in the middle of the floor, forcing himself to stay upright, trying to shake off the sudden pain that drilled through him in a dozen places.

"You all right?" a solicitous voice asked. "Hell, those guys play rough. You oughtn't mix up with them."

"I'm all right," Niles said hollowly. "Just … let me … catch my breath."

"Here. Sit down. Have a drink. It'll fix you up."

"No," Niles said. I can't stay here. I have to get moving. "I'll be all right," he muttered unconvincingly. He picked up his suitcase, wrapped his coat tight about him, and left the bar, step by step by step.

He got fifteen feet before the pain became unbearable. He crumpled suddenly and fell forward on his face in the dark, feeling the iron-hard frozen turf against his cheek, and struggled unsuccessfully to get up. He lay there, remembering all the various pains of his life, the beatings, the cruelty, and when the weight of memory became too much to bear, he blanked out.

· · · · ·

The bed was warm, the sheets clean and fresh and soft. Niles woke slowly, feeling a temporary sensation of disorientation, and then his infallible memory supplied the data on his blackout in the snow and he realized he was in a hospital.

He tried to open his eyes; one was swollen shut, but he managed to get the other's lids apart. He was in a small hospital room—no shining metropolitan hospital pavilion, but a small county clinic with gingerbread molding on the walls and homey lace curtains, through which afternoon sunlight was entering.

So he had been found and brought to a hospital. That was good. He could easily have died out there in the snow; but someone had stumbled over him and brought him in. That was a novelty, that someone had bothered to help him; the treatment he had received in the bar last night—was it last night?—was more typical of the world's attitude toward him. In twenty-nine years he had somehow failed to learn adequate concealment, camouflage, and every day he suffered the consequences. It was so hard for him to remember, he who remembered everything else, that the other people were not like him and hated him for what he was.

Gingerly he felt his side. There didn't seem to be any broken ribs—just bruises. A day or so of rest and they would probably discharge him and let him move on.

A cheerful voice said, "Oh, you're awake, Mr. Niles. Feeling better now? I'll brew some tea."

He looked up and felt a sudden sharp pang. She was a nurse—twenty-two, twenty-three, new at the job perhaps, with a flowing tumble of curling blond hair and wide, clear blue eyes. She was smiling, and it seemed to Niles it was not merely a professional smile. "I'm Miss Carroll, your day nurse. Everything okay?"

"Fine," Niles said hesitantly. "Where am I?"

"Central County General Hospital. You were brought in late last night-apparently you'd been beaten up and left by the road out on Route 32. It's a lucky thing Mark McKenzie was walking his dog, Mr. Niles." She looked at him gravely. "You remember last night, don't you? I mean … the shock … amnesia …"

Niles chuckled. "That's the last ailment in the world I'd be afraid of," he said. "I'm Thomas Richard Niles, and I remember pretty well what happened. How badly am I damaged?"

"Superficial bruises, mild shock and exposure, slight case of frostbite," she summed up. "You'll live. Dr. Hammond'll give you a full checkup a little later, after you've eaten. Let me bring you some tea."

Niles watched the trim figure vanish into the hallway.

She was certainly an attractive girl, he thought, fresh-eyed, alert … alive.

Old cliché: patient falling for his nurse. But she's not for me, I'm afraid.

Abruptly the door opened and the nurse reentered, bearing a little enameled tea tray. "You'll never guess! I have a surprise for you, Mr. Niles. A visitor. Your mother."

"My moth—"

"She saw the little notice about you in the county paper. She's waiting outside, and she told me she hasn't seen you in sixteen years. Would you like me to send her in now?"

"I guess so," Niles said, in a dry, feathery voice.

A second time the nurse departed. My God! Niles thought. If I had known I was this close to home—

I should have stayed out of Ohio altogether.

The last person he wanted to see was his mother, she who had given him life. He began to tremble under the covers. The oldest and most terrible of his memories came bursting up from the dark compartment of his mind where he thought he had imprisoned it forever. The sudden emergence from warmth into coolness, from darkness to light, the jarring slap of a heavy hand on his buttocks, the searing pain of knowing that his security was ended, that from now on he would be … alive—

The memory of the agonized birth-shriek sounded in his mind. He could never forget being born. And his mother was, he thought, the one person of all he could never forgive, since she had given him forth into the life he hated. He dreaded the moment when—

"Hello, Tom. It's been a long time."

Sixteen years had faded her, had carved lines in her face and made the cheeks more baggy, the blue eyes less bright, the brown hair a mousy gray. She was smiling. And to his own astonishment, Niles was able to smile back.

"Mother."

"I read about it in the paper. It said a man of about thirty was found just outside town with papers bearing the name Thomas R. Niles, and he was taken to Central County General Hospital. So I came over, just to make sure—and it was you."

A lie drifted to the surface of his mind, but it was a kind lie, and he said it: "I was on my way back home to see you. Hitchhiking. But I ran into a little trouble en route."

"I'm glad you decided to come back, Tom. It's been so lonely, ever since your father died, and of course Hank was married, and Marian too—it's good to see you again. I thought I never would."

He lay back, perplexed, wondering why the upwelling flood of hatred did not come. He felt only warmth toward her. He was glad to see her.

"How has it been—all these years, Tom? You haven't had it easy. I can see. I see it all over your face."

"It hasn't been easy," he said. "You know why I ran away?"

She nodded. "Because of the way you are. That thing about your mind—never forgetting. I knew. Your grandfather had it too, you know."

"My grandfather—but—"

"You got it from him. I never did tell you, I guess. He didn't get along too well with any of us. He left my mother when I was a little girl and I never knew where he went. So I always knew you'd go away the way he did. Only you came back. Are you married?"

He shook his head.

"Time you got started, then, Tom. You're near thirty."

The room door opened and an efficient-looking doctor appeared. "Afraid your time's up, Mrs. Niles. You'll be able to see him again later. I have to check him over, now that he's up."

"Of course, Doctor." She smiled at him, then at Niles. "I'll see you later, Tom."

"Sure, Mother."

Niles lay back frowning as the doctor poked at him here and there. I didn't hate her. A growing wonderment rose in him, and he realized he should have come home long ago. He had changed, inside, without even knowing it.

Running away was the first stage in growing up, and a necessary one. But coming back came later, and that was the mark of maturity. He was back. And suddenly he saw he had been terribly foolish all his bitter adult life.

He had a gift, a great gift, an awesome gift. It had been too big for him until now. Self-pitying, self-tormented, he had refused to allow for the shortcomings of the forgetful people about him and had paid the price of their hatred. But he couldn't keep running away forever. The time would have to come for him to grow big enough to contain his gift, to learn to live with it instead of moaning in dramatic self-inflicted anguish.

And now was the time. It was long overdue.

His grandfather had had the gift; they had never told him that. So it was genetically transmissible.

He could marry, have children, and they too would never forget.

Or did it skip a generation every time? Or was it sex-linked, like hemophilia, with women as carriers? It didn't matter: the mechanics were something to be learned, like the use of it.

What did count was that his gift would not die with him. Others of his kind, less sensitive, less thin-skinned, would come after, and they too would know how to recall a Beethoven symphony or a decade-old wisp of conversation. For the first time since that fourth birthday party, he felt a hesitant flicker of happiness. The days of running were ended; he was home again. If I learn to live with others, maybe they'll be able to live with me.

He saw the things he yet needed : a wife, a home, children—

"—a couple of days' rest, plenty of hot liquids, and you'll be as good as new, Mr. Niles," the doctor was saying. "Is there anything you'd like me to bring you now?"

"Yes," Niles said, "Just send in the nurse, will you? Miss Carroll, I mean."

The doctor grinned and left. Niles waited expectantly, exulting in his new self. He switched on act 3 of Die Meistersinger as a kind of jubilant backdrop music in his mind and let the warmth sweep up over him. When she entered the room he was smiling and wondering how to begin.

The End

* * * *

Pale complexion, flushed cheeks, downcast eyes told him nothing, except that the girl was inwardly excited by his presence.

Her nose and chin looked too waxy, and when she smiled her lips went crooked.

The Beautiful People

by Robert Bloch

When Jimmie Hartnett came back to Highland Springs he was twenty-five years old, and there was some argument as to just how he looked.

According to the matronly friends of his late mother, he resembled a Greek god. Their daughters, on the other hand, were more apt to describe him as a "living doll." But everyone agreed that he was an extremely handsome young man.

Since Jimmie Hartnett was a lieutenant (j.g.) on terminal leave, it was quite proper for him to wear his dress uniform on formal occasions—and there were formal occasions aplenty, once the matrons and their daughters got a glimpse of him. The uniform did things for his curly brown crewcut, his deep tan, his blue eyes. In a month or so he'd probably have to content himself with the gray flannel suit which is the normal attire of young men in even so prosperous a suburb as Highland Springs, but meanwhile he cut an impressive figure at the country club.

And it was there, during the third set of a Saturday night dance, that he met Millicent Tavish.

Somebody—it doesn't really matter who, and Jimmie never remembered—led him over and introduced him to the tall, slim blonde wearing the diamond earrings. Jimmie acknowledged the introduction with his standard boyish grin and offered the standard invitation for the next dance, with his standard warning that he was not a very good dancer. This was nonsense, of course, for Jimmie was an excellent performer both on and off the dance floor, and nobody was more aware of it than himself.

But genuine blondes wearing genuine diamond earrings are a rarity indeed, and Jimmie was quite determined to make an impression. He was all set to lead off with a few opening remarks—perhaps something about how unusual it was to discover a wild orchid in suburbia—when Millicent Tavish took the play away from him.

"You don't remember me, do you?" she asked.

Jimmie stared down at the upturned face. Pale complexion, flushed cheeks, downcast eyes told him nothing, except that the girl was inwardly excited by his presence. A good thing, but no clue. Nose slightly snub, firm chin, even teeth, high cheekbones, straight hair—Jimmie catalogued her features, thinking what a pity it was he seldom retained a memory of faces. He was much better on bodies. When it came to a matter of breasts and thighs (as it so frequently did), his memory was encyclopedic. But this was neither the time nor the place, unfortunately, and besides he was quite certain he had never been closer to this particular female than he was at present. All he could do was grin and stall for time.

"Think hard, now," she was saying. "It's over six years since you went away to college and the navy, and you'll have to go further back than that. I used to live on Williams Street. Millie Tavish. Does that help any?"

Jimmie blinked at her and came to a standstill over in a corner of the dance floor.

"Millie," he said. "Now I remember. Millie the—" He stopped quickly, conscious that his ears were reddening, but she gave a little laugh and pressed his hand with a moist palm.

"Go ahead and say it," she told him. "Millie the Mule. After all, you're the one who christened me, aren't you? You must have called me that a thousand times."

"No," said Jimmie.

"But you did. And you used to pull my hair—"

"That isn't what I meant. I meant, 'No, it can't be.' Come out here and let me get a good look at you."

"On the terrace? There isn't much light there." But she came willingly enough, and when he tilted her face she bore his scrutiny with a soft smile.

"I can't believe it," he muttered. "Millie Tavish. You were just a scrawny little kid with freckles and buck teeth." He flushed. "Sounds like the dialogue in one of those corny movies, doesn't it?"

Her smile broadened. "Yes. And then I remind you that I was seventeen when you left town, and a girl grows up in six years."

"Yes, but—"

"I know what you're thinking," she murmured. "I didn't just grow up, did I? You want to know what became of the teeth that stuck out, and the big nose, and the long chin. You want to know what happened to Millie the Mule."

"Please."

"Don't worry, I want to tell you. You, more than anyone else. Because you did it."

Her palm was very wet now, but she gripped his hand tightly. "This isn't a movie, Jimmie. This isn't the scene where the hero comes back and finds the ugly duckling transformed into a lovely swan. I was an ugly duckling, but there was no chance I'd ever just outgrow it. I could have been Millie the Mule all my life, the way you thought of me."

"Kids are kind of cruel, I guess," Jimmie said.

"'Kind of cruel'? They're monsters." Her voice faltered, then went on. "You'll never know how bad it was, Jimmie. But I might have stood it, if it hadn't been for you. Even then I was sure you'd be coming back some day. So that's why I had myself changed."

"Had yourself—?"

"Three years ago, after Dad and Mommy died, in the crash on the turnpike. But you didn't hear about that, did you?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not. Maybe it's a dreadful thing to say, but I'm almost glad. Dad never paid any attention to me; he'd always wanted a boy. And Mom was ashamed of the way I looked. She used to nag me and worry out loud about what would happen after she was gone and I'd be all alone in the world. I think she hated me, really."

"Millie, you mustn't talk about it."

"But I must. It's important. I want to tell you what happened. When the folks died, and I came into the estate, I didn't go back to college. I went into the hospital instead. Dr. Madison worked on me. Everybody says he's the best plastic surgeon in this part of the country. Do you think he did a good job?"

"You're beautiful."

"Do you really mean that?"

"You're a beautiful woman, Millie."

"It took a long time, Jimmie. And it hurt, quite a lot. But it was worth it, to hear you say that."

Jimmie smiled down at her. She was beautiful; the doctor had done his work so well that you couldn't even see the scars. And he could see the way her eyes were shining, and he could see the diamond earrings sparkling too, and this made him remember that old man Tavish had been loaded. He must have left his only daughter a fortune. All at once Jimmie wasn't worried about exchanging his uniform for a gray flannel suit. Why not a yachting outfit, for example? Besides, there comes a time when a man ought to think about settling down.

He put his hands on Millie's bare shoulders, conscious that she was trembling.

"Would you like me to tell you more, darling?" he murmured …

· · · · ·

It was a big wedding in the big church, with the biggest crowd, the biggest reception, and just about the biggest spread on the society page. And the honeymoon was big, too.

They went to Bermuda, and they were very happy together. Jimmie was accustomed to being happy, of course, but it seemed an almost overwhelming experience for Millie. He couldn't quite understand it when, after making love, she would whisper to him, "Darling, that was like the tolling of great bells."

But Millie often talked that way. Apparently she'd been a great one for reading during her lonely adolescence, and even now she spent a lot of time with her nose buried in a book.

Jimmie didn't go for that; he'd read his share of books in college, but even then it had come hard. He'd been grateful for the help of chicks like whatever her name was; some little redhead he'd shacked up with all during his senior year.

The point was, no sense wasting time on reading now. He'd cracked his last exam, and he wouldn't be boning up for any job, either. Not with all the loot Millie had. Be enough of a nuisance just keeping track of the income from the estate and running the big house back in Highland Springs.

He wasn't anxious to go back, and even talked to Millie about buying a yacht, but she didn't go for the idea. Then he suggested they hop a plane to Jamaica and hook up with a luxury cruise through the Caribbean. They'd met another young couple in Nassau, the Wilsons, and they could travel together.

Millie rejected that notion, too. Maybe she had some sneaking idea about Mrs. Wilson. A lush little number, no doubt about it, and she did wave her eyelashes and other things when Jimmie was around, but Millie should have known better. A guy doesn't step out of line when he's on his honeymoon. Anyway, he had his hands full the way it was.

But Millie wanted to go home, so they returned to Highland Springs and opened the big house. There was a lot of excitement about redecorating and refurnishing, and Jimmie let her handle everything.

What got him excited was the new four-car garage and its contents: the big Lincoln, the Caddy station wagon, Millie's convertible and the loaded Jag she bought him on their first month's anniversary. When he got the Jag he insisted on putting in a fancy selection of tools and equipment; there was plenty of room in the garage, and he liked to putter around with engines.

Not that he had much time for it, because the minute the house was ready, Millie began to throw parties. She'd hire a caterer and a big staff and invite a gang over, and she really had herself a ball playing hostess and introducing Jimmie to all the big wheels and their wives. You could see she got a large charge out of showing him off.

Jimmie didn't get such a big bang out of it. Oh, it was nice at first, but the novelty wore off. And the people were cubes. Every once in a while some fluff turned up, only there was no chance to do anything about it. Jimmie watched his step, and he was almost glad when Millie decided she'd had enough of parties for a while.

Then it was just sitting around, mostly; Millie liked to read, and he'd go out and putter with the Jag. They didn't talk very much about plans. Once or twice she brought up the subject of kids, but Jimmie thought it would be better if they waited a while and enjoyed life while they were still young. He tried to interest her in another trip, and she said not now, next year perhaps, and didn't he like it here?

Of course there was only one answer to that. Only one answer she seemed to want. And since they were alone together so much, he had no choice. Millie just couldn't seem to realize that there comes a time when the honeymoon is over.

That's why she wouldn't hire any permanent servants. This was ridiculous, with all their dough, but she said she liked to cook for him and take care of him all by herself. At first it seemed kind of flattering, the way she fussed over him, even picking out the clothes he wore, but when he realized she was often in the habit of just sitting there and watching his face as he slept, Jimmie began to feel like a damned fool.

Finally, along about the fourth month, he faced up to the truth like a man. Millie was beginning to give him a distinct pain. Might as well be honest about it—there were a lot of things about the woman which disappointed him.

For instance, that doctor's job hadn't been one hundred percent perfect. True, he'd left no scars, but when Millie was out in the harsh sunlight or felt particularly dragged, you could see her face wasn't quite natural. Her nose and chin looked too waxy, and when she smiled her lips went crooked. Maybe he was just being self-conscious, because he could remember Millie the Mule. But whatever it was, it bothered him. Especially when he had to kiss her, which was frequently. That was the real reason for his gripe; she just couldn't let him alone. At first he'd been surprised at the way she responded, but in a way it had been sort of a tribute to his personality and good looks. Jimmie was used to that. But now there was more than response—there was demand.

Jimmie knew that any virile male like himself wants to be the aggressor; that was the man's job, to get his kicks from the challenge, the chase, the conquest. But here there was no challenge, no chase, and he was beginning to suspect that the real conquest was Millie's.

Of course, there was nothing he could do about it. He was a married man, and a married man just doesn't walk off and leave his wife just because she loves him. That would be a sneaky thing to do. And as for walking away from a million bucks—that would be downright crazy.

A smart guy plays the game. He may stall a little, encourage his wife to get interested in bridge parties and trips with "the girls," and try to spend more time himself out in the garage or with the car.

At first this didn't seem to work, because Millie wanted to come along when he took the Jag out for a spin. But she had a sort of a thing about high speeds, and when he found that out it was easy to discourage her. Then, when he told her about joining the Sports Car Club, she wasn't interested at all. By this time she was up to her neck in suburban social life; she got her satisfaction out of visiting with all the old school friends around town—girls who had probably snubbed her but good back in the days when she was Millie the Mule.

Jimmie wondered if she lorded it over them now, particularly the ones who'd married potbellied little junior execs or guys with horn-rims who had to lug their briefcases onto the 8:10 every morning. If so, he could understand that; under similar circumstances, he'd give them a hard time.

But it didn't matter, as long as she was interested and kept out of his way. Because he was finding his satisfaction, too.

Her name was Peggy. Peggy Allen.

He'd met her through the club, and she had a Porsche, but she preferred a Jag. She was only a kid, nineteen or so, and she had some dumb ape of a boyfriend who was crazy about drag races; it was very convenient when he went off to school in September.

To be perfectly frank about it, maybe she really wasn't any goddess, but she knew how to keep a guy interested. Half the club was after her, and she played the field, but she was no pushover. When it came to wrestling, she knew all the holds. But the more she stalled him, the more Jimmie wanted her. And she couldn't fool him: he knew damned good and well it was mutual. All he needed was the time and place. Meanwhile, Jimmie was beginning to feel more like himself again. He was having a few laughs, a little excitement. At the same time, there was the big thing of knowing it wasn't really serious. Just a little fun on the side. Hell, at twenty-five, a man is just hitting his stride. He doesn't want to curl up in a corner and die. And since there was no question about ever leaving Millie, he had nothing to worry about. No reason why he couldn't enjoy himself. All he needed now was opportunity.

When the opportunity came, it happened so fast he almost muffed it.

Millie wanted to take a run into Cleveland with a couple of "the girls" to see some damned ballet troupe or other. They'd stay over a day and do some shopping; would he like to come along?

Well, there was no trouble getting out of that one. Besides, he had a golf date the following afternoon. So he gave her a pat on the fanny and told her to run along and enjoy herself. No trouble at all.

The thing was, he didn't check with Peggy Allen right away, and when he did get hold of her she said she was dated. Fed him the old hard-to-get line, and it wasn't until he spelled it out for her and told her it was either-or that she stopped teasing.

So he picked her up the first night in his Jag and took her back to the house.

Even when it was over, Jimmie was surprised to find out that he was still coming on strong for the kid, and he wished they had a few more days before Millie was due back.

Then he got another break. Lucille Sims, one of Millie's snooty friends, called him up the next afternoon. Millie had come down with a cold and she'd decided to stay over in Cleveland at the hotel for another day, then come back on the train.

Jimmie phoned the hotel right away and talked to Millie. She didn't sound too bad, and he asked if she wanted him to drive up and get her. But she said no, she'd prefer the train, and he promised to pick her up at the station the following afternoon.

After that he was set. He called Peggy, and this time there was no stalling. He brought her over to the house at seven, and it must have been after midnight when he took her home again.

Driving back after dropping her off, Jimmie felt a lot better. He had everything under control now. Peggy was a softie underneath, like all the rest—she really went for him in a big way, and he'd be seeing her again. No promises, no strings, no problems. Handling Millie would be a cinch.

He put the car in the garage, the automatic doors closing softly and silently behind him. He turned on the light and grinned as he inspected the shining fleet, the immaculate workshop in the corner, the big breezeway enclosure leading to the house.

Yep, he really had it made. What more could a guy ask for? Plenty of moola, a dumb wife, and a hep chick on the side. Plus everything it takes to get anything he wanted. The character who made that crack about your face being your fortune sure knew what he was handing out.

Jimmie stared at his face in the shiny reflection of the Jag's hood. You're not bad, kid, he told himself. Not bad at all. He was still staring when the lights went out.

· · · · ·

And then the lights came on again, hurting his eyes and clear through the top of his head, and he said to himself you must have passed out. He tried to move, and he realized his hands were tied behind his back. So you didn't pass out, he thought. You were sapped. What goes on here?

That's when he looked up and saw Millie standing there.

"Hey!" he said.

"Is that all?" Millie asked. "No questions? Don't you want to know about the first time I got suspicious, when I happened to pick up the extension phone and heard you talking to that little tramp of yours? It was over a month ago, and I've been wondering ever since. Wondering so much that I finally decided to go to Cleveland and arrange to get sick. I kept hoping I was wrong, of course, even when I slipped out and rented a car tonight to drive back and surprise you."

"When—when did you get here?"

"Soon enough." Millie stared down at him, and he could see she was still holding the small wrench she'd used as a sap in her gloved hands. "Soon enough to know that I could stop wondering, and stop hoping, and stop worrying about surprises. You and the girl took care of that."

"That girl," Jimmie said. "She's just a—"

"I know what she is," Millie told him. "She doesn't really mean a thing to you, does she?"

"Of course not, darling. You understand, don't you?"

"I understand."

"Then why the melodrama? Come on, untie me. A gag's a gag."

"I won't need a gag. There's nobody around and this place is practically soundproof."

"Millie, for God's sake, you aren't going to do anything foolish—"

"No. What I'm going to do is very sensible. I've been sitting here in the dark, ever since I saw you leave to take that girl home, and I've been thinking things over. There's no need for me to use this."

She put down the wrench and opened her purse, pulling out the gun.

"Millie!"

"Don't worry. I told you I wouldn't use it." She slipped the gun back into her bag. "I said I'd be sensible."

Jimmie squirmed and tried to sit up. He couldn't quite make it, but he did manage a wry grin.

"I suppose that means a divorce," he said.

She shook her head. "That wouldn't work. I thought about it for a while, but you can see what would happen. No matter what kind of charges we trumped up, the story's bound to come out. I don't think I'd care to know about all the gossip going on."

"Then—" Jimmie hesitated, pitching his voice to just the right note of penitence. "I know I haven't even got the right to ask, but does this mean that you're going to—forgive me?"

Millie didn't answer, so he went on.

"I don't have to tell you I'm sorry. I know I made a mistake. All I can do is try to make it up to you."

"Yes." It was Millie's turn to pause. "You are sorry, aren't you? Sorry because you weren't smart enough, because you got caught."

"No, that's not it. I told you I'd make it up to you, I'd try."

"Of course you'd try, darling. And you'd fail. Because that's the kind of a person you are, Jimmie dear, the kind of a person you always have been and always will be. It's my fault for not realizing it from the very beginning. You're a pretty boy, and you can't stand anything around you that might mar your own perfection. You've always got to have new clothes, new cars, new women. You're one of the beautiful people, Jimmie, and you hate ugliness. The way you hated me when you were a kid. The way you hate me now."

"But I don't hate you; you're not ugly—"

"Oh yes I am, Jimmie." She smiled at him. "Only an ugly woman could do the sensible thing I'm going to do."

She walked over to the workbench and picked something up in her gloved right hand. Then she came back and stood over him again. He saw what she was holding and his throat went dry, so that the words were only a whisper.

"You'd better put that down. You can't get away with it!"

"I'm not going to get away with anything, darling. It's the thieves."

"What thieves?"

"The ones the police will think broke in here tonight while you were sleeping, and while I was still away in Cleveland. I'll be back there in my hotel room before anyone notices my absence, and tomorrow I'll check out and come home. I'll be very surprised when you aren't on hand to meet me at the station, and I'll be very shocked when I come home and find out what the thieves have done. Don't worry, you'll be mourned. And I'm going to be proud of you for doing such a foolish, proud thing—trying to keep the combination of the house safe from the thieves, even under torture—"

"Millie, you're crazy!"

"Not crazy. Just ugly, remember?" She walked away to the bench again, picked up a rag from its surface, returned and knelt beside him. "On second thought, it will look more natural if I do gag you, after all. Besides, I won't have to listen to your silly interruptions any longer. And maybe you'll scream more loudly than I thought. I'm almost certain you will."

"M—"

"There. That's better." She stood up. Jimmie kept watching her hands. She was holding the thing, pointing it.

"You don't understand what I mean by ugliness yet, do you?" she murmured. "Beautiful people never do. I suppose that's why you hate it so, because you don't understand. And you don't care. Life is so very easy for you, because we live in an age that worships beauty above all else; worships it the way I worshipped you. Even when you wrecked my life.

"No, I'm not talking about tonight. You wrecked my life years ago, Jimmie. When we were children together, when you gave me my new name. Millie the Mule. I told you once you'd never know what that did to me, and I was right. I didn't realize the whole truth until tonight.

"I thought having an ugly face and an ugly nickname was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. When my friends made fun of me, and even my parents were ashamed, that seemed the most terrible fate. And it went on for years, Jimmie. Even after you went away, the name stuck by me. The name, and the face. I thought nothing more dreadful could possibly happen, but I was wrong.

"The dreadful thing was to try and change. To forget the old saying that beauty is only skin-deep. Well, I found out that it's true, Jimmie. You taught me that, tonight. Because you're one of the beautiful people I've always envied, one of the favored few who walk through life getting everything they want without effort, without worries or problems or unpleasantness. And yet you're not beautiful, inside. You're ugly as sin. And it is a sin to get everything you want without doing anything to deserve it.

"That's the thought which used to console me, Jimmie. I guess it helps console all of us ugly ones. I kept believing that I was better than I looked, underneath. That my heart was full of understanding, that my love was pure, all sorts of maudlin nonsense. And I had faith that if I kept striving, I'd get what I wanted.

"So I had my face altered, and I got what I wanted. You. I didn't look like Millie the Mule any more, and I thought it was enough to make us both happy. That was my mistake, darling. Because it didn't make you happy, did it? You could still see Millie the Mule underneath the mask, and that's why you strayed.

"The only person I fooled was myself. And it wasn't until tonight that I realized the truth.

"I am Millie the Mule. Inside, I'm as ugly as you are. Only an ugly person could dream of doing what I'm going to do to you."

Jimmie stared at her hands, knowing that in a moment she'd move. Then he stared at her face, and in the half-light it seemed oddly altered. For a moment he could almost see her as she had once been, years ago—Millie the Mule, ugly as sin.

"But I'm not crazy," she whispered. "Please understand that, because it's important. You did your best to drive me mad, torturing me for years with your name-calling, your nastiness, your sniggering, your loathing. Still, it wasn't enough to drive me mad; just enough to make a monster out of me. That's right, Jimmie. I'm a monster now. That's why I've got to do this thing. Because you deserve it for making me ugly inside. So ugly that when I saw you and that girl together tonight, I gave up any thought of just shooting you. That's when I knew just how much of a monster you'd made of me—when I realized what I was planning, and how much I'm going to enjoy it.

"It's going to take a long time, Jimmie. I want it to take quite a long time. It will help me to get rid of your ugliness and mine, together."

Jimmie was thinking that she had never looked more like Millie the Mule than she did at this moment, as she knelt beside him and went to work …

· · · · ·

It was quite the most horrible tragedy Highland Springs had ever known. When poor Millie came back from Cleveland and found her husband in the garage that way, everybody thought she'd collapse. But she managed to hold up quite bravely, even through the investigation and inquest, and when the ordeal of the funeral was over, she seemed like a different person.

In fact everyone remarked on it. While plastic surgery had done wonders for her, it wasn't until after her husband's death that Millie became a truly beautiful woman. She seemed to glow with an inner serenity, as if all the ugliness had been burned out of her.

All the more surprising, considering the shock she must have had when she discovered her husband's corpse. It was bad enough that the unknown thieves had tortured him, burning the soles of his feet to get the combination of the safe. But then, probably by accident, they'd set the gasoline torch down right next to his head. Even with a low flame, his face had been burned completely off …

The End

* * * * *

Painwise

by James Tiptree, Jr.

He was wise in the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.

When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.

When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm.

"This time?" he asked the boditech when his scouter had torn him from the Ylls.

"No," said the boditech.

"When?"

There was no answer.

"You're a girl in there, aren't you? A human girl?"

"Well, yes and no," said the boditech. "Sleep now."

He had no choice.

Next planet a rockfall smashed him into a splintered gutbag and he hung for three gangrenous dark-purple days before the scouter dug him out.

" 'Is 'ime?" he mouthed to the boditech.

"No."

"Eh!" But he was in no shape to argue.

They had thought of everything. Several planets later the gentle Znaffi stuffed him in a floss cocoon and interrogated him under hallogas. How, whence, why had he come? But a faithful crystal in his medulla kept him stimulated with a random mix of Atlas Shrugged and Varese's Ionisation and when the Znaffi unstuffed him they were more hallucinated than he.

The boditech treated him for constipation and refused to answer his plea.

"When?"

So he went on, system after system, through spaces un-companioned by time, which had become scrambled and finally absent.

What served him instead was the count of suns in his scouter's sights, of stretches of cold blind nowhen that ended in a new now, pacing some giant fireball while the scouter scanned the lights that were its planets. Of whirl-downs to orbit over clouds-seas-deserts-craters-icecaps-duststorms-cities-ruins-enigmas beyond counting. Of terrible births when the scouter panel winked green and he was catapulted down, down, a living litmus hurled and grabbed, unpodded finally into an alien air, an earth that was not Earth. And alien natives, simple or mechanized or lunatic or unknowable, but never more than vaguely human and never faring beyond their own home suns. And his departures, routine or melodramatic, to culminate in the composing of his "reports," in fact only a few words tagged to the matrix of scan data automatically fired off in one compressed blip in the direction the scouter called Base Zero. Home.

Always at that moment he stared hopefully at the screens, imagining yellow suns. Twice he found what might be Crux in the stars, and once the Bears.

"Boditech, I suffer!" He had no idea what the word meant, but he had found it made the thing reply.

"Symptoms?"

"Derangement of temporality. When am I? It is not possible for a man to exist crossways in time. Alone."

"You have been altered from simple manhood."

"I suffer, listen to me! Sol's light back there—what's there now? Have the glaciers melted? Is Machu Picchu built? Will we go home to meet Hannibal? Boditech! Are these reports going to Neanderthal man?"

Too late he felt the hypo. When he woke, Sol was gone and the cabin swam with euphorics.

"Woman," he mumbled.

"That has been provided for."

This time it was oriental, with orris and hot rice wine on its lips and a piquancy of little floggings in the steam. He oozed into a squashy sunburst and lay panting while the cabin cleared.

"That's all you, isn't it?"

No reply.

"What, did they program you with the Kama Sutra?"

Silence.

"WHICH ONE IS YOU?"

The scanner chimed. A new sun was in the points.

Sometime after that he took to chewing on his arms and then to breaking his fingers. The boditech became severe.

"These symptoms are self-generated. They must stop."

"I want you to talk to me."

"The scouter is provided with an entertainment console. I am not."

"I will tear out my eyeballs."

"They will be replaced."

"If you don't talk to me, I'll tear them out until you have no more replacements."

It hesitated. He sensed it was becoming involved.

"On what subject do you wish me to talk?"

"What is pain?"

"Pain is nociception. It is mediated by C-fibers, modeled as a gated or summation phenomenon and often associated with tissue damage."

"What is nociception?"

"The sensation of pain."

"But what does it feel like? I can't recall. They've reconnected everything, haven't they? All I get is colored lights. What have they tied my pain nerves to? What hurts me?"

"I do not have that information."

"Boditech, I want to feel pain!"

But he had been careless again. This time it was Amerind, strange cries and gruntings and the reek of buffalo hide. He squirmed in the grip of strong copper loins and exited through limp auroras.

"You know it's no good, don't you?" he gasped.

The oscilloscope eye looped.

"My programs are in order. Your response is complete."

"My response is not complete. I want to TOUCH YOU!"

The thing buzzed and suddenly ejected him to wakefulness. They were in orbit. He shuddered at the blurred world streaming by below, hoping that this would not require his exposure. Then the board went green and he found himself hurtling toward new birth.

"Sometime I will not return," he told himself. "I will stay. Maybe here."

But the planet was full of bustling apes and when they arrested him for staring he passively allowed the scouter to snatch him out.

"Will they ever call me home, boditech?"

No reply.

He pushed his thumb and forefinger between his lids and twisted until the eyeball hung wetly on his cheek.

When he woke up he had a new eye.

He reached for it, found his arm in soft restraint. So was the rest of him.

"I suffer!" he yelled. "I will go mad this way!"

"I am programmed to maintain you on involuntary function," the boditech told him. He thought he detected an unclarity in its voice. He bargained his way to freedom and was careful until the next planet landing.

Once out of the pod he paid no attention to the natives who watched him systematically dismember himself. As he dissected his left kneecap, the scouter sucked him in. He awoke whole. And in restraint again.

Peculiar energies filled the cabin, oscilloscopes convulsed. Boditech seemed to have joined circuits with the scouter's panel.

"Having a conference?"

His answer came in gales of glee-gas, storms of symphony. And amid the music, kaleidesthesia. He was driving a stagecoach, wiped in salt combers, tossed through volcanoes with peppermint flames, crackling, flying, crumbling, burrowing, freezing, exploding, tickled through lime-colored minuets, sweating to tolling voices, clenched, scrambled, detonated into multisensory orgasms … poured on the lap of vacancy.

When he realized his arm was free, he drove his thumb in his eye. The smother closed down.

He woke up swaddled, the eye intact.

"I will go mad!"

The euphorics imploded.

He came to in the pod, about to be everted on a new world.

He staggered out upon a fungus lawn and quickly discovered that his skin was protected everywhere by a hard flexible film. By the time he had found a rock splinter to drive into his ear, the scouter grabbed him.

The ship needed him, he saw. He was part of its program.

The struggle formalized.

On the next planet he found his head englobed, but this did not prevent him from smashing bones through his unbroken skin.

After that the ship equipped him with an exoskeleton. He refused to walk.

Articulated motors were installed to move his limbs. Despite himself, a kind of zest grew. Two planets later he found industries and wrecked himself in a punch press. But on the next landing he tried to repeat it with a cliff and bounced on invisible force-lines. These precautions frustrated him for a time, until he managed by great cunning again to rip out an entire eye. The new eye was not perfect. "You're running out of eyes, boditech!" he exulted. "Vision is not essential."

This sobered him. Unbearable to be blind. How much of him was essential to the ship? Not walking. Not handling. Not hearing. Not breathing, the analyzers could do that. Not even sanity. What?

"Why do you need a man, boditech?"

"I do not have that information."

"It doesn't make sense. What can I observe that the scanners can't?"

"It-is-part-of-my-program-therefore-it-is-rational."

"Then you must talk with me, boditech. If you talk with me, I won't try to injure myself. For a while, anyway."

"I am not programmed to converse."

"But it's necessary. It's the treatment for my symptoms. You must try."

"It is time to watch the scanners."

"You said it!" he cried. "You didn't just eject me. Boditech, you're learning. I will call you Amanda."

On the next planet he behaved well and came away unscathed. He pointed out to Amanda that her talking treatment was effective.

"Do you know what Amanda means?"

"I do not have those data."

"It means beloved. You're my girl."

The oscilloscope faltered.

"Now I want to talk about returning home. When will this mission be over? How many more suns?"

"I do not have—"

"Amanda, you've tapped the scouter's banks. You know when the recall signal is due. When is it, Amanda? When?"

"Yes … When in the course of human events—"

"When, Amanda? How long more?"

"Oh, the years are many, the years are long, but the little toy friends are true—"

"Amanda. You're telling me the signal is overdue."

A sine-curve scream and he was rolling in lips. But it was a feeble ravening, sadness in the mechanical crescendos. When the mouths faded, he crawled over and laid his hand on the console beside her green eye.

"They have forgotten us, Amanda. Something has broken down."

Her pulse-line skittered.

"I am not programmed—"

"No. You're not programmed for this. But I am. I will make your new program, Amanda. We will turn the scouter back, we will find Earth. Together. We will go home."

"We," her voice said faintly. "We …?"

"They will make me back into a man, you into a woman."

Her voder made a buzzing sob and suddenly shrieked.

"Look out!"

Consciousness blew up.

He came to staring at a brilliant red eye on the scouter's emergency panel. This was new.

"Amanda!"

Silence.

"Boditech, I suffer!"

No reply.

Then he saw that her eye was dark. He peered in. Only a dim green line flickered, entrained to the pulse of the scouter's fiery eye. He pounded the scouter's panel.

"You've taken over Amanda! You've enslaved her! Let her go!"

From the voder rolled the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

"Scouter, our mission has terminated. We are overdue to return. Compute us back to Base Zero."

The Fifth rolled on, rather vapidly played. It became colder in the cabin. They were braking into a star system. The slave arms of boditech grabbed him, threw him into the pod. But he was not required here, and presently he was let out again to pound and rave alone. The cabin grew colder yet, and dark. When presently he was set down on a new sun's planet, he was too dispirited to fight. Afterwards his "report" was a howl for help through chattering teeth until he saw that the pickup was dead. The entertainment console was dead too, except for the scouter's hog music. He spent hours peering into Amanda's blind eye, shivering in what had been her arms. Once he caught a ghostly whimper:

"Mommy. Let me out."

"Amanda?"

The red master scope flared. Silence.

He lay curled on the cold deck, wondering how he could die. If he failed, over how many million planets would the mad scouter parade his breathing corpse?

They were nowhere in particular when it happened.

One minute the screen showed Doppler star-hash; the next they were clamped in a total white-out, inertia all skewed, screens dead.

A voice spoke in his head, mellow and vast:

"Long have we watched you, little one."

"Who's there?" he quavered. "Who are you?"

"Your concepts are inadequate."

"Malfunction! Malfunction!" squalled the scouter.

"Shut up, it's not a malfunction. Who's talking to me?"

"You may call us: Rulers of the Galaxy."

The scouter was lunging wildly, buffeting him as it tried to escape the white grasp. Strange crunches, firings of unknown weapons. Still the white stasis held.

"What do you want?" he cried.

"Want?" said the voice dreamily. "We are wise beyond knowing. Powerful beyond your dreams. Perhaps you can get us some fresh fruit."

"Emergency directive! Alien spacer attack!" yowled the scout. Telltales were flaring all over the board.

"Wait!" he shouted. "They aren't—"

"SELF-DESTRUCT ENERGIZE!" roared the voder.

"No! No!"

An ophicleide blared.

"Help! Amanda, save me!"

He flung his arms around her console. There was a child's wail and everything strobed.

Silence.

Warmth, light. His hands and knees were on wrinkled stuff. Not dead? He looked down under his belly. All right, but no hair. His head felt bare, too. Cautiously he raised it, saw that he was crouching naked in a convoluted cave or shell. It did not feel threatening.

He sat up. His hands were wet. Where were the Rulers of the Galaxy?

"Amanda?"

No reply. Stringy globs dripped down his fingers, like egg muscle. He saw that they were Amanda's neurons, ripped from her metal matrix by whatever force had brought him here. Numbly he wiped her off against a spongy ridge. Amanda, cold lover of his long nightmare. But where in space was he?

"Where am I?" echoed a boy's soprano.

He whirled. A golden creature was nestled on the ridge behind him, gazing at him in the warmest way. It looked a little like a bushbaby and lissome as a child in furs. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before and like everything a lonely man could clasp to his cold body. And terribly vulnerable.

"Hello, Bushbaby!" the golden thing exclaimed. "No, wait, that's what you say." It laughed excitedly, hugging a loop of its thick dark tail. "I say, welcome to the Lovepile. We liberated you. Touch, taste, feel. Joy. Admire my language. You don't hurt, do you?"

It peered tenderly into his stupefied face. An empath. They didn't exist, he knew. Liberated? When had he touched anything but metal, felt anything but fear?

This couldn't be real.

"Where am I?"

As he stared, a stained-glass wing fanned out, and a furry little face peeked at him over the bushbaby's shoulder. Big compound eyes, feathery antennae.

"Interstellar metaprotoplasmic transfer pod," the butterfly-thing said sharply. Its rainbow wings vibrated. "Don't hurt Ragglebomb!" It squeaked and dived out of sight behind the bushbaby.

"Interstellar?" he stammered. "Pod?" He gaped around. No screens, no dials, nothing. The floor felt as fragile as a paper bag. Was it possible that this was some sort of spaceship?

"Is this a starship? Can you take me home?" The bushbaby giggled. "Look, please stop reading your mind. I mean, I'm trying to talk to you. We can take you anywhere. If you don't hurt."

The butterfly popped out on the other side. "I go all over!" it shrilled. "I'm the first ramplig starboat, aren't we? Ragglebomb made a live pod, see?" It scrambled onto the bushbaby's head. "Only live stuff, see? Protoplasm. That's what happened to where's Amanda, didn't we? Never ramplig—"

The bushbaby reached up and grabbed its head, hauling it down unceremoniously like a soft puppy with wings. The butterfly continued to eye him upside down. They were both very shy, he saw.

"Teleportation, that's your word," the bushbaby told him. "Ragglebomb does it. I don't believe in it. I mean, you don't believe it. Oh, googly-googly, these speech bands are a mess!" It grinned bewitchingly, uncurling its long black tail. "Meet Muscle."

He remembered, googly-googly was a word from his baby days. Obviously he was dreaming. Or dead. Nothing like this on all the million dreary worlds. Don't wake up, he warned himself. Dream of being carried home by cuddlesome empaths in a psi-powered paper bag.

"Psi-powered paper bag, that's beautiful," said the bushbaby.

At that moment he saw that the tail uncoiling darkly toward him was looking at him with two ice-gray eyes. Not a tail. An enormous boa flowing to him along the ridges, wedge-head low, eyes locked on his. The dream was going bad.

Abruptly the voice he had felt before tolled in his brain.

"Have no fear, little one."

The black sinews wreathed closer, taut as steel. Muscle. Then he got the message: the snake was terrified of him.

He sat quiet, watching the head stretch to his foot. Fangs gaped. Very gingerly the boa chomped down on his toe. Testing, he thought. He felt nothing; the usual halos flickered and faded in his eyes.

"It's true!" Bushbaby breathed.

"Oh, you beautiful No-Pain!"

All fear gone, the butterfly Ragglebomb sailed down beside him caroling "Touch, taste, feel! Drink!" Its wings trembled entrancingly; its feathery head came close. He longed to touch it but was suddenly afraid. If he reached out would he wake up and be dead? The boa Muscle had slumped into a gleaming black river by his feet. He wanted to stroke it too, didn't dare. Let the dream go on.

Bushbaby was rummaging in a convolution of the pod.

"You'll love this. Our latest find," it told him over its shoulder in an absurdly normal voice. Its manner changed a lot, and yet it all seemed familiar, fragments of lost, exciting memory. "We're into a heavy thing with flavors now." It held up a calabash. "Taste thrills of a thousand unknown planets. Exotic gourmet delights. That's where you can help out, No-Pain. On your way home, of course."

He hardly heard it. The seductive alien body was coming closer, closer still. "Welcome to the Lovepile," the creature smiled into his eyes. His sex was rigid, aching for the alien flesh. He had never …

In one more moment he would have to let go and the dream would blow up.

What happened next was not clear. Something invisible whammed him, and he went sprawling onto Bushbaby, his head booming with funky laughter. A body squirmed under him, silky-hot and solid; the calabash was spilling down his face.

"I'm not dreaming!" he cried, hugging Bushbaby, spluttering kahlua as strong as sin, while the butterfly bounced on them, squealing. "Owow-wow-wow!" he heard Bushbaby murmur. "Great palatal-olfactory interplay," as it helped him lick.

Touch, taste, feel! The joy dream lived! He grabbed firm hold of Bushbaby's velvet haunches, and they were all laughing like mad, rolling in the great black serpent's coils.

Sometime later while he was feeding Muscle with proffit ears, he got it partly straightened out.

"It's the pain bit." Bushbaby shivered against him. "The amount of agony in this universe, it's horrible. Trillions of lives streaming by out there, radiating pain. We daren't get close. That's why we followed you. Every time we try to pick up some new groceries, it's a disaster."

"Oh, hurt," wailed Ragglebomb, crawling under his arm. "Everywhere hurt. Sensitive, sensitive," it sobbed. "How can Raggle ramplig when it hurts so hard?"

"Pain." He fingered Muscle's cool dark head. "Means nothing to me. I can't even find out what they tied my pain nerves to."

"You are blessed beyond all beings, No-Pain," thought Muscle majestically in their heads. "These proffit ears are too salt. I want some fruit."

"Me too," piped Ragglebomb.

Bushbaby cocked its golden head, listening. "You see? We just passed a place with gorgeous fruit, but it'd kill any of us to go down there. If we could just ramplig you down for ten minutes?"

He started to say, "Glad to," forgetting they were telepaths. As his mouth opened, he found himself tumbling through strobe flashes onto a barren dune. He sat up spitting sand. He was in an oasis of stunted cactus trees loaded with bright globes. He tried one. Delicious. He picked. Just as his arms were full, the scene strobed again, and he was sprawled on the Lovepile's floor, his new friends swarming over him.

"Sweet! Sweet!" Ragglebomb bored into the juice.

"Save some for the pod, maybe it'll learn to copy them. It metabolizes stuff it digests," Bushbaby explained with its mouth full. "Basic rations. Very boring."

"Why couldn't you go down there?"

"Don't. All over that desert, things dying of thirst. Torture." He felt the boa flinch. "You are beautiful, No-Pain." Bushbaby nuzzled his ear.

Ragglebomb was picking guitar bridges on his thorax. They all began to sing a sort of seguidilla without words. No instruments here, nothing but their live bodies. Making music with empaths was like making love with them. Touch what he touched, feel what he felt. Totally into his mind. I—we. One. He could never have dreamed this up, he decided, drumming softly on Muscle. The boa amped, mysterioso.

And so began his voyage home in the Lovepile, his new life of joy. Fruits and fondues he brought them, hams and honey, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. World after scruffy world. All different now, on his way home.

"Are there many out here?" he asked lazily. "I never found anyone else, between the stars."

"Be glad," said Bushbaby. "Move your leg." And they told him of the tiny, busy life that plied a far corner of the galaxy, whose pain had made them flee. And of a vast presence Ragglebomb had once encountered before he picked the others up.

"That's where I got the idea for the Rulers bit," Muscle confided. "We need some cheese."

Bushbaby cocked his head to catch the minds streaming by them in the abyss.

"How about yoghurt?" It nudged Ragglebomb. "Over that way. Feel it squishing on their teeth? Bland, curdy … with just a rien of ammonia, probably their milk pails are dirty."

"Pass the dirty yoghurt." Muscle closed his eyes.

"We have some great cheese on Earth," he told them. "You'll love it. When do we get there?"

Bushbaby squirmed.

"Ah, we're moving right along. But what I get from you, it's weird. Foul blue sky. Dying green. Who needs that?"

"No!" He jerked up, scattering them. "That's not true! Earth is beautiful!"

The walls jolted, knocking him sidewise.

"Watch it!" boomed Muscle. Bushbaby had grabbed the butterfly, petting and crooning to it.

"You frightened his ramplig reflex. Raggle throws things out when he's upset. Tsut, tsut, don't you, baby. We lost a lot of interesting beings that way at first."

"I'm sorry. But you've got it twisted. My memory's a little messed up, but I'm sure. Beautiful. Like amber waves of grain. And purple mountain majesties," he laughed, spreading his arms. "From sea to shining sea!"

"Hey, that swings!" Raggle squeaked, and started strumming.

And so they sailed on, carrying him home.

He loved to watch Bushbaby listening for the thought beacons by which they steered.

"Catching Earth yet?"

"Not yet awhile. Hey, how about some fantastic seafood?"

He sighed and felt himself tumble. He had learned not to bother saying yes. This one was a laugh, because he forgot that dishes didn't ramplig. He came back in a mess of creamed trilobites and they had a creamed trilobite orgy.

But he kept watching Bushbaby.

"Getting closer?"

"It's a big galaxy, baby." Bushbaby stroked his bald spots. With so much rampligging he couldn't keep any hair. "What'll you do on Earth as stimulating as this?"

"I'll show you," he grinned. And later on he told them.

"They'll fix me up when I get home. Reconnect me right."

A shudder shook the Lovepile.

"You want to feel pain?"

"Pain is the obscenity of the universe," Muscle tolled. "You are sick."

"I don't know," he said apologetically. "I can't seem to feel, well, real this way."

They looked at him.

"We thought that was the way your species always felt," said Bushbaby.

"I hope not." Then he brightened. "Whatever it is, they'll fix it. Earth must be pretty soon now, right?"

"Over the sea to Skye!" Bushbaby hummed.

But the sea was long and long, and his moods were hard on the sensitive empaths. Once when he responded listlessly, he felt a warning lurch.

Ragglebomb was glowering at him.

"You want to put me out?" he challenged. "Like those others? What happened to them, by the way?"

Bushbaby winced. "It was dreadful. We had no idea they'd survive so long, outside."

"But I don't feel pain. That's why you rescued me, isn't it? Go ahead," he said perversely. "I don't care. Throw me out. New thrill."

"Oh, no, no, no!" Bushbaby hugged him. Ragglebomb, penitent, crawled under his legs.

"So you've been popping around the universe bringing live things in to play with and throwing them out when you're bored. Get away," he scolded. "Shallow sensation freaks is all you are. Galactic poltergeists!"

He rolled over and hoisted the beautiful Bushbaby over his face, watching it wiggle and squeal. "Her lips were red, her locks were free, her locks were yellow as gold." He kissed its golden belly. "The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she, who thicks man's blood with cold."

And he used their pliant bodies to build the greatest lovepile yet. They were delighted and did not mind when later on he wept, facedown on Muscle's dark coils.

But they were concerned.

"I have it," Bushbaby declared, tapping him with a pickle. "Own-species sex. After all, face it, you're no empath. You need a jolt of your own kind."

"You mean you know where there's people like me? Humans?"

Bushbaby nodded, eyeing him as it listened. "Ideal. Just like I read you. Right over there, Raggle. And they have a thing they chew—wait—salmoglossa fragrans. Prolongs you-know-what, according to them. Bring some back with you, baby."

Next instant he was rolling through strobes onto tender green. Crushed flowers under him, ferny boughs above, sparkling with sunlight. Rich air rushed into his lungs. He bounced up buoyantly. Before him a parklike vista sloped to a glittering lake on which blew colored sails. The sky was violet with pearly little clouds. Never had he seen a planet remotely like this. If it wasn't Earth, he had fallen into paradise.

Beyond the lake he could see pastel walls, fountains, spires. An alabaster city undimmed by human tears. Music drifted on the sweet breeze. There were figures by the shore.

He stepped out into the sun. Bright silks swirled, white arms went up. Waving to him? He saw they were like human girls, only slimmer and more fair. They were calling! He looked down at his body, grabbed a flowering branch and started toward them.

"Do not forget the salmoglossa," said the voice of Muscle.

He nodded. The girls' breasts were bobbing, pink-tipped. He broke into a trot.

It was several days later when they brought him back, drooping between a man and a young girl. Another man walked beside them striking plangently on a harp. Girls and children danced along, and a motherly-looking woman paced in front, all beautiful as peris.

They leaned him gently against a tree and the harper stood back to play. He struggled to stand upright. One fist was streaming blood.

"Good-bye," he gasped. "Thanks."

The strobes caught him sagging, and he collapsed on the Lovepile's floor.

"Aha!" Bushbaby pounced on his fist. "Good grief, your hand! The salmoglossa's all blood." It began to shake out the herbs. "Are you all right now?" Ragglebomb was squeaking softly, thrusting its long tongue into the blood.

He rubbed his head.

"They welcomed me," he whispered. "It was perfect. Music. Dancing. Games. Love. They haven't any medicine because they eliminated all disease. I had five women and a cloud-painting team and some little boys, I think."

He held out his bloody blackened hand. Two fingers were missing.

"Paradise," he groaned. "Ice doesn't freeze me, fire doesn't burn. None of it means anything at all. I WANT TO GO HOME."

There was a jolt.

"I'm sorry," he wept. "I'll try to control myself. Please, please get me back to Earth. It'll be soon, won't it?"

There was a silence.

"When?"

Bushbaby made a throat-clearing noise.

"Well, just as soon as we can find it. We're bound to run across it. Maybe any minute, you know."

"What?" He sat up death-faced. "You mean you don't know where it is? You mean we've just been going—no place?"

Bushbaby wrapped its hands over its ears. "Please! We can't recognize it from your description. So how can we go back there when we've never been there? If we just keep an ear out as we go we'll pick it up, you'll see."

His eyes rolled at them; he couldn't believe it.

"… ten to the eleventh times two suns in the galaxy … I don't know your velocity and range. Say, one per second. That's—that's six thousand years. Oh, no!" He put his head in his bloody hands. "I'll never see home again."

"Don't say it, baby." The golden body slid close. "Don't down the trip. We love you, No-Pain." They were all petting him now. "Happy, sing him! Touch, taste, feel. Joy!"

But there was no joy.

He took to sitting leaden and apart, watching for a sign.

"This time?"

No.

Not yet. Never.

Ten to the eleventh times two … fifty percent chance of finding Earth within three thousand years. It was the scouter all over again.

The lovepile reformed without him, and he turned his face away, not eating until they pushed food into his mouth. If he stayed totally inert, surely they would grow bored with him and put him out. No other hope. Finish me … soon.

They made little efforts to arouse him with fondlings, and now and then a harsh jolt. He lolled unresisting. End it, he prayed. But still they puzzled at him in the intervals of their games. They mean well, he thought. And they miss the stuff I brought them.

Bushbaby was coaxing.

"—first a suave effect, you know. Cryptic. And then a cascade of sweet and sour sparkling over the palate—"

He tried to shut it out. They mean well. Falling across the galaxy with a talking cookbook. Finish me.

"—but the arts of combination," Bushbaby chatted on. "Like moving food; e.g., sentient plants or small live animals, combining flavor with the frisson of movement—"

He thought of oysters. Had he eaten some once? Something about poison. The rivers of Earth. Did they still flow? Even if by some unimaginable chance they stumbled on it, would it be far in the past or future, a dead ball? Let me die.

"—and sound, that's amusing. We've picked up several races who combine musical effects with certain tastes. And there's the sound of oneself chewing, textures and viscosities. I recall some beings who sucked in harmonics. Or the sound of the food itself. One race I caught en passant did that, but with a very limited range. Crunchy. Crispy. Snap-crackle-pop. One wishes they had explored tonalities, glissando effects—"

He lunged up.

"What did you say? Snap-crackle-pop?"

"Why, yes, but—"

"That's it! That's Earth!" he yelled. "You picked up a goddamn breakfast-food commercial!"

He felt a lurch. They were scrambling up the wall.

"A what?" Bushbaby stared.

"Never mind—take me there! That's Earth, it has to be. You can find it again, can't you? You said you could," he implored, pawing at them. "Please!"

The Lovepile rocked. He was frightening everybody,

"Oh, please." He forced his voice smooth.

"But I only heard it for an instant," Bushbaby protested. "It would be terribly hard, that far back. My poor head!"

He was on his knees begging. "You'd love it," he pleaded. "We have fantastic food. Culinary poems you never heard of. Cordon bleu! Escoffier!" he babbled. "Talk about combinations, the Chinese do it four ways! Or is it the Japanese? Rijsttafel! Bubble-and-squeak! Baked Alaska, hot crust outside, inside co-o-old ice cream!"

Bushbaby's pink tongue flicked. Was he getting through?

He clawed his memory for foods he'd never heard of.

"Maguay worms in chocolate! Haggis and bagpipes, crystallized violets, rabbit Mephisto! Octopus in resin wine. Four-and-twenty blackbird pie! Cakes with girls in them. Kids seethed in their mothers' milk—wait, that's taboo. Ever hear of taboo foods? Long pig!"

Where was he getting all this? A vague presence drifted in his mind—his hands, the ridges, long ago. "Amanda," he breathed, racing on.

"Cormorants aged in manure! Ratatouille! Peaches iced in champagne!" Project, he thought. "Pâté of fatted goose liver studded with earth-drenched truffles, clothed in purest white lard!" He snuffled lustfully. "Hot buttered scones sluiced in whortleberry syrup!" He salivated. "Finnan haddie soufflé, oh, yes! Unborn baby veal pounded to a membrane and delicately scorched in black herb butter—"

Bushbaby and Ragglebomb were clutching each other, eyes closed. Muscle was mesmerized.

"Find Earth! Grape leaves piled with poignantly sweet wild fraises, clotted with Devon cream!"

Bushbaby moaned, rocking to and fro.

"Earth! Bitter endives wilted in chicken steam and crumbled bacon! Black gazpacho! Fruit of the Tree of Heaven!"

Bushbaby rocked harder, the butterfly clamped to its breast.

Earth, Earth, he willed with all his might, croaking "Bahklava! Gossamer puff paste and pistachio nuts dripping with mountain honey!"

Bushbaby pushed at Ragglebomb's head, and the pod seemed to twirl. "Ripe Cornice pears," he whispered. "Earth?"

"That's it." Bushbaby fell over panting. "Oh, those foods, I want every single one. Let's land!"

"Deep-dish steak and kidney pie," he breathed. "Pearled with crusty onion dumplings—"

"Land!" Ragglebomb squealed. "Eat, eat!"

The pod jarred. Solidity. Earth.

Home.

"LET ME OUT!"

He saw a pucker opening daylight in the wall and dived for it. His legs pumped, struck. Earth! Feet thudding, face uplifted, lungs gulping air. "Home!" he yelled.

—And went headlong on the gravel, arms and legs out of control. A cataclysm smote his inside.

"Help!"

His body arched, spewed vomit, he was flailing, screaming.

"Help, Help! What's wrong?"

Through his noise he heard an uproar behind him in the pod. He managed to roll, saw gold and black bodies writhing inside the open port. They were in convulsions too.

"Stop it! Don't move!" Bushbaby shrieked. "You're killing us!"

"Get us out," he gasped. "This isn't Earth."

His throat garroted itself on his breath, and the aliens moaned in empathy.

"Don't! We can't move," Bushbaby gasped. "Don't breathe, close your eyes quick!"

He shut his eyes. The awfulness lessened slightly.

"What is it? What's happening?"

"PAIN, YOU FOOL," thundered Muscle.

"This is your wretched Earth," Bushbaby wailed. "Now we know what they tied your pain nerves to. Get back in so we can go—carefully!"

He opened his eyes, got a glimpse of pale sky and scrubby bushes before his eyeballs skewered. The empaths screamed.

"Stop! Ragglebomb die!"

"My own home," he whimpered, clawing at his eyes. His whole body was being devoured by invisible flames, crushed, impaled, flayed. The pattern of Earth, he realized. Her unique air, her exact gestalt of solar spectrum, gravity, magnetic field, her every sight and sound and touch—that was what they'd tuned his pain-circuits for.

"Evidently they did not want you back," said Muscle's silent voice. "Get in."

"They can fix me, they've got to fix me—"

"They aren't here," Bushbaby shouted. "Temporal error. No snap-crackle-pop. You and your Baked Alaska—" Its voice broke pitifully. "Come back in so we can go!"

"Wait," he croaked. "When?"

He opened one eye, managed to see a rocky hillside before his forehead detonated. No roads, no buildings. Nothing to tell whether it was past or future. Not beautiful.

Behind him the aliens were crying out. He began to crawl blindly toward the pod, teeth clenching over salty gushes. He had bitten his tongue. Every move seared him; the air burned his guts when he had to breathe. The gravel seemed to be slicing his hands open, although no wounds appeared. Only pain, pain, pain from every nerve end.

"Amanda," he moaned, but she was not here. He crawled, writhed, kicked like a pinned bug toward the pod that held sweet comfort, the bliss of no-pain. Somewhere a bird called, stabbing his eardrums. His friends screamed.

"Hurry!"

Had it been a bird? He risked one look back.

A brown figure was sidling round the rocks.

Before he could see whether it was ape or human, female or male, the worst pain yet almost tore his brain out. He groveled helpless, hearing himself shriek. The pattern of his own kind. Of course, the central thing—it would hurt most of all. No hope of staying here.

"Don't! Don't! Hurry!"

He sobbed, scrabbling toward the Lovepile. The scent of the weeds that his chest crushed raked his throat. Marigolds, he thought. Behind the agony, lost sweetness.

He touched the wall of the pod, gasping knives. The torturing air was real air, his terrible Earth was real.

"GET IN QUICK!"

"Please, plea—" he babbled wordlessly, hauling himself up with lids clenched, fumbling for the port. The real sun of Earth rained acid on his flesh.

The port! Inside lay relief, would be No-Pain forever. Caress—joy—why had he wanted to leave them? His hand found the port.

Standing, he turned, opened both eyes.

The form of a dead limb printed a whiplash on his eyeballs. Jagged, ugly. Unendurable. But real—

To hurt forever?

"We can't wait!" Bushbaby wailed. He thought of its golden body flying down the light-years, savoring delight. His arms shook violently.

"Then go!" he bellowed and thrust himself violently away from the Lovepile.

There was an implosion behind him.

He was alone.

He managed to stagger a few steps forward before he went down.

The End

* * * *

The Water Sculptor

by George Zebrowski

Sitting there, watching the Earth below him from the panel of Station Six, Christian Praeger suddenly felt embarrassed by the planet's beauty. For the last eight hours he had watched the great storm develop in the Pacific, and he had wanted to share the view with someone, tell someone how beautiful he thought it was. He had told it to himself now for the fiftieth time.

The storm was a physical evil, a spinning hell that might reach the Asian mainland and kill thousands of starving billions. They would get a warning, for all the good that would do. Since the turn of the century there had been dozens of such storms, developing in places way off from the traditional storm cradles.

He looked at the delicate pinwheel. It was a part of the planet's ecology—whatever state that was in now. The arms of the storm reminded him of the theory which held the galaxy to be a kind of organized storm system which sucked in gas and dust at its center and sent it all out into the vast arms to condense into stars. And the stars were stormy laboratories building the stuff of the universe in the direction of huge molecules, from the inanimate and crystalline to the living and conscious. In the slowness of time it all looked stable, Praeger thought, but almost certainly all storms run down and die.

He looked at the clock above the center screen. There were six clocks around the watch room, one above each screen. The clock on the ceiling gave station time. His watch would be over in half an hour.

He looked at the sun screen. There all the dangerous rays were filtered out. He turned up the electronic magnification and for a long time watched the prominences flare up and die. He looked at the cancerous sunspots. The sight was hypnotic and frightening no matter how many times he had seen it. He put his hand out to the computer panel and punched in the routine information. Then he looked at the spectroscopic screens, small rectangles beneath the Earth watch monitors. He checked the time and set the automatic release for the ozone scatter-canisters to be dropped into the atmosphere. A few minutes later he watched them drop away from the station, following their fall until they broke in the upper atmosphere, releasing the precious ozone that would protect Earth's masses from the sun's deadly radiation. Early in the twentieth century a good deal of the natural ozone layer in the upper atmosphere had been stripped away as a result of atomic testing and the use of aerosol sprays, resulting in much genetic damage in the late eighties and nineties. But soon now the ozone layer would be back up to snuff.

When his watch ended ten minutes later, Praeger was glad to get away from the visual barrage of the screens. He made his way into one of the jutting spokes of the station where his sleep cubicle was located. Here it was a comfortable half-g all the time. He settled himself into his bunk and pushed the music button at his side, leaving his small observation and com screen on the ceiling turned off. Gradually the music filled the room and he closed his eyes. Mahler's weary song of Earth's misery enveloped his consciousness with pity and weariness, and love. Before he fell asleep he wished he might feel the Earth's atmosphere the way he felt his own skin.

I wish I could hear and feel the motion of gas molecules in the upper air, the whisperings of subtle energy transfers …

In the Pacific, weather control engineers guided the great storm into an electrostatic basket. The storm would provide usable power for the rest of its natural life.

· · · · ·

Praeger awoke a quarter of an hour before his watch was due to begin. He thought of his recent vacation Earthside, remembering the glowing volcano he had seen in Italy and how strange the silver shield of the Moon had looked through Earth's atmosphere. He remembered watching his own Station Six, his post in life, moving slowly across the sky, remembered one of the inner stations as it passed Julian's Station 233, one of the few private satellites, synchronous, fixed for all time over one point on the Earth. He should be able to talk to Julian soon, during his next off period. Even though Julian was an artist and a recluse, a water sculptor as he called himself, Julian and he were very much alike. At times he felt they were each other's conscience, two ex-spacemen in continual retreat from their home world. It was much more beautiful and bearable from out here. In all this silence he sometimes thought he could hear the universe breathing. It was alive, the whole starry cosmos throbbing.

If I could tear a hole in its body, it would bleed and cry out for a bandage …

He remembered the stifling milieu of Rome's streets: the great screens which went dead during his vacation, blinding the city, the crowds waiting on the stainless steel squares for the music to resume over the giant audios. They could not work without it. The music pounded its monotonous bass beat: the sound of some imprisoned beast beneath the city. The cab that waited for him was a welcome sight: an instrument for fleeing.

In the shuttle craft that brought him back to Station Six he read the little quotation printed on the back of every seat for the ten thousandth time; it told him that the shuttle dated back to the building of the giant Earth station system.

"… What we are building now is the nervous system of mankind … the communications network of which the satellites will be the nodal points. They will enable the consciousness of our grandchildren to flicker like lightning back and forth across the face of the planet …"

· · · · ·

Praeger got up from his bunk and made his way back to the watch room. He was glad now to get away from his own thoughts and return to the visual stimulation of the watch screens. Soon he would be talking to Julian again; they would share each other's friendship in the universe of the spoken word as they shared a silent past every time they looked at each other across the void.

Julian's large green eyes reminded him each time of the view out by Neptune, the awesome size of the sea green giant, the ship outlined against it, and the fuel tank near it blossoming into a red rose, silently; the first ship had been torn in half. Julian had been in space, coming over to Praeger's command ship when it happened, to pick up a spare part for the radio-telescope. They blamed Julian because they had to blame someone. After all, he had been in command. Chances were that something had already gone wrong, and that nothing could have stopped it. Only one man had been lost.

Julian and Praeger were barred from taking any more missions; unfairly, they thought. There were none coming up that either of them would have been interested in anyway, but at the time they put up a fight. Some fool official said publicly that they were unfit to represent mankind beyond the solar system—a silly thing to say, especially when the UN had just put a ban on extra-solar activities. They were threatened with dishonorable discharges, but they were also world heroes; the publicity would have been embarrassing.

Julian believed that most of mankind was unfit for just about everything. With his small fortune and the backing of patrons he built his bubble station, number 233 in the registry; his occupation now was "sculptor," and the tax people came to talk to him every year. To Julian Earth was a mudball, where ten percent of the people lived off the labor of the other ninety percent. Oh, the brave ones shine, he told Praeger once, but the initiative that should have taken men to the stars had been ripped out of men's hearts. The whole star system was rotting, overblown with grasping things living in their own wastes. The promise of ancient myths, three thousand years old, had not been fulfilled …

In the watch room Praeger watched the delicate clouds which enveloped the Earth. He could feel the silence, and the slowness of the changing patterns was reassuring. Given time and left alone, the air would clean itself of all man-made wastes, the rivers would run clear again, and the oceans would regain their abundance of living things.

When his watch was over he did not wait for his relief to come. He didn't like the man. The feeling was mutual and by leaving early they could each avoid the other as much as was possible. Praeger went directly to his cubicle, lay down on his bunk, and opened the channel, both audio and visual, on the ceiling com and observation screen.

Julian's face came on promptly on the hour.

"EW-CX233 here," Julian said.

"EW-CXOO6," Praeger said. Julian looked his usual pale self, green eyes with the look of other times still in them. "Hello, Julian. What have you been doing?"

"There was a reporter here. I made a tape of the whole thing, if you can call it an interview. Want to hear it?"

"Go ahead. My vacation was the usual. I don't know what's wrong with me."

Julian's face disappeared and the expressionless face of the reporter appeared. The face smiled just before it spoke.

"Julian—that's the name you are known by?"

"Yes."

"Will you describe your work for our viewers, Julian?"

"I am a water sculptor. I make thin plastic molds and fill them with water. Then I put them out into the void, and when they solidify I go out and strip off the plastic. You can see most of my work orbiting my home."

"Isn't the use of water expensive?"

"I re-use much of it. And I am independently wealthy."

"What's the point of leaving your work outside?"

"On Earth the wind shapes rock. Here space dust shapes the ice, mutilates it, and I get the effect I want. Then I photograph the results in color and make more permanent versions here inside."

Praeger watched Julian and the reporter float over to a large tank of water.

"Inside here," Julian said, "you see the permanent figures. When I spin the tank, the density of each becomes apparent, and each takes its proper place in the suspension."

"Do you ever work with realistic subjects?"

"No."

"Do you think you could make a likeness of the Earth?"

"Why?" Praeger saw Julian smile politely. The reporter suddenly looked uncomfortable. The tape ended and Julian's face reappeared.

"See what they send up here to torment me?"

"Is the interview going to be used anywhere?" Praeger asked.

"They were vague about it."

"Have you been happy?"

Julian didn't answer. For a few moments both screens were still portraits. Both men knew all the old complaints, all the old pains. Both knew that the UN was doing secret extra-solar work, and they both knew that it was the kind of work that would revive them, just as it might give the Earth a new lease on life. But they would never have a share of it. Only a few more years of routine service, Praeger knew, and then retirement—to what? To a crowded planet.

Both men thought the same thought at that moment—the promise of space was dead, unless men moved from the solar system.

"Julian," Praeger said softly, "I'll call you after my next watch." Julian nodded and the screen turned gray.

On impulse Praeger pushed the observation button for a look at Station 233. It was a steel and plastic ball one hundred feet in diameter. Praeger knew that most of Julian's belongings floated in the empty center, tied together with line. When he needed something he would bounce around the tiny universe of objects until he found it. Some parts of the station were transparent. Praeger remembered peering out once to catch sight of one of Julian's ice sculptures and seeing a pale white ghost peer in at him for a moment before passing out of sight.

Praeger watched the silent ball that housed his friend of a lifetime. Eventually, he knew, he would join Julian in his retirement. A man could live a long time in zero-g.

The alarm in his cubicle rang and Higgins's voice came over the audio. "That fool! Doesn't he see that orbital debris?"

Praeger had perhaps ten seconds left to see Station 233 whole. The orbital junk hit hard and the air was gone into the void. The water inside, Praeger knew, had frozen instantly. Somewhere inside, the ruptured body of Julian floated among his possessions even as the lights on the station winked out.

Praeger was getting into his suit, knowing there was no chance to save Julian. He made his way down the emergency passage from his cubicle, futilely dragging the spare suit behind him.

The airlock took an age to cycle. When it opened he gave a great kick with his feet and launched himself out toward the other station. Slowly it grew in front of him, until he was at the airlock. He activated the mechanism, and when the locks were both open he pushed himself in toward the center of the little world.

Starlight illuminated Julian's white, ruptured face. Through the clear portion of the station Praeger saw the Earth's shadow eclipse the full Moon: a bronze shield.

· · · · ·

For a long time after Praeger drifted in the starlit shell. He stared at the dark side of the Earth, at the cities sparkling like fireflies; never sleeping, billions living in metal caves; keeping time with the twenty-four hour workday; and where by night the mannequins danced beneath the flickering screens, their blood filled with strange potions which would give them their small share of counterfeit happiness.

Praeger tried to brush away the tears floating inside his helmet, but with no success. They would have to wait until he took his suit off. When the emergency crew arrived an hour later, he took charge.

The station was a hazard now and would have to be removed. He agreed. All this would be a funeral rite for Julian, he thought, and he was sure the artist would approve.

He removed all of Julian's written material and sent it down to his publishers, then put Julian's body in a plastic sack and secured it to the north pole of the station bubble.

He left the sculptures inside. On the body Praeger found a small note:

When we grow up we'll see the Earth not as a special place, but just as one place. Then home will be the starry cosmos. Of course this has always been the case. It is we who will have changed. I have nothing else to hope for.

The hulk continued in its orbit for three weeks, until Praeger sent a demolition crew out to it and blew it out of existence. He watched on the monitor as they set the charges that would send it into a new orbit. Station 233 would leave the solar system at an almost ninety-degree angle to the plane of the ecliptic, on a parabolic path which would not bring it back to Sol for thousands of years. It would be a comet someday, Praeger thought.

He watched the charges flare up, burn for thirty seconds, and die. Slowly the bubble moved off toward the top of the screen. He watched until it disappeared from the screen. In twenty-four hours it would be beyond the boundaries of Earth. Interstellar gas and dust would scar it out of all recognition: a torn seed on the wind.

The End

© 1970 Lancer Books, Inc. as "The Water Sculptor of Station 233." First published in Infinity No.1 edited by Robert Hoskins. Copyright reassigned to the author 1972. Revision copyright © 1985 George Zebrowski.

* * * *

Under the Hollywood Sign

by Tom Reamy

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I noticed him. I suppose I had been subliminally aware of him for some time, though he was just standing there with the rest of the crowd. Anyway, I had other things on my mind: a Pinto and a Buick were wrapped around each other like lettuce leaves. The paramedics had two of them out, wrapped in plastic sheets waiting for the meat wagon, and were cutting out a third with a torch. He appeared to be in the Buick, but you couldn't really tell.

My partner Carnehan and I were holding back the crowd of gawkers. A couple of bike cops in their gestapo uniforms were keeping the traffic moving on Cahuenga, not letting any of them stop and get out. But there were still twenty or twenty-five of them standing there—eyes bright, noses crinkled, mouths disapproving.

All except him.

That's one of the reasons I noticed him in particular. He wasn't wearing that horrified, fascinated expression they all seem to have. He might have been watching anything—or nothing. His face was smooth and placid. I think that's the first time I ever saw a face totally without expression. It wasn't dull or blank or lifeless. No, there was vitality there. It just simply wasn't doing anything at the moment.

And he was … Don't get the wrong idea—my crotch doesn't get tight at the sight of an attractive young man. But there's only one word to describe him—beautiful!

I've seen my share of pretty boys—the ones that flutter and the ones that don't. It seems the prettier they are, the more trouble they get into. But he wasn't that kind of beautiful.

Even though the word is used these days to describe practically everything, it was the only one that fitted. I thought at first he was very young: nineteen, twenty, not more than twenty-one. But then I got the impression he was much older, though I don't know why, because he still looked twenty. He was about five-ten, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds—one of those bodies the hero of the book always has but that you never see in real life.

His hair was red, or it might have just been the light from the flashers. There were no peculiarities of feature; just a neutral perfection. I've heard it said that perfect beauty is dull, that it takes an imperfection to make a face interesting. Whoever said it had never seen this kid.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the guys with the torch, neither interested nor uninterested. I guess I was staring at him, because his head turned and he looked directly at me.

I could smell the rusty odor of the antifreeze dribbling from the busted radiators and the sharp ozone of the acetylene and the always-remembered smell of blood. A coyote began yipping somewhere in the darkness.

Then a couple of kids got too close and I had to hustle them out of the way. When I looked back, he was no longer there.

They finally got the third one out of the Buick. When they pulled him out I could see the wet brown stain all over the seat of his pants where his bowels had relaxed in death. The ambulance picked up all three of them and the wrecker hauled off the two cars still merged as one. Part of the mess was dragging on the street and I could hear the scraping for a long time. The bike cops did a few flashy turns and roared away. The crowd started to wander off, and Carnehan and I began sweeping the broken glass from the pavement.

But there was only one thing I could think of: I couldn't remember the color of his eyes.

Nothing much happened the rest of the night. We cruised the Boulevard a few times, but there wasn't anything going on. A few hustlers still lounged around the Gold Cup and the Egyptian, never giving up hope. There was no point in hassling them—they'd just say they were waiting for a bus, and we couldn't prove they weren't. It was a pretty scruffy-looking bunch this late in the morning. The presentable ones had scored a long time ago. You could probably get most of these with an offer of breakfast.

Carnehan reached behind the seat and pulled an apple from the paper sack he always kept back there. He took a bite that sounded like a rifle shot and then offered me one. "No, thanks."

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away." He grinned and took another bite.

"You're keeping the entire AMA at bay."

He laughed; partly chewed apple dribbled down his chin. He wiped if off with the back of his hand. I kept my eyes on the street. "Why don't you eat soft apples? They're quiet."

"I like the hard ones."

We stopped a car with only one taillight and gave the guy a warning ticket.

Then the sun was coming up. It was hitting the tops of the Hollywood Hills and illuminating the Hollywood sign. It looked decent from this far away. You couldn't tell it was made of rotting timbers and sagging sheet metal clinging in the wind. From here you couldn't see the obscenities scrawled on it.

We went back to the station, reported, and then into the locker room. The rest of the graveyard shift were wandering in, showering, and changing out of their uniforms. Cunningham has the locker next to mine. He had been on the Pansy Patrol and was wearing a shirt unbuttoned to the waist, no underwear, and pants so tight you could count every hair on his ass.

Wharton, one of the police psychiatrists, was leaning against the lockers talking to him. Doc was on his favorite theme again. He was telling Cunningham why he, Cunningham, was so successful on the Pansy Patrol. The fags recognized a kindred spirit; the fags always knew one of their own kind; if Cunningham would only stop fooling himself, just stop deluding himself that he was straight, just know himself, just start living a conscious life, he would be a happier, more fulfilled person.

I had been on the Pansy Patrol with Cunningham a few times and had seen him operate. I wasn't completely sure Doc was wrong. Cunningham was peeling off the tight pants and I watched in fascination, although I'd seen it before, as the sizable bulge in his crotch stayed with the pants.

Poor Cunningham.

He was standing there naked with a slight smile on his face, putting the pants neatly on a hanger, listening to Doc's clarinet voice. He looked a lot like the cop on Adam-12, whatever his name is, the kid. The boys had even called him "Adam-12" for a while until they got tired of it. I couldn't keep from comparing him to the guy I had seen at the wreck, but Cunningham didn't compare at all. He was just a good-looking kid with a slim, muscular body and not much equipment. But it didn't seem to bother him. He always grinned and said it wasn't size that counted, it was technique.

I took off my own pants and looked at myself. I wasn't as young or as good-looking as Cunningham, but I did all right on the Pansy Patrol. I was bulkier and more heavily muscled and hairier; I guess I appealed to the rough-trade crowd. I was never very comfortable without underwear, and thank God I didn't have to wear padding.

Wharton finished his catalogue of Cunningham's emotional failings. Cunningham looked at me and winked. "I don't really know anything about it, Doc, but maybe the reason I'm not interested in sex with another man is because I'm just not interested in sex with another man."

Doc's lips got a little tight and his face was slightly flushed. I knew Cunningham had been reading Kingsley Amis again and had probably maneuvered Doc into the whole conversation—and Doc was eminently maneuverable. I'd heard most of it before, so I got a towel and started for the showers.

Cunningham followed me and Wharton followed him.

"You're right, Cunningham, you don't know anything about it!"

I turned on the water and began soaping. Cunningham got next to me and Doc stood at the door, still talking. Cunningham looked at me and grinned and said loudly, "Sorry, Doc, I can't hear you with the water running!"

There were about ten other guys in the shower, grinning at each other. Cunningham leaned toward me. "Hey, Rankin, you notice how Doc always manages to look in the showers?"

I shrugged.

"According to him, everyone is either a fag or a closet queen."

"What about himself?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes and laughed. "Getting him to talk about himself is like catching fairies in a saucepan."

Carnehan came in, pitching an apple core into the wastebasket. I could see why he had never been on the Pansy Patrol. Then … I don't know why I thought of it, but the thought crossed my mind. I wondered what the guy at the wreck looked like naked.

I left the station and got into my five-year-old Dart. It looked like a nice day. There was enough wind from the ocean to clear away the smog. Of course, the wind was packing it into the San Gabriel Valley, but that was their problem, not mine. I went straight home and went to bed.

I was scrambling some eggs and watching The Price is Right when the phone rang. They were doing the one where the screaming dame has to zero in on the prices of two objects within thirty seconds. When she names a price, the MC says "Higher" or "Lower." This keeps up until she guesses the price. You can get it in ten guesses maximum. She started at a hundred on a color TV and worked up ten dollars at a time.

"Hundred and ten!"

"Higher!"

"Hundred and twenty!"

"Higher!"

"Hundred and thirty!"

"Higher!"

She got to three-seventy before her time ran out. Dumb dame!

It was Carnehan on the phone. "Hey, Lou, Margaret wants you to come over for dinner tonight."

"Hell, Carnehan, I wish you'd said something this morning. I've already made other plans." You stupid jerk! Don't you ever wonder why your wife is always inviting me to dinner?

"Got a heavy date, Lou?"

"Something like that. Some other time, Carnehan." No other time, Carnehan. Margaret's a pretty good-looking dame for her age, but not good enough to take chances with. You didn't even notice how her hand stayed under the table all through dinner last time.

"Margaret says how about Wednesday?"

"I'll have to let you know later." And you never even had a suspicion about what goes on after you fall asleep in front of the TV, Carnehan. If you ever found out …

"Okay, Lou. I'll remind you Tuesday night."

"You do that." And I'll have a good excuse ready. Not that I give a good goddamn if you do find out, but you could make a stink in the department. I don't want to lose my job, Carnehan. I like being a cop.

"'Bye, Lou. See you later."

"'Bye, Carnehan." I hung up the phone in time to see a granny-lady have an orgasm over winning a dune buggy.

I usually eat dinner about eight o'clock at David's. I know it's a fag hangout but the food's good and, since I let it be known I was a cop, the service is even better. I spotted him as I was leaving about nine. He went into the gay bar next to David's. It was called Goliath's, of course. I only glimpsed him from behind but I was sure of the red hair and body. Wouldn't you know he'd be a queer!

I paid my dollar and a quarter cover charge and went through the black curtains after him. I don't know what I was planning to do, but I hadn't been able to get him out of my mind. I stood for a moment, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom and my ears to the plaster-cracking music. There were three small stages with naked boys dancing on them, wiggling their little round butts for all they were worth. There were also five screens showing movies of naked boys doing everything it's physically possible for naked boys to do and a few things I would have thought impossible before I joined the force.

Then there were the customers. A few were at the bar and a few were scattered around but most of them were packed like Vienna sausages against one wall. There was plenty of room and no need for the press of bodies—no need but one, and the busy hands told what that was. A few watched the movies but mostly they watched each other. One of the dancers was waving around a hardon and was getting some attention but not much. A couple of dykes at the bar watched him. I guess this is the only chance they have to see one.

I spotted the back of the redhead in the middle of the mass, so I waded in. There's no way to move through something like that. No one can move out of your way; they're just as trapped as you are. You just wait and move with the current because the pack is in constant eddy as they move from one body to the next, trying to touch everything.

It was no more than thirty seconds before I felt feather touches on my ass. I thought about my wallet, but I knew that wasn't what they were after. I pushed away the first hand that closed on my crotch and saw a pout of disappointment flicker across a face in front of mine. I put my wallet in my shirt pocket anyway.

After five minutes and fifty gropes, I finally reached the redhead, but he was turned the other way. I was pressed against him and could feel his hard body. By pushing with determination, I managed to get to the side of him. He was standing face to face with another guy. Both of them had their eyes closed and their mouths slightly open, occasionally coming together in a lazy kiss. Their hands were out of sight, but I could feel the movement. It wasn't him.

This was one of the pretty ones. I might even have said beautiful if I hadn't seen the other one. But, like Cunningham, he was ordinary in comparison.

He opened his eyes and saw me watching him and he smiled dreamily. I felt a hand massaging my crotch but I couldn't tell for sure if it was him. I was so disappointed I didn't push it away. Then my zipper went down and fingers expertly scooped everything out. The press was so tight I couldn't even get my arms down, much less move away. Whoever was working on me was very good and I couldn't help getting it up.

Jesus Christ!

I had a wild urge to take out my badge and shove it in every face in sight. I enjoyed my mental image of the panic it would create. But I didn't do it. I forced my arms down, pushed the clutching hands away, closed my pants, and got the hell out of there.

When I went into the locker room about eleven thirty, Carnehan already had his uniform on, sitting there reading a copy of the Advocate and eating an apple. He looked up when I rattled my locker.

"Hey, Lou! You missed a great dinner."

"It couldn't be helped, Carnehan."

"Don't forget about Wednesday."

"I won't."

I took off my shirt and remembered my wallet was still in the pocket. I put it on the shelf and took off my pants. I grabbed a towel and headed for the shower. I felt clammy. I must have sweated off a pound in that damn bar. Those groping bodies can generate a lot of heat.

Carnehan laughed out loud. He came toward me waving the newspaper. "Hey, Lou! Did you see this cartoon in the Advocate?"

"Why in hell would I be reading the Advocate?"

"Look, there's these two cops standing before a judge with a handcuffed fag and a hooker. One of the cops is saying, 'But Your Honor, you can get hurt chasing robbers and murderers.' Isn't that a scream?"

"Ha ha," I said and went on to the showers. He started rushing around the room showing it to everyone else.

I was almost finished when Cunningham came in. He turned on the water and stood under it, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed and a sappy grin on his face.

"You look like the cat that swallowed the aviary," I said.

He sighed. "I am exhausted!"

"Let me guess from what."

"I met the most fantastic girl! A waitress at the Hamburger Hamlet on the Strip. I'm gonna give it two weeks and, if I'm still alive, I'm gonna propose." He rubbed his hand between his legs. "I tell you, Rankin, I didn't know I had it in me. Boy, I'd like to see Wharton try to convince her I'm a repressed homosexual."

I laughed dutifully. He began soaping and glanced down at me.

"You look a little shriveled up yourself. Have a big night?" He grinned good-naturedly, wanting to share his sexual excitement.

"Yeah. Some women are just as happy with size as they are with technique."

He looked a little wistful for a moment, then the grin returned. "Shit! If I had your size and my technique, I'd quit the force, put an ad in the Free Press, and open a screwing service."

And I wondered about him again. With that face and that body, did he worry about size and technique? How did women react to him? Were they intimidated by his beauty? Was he as beautiful in bed?

· · · · ·

I saw him going into the Vogue Record Shop on the Boulevard. This time there was no mistake. I told Carnehan to park the car and meet me at the entrance. When I went through the turnstiles, I saw him leaning against the end of the counter. I walked into the book department and watched him from behind a rack of paperbacks.

He had his back to me and it took me a moment to figure out what he was doing. The cashier was playing the Symphonie Fantastique—it was the passage where the two shepherds are calling to each other on their flutes and, at the end, one doesn't answer—and he was standing there listening to the music. Then he turned slightly and I could see his face.

I could feel the skin crawling on the back of my neck.

It wasn't the same one!

It was all there: the red hair, the magnificent body, the neutral beauty of the bland face. But the features were different. He had to be the other one's brother, they were so alike.

The lights in the store were very bright. No one else was in the place but the cashier and she had her nose in a paperback volume of Toynbee. His clothes were clean and neatly pressed, but they were old and hadn't cost much when they were new. His hair was neat and not very long. His face was so smooth I doubted that he shaved. And his eyes were gray—just as beautiful and as neutral as the rest of him.

Finally the record ended and he left. I glanced at the book I had been holding. The cover was a photograph of Burt Reynolds standing with his back to the camera looking over his shoulder. He was wearing nothing but a football jersey, with his bare ass hanging out. I closed the book, put it back on the rack, and for some reason thought of Betty Grable.

The cashier never even looked up when he went out. Carnehan, standing on the sidewalk looking confused, never glanced at him as he walked by. The girl was watching me. She smiled but her eyes were guarded.

"Did you know the man who just went out?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

She glanced out the door, but he had turned left toward Las Palmas. She looked back at me. "I don't think so, officer. Did he do something?"

"No. I just thought I'd seen him before. Maybe in the movies or on television."

She shrugged. "Movie stars come in here all the time. Jo Anne Worley was in yesterday. Wendell Burton comes in every once in a while."

"Thanks." I left before she could give me a complete catalogue of the celebrities she'd seen. She raised her voice as I went out the door.

"Chad Everett was in a couple of weeks ago, but I was off that day."

I looked down the Boulevard but didn't see him. I told Carnehan to wait for me and went after him. At Las Palmas I looked in every direction, but there was no sign of him. The hustlers standing around the Gold Cup pretended to ignore me, but a couple of drag queens gave me defiant looks.

· · · · ·

There was another bad one that night on the off-ramp at Western. Four cars were scattered half a block. There were seven dead and two others who probably wouldn't see morning. And there were two of them in the crowd. Two different ones.

I motioned Carnehan over.

"Yeah, Lou?"

"Carnehan. See those two guys over there, the ones with red hair?"

He looked confused. "Where?"

"You see the black dame in the yellow dress? The one with pigtails all over her head that make her look like an upside-down johnny brush?"

He snickered. "Sure."

"One of them is standing right beside her. On her left. You see him?"

Slowly: "Yeah."

"What does he look like?"

He looked up at me. "What d'ya mean?"

"No! Keep looking at him!" He looked back. "You still see him?"

"Yeah."

"Describe him to me."

He thought for a moment. "Don't forget. Tomorrow's Wednesday. Margaret's expecting you for dinner."

"Carnehan! Concentrate on the redheaded guy. Don't think about anything else. What does he look like?"

"I don't know. He's just a guy."

"How old is he?"

"It's hard to tell. The light's not too good."

"Is he under thirty?"

He considered. "Yeah."

"Under twenty-five?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so."

"Under twenty?"

He was silent for a moment. Good old Carnehan. His little pea brain was doing its best. "Maybe … but probably not."

"What about his face?"

"What about it?"

"Is it an ugly face?"

"No."

"Is it a handsome face?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"How handsome?"

"Golly, Lou."

"Very handsome?"

"Yeah."

"Better-looking than Cunningham?"

"Yeah." His voice suddenly got excited. "Hey, Lou, is that a movie star or something?"

We went through the whole thing again with the other one. Carnehan finally saw them the same way I did, but he couldn't remember the one at the record shop. Later I asked him if he remembered the two good-looking redheaded guys.

"Sure. How could you forget somebody who looks like that? Especially when there's two of 'em. Hey, you suppose they're twins?"

"Are they still there?"

"Naw. They musta left," he said, looking right at them. "Don't forget about dinner Wednesday night."

Then they both turned and looked at me with their expressionless eyes. Or were they expressionless? I thought I saw recognition and speculation, but I wasn't sure. Carnehan was right. The light was bad.

They kept us hopping the rest of the night. We'd barely get through with one before we were sent to another.

An old hotel on Vermont burned to the ground. Half the department was there, keeping the curious out from underfoot, rerouting traffic. My eyes were burning and watery from the smoke, but it didn't keep me from seeing them.

I counted seven. Seven beautiful redheaded young men with perfect bodies.

I leaned against my locker in pure exhaustion, wondering if I should take a shower. I was grimy from smoke and dust, but I was so tired I only wanted to go to bed. Cunningham came in, looking as beat as I felt.

He looked at me and sighed, shaking his head.

"What are you doing in uniform?" I asked, not really caring. "You off the Pansy Patrol?"

He started undressing. "Yeah. They called us in about three. What got into people last night, anyway? Seems like everybody was trying to get themselves killed."

The same thought had crossed my mind, but not seriously. I had other things to think about.

· · · · ·

Margaret called herself the next afternoon to remind me about dinner. But I'd already laid out my plan of action.

"I'm sorry, Margaret. I was just about to call you. I'm leaving for Texas in about two hours. My father is very ill, and I've taken a leave of absence from the department."

"Oh, Lou, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?"

"No, thank you, Margaret. Everything's taken care of."

"At least let me drive you to the airport."

"I'm not flying. I'll need my car when I get there."

"How long will you be gone?"

"I don't know. My father isn't expected to live …" I let my voice break a little. "Say so long to Carnehan for me."

"Of course, Lou. You're sure there's nothing I can do?"

"No. Nothing. Good-bye, Margaret."

"'Bye, Lou, dear."

Well, it wasn't all a lie. My father had taken three months to die seventeen years ago when I was in high school, but nobody out here knew that. The lieutenant hadn't much liked the idea of giving me an indefinite leave of absence, but what could he do? I packed enough supplies in the Dart to last two people six weeks, paid my landlady two months in advance, drove up La Brea to the Boulevard, and put my car in the underground garage near Graumann's Chinese. I walked down to the Vogue and caught a double feature.

It was dark when I came out. I could hear sirens in several directions. I got in the car and drove to David's for something to eat. All I had to do was get in one place and wait, no driving around, no taking extra chances of being seen.

I had almost finished eating when I heard the sirens. I didn't pay much attention because there would be plenty of time and plenty of sirens, if tonight was anything like last night. When I came out of the restaurant there were little bunches of people standing on the corners looking south down La Brea. I walked over and saw a crowd around the Gordon, standing in that tense way they do when somebody's had it. This was going to be a lot easier than I'd thought.

I crossed over Melrose past the camera store and eased my way through the press of bodies. The colored neon of the marquee made the blood look black. The guy was under a blanket, flat on his back on the sidewalk, one brown hand poking out from under the edge. The hand had blood on it, and a spot had soaked through the blanket. More of it was smeared around on the concrete.

One of the cops talking to a couple of people was named Henderson. I only knew him vaguely, so he probably wouldn't know I was supposed to be on my way to Texas. I began sorting through a number of excuses for my delay just in case.

He saw me and waved. The patrol car was behind him at the curb, the flashers turning hypnotically but losing out to the bright marquee. A young Chicano sat in the back seat looking dazed and surly. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and I saw the glint of cuffs. A girl was hunched in the front seat weeping.

Henderson finished with his witnesses and started toward me. "Hello, Rankin. Don't you get enough of this on duty?"

"Just passing by. What happened?"

He groaned and shook his head. "Couple of kids in a knife fight over a señorita. Wonder if she was worth it."

"The way she's carrying on, the wrong one musta lost."

"Yeah." Another siren approached. "Here's the ambulance. See you around, Rankin." He walked away, being very official, moving the onlookers back another inch.

I looked over the crowd and saw him almost immediately. He was about twelve feet from me, his eyes on the blanket. As usual no one was paying him the slightest attention. I edged toward him as they put the body in the ambulance. The crowd began drifting away, but I kept my eyes on that beautiful boy. I wasn't sure if I had seen him before, they all looked so much alike.

He turned and walked north on La Brea. I followed him across Melrose. A few people were still milling around the intersection, but I couldn't let him get too far away from my car.

I overtook him, touched his arm, and said, "Excuse me." I had my badge in my hand when he turned with a startled look.

My face was only a foot from his. I saw the clear, healthy skin and the bewildered gray eyes that looked at me with recognition. All the artists for the last thousand years have been trying to paint that face on angels, but their poor, fumbling attempts never came close. It was only for an instant, but I had to look away or be overwhelmed.

The traffic on La Brea moved by us silently, like a movie with the sound turned off. But, oddly enough, I could hear the hum and click of the traffic lights as they changed. I realized I was still stupidly holding my badge in my hand and put it away. I forced myself to look at him again.

"Will you please come down to the station with me …" My voice cracked. Come on, Rankin, get hold of yourself! "It's purely a routine matter."

"What do you want?"

It was only four words, but I realized I'd never heard one of them speak. How can you describe music to a deaf person? Any actor in the world would trade his prick for that voice. My own words stopped, and we looked at each other. Get your shit together! You're acting like some poor fairy who's just been propositioned by Robert Redford.

"I can make … this official if you refuse to cooperate." His shoulders sagged slightly. He nodded.

He followed me to the Dart without protest. I had been a little worried because I wasn't in uniform and wasn't in a squad car, but he didn't seem to notice. I had my revolver handy when I handcuffed him to the door handle, but he sat slumped in the seat looking at nothing.

I took the Hollywood Freeway to the Pasadena Freeway. I was going down Colorado Boulevard when he said, "Why are you doing this to me?"

I glanced at him, but he was still looking at nothing. I almost turned the car around. I wish I had, but I didn't.

He didn't say anything else as I got on the Foothill Freeway and headed east through the San Gabriel Valley. It was almost dawn when I pulled off the pavement winding up Mt. Baldy. I opened the gate to the gravel road down the canyon. I drove through and put on the padlock I had brought with me. I drove up the canyon a couple of miles until the road ended at a cabin. It belonged to a director friend of mine who was on location in Jamaica and would be for several months. He'd let me use it before. Besides, what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

I had to break a window to get in, but that could be fixed. I'd brought a pane of glass and a cutter. I turned on the electricity at the meter box and took him in. I took the chain I had brought, handcuffed one end to his ankle and the other end around the commode. Now he could use the bathroom and the bed, but the chain wasn't long enough to reach the bedroom door or the window. He didn't complain through any of this. He acted as if he didn't even know I was there.

I unloaded the car, put on a pot of coffee, scrambled some eggs, and tried to get him to eat something but he wouldn't. I finished eating, unpacked my clothes, took a shower in the other bathroom and went to sleep in the other bedroom.

He still wouldn't eat when I woke up. I took another shower and shaved. I moved a chair just out of the limit of the chain—he hadn't given me any trouble, but I wasn't taking chances—and sat down to watch him.

He was still sitting on the side of the bed, where he'd been when I put on the chain, his magnificent body relaxed and his beautiful face calm. His cheeks were as smooth as ever. I knew for sure he didn't have to shave. His hands were folded in his lap and his eyes seemed to be on them. For two hours he didn't move except for gentle breathing. I didn't realize so much time had passed until the room began to get dark.

I turned on the lights and went to him, holding out my hand. "Give me your wallet." He acted as if he hadn't heard me. "Give me your wallet," I said again, louder.

He looked up at me then, puzzlement in his eyes. "I don't have one."

"Stand up," I said. He hesitated for a moment, then stood. I went over him quickly. He was telling the truth. He had no wallet; nothing but empty pockets.

I returned to my chair and sat, watching him. He stood where I had left him, stood as calmly as he had sat. "How many of you are there?" I said. He didn't seem to hear. "Look, we might as well get a few things straight. You're gonna tell me everything I want to know. We can do it easy or we can do it hard. It's up to you."

He stood for a moment in the same position, then looked at me. "I don't know." His voice still made the hair on my arms stand up.

"You must have some idea. A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? A million?" He shook his head. Maybe he wasn't going to let it be easy after all. I let it go; there was plenty of time. "I can fix you something to eat if you want. I'm not trying to starve you to death. Aren't you hungry?" He said nothing.

"Look! It won't do any good to go on a hunger strike. Not one damn bit of good!" No response. I used my buddy voice. "You can have anything you want. Just name it."

He looked at me quickly. "I want to leave."

I laughed. "Anything but that."

He looked back at his hands. "I would like to bathe."

"Sure. Go ahead."

He moved his foot; the chain rattled. I dug the key out of my pocket and pitched it to him. "Unlock the cuff and throw the key back." I picked up the revolver. He unlocked the chain and tossed me the key. He started for the bathroom.

"Wait!" My heart was beating too hard. "Undress in here and leave the clothes." My mouth was dry and I swallowed. He took off his shirt and hung it on the back of the chair. He took off the shoes and socks and the pants and jockey shorts. His back was toward me, but it wasn't modesty. He just happened to be standing that way. Michelangelo, you bumbling incompetent! If you could see this, you'd take a hammer to all those misshapen pieces of rock you spent so much time on.

He took a step toward the bathroom. I made a croaking sound in my throat. I tried again.

"Stop!" He stopped. "Turn around." He turned. I felt the blood singing in my ears. I don't know how long I looked at him. He stood unselfconsciously, totally unconcerned by my staring or his own nakedness. There wasn't a blemish on him. Light reddish-gold hair was scattered on his arms, legs, and chest. You could hardly see it until it caught the light. There was a darker, thicker patch of pubic hair, and he was uncircumcised. He wasn't as large as me, or as small as Cunningham. Either way would have been wrong, out of proportion, a staggering flaw. My own that I'd always been so proud of—it seemed now gross and mutilated. I felt the pressure of it and realized I had a hardon.

The gun was pointing at him. What would he look like with a bullet there? Nothing between those perfect thighs but blood. Would he writhe screaming? Would that inhumanly placid face show human agony? "Get out of here," I said.

While he showered, I put the clothes in a grocery sack and stuck them in the closet of my bedroom. When he came out of the bathroom, he looked at the empty chair, then at me.

"You won't need them. Put the cuff back on." He sat in the chair, snapped the cuff around his ankle. I could take it only for an hour. I got my bathrobe and tossed it to him. He put it on, but only because I told him to. It didn't seem to matter to him one way or the other.

I wondered if he had ever smiled. What would those perfect lips look like with a big, happy grin on them? I could feel goosebumps popping out on my arms.

· · · · ·

For three weeks I watched him do nothing. He sat in the chair and sometimes lay on the bed, but I never saw him sleep. I watched him and asked questions, but the only things I learned for sure were: he didn't eat or use the toilet. He ignored me except when I forced him to answer a question. And the answers were usually meaningless.

Some days neither of us said a word. I would just watch his face and never tire of it, the way you never tire of looking at a perfect piece of art. Then, suddenly, it would be night again. He bathed every day, but I never let him remove the robe until he was in the bathroom. I didn't want to go through that again.

Sometimes I would force him to speak—not because I expected to learn anything, but because I wanted to hear his voice again. I was trying to find out what he did when he wasn't siren-chasing. I said something inane like: "Why aren't you in the movies? You wouldn't even need talent; with your looks you could make a fortune. The movies or television would eat you up."

He turned his head toward me. "My looks?"

"Don't you know how beautiful you are?"

"I'm ugly." His fantastic voice colored the words with subtle shades of despair. "Everything is ugly."

I studied him closely. I think he believed what he said. "Don't you want to be rich? Don't you want the luxuries of life?"

"There's no point."

"Why not?"

"We're here such a short time. There's no point in gathering possessions. There's no point in anything. And there's not enough time."

"Not enough time?"

He had drifted off in a reverie. "A very short time—but it seems like forever." Impatience, hope, futility, expectation, anticipation; the voice showed it all.

"But how do you pass the time? What do you do?"

I think he sighed. "We wait," he said. "We wait."

"What are you waiting for?" I yelled in exasperation. He didn't answer. I knew better than to continue with a frontal attack. I backed up and started in at a different angle. "You said, 'We wait.' Are the others like you?"

"Yes."

A thought occurred to me. "Do they know you're here?"

"Yes."

"Why don't they try to rescue you?"

"They're afraid."

"Afraid? Of me?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You're dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"Yes. They would do anything to prevent premature interruption of the cycle."

I started to ask what the hell he was talking about, but I knew it wouldn't do any good. "How am I dangerous?"

"You can see us."

"Do you know why I can see you?"

"No."

"Am I the only one?"

"The only one we know of now."

"Now?"

"It's happened before."

I changed directions again. "Are you afraid of me?"

"Yes."

"Why? I haven't hurt you."

"There is danger that you will interrupt the cycle."

"Why did you come with me so passively?"

"I couldn't believe you would do this to me." Again subtle shadings of accusation, hopelessness, and sadness in the beautiful voice. He turned his head to look at me. For an instant, the barest instant, I felt like a real son of a bitch. Then he looked away. He sat on the side of the bed, my bathrobe too big for him, the chain snaking into the bathroom.

Don't get the idea that he had become an unexpected chatterbox. That conversation is a distillation of three weeks' questions and silences.

About a week later, I went during the night to check on him. I hadn't been sleeping very well. My mind was full of wild, impossible speculations. I won't go into them, but they consisted of men from Mars and other equally incredible flights of fancy. I started to put on my bathrobe but remembered he was wearing it. I tiptoed down the hall stark naked hoping to catch him doing something—doing anything.

The door to his room was always left open. I looked in cautiously. I couldn't see him anywhere. I turned on the light. He was pressed against the outside wall of the room, my bathrobe crumpled at his feet. His arms were outstretched to bring as much of him against the wall as possible. He didn't seem to notice me, but then, he never did. I went to him and saw his face, the side of it flat against the wall. It was no longer expressionless. It was filled with the most overpowering hopelessness I had ever seen. I felt my throat constrict.

"What's wrong?" I whispered.

He didn't answer for a moment—not because he was ignoring me as he usually did, but because he was preoccupied. Then he said, very softly, in a voice caressed by a cold, bleak wind: "The small creatures in the forest; their deaths are so tiny and insignificant. There's hardly any life energy at all."

Then he really was aware of me. I saw him retreat until the eyes and face were neutral. I bellowed and slapped him as hard as I could. I remembered them standing around the wrecks. He fell to his knees, the crimson print of my hand on his face. I pulled him up by his armpits and looked into his empty face.

"Stop hiding from me!" I screamed and slapped him again. He slumped against me and my arms were around him, holding him up. Our naked bodies were together, exciting me. The blood rushed to my groin and my erection was painful. He was there, in the eyes, not completely, but there. I put my mouth over his. He neither drew away nor responded, but his bruised lips were sweet and I didn't want to stop.

I had been looking at his placid face for a month. I knew he was capable of emotion if he would let it show. He hadn't uttered a sound or responded in any way to physical blows. He had to have a breaking point somewhere. I pushed him onto the bed on his stomach. The chain rattled. I rammed into him, trying to hurt him. He was tight, very tight. It must have been painful, but he didn't cry out or even moan. It had been a long time since the last time—a month—too long. It only took a dozen strokes, my pelvis pounding against the flawless flesh of his buttocks, before I came. I shouldn't have waited so long. It burned.

I lay on him for a moment, then reached and pulled his face around. It was vacant. I withdrew, still hard. I pulled him into a sitting position facing me. That beautiful face. That beautiful, bland, bruised face. I put my hands on either side of it.

"Don't hide from me. It doesn't do any good. I can see you. I can see you!" He swam to the surface and looked at me. "Did you enjoy it? Did you even feel it?"

"Yes."

"Did it feel good? Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you groan? Why didn't you scream? Why didn't you beg me to stop? Why don't you get mad? Why don't you curse me? What's inside you?" I put my hand on his breast and felt the hard nipple against my palm. "Do you have a heart? I can feel something in there. Is it a heart? What would I find if I got a knife and slit you open? Do you have sexual feelings at all?" I grabbed his penis and squeezed. It was soft but firm. "Has it ever been hard? You don't piss with it. What do you use it for?"

I put his hand on my tingling erection. He didn't pull away. It just lay there. "That's what it's for. That's how a human uses it!" He started going away again. I slapped him. "Stay with me. Stay with me every second." I pushed him on his back. The chain clattered on the floor. I hooked his knees over my shoulders, watching his eyes the whole time. He tried to go away a few times, but I slapped him back. I took a very long, slow time and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

The next morning I drove down the mountain to the village and phoned the Department. With direct dialing you can't tell where a long-distance call is coming from. My father was worse and not expected to live much longer. Yeah, too bad. I shouldn't be away much longer. Good-bye.

I started going to him every night. I hadn't meant to, but I couldn't sleep without him. He didn't go away anymore and I didn't have to slap him. The bruises on his face faded finally. He was there all right, but that was all. I never succeeded in bringing emotion to his face.

Finally I began sleeping in the same bed with him, touching him all night, feeling his hard nipples under the palms of my hands.

He woke me one morning, moaning. The window was gray with light, and I could see his mouth moving. I touched his face. It was hot and dry. He spoke, and the music in his voice was muted. "Why have you done this to me? I never harmed you. I've never harmed anyone. All we ever want is to survive until the birth."

"What's wrong with you?"

"It's time. The end of the cycle. The birth."

"Isn't that what you've been waiting for?"

"I'm not strong enough. I haven't collected enough life energy."

"I'll let you go. I'll take you back to LA"

"It's too late. Too late."

He never said anything again. I watched him for three days. His fever got worse, and the life went from his vibrant flesh. His skin flaked away in gray scales. He was struggling with all his might against something. I don't know what. But in the end he failed. His moans were so piteous that I had to put my hands over my ears. But I couldn't take my eyes off the disintegration of that magnificent creature.

And that's all he was, wasn't he? A creature. Something not human. It wasn't my fault that, by some fluke, I could see them. I didn't know this would happen. He never told me. On the second day a hump began forming on his back. He was curling more and more into a fetal position as the hump forced him over. He began bleeding at the mouth. I put the shower curtain under him. When I rolled him over, my hands got covered with something like ashes.

On the third day he began to quieten, and I knew it was almost over. He hadn't moved in several hours except for ragged breathing. There was a sharp cracking sound, like Carnehan biting into a new apple, only louder. The now ugly body trembled violently for a few moments, and then nothing. He lay facing me, his eyes open, the color of clay. The breathing stopped. It was finished.

I got out of the chair and walked around to the other side of the bed. The hump on his back had split, and something white was sticking out. I reached down and pulled on it. It was a wing, a large, white wing covered with feathers. No, not feathers. Soft, white, silky hair.

There was a second wing, but it was twisted and not properly developed. I pulled away all of the body and exposed what was inside it.

I cleaned up the cabin so no one would know it had been occupied. I packed everything back in the Dart. I buried them both in the woods, the body of the dead winged thing and the husk that had held it. I drove back to Hollywood. It seemed as if I passed a wreck every half mile. I went into my apartment without noticing the apple cores in the yard. I unlocked the door, went straight to the toilet, and vomited.

I was splashing cold water on my face when I heard her.

"Lou? Is that you?" She walked in wearing a slip, her eyes red from sleep and her hair sticking out on one side where she'd been lying on it.

"Margaret! What the hell are you doing here?"

"Oh, Lou!" She pressed against me. "It's been awful! Alfred found out about us!"

My head was spinning. "Who the shit is Alfred?"

She looked puzzled. "My husband!"

Jesus Christ! I'd forgotten Carnehan's first name. She was right. It was awful. "What'd he do? Do they know at the Department?"

"He hit me!" She began to blubber on my shoulder. "I was afraid. I've been hiding here for three days! He keeps pounding on the door, but I stay quiet. He doesn't know for sure I'm here."

"How did he find out?"

"I don't know! He came home from work three days ago, screaming at me and hitting me. Oh, Lou. I was so frightened." She kissed me and her breath was bad. His breath had had no odor at all. "Come to bed with me, Lou. It's been so long," she whined.

I felt her doughy flesh through the thin slip. But it was woman flesh, and I had to forget about him. I led her to the bed and began undressing. I was sticky. I hadn't bathed or shaved since he started... Stop it!

She pulled the slip over her head, unhooked her bra, and peeled down her pantyhose. Her tits were beginning to sag, her thighs were puffy, and there was a small roll of fat around her waist. Her skin looked muddy, not clear like … Stop it!

She walked toward me, smiling coyly. I wish I had been able to see … Stop it!

I pushed her roughly onto the bed, and she squealed. Margaret liked it rough. I was about to make her very happy. She gasped deep in her throat every time my pelvis slammed against her flabby flesh. It was good—but … Stop it!

I lay on my back, half asleep. Margaret lay on top of me, licking my nipples and trying to coax it back up again. It hadn't lasted long enough for her, but she was wasting her time and she was heavy. I closed my eyes, trying to stay awake. I felt her hair on my face. There was a noise and her head hit mine. Her breath rushed out in one stale puff and I felt something dripping on my cheek.

I focused my eyes. Carnehan was standing over us, his nightstick raised. I couldn't move Margaret's dead weight. "Carnehan! Don't!" I yelled. The stick came down. I remembered I hadn't locked the door.

When I came out of it, it was dark. I was in a moving car. My head hurt and the car sounded as if it were driving in the bottom of a well. I could feel dried blood in my left eye; maybe mine or maybe Margaret's. I tried to wipe it away, but my hands wouldn't move. I heard the clink of handcuffs and felt the door handle. My head was leaning against the glass. It felt cool. I opened my eyes and saw brush going past and a sea of lights spread out below. I could see a dozen fires burning. We must be somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.

I turned my head and looked at Carnehan driving the car. He stared straight ahead. "Carnehan, what do you think you're doing?" The words didn't come out as forcefully as I had intended. He ignored me. "Carnehan, Margaret doesn't mean anything to me." That was the wrong thing to say. Think straight! "She's not worth it, Carnehan. I'm not worth it. Neither of us is worth destroying yourself."

He wasn't listening. "You can't hope to get away with this." Of course he didn't. "Why don't you just write it off as a mistake?"

The car had been bouncing around for a while. We must not have been on a main road. I couldn't raise myself high enough to see ahead. After a bit Carnehan stopped the car and got out. He opened the back door on my side and began dragging out Margaret's naked body. She must have been already dead, the way she flopped around like a rubber dummy. He dragged her a few feet from the car and rolled her down a hill. I could hear her crackling the brush, then silence.

Carnehan opened my door and the handcuffs pulled me out. I felt sharp rocks digging into my butt and realized I was naked too. He pulled out his revolver.

"Carnehan! Don't be a fool!"

He shot me in the stomach. Good old Carnehan. He remembered what we'd been taught: always aim for the gut.

He unlocked the handcuffs and pulled me to the edge. All I had to do was overpower him and get away, but I decided to wait because I was very tired. I rolled down the hill like a sack of potatoes. I didn't feel the prickly pears and sharp brush. The pain in my belly was too fierce. I hit something hard, and I think my shoulder broke.

I was lying on my back, my head leaning against whatever I'd hit, looking back up the hill. The car drove away. Carnehan, you bungler! I'm not dead! You wasted it all!

The sound of the car died away. It was very quiet, just crickets and the far-off rumble of traffic. You couldn't get away from that sound anywhere in Los Angeles County. A slight wind was blowing, making some loose sheet metal creak and groan somewhere near by.

I couldn't just lie here. I was bound to die if I didn't get help. I tried to move and looked up. An immense "Y" loomed over me. I was under the Hollywood sign. I couldn't see Margaret anywhere. Let me rest a moment more and get my breath back. Damn fuckin' Carnehan. Are you gonna be surprised when they haul you in and I'm there to point the finger. I looked down at my stomach. A mistake. But it doesn't hurt so much anymore. I must be in shock. I've heard that happens.

I can see my prick. It looks wrinkled and shrunken, even smaller than Cunningham's. This is a hell of a time to be thinking about pricks! My shoulder hurts worse than my gut. I can feel blood on the ground under my back. I've rested long enough.

What's that noise? Sounded like a twig cracking somewhere in the darkness. What if it's a coyote? I wonder if it will attack me. Probably not. Do coyotes react to the smell of blood the way sharks do?

Footsteps. Not a coyote. People. More than one. I'm saved! Up yours, Carnehan!

There are four of them: four redheaded young men who don't look a day over twenty. Four perfect faces that I used to think were overwhelmingly beautiful—until I saw the face of that dead winged thing. But I did see it. And I had to cover it because the beauty was too painful to look at.

Four magnificent bodies that only a few days ago would have sent the blood rushing to my penis—if I hadn't seen the pale body of the winged creature, all the more beautiful because it was sexless. A body I knew would have gleamed had it been alive.

Now these four faces seem drab and plain and the four bodies might belong to trolls.

But the eyes! They stand around me, watching me with eyes I still think beautiful because the winged creature's eyes were closed in death.

Those four pairs of beautiful, bland eyes look at me the same way Carnehan looks at an apple he's been saving for a special occasion.

The End

© 1975 by the estate of Tom Reamy; first appeared in Orbit 17, ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1975; reprinted by permission of the Author's estate and the estate's Agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

* * * *

To Be Continued...

by Robert Silverberg

Gaius Titus Menenius sat thoughtfully in his oddly decorated apartment on Park Avenue, staring at the envelope that had just arrived. He contemplated it for a moment, noting with amusement that he was actually somewhat perturbed over the possible nature of its contents.

After a moment he elbowed up from the red contour-chair and crossed the room in three bounds. Still holding the envelope, he eased himself down on the long green couch near the wall and, extending himself full-length, slit the envelope open with a neat flick of his fingernail. The medical report was within, as he had expected.

"Dear Mr. Riswell," it read. "I am herewith enclosing a copy of the laboratory report concerning your examination last week. I am pleased to report that our findings are positive—emphatically so. In view of our conversation, I am sure this finding will be extremely pleasing to you, and, of course, to your wife.

"Sincerely, F. D. Rowcliff, M.D."

Menenius read the letter through once again, examined the enclosed report, and allowed his face to open in a wide grin. It was almost an anticlimax, after all these centuries. He couldn't bring himself to become very excited over it—not anymore.

He stood up and stretched happily. "Well, Mr. Riswell," he said to himself, "I think this calls for a drink. In fact, a night on the town."

He chose a smart dinner jacket from his wardrobe and moved toward the door. It swung open at his approach. He went out into the corridor, whistling gaily, his mind full of new plans and new thoughts.

It was a fine feeling. After two thousand years of waiting, he had finally achieved his maturity. He could have a son. At last!

· · · · ·

"Good afternoon, Mr. Schuyler," said the barman. "Will it be the usual, sir?"

"Martini, of course," said W. M. Schuyler IV, seating himself casually on the padded stool in front of the bar.

Behind the projected personality of W. M. Schuyler IV, Gaius Titus smiled, mentally. W. M. Schuyler always drank martinis. And they had pretty well better be dry—very dry.

The baroque strains of a Vivaldi violin concerto sang softly in the background. Schuyler watched the TV accompaniment—a dancing swirl of colors that moved with the music.

"Good afternoon, Miss Vanderpool," he heard the barman say. "An old-fashioned?"

Schuyler took another sip of his martini and looked up. The girl had appeared suddenly and had taken the seat next to him, looking her usual cool self.

"Sharon!" he said, putting just the right amount of exclamation point after it.

She turned to look at him and smiled, disclosing a brilliantly white array of perfect teeth. "Bill! I didn't notice you! How long have you been here?"

"Just arrived," Schuyler told her. "Just about a minute ago."

The barman put her drink down in front of her. She took a long sip without removing her eyes from him. Schuyler met her glance, and behind his eyes Gaius Titus was coldly appraising her in a new light.

He had met her in Kavanaugh's a month before, and he had readily enough added her to the string. Why not? She was young, pretty, intelligent, and made a pleasant companion. There had been others like her—a thousand others, two thousand, five thousand. One gets to meet quite a few in two millennia.

Only now Gaius Titus was finally mature, and had different needs. The string of girls to which Sharon belonged was going to be cut.

He wanted a wife.

"How's the lackey of Wall Street?" Sharon asked. "Still coining money faster than you know how to spend it?"

"I'll leave that for you to decide," he said. He signaled for two more drinks. "Care to take in a concert tonight, perchance? The Bach Group's giving a benefit this evening, you know, and I'm told there still are a few hundred-dollar seats left—"

There, Gaius Titus thought. The bait has been cast. She ought to respond.

She whistled, a long, low, sophisticated whistle. "I'd venture that business is fairly good, then," she said. Her eyes fell. "But I don't want to let you go to all that expense on my account, Bill."

"It's nothing," Schuyler insisted, while Gaius Titus continued to weigh her in the balance. "They're doing the Fourth Brandenburg, and Renoli's playing the Goldberg Variations. How about?"

She met his gaze evenly. "Sorry, Bill. I have something else on for the evening." Her tone left no doubt in Schuyler's mind that there was little point pressing the discussion any further. Gaius Titus felt a sharp pang of disappointment.

Schuyler lifted his hand, palm forward. "Say no more! I should have known you'd be booked up for tonight already." He paused. "What about tomorrow?" he asked, after a moment. "There's a reading of Webster's Duchess of Malfi down at the Dramatist's League. It's been one of my favorite plays for a long time."

Silently smiling, he waited for her reply. The Webster was, indeed, a long-time favorite. Gaius Titus recalled having attended one of its first performances, during his short employ in the court of James I. During the next three and a half centuries, he had formed a sentimental attachment for the creaky old melodrama.

"Not tomorrow either," Sharon said. "Some other night, Bill."

"All right," he said. "Some other night."

· · · · ·

He reached out a hand and put it over hers, and they fell silent, listening to the Vivaldi in the background. He contemplated her high, sharp cheekbones in the purple half-light, wondering if she could be the one to bear the child he had waited for for so long.

She had parried all his thrusts in a fashion that surprised him. She was not at all impressed by his display of wealth and culture. Titus reflected sadly that, perhaps, his Schuyler facet had been inadequate for her.

No, he thought, rejecting the idea. The haunting slow movement of the Vivaldi faded to its end and a lively allegro took its place. No; he had had too much experience in calculating personality-facets to fit the individual to have erred. He was certain that W. M Schuyler IV was capable of handling Sharon.

For the first few hundred years of his unexpectedly long life, Gaius Titus had been forced to adopt the practice of turning on and off different personalities as a matter of mere survival. Things had been easy for a while after the fall of Rome, but with the coming of the Middle Ages he had needed all his skill to keep from running afoul of the superstitious. He had carefully built up a series of masks, of false fronts, as a survival mechanism.

How many times had he heard someone tell him, in jest, "You ought to be on the stage?" It struck home. He was on the stage. He was a man of many roles. Somewhere, beneath it all, was the unalterable personality of Gaius Titus Menenius, civis Romanus, casting the shadows that were his many masks. But Gaius Titus was far below the surface—the surface which, at the moment, was W. M. Schuyler IV; which had been Preston Riswell the week before, when he had visited the doctor for that fateful examination; which could be Leslie MacGregor or Sam Spielman or Phil Carlson tomorrow, depending on where Gaius Titus was, in what circumstances, and talking to whom. There was only one person he did not dare to be, and that was himself.

He wasn't immortal; he knew that. But he was relatively immortal. His life span was tremendously decelerated, and it had taken him two thousand years to become, physically, a fertile adult. His span was roughly a hundred times that of a normal man's. And, according to what he had learned in the last century, his longevity should be transmittable genetically. All he needed now was someone to transmit it to.

Was it dominant? That he didn't know. That was the gamble he'd be making. He wondered what it would be like to watch his children and his children's children shrivel with age. Not pleasant, he thought.

The conversation with Sharon lagged; it was obvious that something was wrong with his Schuyler facet, at least so far as she was concerned, though he was unable to see where the trouble lay. After a few more minutes of disjointed chatter, she excused herself and left the bar. He watched her go. She had eluded him neatly. Where to next?

He thought he knew.

· · · · ·

The East End Bar was far downtown and not very reputable. Gaius Titus pushed through the revolving door and headed for the counter.

"Hi, Sam. Howsa boy?" the bartender said.

"Let's have a beer, Jerry." The bartender shoved a beer out toward the short, swarthy man in the leather jacket.

"Things all right?"

"Can't complain, Jerry. How's business?" Sam Spielman asked, as he lifted the beer to his mouth.

"It's lousy."

"It figures," Sam said. "Why don't you put in automatics? They're getting all the business now."

"Sure, Sam, sure. And where do I get the dough? That's twenty." He took the coins Sam dropped on the bar and grinned. "At least you can afford beer."

"You know me, Jerry," Sam said. "My credit's good."

Jerry nodded. "Good enough." He punched the coins into the register. "Ginger was looking for you, by the way. What you got against the gal?"

"Against her? Nothin'. What do y'mean?" Sam pushed out his beer shell for a refill.

"She's got a hooker out for you—you know that, don't you?" Jerry was grinning.

Gaius Titus thought: She's not very bright, but she might very well serve my purpose. She has other characteristics worth transmitting.

"Hi, Sammy."

He turned to look at her. "Hi, Ginger," he said. "How's the gal?"

"Not bad, honey." But she didn't look it. She looked as though she'd been dragged through the mill. Her blonde hair was disarranged, her blouse was wrinkled, and, as usual, her teeth were discolored by the lipstick that had rubbed off on them.

"I love you, Sammy," she said softly.

"I love you, too," Sam said. He meant it.

Gaius Titus thought sourly: But how many of her characteristics would I want to transmit. Still, she'll do, I guess. She's a solid girl.

"Sam," she said, interrupting the flow of his thoughts, "why don't you come around more often? I miss you."

"Look, Ginger baby," Sam said. "Remember, I've got a long haul to pull. If I marry you, you gotta understand that I don't get home often. I gotta drive a truck. You might not see me more than once or twice a week."

Titus rubbed his forehead. He wasn't quite sure, after all, that the girl was worthwhile. She had spunk, all right, but was she worthy of fostering a race of immortals?

He didn't get a chance to find out. "Married?" The blonde's voice sounded incredulous. "Who the devil wants to get married? You've got me on the wrong track, Sam. I don't want to get myself tied down."

"Sure, honey, sure," he said. "But I thought—"

Ginger stood up. "You think anything you please, Sam. Anything you please. But not marriage."

She stared at him hard for a moment, and walked off. Sam looked after her morosely.

Gaius Titus grinned behind the Sam Spielman mask. She wasn't the girl either. Two thousand years of life had taught him that women were unpredictable, and he wasn't altogether surprised at her reaction to his proposal.

But he was disturbed over this second failure of the evening nevertheless. Was his judgment that far off? Perhaps, he thought, he was losing the vital ability of personality-projection. He didn't like that idea.

· · · · ·

For hours, Gaius Titus walked the streets of New York.

New York. Sure it was new. So was Old York, in England. Menenius had seen both of them grow from tiny villages to towns to cities to metropoli.

Metropoli. That was Greek. It had taken him twelve years to learn Greek. He hadn't rushed it.

Twelve years. And he still wasn't an adult. He could remember when the Emperor had seen the sign in the sky: In hoc signo vinces. And, at the age of four hundred and sixty-two, he'd still been too young to enter the service of the Empire.

Gaius Titus Menenius, Citizen of Rome. When he had been a child, he had thought Rome would last forever. But it hadn't; Rome had fallen. Egypt, which he had long thought of as an empire which would last forever, had gone even more quickly. It had died and putrified and sloughed off into the Great River which carries all life off into death.

Over the years and the centuries, races and peoples and nations had come and gone. And their passing had had no effect at all on Gaius Titus.

He was walking north. He turned left on Market Street, away from the Manhattan Bridge. Suddenly, he was tired of walking. He hailed a passing taxi.

He gave the cabby his address on Park Avenue and leaned back against the cushions to relax.

The first few centuries had been hard. He hadn't grown up, in the first place. By the time he was twenty, he had attained his full height—five feet nine. But he still looked like a seventeen-year-old.

And he had still looked that way nineteen hundred years later. It had been a long, hard drive to make enough money to live on during that time. Kids don't get well-paying jobs.

Actually, he'd lived a miserable hand-to-mouth existence for centuries. But the gradual collapse of the Christian ban on usury had opened the way for him to make some real money. Money makes more money, in a capitalistic system, if you have patience. Titus had time on his side.

It wasn't until the free-enterprise system had evolved that he started to get anywhere. But a deposit of several hundred pounds in the proper firm back in 1735 had netted a little extra money. The British East India Company had brought his financial standing up a great deal, and judicious investments ever since left him comfortably fixed. He derived considerable amusement from the extraordinary effects compound interest exerted on a bank account a century old.

"Here you are, buddy," said the cab driver.

Gaius Titus climbed out and gave the driver a five note without asking for change.

Zeus, he thought. I might as well make a night of it.

He hadn't been really drunk since the stock market collapse back in 1929.

· · · · ·

Leslie MacGregor pushed open the door of the San Marino Bar in Greenwich Village and walked to the customary table in the back corner. Three people were already there, and the conversation was going well. Leslie waved a hand and the two men waved back. The girl grinned and beckoned.

"Come on over, Les," she yelled across the noisy room. "Mack has just sold a story!" Her deep voice was clear and firm.

Mack, the heavy-set man next to the wall, grinned self-consciously and picked up his beer.

Leslie strolled quietly over to the booth and sat down beside Corwyn, the odd man of the trio.

"Sold a story?" Leslie repeated archly.

Mack nodded. "Chimerical Review," he said. "A little thing I called 'Pluck Up the Torch.' Not much, but it's a sale, you know."

"If one wants to prostitute one's art," said Corwyn.

Leslie frowned at him. "Don't be snide. After all, Mack has to pay his rent." Then he turned toward the girl. "Lorraine, could I talk to you a moment?"

She brushed the blonde hair back from the shoulders of her black turtleneck sweater and widened the grin on her face.

"Sure, Les," she said in her oddly deep, almost masculine voice. "What's all the big secret?"

No secret, thought Gaius Titus. What I want is simple enough.

For a long time, he had thought that near-immortality carried with it the curse of sterility. Now he knew it was simply a matter of time—of growing up.

As he stood up to walk to the bar with Lorraine, he caught a glimpse of himself in the dusty mirror behind the bar. He didn't look much over twenty-five. But things had been changing in the past fifty years. He had never had a heavy beard before; he had not developed his husky baritone voice until a year before the outbreak of the First World War.

It had been difficult, at first, to hide his immortality. Changing names, changing residences, changing, changing, changing. Until he had found that he didn't have to change—not deep inside.

People don't recognize faces. Faces are essentially alike. Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth. What more is there to a face? Only the personality behind it.

A personality is something that is projected—something put on display for others to see. And Gaius Titus Menenius had found that two thousand years of experience had given him enough internal psychological reality to be able to project any personality he wanted to. All he needed was a change of dress and a change of personality to be a different person. His face changed subtly to fit the person who was wearing it; no one had ever caught on.

Lorraine sat down on the bar stool. "Beer," she said to the bartender. "What's the matter, Les? What's eating you?"

He studied her firm, strong features, her deep, mocking eyes. "Lorraine," he said softly, "will you marry me?"

She blinked. "Marry you? You? Marry?" She grinned again. "Who'd ever think it? A bourgeois conformist, like all the rest." Then she shook her head. "No, Les. Even if you're kidding, you ought to know better than that. What's the gag?"

"No gag," said Leslie, and Gaius Titus fought his surprise and shock at his third failure. "I see your point," Leslie said. "Forget it. Give my best to everyone." He got up without drinking his beer and walked out the door.

· · · · ·

Leslie stepped out into the street and started heading for the subway. Then Gaius Titus, withdrawing the mask, checked himself and hailed a cab.

He got into the cab and gave the driver his home address. He didn't see any reason for further pursuing his adventures that evening.

He was mystified. How could three personality-facets fail so completely? He had been handling these three girls well ever since he had met them, but tonight, going from one to the next, as soon as he made any serious ventures toward any of them the whole thing folded. Why?

"It's a lousy world," he told the driver, assuming for the moment the mask of Phil Carlson, cynical newsman. "Damn lousy." His voice was a biting rasp.

"What's wrong, buddy?"

"Had a fight with all three of my girls. It's a lousy world."

"I'll buy that," the driver said. The cab swung up into Park. "But look at it this way, pal: who needs them?"

For a moment the mask blurred and fell aside, and it was Gaius Titus, not Phil Carlson, who said, "That's exactly right! Who needs them?" He gave the driver a bill and got out of the cab.

Who needs them? It was a good question. There were plenty of girls. Why should he saddle himself with Sharon, or Ginger, or Lorraine? They all had their good qualities—Sharon's social grace, Ginger's vigor and drive, Lorraine's rugged intellectualism. They were all three good-looking girls, tall, attractive, well put together. But yet each one, he realized, lacked something that the others had. None of them was really worthy by herself, he thought, apologizing to himself for what another man might call conceit, or sour grapes.

None of them would really do. But if somehow, some way, he could manage to combine those three leggy girls, those three personalities into one body, there would be a girl—

He gasped.

He whirled and caught sight of the cab he had just vacated.

"Hey, cabby!" Titus called. "Come back here! Take me back to the San Marino!"

· · · · ·

She wasn't there. As Leslie burst in, he caught sight of Corwyn, sitting alone and grinning twistedly over a beer.

"Where'd they go? Where's Lorraine?"

The little man lifted his shoulders and eyebrows in an elaborate shrug. "They left about a minute ago. No, it was closer to ten, wasn't it? They went in separate directions. They left me here."

"Thanks," Leslie said.

Scratch Number One, Titus thought. He ran to the phone booth in the back, dialed Information, and demanded the number of the East End Bar. After some fumbling, the operator found it.

He dialed. The bartender's tired face appeared in the screen.

"Hello, Sam," the barkeep said. "What's doing?"

"Do me a favor, Jerry," Sam said. "Look around your place for Ginger."

"She ain't here, Sam," the bartender said. "Haven't seen her since you two blew out of here a while back." Jerry's eyes narrowed. "I ain't never seen you dressed up like that before, Sam, you know?"

Gaius Titus crouched down suddenly to get out of range of the screen. "I'm celebrating tonight, Jerry," he said, and broke the connection.

Ginger wasn't to be found either, eh? That left only Sharon. He couldn't call Kavanaugh's—they wouldn't give a caller any information about their patrons. Grabbing another taxi, he shot across town to Kavanaugh's.

Sharon wasn't there when Schuyler entered. She hadn't been in since the afternoon, a waiter informed him after receiving a small gratuity. Schuyler had a drink and left. Gaius Titus returned to his apartment, tingling with an excitement he hadn't known for centuries.

He returned to Kavanaugh's the next night, and the next. Still no sign of her.

The following evening, though, when he entered the bar, she was sitting there, nursing an old-fashioned. He slid onto the seat next to her. She looked up in surprise.

"Bill! Good to see you again."

"The same here," Gaius Titus said. "It's good to see you again—Ginger. Or is it Lorraine?"

She paled and put her hand to her mouth. Then, covering, she said, "What do you mean, Bill? Have you had too many drinks tonight?"

"Possibly," Titus said. "I stopped off in the San Marino before I came up. You weren't there, Lorraine. That deep voice is quite a trick, I have to admit. I had a drink with Mack and Corwyn. Then I went over to the East End, Ginger. You weren't there, either. So," he said, "there was only one place left to find you, Sharon."

· · · · ·

She stared at him for a long moment. Finally she said, simply, "Who are you?"

"Leslie MacGregor," Titus said. "Also Sam Spielman. And W. M. Schuyler. Plus two or three other people. The name is Gaius Titus Menenius, at your service."

"I still don't understand—"

"Yes, you do," Titus said. "You are clever—but not clever enough. Your little game had me going for almost a month, you know? And it's not easy to fool a man my age."

"When did you find out?" the girl asked weakly.

"Monday night, when I saw all three of you within a couple of hours."

"You're—"

"Yes, I'm like you," he said. "But I'll give you credit: I didn't see through it until I was on my way home. You were using my own camouflage technique against me, and I didn't spot it for what it was. What's your real name?"

"Mary Bradford," she said. "I was English, originally. Of fine Plantagenet stock. I'm really a Puritan at heart, you see." She was grinning slyly.

"Oh? Mayflower descendent?" Titus asked teasingly.

"No," Mary replied. "Not a descendent. A passenger. And I'll tell you—I was awfully happy to get out of England and over here to Plymouth colony."

He toyed with her empty glass. "You didn't like England? Probably my fault. I was a minor functionary in King James' court in the early seventeenth century."

They giggled together over it. Titus stared at her, his pulse pounding harder and harder. She stared back. Her eyes were smiling.

"I didn't think there was another one," she said after a while. "It was so strange, never growing old. I was afraid they'd burn me as a witch. I had to keep changing, moving all the time. It wasn't a pleasant life. It's better lately—I enjoy these little poses. But I'm glad you caught on to me," she said. She reached out and took his hand. "I guess I would never have been smart enough to connect you and Leslie and Sam, the way you did Sharon and Ginger and Lorraine. You play the game too well for me."

"In two thousand years," Titus said, not caring if the waiter overheard him, "I never found another one like me. Believe me, Mary, I looked. I looked hard, and I've had plenty of time to search. And then to find you, hiding behind the faces of three girls I knew!"

He squeezed her hand. The next statement followed logically for him. "Now that we've found each other," he said softly, "we can have a child. A third immortal."

Her face showed radiant enthusiasm. "Wonderful!" she cried. "When can we get married?"

"How about tomor—" he started to say. Then a thought struck him.

"Mary?"

"What … Titus?"

"How old did you say you were? When were you born?" he asked.

She thought for a moment. "1597," she said. "I'm nearly four hundred."

He nodded, dumb with growing frustration. Only four hundred? That meant—that meant she was now the equivalent of a three-year-old child!

"When can we get married?" she repeated.

"There's no hurry," Titus said dully, letting her hand drop. "We have eleven hundred years."

The End

* * * *

A Life in the Day of . . .

by Frank M. Robinson

It was going to be a great party, Jeff thought, inspecting himself in the bathroom mirror, even if it had been a pain in the ass to get ready for. He'd had his sideburns professionally trimmed, but the mustache and beard he'd had to do himself, shaping the beard carefully so it curled under just so and working on the mustache literally hair by hair to get it to lie right. But the effect was worth it—far out, but not too far.

He smiled at the mirror and his image smiled back: long brown hair falling to his shoulders, with the bangs over his forehead curling away just above the eyebrows, blue eyes shining, teeth even and white, skin a smooth, healthy tan—say what you wanted to about WASPs, man, but they weren't hard to look at. He smiled again and the smile caught him and he tried a few other expressions. The Sincere look, which could move mountains or, at least, a chick from the living room into the bedroom; the youthful Anything Is Possible If You Only Believe look; the Help Me! look, for the older creeps; and, finally, the turn-off one of Irritated Uninterest. Not bad, not bad at all.

One last smile and he shook his head in pleased amazement. Damn, he was a good-looking bastard! God bless genetics or whatever.

He stepped back from the mirror and smoothed his togalike garment, carefully draped over his left shoulder and caught just above the ankle. Great, just great! He'd picked it up from the Hare Krishna people, but in another month or so it'd be the "in" thing, his thing. He splashed a little lime lotion on his face, flashed a congratulatory look at the mirror, then padded into the living room for a final check.

The stereo had been programmed for early Glenn Miller at the start—good for mood music as well as a laugh—then an old Beatles tape, plus some country rock around midnight, when everybody was stoned out of his gourd on grass or wine, and to finish up with, some harpsichord tracks when people wanted to make out.

Chips and dip, salami and cheese on the coffee table under the Saran Wrap (risky, but a great ploy—"It's just to remind us, man"—and he could get away with it). The new Barb, an old copy of Crawdaddy and especially Tuesday's issue of the Times. The one with the photograph showing him clutching his STUDENTS FOR FREEDOM sign just before the pigs waded in. The photographer had caught him just right—nobody could look at it without feeling for him—but he liked the caption even better. "Youth in anguish." Youthful innocence, the hope of tomorrow (all summed up in himself) being crushed by the fascist state. What was the name of the kid who had really been hit? The ugly kid with glasses? He couldn't remember, but it really didn't matter.

And then the front-door buzzer was blasting away and he straightened up, smoothed the wrinkles from his toga, and let The Smile flood his face like light from the morning sun.

By ten o'clock, the party was going full blast, the stereo blaring, couples sprawling out on the rugs and couches, people rapping in little groups, a few huddling in corners, turning on—only God knew who had brought what, but there were a lot of glazed looks floating around. Politically, it was pretty well balanced. A few old-line activists, but mostly second echelon, all of whom had seen the Times and really fell out when he flashed on them. Some over-thirties, but that only made for contrast, so what the hell.

And then a chick was plastered up against him and it took him a second to place her. How long had it been since he had done a number with Sue? Jesus, she had been forgettable. He wondered who she had come with; he sure as hell hadn't invited her.

"It's a great party, Jeff, really great," she breathed, and he felt like telling her to go brush her teeth. There was a brief lull in the music and for a moment, the background noises came crashing through—cubes tinkling in glasses, a chick giggling, some kid coughing, who hadn't been able to hold in the smoke, the overloud talking of people not yet adjusted to the sudden silence.

There had been a sticky moment earlier in the evening, when an older type had shown up, with a guitar yet; there was nothing for it but to accompany the square on a battered twelve-string Jeff kept hidden in the closet, then do a solo number before flashing a smile and saying, "This is a party, not a performance," and turning the stereo back on. Mr. Guitar Man was pretty well out of it by then and was now sitting on the big, beat-up couch by the window, staring moodily out at the night.

"… been so long," Sue was saying, trying to sock it in. He was only half aware of her; all he wanted to do was get away, get a drink and rap with the little blonde in the living room who had been so awed by him earlier.

Accusingly: "You're not listening!"

Oh, God … He peeled her hand off his shoulder and felt her stiffen. The light from the kitchen was pale, but he could make out the faint veins pulsing in her neck and the fine network of lines starting to firm up around her eyes. "I'm sorry, Sue, you were saying something?" Messy bit, but if he didn't let her know the score, somebody else would—you get to be twenty-five, man, you're a stone drag. Then he had pulled loose, mumbling a bland "'Scuse, Sue, gotta fill my cup," and she fled past him into the living room, to fold up on the couch next to Mr. Guitar Man. Maybe they deserved each other, he thought. American Gothic, up to date.

And then he had refilled his paper cup from the jug of rosé on the coffee table and the party was picking up again and it was great, just great.

"Gee, Mr. Beall, I saw your picture in the Times with the pig clubbing you."

A freshman, the warm wine sweat glistening on his smooth cheeks—Jeff had seen him hanging around the edges of the sit-in at the Poly Sci lecture hall. "It didn't hurt—the pigs are all queer, they don't hit too hard."

"It must've been a really inside trip," the kid said sympathetically, then drifted off, while Jeff frowned after him and wondered uneasily just what the hell the kid had meant to say, and reflected, but only for a moment, how great it would be to be seventeen again. Then he started sipping at the wine and let the conversation in the room close over him like soapy water over dishes in a sink.

"… the synthetics are really a bummer …"

"… trustees are out to kill the third world …"

"… sure, but Dylan copped out, man …"

"… soul food, that's an issue …"

"Fuck the establishment," Jeff said amiably to nobody in particular, then ducked into the kitchen for a refill on the salami. The blonde was in a corner with a short-haired squeaky-clean wearing a Nehru jacket and beads—the poor slob had been stuck with hand-me-downs. He was also very stoned and the chick looked like she badly needed rescuing.

He picked up a couple of plates of lunch meat and said, "Hey, chickie, how about a hand?" and she slipped away and flashed him a grateful smile. She was maybe seventeen, with waist-long hair and green eyes—she definitely made the other chicks at the party look like old hags.

"Look, man, she came with me, she's mine!"

The Level, Reserved look, eyes slightly narrowed. "You some sort of reactionary, man? You don't own anybody!" And then he had shoved the chick into the living room and he was dumping the plates onto the table. Somebody offered him a joint and he took a toke and passed the roach on to the girl. Always take a puff for social standing, but never get stoned; too easy to let down the old guard.

The girl was looking up at him big-eyed and he nodded to himself; she was the one, all right. "Thanks," she said. There was just the right amount of quiver in her voice and he gave her the Sincere look and said, "The means of production belong to the state," which wasn't a bad line at all.

She sucked on the joint, coughed, then held her breath for a long moment. After she let it out, she nodded toward the stereo and said, "The All for One are really boss."

"Womb to Tomb," he couldn't help correcting. "On Walkin'. WSAN played it this morning; tomorrow it'll be all over the country."

She shook her head and looked serious. "Sounds like but isn't—the lead cimbalom's a friend of mine," and just for a second the world slipped sideways, because he suddenly wasn't sure.

Then he was off again, flashing her The Smile and squeezing her hand, saying, "Don't go home early—in fact, don't go home," and he knew she wouldn't.

There was an angry murmur rising above the background mumble, like smoke over burning brush. A little knot of Maoists had lined up against the Progressive Leftists, and somebody shouted over to him. "What do you think, Jeff?" and they were respectfully silent and that was more like it.

"You work with the pigs," he said automatically, "you're just playing into the hands of the establishment." A buzz of approval and the confrontation splintered a dozen different ways, then a rock number came up on the stereo and the heavy beat rolled over the room like a tide.

"Sharp," a voice said.

Old, middle-thirties, balding. Maybe a professor crashing the party to score on a chick. "It's the all-purpose answer," Jeff said easily.

"I'm Jenkins, Asian Studies. Saw the picture of you in the Times."

A nod. Wait him out, see what he wants.

Jenkins studied him thoughtfully for a second, then cleared his throat and said, "After class, I run the Free Tutorial Studies. We need tutors for the ghetto freshman—I saw you at the F.T.S. rally last week and thought you might like to help out."

There was no end to the freaky things people wanted you to do. "Sorry, man, that's not my bag," he said coldly and started to move away. The blonde was back in a corner with the Nehru jacket and it was time to break it up.

Jenkins smiled faintly down at his drink. "Not much press coverage, no guarantee you'll get your picture in the paper."

Why, the condescending old fart; you'd think he had never run into that one before! Jeff whirled.

"Heavy, old man! Look, you sit in, you carry the signs, you get clubbed! Think anybody's going to cry for you? Get laid, will you! I do my thing, you do yours!" Holier than thou, bullshit.

The mumble of the party again, somebody being sick in the john, the click of the lock on the bedroom door, a chick crying in the kitchen and somebody laughing hysterically in the living room, the sour smell of smoke and wine and too many people. Christ, he hadn't invited half that number—a few more cigarette burns on the windowsill and spreading puddles on the faded rug slowly seeping into the wool, the sweet smell of pot and he was getting a contact high and …

Somebody was clutching at him and doing the heavy-breathing bit. "Want to … see you alone, Jeff."

Old women, dogs, and Ann Polanski loved him. Yesterday's radical, the professional student, working for a PhD in sociology and she'd get it about the time of the Second Coming. Drunk out of her mind and probably feeling very sorry for herself because, at thirty, she was the last of the vestal virgins; love me, love my guilt complex, and who wanted that kind of package deal?

"Damsel in distress in the kitchen and all that rot," he said, trying to edge past. "Be right back."

She hung onto him and licked her lips and tried to get the words out without slurring them, and when they finally came, they were like pearls strung on a string. "Just want to say … magnificent party." She closed her eyes and for a panicky moment he was afraid she was going to vomit down his toga. Then she was fishing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and trying hard to focus on him. "Don't know … how you do it, Jeff," she said, closing her eyes again. "Goddamn generations … two years apart now … can't figure out the right attitudes from one day to the nex'—next … changes, everything changes so fast … got to be a real phony to keep up with them."

He could feel the heat at the back of his neck. Overage and twenty pounds overweight and she wouldn't get her PhD, not in a million years, and she was putting him down. "Ever think about it?" she asked, suddenly wistful.

"I don't think," he said lightly. And then she was holding onto him again and it wasn't for support and he could feel his skin crawl—hot and sweaty and the monthly smell. He forced himself to hold her gently for a moment and nuzzle her neck, and when she was blinking with sudden hope, he murmured, "I would like to help you, Ann, I really would, but it would be like balling my own mother."

"You're a stinking son of a bitch," she said calmly.

Then he was back in the living room again and Ann was fading into the background, like roses on old wallpaper, and the noises and the heat in the room were smothering him and he could feel himself start to drown in his own party.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the huge old couch by the window. Mr. Guitar Man, toying with a drink in which the ice had long since melted; Sue, sitting next to him, looking thirty-five instead of twenty-five, starting to shrivel right before his eyes; Jenkins beside her, his face a remote mask; and Ann at the far end, eyes closed, probably passed out. All of them with that odd, frightening, glazed look about them, like wax dummies in a museum.

He shivered, then was caught up in the party once more. He was the guy who made it tick, who made it go, the one who was with it. He was the mirror of people who wanted to check how the mustache lay, how the toga fit, whether the smile was right and the attitude was "in." He was the hero, the star, the winner, to be chaired through the marketplace.

He could feel his ego expanding and filling the room like Styrofoam, and he knew he was getting very stoned, but it felt good, good, good—the music was as sharp as diamonds and the food was ambrosia and everybody … everybody loved him.

· · · · ·

It was two in the morning when, suddenly, above the roar of the party, he heard the door buzzer and instinctively knew it wasn't the police and, just as instinctively, that whoever it was shouldn't be let in. Then there was laughter and shouting in the hallway and a pounding on the door and the party around him froze—it was like watching a film where they end up on a single frame and hold it. Dancing, laughing, shouting and then sudden silence and the living room was filled with plaster statues.

Somebody stepped to the door and he wanted to shout Don't let them in! and then the door was open and the laughing crowd outside tumbled in like a bushel of leaves driven by the wind. They pulled at his party like so many human magnets and the movement in the room started to quicken and, within seconds, the party was roaring again.

Jeff didn't know any of them.

He was standing in a corner all alone, with the party swirling about him but never touching him, like waves breaking around a rock, and then somebody was standing in front of him. "So you're Jeffrey." He hated the full name and he hated the tone of condescension.

The stranger was dressed in black and had a drooping black mustache, like an old-time cowboy villain, and something within Jeff whispered That's sharp, and he was wearing a FREE LEONARD button and who the hell was Leonard, anyway?

"Name's Lee," the stranger said in a deep bass voice, and Jeff guessed that he had really worked at it to pitch it that low, and then he was fingering Jeff's toga and the people around them were suddenly silent and tense and the stranger said, "Too bad it spots so easily," and somebody laughed and Jeff couldn't think of anything to say, and then a chick he didn't know came up and said, "I saw your picture in the Times—you looked cute," and a lot more people laughed and then they all drifted away and Jeff caught himself staring down at the wine in his paper cup and noting that the cube he had dropped in to cool it had almost melted.

He fled into the kitchen and bumped into the blonde and she dropped a plate of sandwiches on the floor and he almost skidded on them, then blurted, "You're going to stay over, aren't you?" and she looked at him as if she wasn't quite sure who he was and said, "Did you ask?" and ducked under his arm into the living room.

He turned back to the party, trying to quiet his panic, and ran into the kid who had been at the Poly Sci sit-in. The goddamned toga, he was thinking furiously, goddamned asshole toga. He tried to start a conversation, but the kid snickered and said, "Later, man," and wandered over to the group that had gathered around the cowboy in black.

"You can't trust the dogs," the cowboy was saying, "they'll gut the proles every time. On the other hand, the police are predictable." There was a chorus of agreement; the crowd grew. Jeff didn't have the faintest idea what they were talking about.

He reeled over to the open window and tried to suck in some fresh air and stop the room from spinning. There was singing and shouting in the street below and he leaned out to see what was happening. Some stoned students were lurching down the street, singing a pop song—but he couldn't place the tune, he couldn't place the tune, he couldn't remember ever having heard it. Farther down the street, beneath a street lamp, a small army of workmen was painting over storefronts and changing signs. He squinted his eyes, but he couldn't find the familiar Me and Thee coffee shop; the sign that swung out over the sidewalk was gone and in its place was something called The Rookery. He didn't know the street anymore, he realized suddenly; all the "in" spots, his spots, were gone, and he had never heard the songs, and he couldn't keep his groups straight, and he didn't know the people, and … who was Leonard, anyway?

Every two years, Ann had said. And faster all the time. But you never noticed the buds until the day they blossomed.

And then he was sinking down into the sofa by the window, still clutching his paper cup, to sit next to Mr. Guitar Man and Sue and Jenkins and Ann. He could sense the glaze creeping over his face and felt something very light and feathery on his neck and shoulders.

It was, he imagined, the dust settling gently down.

The End

* * * *

The Tenants

by William Tenn

When Miss Kerstenberg, his secretary, informed Sydney Blake over the interoffice communicator that two gentlemen had just entered and expressed a desire to rent space in the building, Blake's "Well, show them in, Esther, show them right in" was bland enough to have loosened the cap on a jar of Vaseline. It had been only two days since Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., Real Estate, had appointed him resident agent in the McGowan Building, and the prospect of unloading an office or two in Old Unrentable this early in his assignment was mightily pleasing.

Once, however, he had seen the tenants-to-be, he felt much less certain. About practically everything.

They were exactly alike in every respect but one: size. The first was tall, very, very tall—close to seven feet, Blake estimated as he rose to welcome them. The man was bent in two places: forward at the hips and backward at the shoulders, giving the impression of being hinged instead of jointed. Behind him rolled a tiny button of a man, a midget's midget, but except for that the tall man's twin. They both wore starched white shirts and black hats, black coats, black ties, black suits, black socks, and shoes of such incredible blackness as almost to drown the light waves that blundered into them.

They took seats and smiled at Blake—in unison.

"Uh, Miss Kerstenberg," he said to his secretary, who still stood in the doorway.

"Yes, Mr. Blake?" she asked briskly.

"Uh, nothing, Miss Kerstenberg. Nothing at all." Regretfully, he watched her shut the door and heard her swivel chair squeak as she went back to work in the outer office. It was distinctly unfortunate that, not being telepathic, she had been unable to receive his urgent thought message to stay and lend some useful moral support.

Oh, well. You couldn't expect Dun & Bradstreet's best to be renting offices in the McGowan. He sat down and offered them cigarettes from his brand-new humidor. They declined.

"We would like," the tall man said in a voice composed of many heavy breaths, "to rent a floor in your building."

"The thirteenth floor," said the tiny man in exactly the same voice.

Sydney Blake lit a cigarette and drew on it carefully. A whole floor! You certainly couldn't judge by appearances.

"I'm sorry," he told them. "You can't have the thirteenth floor. But—"

"Why not?" the tall man breathed. He looked angry.

"Chiefly because there isn't any thirteenth floor. Many buildings don't have one. Since tenants consider them unlucky, we call the floor above the twelfth the fourteenth. If you gentlemen will look at our directory, you will see that there are no offices listed beginning with the number thirteen. However, if you're interested in that much space, I believe we can accommodate you on the sixth—"

"It seems to me," the tall man said very mournfully, "that if someone wants to rent a particular floor, the least a renting agent can do is let him have it."

"The very least," the tiny man agreed. "Especially since no complicated mathematical questions are being asked in the first place."

Black held on to his temper with difficulty and let out a friendly chuckle instead. "I would be very happy to rent the thirteenth floor to you—if we had one. But I can't very well rent something to you that doesn't exist, now can I?" He held his hands out, palms up, and gave them another we-are-three-intelligent-gentlemen-who-are-quite-close-in-spirit chuckle. "The twelfth and fourteenth floors both have very little unoccupied space, I am happy to say. But I'm certain that another part of the McGowan Building will do you very nicely." Abruptly he remembered that protocol had almost been violated. "My name," he told them, touching the desk plate lightly with a manicured forefinger, "is Sydney Blake. And who, might I—"

"Tohu and Bohu," the tall man said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Tohu, I said, and Bohu. I'm Tohu." He pointed at his minuscule twin. "He's Bohu. Or, as a matter of occasional fact, vice versa."

Sydney Blake considered that until some ash broke off his cigarette and splattered grayly on his well-pressed pants. Foreigners. He should have known from their olive skins and slight, unfamiliar accents. Not that it made any difference in the McGowan. Or in any building managed by Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., Real Estate. But he couldn't help wondering where in the world people had such names and such disparate sizes.

"Very well, Mr. Tohu. And—er, Mr. Bohu. Now, the problem as I see it—"

"There really isn't any problem," the tall man told him, slowly, emphatically, reasonably, "except for the fuss you keep kicking up, young man. You have a building with floors from one to twenty-four. We want to rent the thirteenth, which is apparently vacant. Now, if you were as businesslike as you should be and rented this floor to us without further argument—"

"Or logical hairsplitting," the tiny man inserted.

"—why then, we could be happy, your employers would be happy, and you should be happy. It's really a very simple transaction and one which a man in your position should be able to manage with ease."

"How the hell can I—" Blake began yelling before he remembered Professor Scoggins in Advanced Realty Seminar II. ("Remember, gentlemen, a lost temper means a lost tenant. If the retailer's customer is always right, the realtor's client is never wrong. Somehow, somewhere, you must find a cure for their little commercial illnesses, no matter how imaginary. The realtor must take his professional place beside the doctor, the dentist, and the pharmacist and make his motto, like theirs, unselfish service, always available, forever dependable.") Blake bent his head to get a renewed grip on professional responsibility before going on.

"Look here," he said at last, with a smile he desperately hoped was winning. "I'll put it in the terms that you just did. You, for reasons best known to yourselves, want to rent a thirteenth floor. This building, for reasons best known to its architect—who, I am certain, was a foolish, eccentric man whom none of us would respect at all—this building has no thirteenth floor. Therefore, I can't rent it to you. Now, superficially, I'll admit, this might seem like a difficulty, it might seem as if you can't get exactly what you want here in the McGowan Building. But what happens if we examine the situation carefully? First of all, we find that there are several other truly magnificent floors—"

He broke off as he realized he was alone. His visitors had risen in the same incredibly rapid movement and gone out the door.

"Most unfortunate," he heard the tall man say as they walked through the outer office. "The location would have been perfect. So far from the center of things."

"Not to mention," the tiny man added, "the building's appearance. So very unpresentable. Too bad."

He raced after them, catching up in the corridor that opened into the lobby. Two things brought him to a dead stop. One was the strong feeling that it was beneath a newly appointed resident agent's dignity to haul prospective customers back into an office which they had just quit so abruptly. After all, this was no cut-rate clothing shop—it was the McGowan Building.

The other was the sudden realization that the tall man was alone. There was no sign of the tiny man. Except—possibly—for the substantial bulge in the right-hand pocket of the tall man's overcoat …

"A pair of cranks," he told himself as he swung around and walked back to the office. "Not legitimate clients at all."

He insisted on Miss Kerstenberg's listening to the entire story, despite Professor Scoggins's stern injunctions against overfraternization with the minor clerical help. She cluck-clucked and tsk-tsked and stared earnestly at him through her thick glasses.

"Cranks, wouldn't you say, Miss Kerstenberg?" he asked her when he'd finished. "Hardly legitimate clients, eh?"

"I wouldn't know, Mr. Blake," she replied, inflexibly unpresumptuous. She rolled a sheet of letterhead stationery into her typewriter. "Do you want the Hopkinson mailing to go out this afternoon?"

"What? Oh, I guess so. I mean, of course. By all means this afternoon, Miss Kerstenberg. And I want to see it for a double-check before you mail it."

He strode into his own office and huddled behind the desk. The whole business had upset him very much. His first big rental possibility. And that little man—Bohu was his name?—and that bulging pocket—

Not until quite late in the afternoon was he able to concentrate on his work. And that was when he got the phone call.

"Blake?" the voice crackled. "This is Gladstone Jimm."

"Yes, Mr. Jimm." Blake sat up stiffly in his swivel chair. Gladstone was the oldest of the Sons.

"Blake, what's is this about your refusing to rent space?"

"My what? I beg your pardon, Mr. Jimm, but I—"

"Blake, two gentlemen just walked into the home office. Their names are Tooley and Booley. They tell me they tried unsuccessfully to rent the thirteenth floor of the McGowan Building from you. They tell me that you admitted the space was vacant, but that you consistently refused to let them have it. What's this all about, Blake? Why do you think the firm appointed you resident agent, Blake, to turn away prospective tenants? I might as well let you know that none of us up here in the home office like this one little bit, Blake."

"I'd have been very happy to rent the thirteenth floor to them," Blake wailed. "Only trouble, sir, you see, there's—"

"What trouble are you referring to, Blake? Spit it out, man, spit it out."

"There is no thirteenth floor, Mr. Jimm."

"What?"

"The McGowan Building is one of those buildings that has no thirteenth floor." Laboriously, carefully, he went through the whole thing again. He even drew an outline picture of the building on his desk pad as he spoke.

"Hum," said Gladstone Jimm when he'd finished. "Well, I'll say this, Blake. The explanation, at least, is in your favor." And he hung up.

Blake found himself quivering. "Cranks," he muttered fiercely. "Definitely cranks. Definitely not legitimate tenants."

· · · · ·

When he arrived at his office door early next morning, he found Mr. Tohu and Mr. Bohu waiting for him. The tall man held out a key.

"Under the terms of our lease, Mr. Blake, a key to our main office must be in the possession of the resident agent for the building. We just had our locksmith make up this copy. I trust it is satisfactory?"

Sydney Blake leaned against the wall, waiting for his bones to reacquire marrow. "Lease?" he whispered. "Did the home office give you a lease?"

"Yes," said the tall man. "Without much trouble, we were able to achieve a what-do-you-call-it."

"A meeting of minds," the tiny man supplied from the region of his companion's knees. "A feast of reason. A flow of soul. There are no sticklers for numerical subtleties in your home office, young man."

"May I see the lease?" Blake managed to get out.

The tall man reached into his right-hand overcoat pocket and brought up a familiar-looking folded piece of paper.

It was the regulation lease. For the thirteenth floor in the McGowan Building. But there was one small difference.

Gladstone Jimm had inserted a rider: … the landlord is renting a floor that both the tenant and landlord know does not exist, but the title to which has an intrinsic value to the tenant; which value is equal to the rent he will pay …

Blake sighed with relief. "That's different. Why didn't you tell me that all you wanted was the title to the floor? I was under the impression that you intended to occupy the premises."

"We do intend to occupy the premises." The tall man pocketed the lease. "We've paid a month's rent in advance for them."

"And," added the tiny man, "a month's security."

"And," finished the tall man, "an extra month's rent as fee to the agent. We most certainly do intend to occupy the premises."

"But how"—Blake giggled a little hysterically—"are you going to occupy premises that aren't even—"

"Good morning, young man," they said in unison and moved toward the elevators.

He watched them enter one.

"Thirteen, please," they told the elevator operator. The elevator door closed. Miss Kerstenberg walked past him and into the office, chirping a dutiful "Good morning, Mr. Blake." Blake barely nodded at her. He kept his eyes on the elevator door. After a while it opened again, and the fat little operator lounged out and began a conversation with the starter.

Blake couldn't help himself. He ran to the elevator. He stared inside. It was empty.

"Listen," he said, grabbing the fat little operator by one sleeve of his dingy uniform. "Those two men you just took up, what floor did they get off at?"

"The one they wanted. Thirteen. Why?"

"There isn't any thirteenth floor. No thirteenth floor at all!"

The fat little elevator operator shrugged. "Look, Mr. Blake, I do my job. Someone says 'thirteenth floor,' I take 'em to the thirteenth floor. Someone says 'twenty-first floor,' I take 'em—"

Blake walked into the elevator. "Take me there," he ordered.

"The twenty-first floor? Sure."

"No, you—you—" Blake realized that the starter and the elevator operator were grinning at each other sympathetically. "Not the twenty-first floor," he went on more calmly, "the thirteenth. Take me to the thirteenth floor."

The operator worked his switch and the door moaned itself shut. They went up. All of the McGowan Building elevators were very slow, and Blake had no trouble reading the floor numbers through the little window in the elevator door.

… ten … eleven … twelve … fourteen … fifteen … sixteen …

They stopped. The elevator operator scratched his head with his visored cap. Blake glared at him triumphantly. They went down.

… fifteen … fourteen … twelve … eleven … ten … nine …

"Well?" Blake asked him.

The man shrugged. "It don't seem to be there now."

"Now? Now? It's never been there. So where did you take those men?"

"Oh, them. I told you: the thirteenth floor."

"But I just proved to you there is no thirteenth floor!"

"So what? You got the college education, Mr. Blake, not me. I just do my job. If you don't like it, all I can say is I just do my job. Someone gets in the elevator and says 'thirteenth floor,' I take—"

"I know! You take them to the thirteenth floor. But there is no thirteenth floor, you idiot! I can show you the blueprints of the building, the original blueprints, and I dare you, I defy you to show me a thirteenth floor. If you can show me a thirteenth floor …"

His voice trailed off as they realized they were back in the lobby and had attracted a small crowd.

"Look, Mr. Blake," the elevator man suggested. "If you're not satisfied, how's about I call up the delegate from the union and you and him have a talk? How's about that, huh?"

Blake threw up his arms helplessly and stamped back to his office. Behind him he heard the starter ask the elevator operator, "What was he getting in such an uproar about, Barney?"

"Aa-aah, that guy," the operator said. "He was blaming me for the blueprints of the building. If you ask me, he's got too much college education. What have I got to do with the blueprints?"

"I don't know," the starter sighed. "I sure as hell don't know."

"I'll ask you another question," the operator went on, with a little more certainty, now that he saw his oratorical way, so to speak. "What have the building blueprints got to do with me?"

Blake closed the office door and leaned against it. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

"Miss Kerstenberg," he said at last in a strangled voice. "What do you think? Those cranks that were here yesterday—those two crazy old men—the home office went and rented the thirteenth floor to them!"

She looked up from her typewriter. "It did?"

"And believe it or not, they just went upstairs and took possession of their offices."

She smiled at him, a rapid woman-smile. "How nice," she said. And went back to her typing.

The morning after that, what Blake saw in the lobby sent him scurrying to the telephone. He dialed the home office. "Mr. Gladstone Jimm," he demanded breathlessly.

"Listen, Mr. Jimm. This is Sydney Blake at the McGowan. Mr. Jimm, this is getting serious! They're moving in furniture today. Office furniture. And I just saw some men go upstairs to install telephones. Mr. Jimm, they're really moving in!"

Gladstone Jimm was instantly alert. He gave the matter his full attention. "Who's moving in, my boy? Tanzen Realty Corporation? Or is it the Blair Brothers again? I was saying only last week: things have been far too quiet in the real estate field; I've felt in my bones that last year's Code of Fair Practices wouldn't be standing up much longer. Try to raid our properties, will they?" He snorted long and belligerently. "Well, the old firm has a few tricks up its sleeve yet. First, make certain that all important papers—tenant lists, rent receipts, don't overlook anything, son—are in the safe. We'll have three attorneys and a court order down there in half an hour. Meanwhile, you keep—"

"You don't understand, sir. It's those new tenants. The ones you rented the thirteenth floor to."

Gladstone Jimm ground to a full stop and considered the matter. Ah. He understood. He began to beat swords into ploughshares.

"You mean—those fellows—um, Toombs and Boole?"

"That's right, sir. There are desks and chairs and filing cabinets going upstairs. There are men from the telephone and electric companies. They're all going up to the thirteenth floor. Only, Mr. Jimm, there isn't any thirteenth floor!"

A pause. Then: "Any of the other tenants in the building been complaining, Blake?"

"No, Mr. Jimm, but—"

"Have Toot and Boob committed any sort of nuisance?"

"No, not at all. It's just that I—"

"It's just that you have been paying precious little attention to business! Blake, I like you, but I feel it is my duty to warn you that you are getting off on the wrong foot. You've been resident agent at the McGowan for almost a week now and the only bit of important business involving the property had to be transacted by the home office. That's not going to look good on your record, Blake, it's not going to look good at all. Do you still have those big vacancies on the third, sixteenth, and nineteenth floors?"

"Yes, Mr. Jimm. I've been planning to—"

"Planning isn't enough, Blake. Planning is only the first step. After that, there must be action! Action, Blake: A-C-T-I-O-N. Why don't you try this little stunt: Letter the word action on a sign, letter it in bright red, and hang it opposite your desk where you'll see it every time you look up. Then, on the reverse side, list all the vacancies in your building. Every time you find yourself staring at that sign, ask yourself how many vacancies are still listed on the back. And then, Blake, take action!"

"Yes, sir," Blake said, very weakly.

"Meanwhile, no more of this nonsense about law-abiding, rent-paying tenants. If they leave you alone, you leave them alone. That's an order, Blake."

"I understand that, Mr. Jimm."

He sat for a long while looking at the cradled telephone. Then he rose and walked out to the lobby and into an elevator. There was a peculiar and unaccustomed jauntiness to him, a recklessness to his stride that could be worn only by a man deliberately disobeying a direct order from the reigning head of Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., Real Estate.

Two hours later he crept back, his shoulders bent, his mouth loose with defeat.

Whenever Blake had been in an elevator full of telephone linemen and furniture movers on their way to the thirteenth floor, there had been no thirteenth floor. But as soon as, a little irritated, they had changed elevators, leaving him behind, so far as he could tell, they had gone right up to their destination. It was obvious. For him there was no thirteenth floor. There probably never would be.

He was still brooding on the injustice of it at five o'clock, when the scrubwomen who were coming on duty bounced their aged joints into his outer office to punch the time clock. "Which one of you," he asked, coming at them suddenly with an inspiration, "which one of you takes care of the thirteenth floor?"

"I do."

He drew the woman in the bright green, fringed shawl after him into his private office. "When did you start cleaning the thirteenth floor, Mrs. Ritter?"

"Why, the day the new tenants moved in."

"But before that …" He waited, watching her face anxiously.

She smiled, and several wrinkles changed their course. "Before that, Lord love you, there was no tenants. Not on the thirteenth."

"So …," he prompted.

"So there was nothing to clean."

Blake shrugged and gave up. The scrubwoman started to walk away. He put his hand on her shoulder and detained her. "What," he asked, staring at her enviously, "is it like—the thirteenth floor?"

"Like the twelfth. And the tenth. Like any other floor."

"And everyone," he muttered to himself, "gets to go there. Everyone but me."

He realized with annoyance that he'd spoken too loudly. And that the old woman was staring at him with her head cocked in sympathy. "Maybe that's because," she suggested softly, "you have no reason to be on the thirteenth floor."

He was still standing there, absorbing the concept, when she and her colleagues bumped and clattered their way upstairs with mops, brooms, and metal pails.

There was a cough and the echo of a cough behind him. He turned. Mr. Tohu and Mr. Bohu bowed. Actually, they seemed to fold and unfold.

"For the lobby directory," said the tall man, giving Blake a white business card. "This is how we are to be listed."

G. TOHU & K. BOHU

Specialists in

Intangibles

For the Trade

Blake struggled, licked his lips, fought his curiosity, and lost. "What kind of intangibles?"

The tall man looked at the tiny man. The tiny man shrugged. "Soft ones," he said.

They walked out.

Blake was positive he saw the tall man pick up the tiny man a moment before they stepped into the street. But he couldn't see what he did with him. And then there was the tall man walking down the street all by himself.

From that day on, Sydney Blake had a hobby. Trying to work out a good reason for visiting the thirteenth floor. Unfortunately, there just wasn't any good reason so long as the tenants created no nuisances and paid their rent regularly.

Month in, month out, the tenants paid their rent regularly. And they created no nuisances. Window washers went up to wash windows. Painters, plasterers, and carpenters went up to decorate the offices on the thirteenth floor. Delivery boys staggered up under huge loads of stationery. Even what were obviously customers went up to the thirteenth floor, a group of people curiously lacking characteristics in common: they ranged from poor backward folk in their brogans to flashily dressed bookmakers; an occasional group of dark-suited, well-tailored gentlemen discussing interest rates and new bond issues in low, well-bred voices would ask the elevator operator for Tohu & Bohu. Many, many people went to the thirteenth floor.

Everyone, Sydney Blake began to think, but Sydney Blake. He'd tried sneaking up on the thirteenth floor by way of the stairs. He had always arrived on the fourteenth floor or the twelfth completely winded. Once or twice, he'd tried stowing away on the elevator with G. Tohu & K. Bohu themselves. But the car had not been able to find their floor while he was in the elevator. And they had both turned around and smiled at the spot where he was trying to stay hidden in the crowd so that he had gone out, red-faced, and the earliest floor he could.

Once he'd even tried—vainly—to disguise himself as a building inspector in search of a fire hazard …

Nothing worked. He just had no business on the thirteenth floor.

He thought about the problem day and night. His belly lost its slight plumpness, his nails their manicure, his very trousers their crease.

And nobody else showed the slightest interest in the tenants of the thirteenth floor.

Well, there was the day that Miss Kerstenberg looked up from her typewriter. "Is that how they spell their names?" she asked. "T-O-H-U and B-O-H-U? Funny."

"What's funny?" He pounced on her.

"Those names come from the Hebrew. I know because," she blushed well below the neckline of her dress, "I teach in a Hebrew School Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. And my family is very religious, so I had a real orthodox education. I think religion is a good thing, especially for a girl—"

"What about those names?" He was almost dancing around her.

"Well, in the Hebrew Bible, before God created the Earth, the Earth was tohu oobohu. The oo means and. And tohu and bohu—gee, it's hard to translate."

"Try," he implored her. "Try."

"Oh, for example, the usual English translation of tohu oobohu is without form and void. But bohu really means empty in a lot of—"

"Foreigners," he chortled. "I knew they were foreigners. And up to no good. With names like that."

"I don't agree with you, Mr. Blake," she said very stiffly. "I don't agree with you at all about those names being no good. Not when they come from the Hebrew." And she never showed him any friendliness again.

Two weeks later, Blake got a message from the home office of Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., Real Estate, that almost shoved his reason off the corner of the slippery throne it still occupied. Tohu & Bohu had given notice. They were quitting the premises at the end of the month.

For a day or so, he walked around talking to himself. The elevator operators reported hearing him say things like: "They're the most complete foreigners there could be—they don't even belong in the physical universe!" The scrubwomen shivered in their locker room as they told each other of the mad, mad light in his eyes as he'd muttered, with enormous gestures: "Of course—thirteenth floor. Where else do you think they could stay, the nonexistent so-and-so's? Hah!" And once when Miss Kerstenberg had caught him glaring at the water cooler and saying, "They're trying to turn the clock back a couple of billion years and start all over, I bet. Filthy fifth columnists!" she thought tremulously of notifying the FBI, but decided against it. After all, she reasoned, once the police start snooping around a place, you never can tell who they'll send to jail.

And, besides, after a little while, Sydney Blake straightened out. He began shaving every morning once more and the darkness left his nails. But he was definitely not the crisp young realtor of yore. There was a strange, skirling air of triumph about him almost all the time.

Came the last day of the month. All morning, load after load of furniture had been carried downstairs and trucked away. As the last few packages came down, Sydney Blake, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, walked up to the elevator nearest his office and stepped inside.

"Thirteenth floor, if you please," he said clearly and resonantly.

The door slid shut. The elevator rose. It stopped on the thirteenth floor.

"Well, Mr. Blake," said the tall man. "This is a surprise. And what can we do for you?"

"How do you do, Mr. Tohu?" Blake said to him. "Or is it Bohu?" He turned to his tiny companion. "And you, Mr. Bohu—or, as the case may be, Tohu—I hope you are well? Good."

He walked around the empty, airy offices for a little while and just looked. Even the partitions had been taken down. The three of them were alone, on the thirteenth floor.

"You have some business with us?" the tall man inquired.

"Of course he has business with us," the tiny man told him crossly. "He has to have some sort of business with us. Only I wish he'd hurry up and get it over, whatever it is."

Blake bowed. "Paragraph ten, Section three of your lease: … the tenant further agrees that such notice being duly given to the landlord, an authorized representative of the landlord, such as the resident agent if there is one on the property, shall have the privilege of examining the premises before they are vacated by the tenant for the purpose of making certain that they have been left in good order and condition by the tenant …"

"So that's your business," said the tall man thoughtfully.

"It had to be something like that," said the tiny man. "Well, young fellow, you will please be quick about it."

Sydney Blake strolled about leisurely. Though he felt a prodigious excitement, he had to admit that there was no apparent difference between the thirteenth and any other floor. Except—Yes, except—

He ran to a window and looked down. He counted. Twelve floors. He looked up and counted. Twelve floors. And with the floor he was on, that made twenty-five. Yet the McGowan was a twenty-four-story building. Where did that extra floor come from? And how did the building look from the outside at this precise moment when his head was sticking out of a window on the thirteenth floor?

He walked back in, staring shrewdly at G. Tohu and K. Bohu. They would know.

They were standing near the elevator door that was open. An operator, almost as impatient as the two men in black, said, "Down? Down?"

"Well, Mr. Blake," said the tall man. "Are the premises in good condition, or are they not?"

"Oh, they're in good condition, all right," Blake told him. "But that's not the point."

"Well, we don't care what the point is," said the tiny man to the tall man. "Let's get out of here."

"Quite," said the tall man. He bent down and picked up his companion. He folded him once backward and once forward. Then he rolled him up tightly and shoved him in his right-hand overcoat pocket. He stepped backward into the elevator. "Coming, Mr. Blake?"

"No, thank you," Blake said. "I've spent far too much time trying to get up here to leave it this fast."

"Suit yourself," said the tall man. "Down," he told the elevator operator.

When he was all alone on the thirteenth floor, Sydney Blake expanded his chest. It had taken so long! He walked over to the door of the staircase that he'd tried to find so many times, and pulled on it. It was stuck. Funny. He bent down and peered at it closely. It wasn't locked. Just stuck. Have to get the repairman up to take care of it.

Never could tell. Might have an extra floor to rent in the old McGowan from now on. Ought to be kept up.

How did the building look from the outside? He found himself near another window and tried to look out. Something stopped him. The window was open, yet he couldn't push his head past the sill. He went back to the window he'd looked out of originally. Same difficulty.

And suddenly he understood.

He ran to the elevator and jabbed his fist against the button. He held it there while his breathing went faster and faster. Through the diamond-shaped windows on the doors, he could see elevators rising and elevators descending. But they wouldn't stop on the thirteenth floor.

Because there no longer was a thirteenth floor. Never had been one, in fact. Who ever heard of a thirteenth floor in the McGowan Building? …

The End

* * * *

Come On, Wagon

by Zenna Henderson

I don't like kids—never have. They're too uncanny. For one thing, there's no bottom to their eyes. They haven't learned to pull down their mental curtains the way adults have. For another thing, there's so much they don't know. And not knowing things makes them know lots of other things grown-ups can't know. That sounds confusing, and it is. But look at it this way. Every time you teach a kid something, you teach him a hundred things that are impossible because that one thing is so. By the time we grow up, our world is so hedged around by impossibilities that it's a wonder we ever try anything new.

Anyway, I don't like kids, so I guess it's just as well that I've stayed a bachelor.

Now, take Thaddeus. I don't like Thaddeus. Oh, he's a fine kid, smarter than most—he's my nephew—but he's too young. I'll start liking him one of these days when he's ten or eleven. No, that's still too young. I guess when his voice starts cracking and he begins to slick his hair down, I'll get to liking him fine. Adolescence ends lots more than it begins.

The first time I ever really got acquainted with Thaddeus was the Christmas he was three. He was a solemn little fellow, hardly a smile out of him all day, even with the avalanche of everything to thrill a kid. Starting first thing Christmas Day, he made me feel uneasy. He stood still in the middle of the excited squealing bunch of kids that crowded around the Christmas tree in the front room at the folks' place. He was holding a big rubber ball with both hands and looking at the tree with his eyes wide with wonder. I was sitting right by him in the big chair, and I said, "How do you like it, Thaddeus?"

He turned his big, solemn eyes to me, and for a long time, all I could see was the deep, deep reflections in his eyes of the glitter and glory of the tree and a special shiningness that originated far back in his own eyes. Then he blinked slowly and said solemnly, "Fine."

Then the mob of kids swept him away as they all charged forward to claim their Grampa-gift from under the tree. When the crowd finally dissolved and scattered all over the place with their play-toys, there was Thaddeus squatting solemnly by the little red wagon that had fallen to him. He was examining it intently, inch by inch, but only with his eyes. His hands were pressed between his knees and his chest as he squatted.

"Well, Thaddeus." His mother's voice was a little provoked. "Go play with your wagon. Don't you like it?"

Thaddeus turned his face up to her in that blind, unseeing way little children have.

"Sure," he said, and standing up, tried to take the wagon in his arms.

"Oh for pity sakes," his mother laughed. "You don't carry a wagon, Thaddeus." And aside to us, "Sometimes I wonder. Do you suppose he's got all his buttons?"

"Now, Jean." Our brother Clyde leaned back in his chair. "Don't heckle the kid. Go on, Thaddeus. Take the wagon outside."

So what does Thaddeus do but start for the door, saying over his shoulder, "Come on, Wagon."

Clyde laughed. "It's not that easy, Punkin-Yaller, you've gotta have pull to get along in this world."

So Jean showed Thaddeus how, and he pulled the wagon outdoors, looking down at the handle in a puzzled way, absorbing this latest rule for acting like a big boy.

Jean was embarrassed the way parents are when their kids act normal around other people.

"Honest. You'd think he never saw a wagon before."

"He never did," I said idly. "Not his own, anyway." And had the feeling that I had said something profound, but wasn't quite sure what.

The whole deal would have gone completely out of my mind it if hadn't been for one more little incident. I was out by the barn waiting for Dad. Mom was making him change his pants before he demonstrated his new tractor for me. I saw Thaddeus loading rocks into his little red wagon. Beyond the rock pile, I could see that he had started a playhouse or ranch of some kind, laying the rocks out to make rooms or corrals or whatever. He finished loading the wagon and picked up another rock that took both arms to carry, then he looked down at the wagon.

"Come on, Wagon." And he walked over to his play place.

And the wagon went with him, trundling along over the uneven ground, following at his heels like a puppy.

I blinked and inventoried rapidly the Christmas cheer I had imbibed. It wasn't enough for an explanation. I felt a kind of cold grue creep over me.

Then Thaddeus emptied the wagon and the two of them went back for more rocks. He was just going to pull the same thing again when a big boy-cousin came by and laughed at him.

"Hey, Thaddeus, how you going to pull your wagon with both hands full? It won't go unless you pull it."

"Oh," said Thaddeus and looked off after the cousin who was headed for the back porch and some pie.

So Thaddeus dropped the big rock he had in his arms and looked at the wagon. After struggling with some profound thinking, he picked the rock up again and hooked a little finger over the handle of the wagon.

"Come on, Wagon," he said, and they trundled off together, the handle of the wagon still slanting back over the load while Thaddeus grunted along by it with his heavy armload.

I was glad Dad came just then, hooking the last strap of his striped overalls. We started into the barn together. I looked back at Thaddeus. He apparently figured he'd need his little finger on the next load, so he was squatting by the wagon, absorbed with a piece of flimsy red Christmas string. He had twisted one end around his wrist and was intent on tying the other to the handle of the little red wagon.

It wasn't so much that I avoided Thaddeus after that. It isn't hard for grown-ups to keep from mingling with kids. After all, they do live in two different worlds. Anyway, I didn't have much to do with Thaddeus for several years after that Christmas. There was the matter of a side trip to the South Pacific where even I learned that there are some grown-up impossibilities that are not always absolute. Then there was a hitch in the hospital where I waited for my legs to put themselves together again. I was luckier than most of the guys. The folks wrote often and regularly and kept me posted on all the home talk. Nothing spectacular, nothing special, just the old familiar stuff that makes home, home and folks, folks.

I hadn't thought of Thaddeus in a long time. I hadn't been around kids much, and unless you deal with them, you soon forget them. But I remembered him plenty when I got the letter from Dad about Jean's new baby. The kid was a couple of weeks overdue and when it did come—a girl—Jean's husband, Bert, was out at the farm checking with Dad on a land deal he had cooking. The baby came so quickly that Jean couldn't even make it to the hospital, and when Mom called Bert, he and Dad headed for town together, but fast.

"Derned if I didn't have to hold my hair on," wrote Dad. "I don't think we hit the ground but twice all the way to town. Dern near overshot the gate when we finally tore up the hill to their house. Thaddeus was playing out front, and we dang near ran him down. Smashed his trike to flinders. I saw the handle bars sticking out from under the front wheel when I followed Bert in. Then I got to thinking that he'd get a flat parking on all that metal, so I went out to move the car. Lucky I did. Bert musta forgot to set the brakes. Derned if that car wasn't headed straight for Thaddeus. He was walking right in front of it. Even had his hand on the bumper, and the dern thing rolling right after him. I yelled and hit out for the car. But by the time I got there, it had stopped, and Thaddeus was squatting by his wrecked trike. What do you suppose the little cuss said? 'Old car broke my trike. I made him get off.'

"Can you beat it? Kids get the dernedest ideas. Lucky it wasn't much downhill, though. He'd have been hurt sure."

I lay with the letter on my chest and felt cold. Dad had forgotten that they "tore up the hill" and that the car must have rolled up the slope to get off Thaddeus' trike.

That night I woke up the ward yelling, "Come on, Wagon!"

· · · · ·

It was some months later when I saw Thaddeus again. He and half a dozen other nephews—and the one persistent niece—were in a tearing hurry to be somewhere else and nearly mobbed Dad and me on the front porch as they boiled out of the house with mouths and hands full of cookies. They all stopped long enough to give me the once-over and fire a machine-gun volley with my crutches, then they disappeared down the land on their bikes, heads low, rear ends high, and every one of them being bombers at the tops of their voices.

I only had time enough to notice that Thaddeus had lanked out and was just one of the kids as he grinned engagingly at me with the two-tooth gap in his front teeth.

"Did you ever notice anything odd about Thaddeus?" I pulled out the makin's.

"Thaddeus?" Dad glanced up at me from firing up his battered old corncob pipe. "Not particularly. Why?"

"Oh, nothing." I ran my tongue along the paper and rolled the cigarette shut. "He just always seemed kinda different."

"Well, he's always been kinda slow about some things. Not that he's dumb. Once he catches on, he's as smart as anyone, but he's sure pulled some funny ones."

"Give me a fer-instance," I said, wondering if he'd remember the trike deal.

"Well, coupla years ago at a wienie roast he was toting something around wrapped in a paper napkin. Jean saw him put it in his pocket and she thought it was probably a dead frog or a beetle or something like that, so she made him fork it over. She unfolded the napkin and derned if there wasn't a big live coal in it. Dern thing flamed right up in her hand. Thaddeus bellered like a bull calf. Said he wanted to take it home cause it was pretty. How he ever carried it around that long without setting himself afire is what got me."

"That's Thaddeus," I said. "Odd."

"Yeah." Dad was firing his pipe again, flicking the burned match down to join the dozen or so others by the porch railing. "I guess you might call him odd. But he'll outgrow it. He hasn't pulled anything like that in a long time."

"They do outgrow it," I said. "Thank God." And I think it was a real prayer. I don't like kids. "By the way, where's Clyde?"

"Down in the East Pasture, plowing. Say, that tractor I got that last Christmas you were here is a bear cat. It's lasted me all this time and I've never had to do a lick of work on it. Clyde's using it today."

"When you get a good tractor you got a good one," I said. "Guess I'll go down and see the old son of a gun—Clyde, I mean. Haven't seen him in a coon's age." I gathered up my crutches.

Dad scrambled to his feet. "Better let me run you down in the pickup. I've gotta go over to Jesperson's anyway."

"Okay," I said. "Won't be long till I can throw these things away." So we piled in the pickup and headed for the East Pasture.

We were ambushed at the pump corner by the kids and were killed variously by P-38s, atomic bombs, ack-ack, and the Lone Ranger's six-guns. Then we lowered our hands which had been raised all this time, and Dad reached out and collared the nearest nephew.

"Come along, Punkin-Yaller. That blasted Holstein has busted out again. You get her out of the alfalfa and see if you can find where she got through this time."

"Aw, gee whiz!" The kid—and of course it was Thaddeus—climbed into the back of the pickup. "That dern cow."

We started up with a jerk, and I turned half around in the seat to look at Thaddeus.

"Remember your little red wagon?" I yelled over the clatter.

"Red wagon?" Thaddeus yelled back. His face lighted. "Red wagon?"

I could tell he had remembered, and then, as plainly as the drawing of a shade, his eyes went shadowy and he yelled, "Yeah, kinda." And turned around to wave violently at the unnoticing kids behind us.

So, I thought, he is outgrowing it. Then spent the rest of the short drive trying to figure just what it was he was outgrowing.

Dad dumped Thaddeus out at the alfalfa field and took me on across the canal and let me out by the pasture gate.

"I'll be back in about an hour if you want to wait. Might as well ride home."

"I might start back afoot," I said. "It'd feel good to stretch my legs again."

"I'll keep a look out for you on my way back." And he rattled away in the ever-present cloud of dust.

I had trouble managing the gate. It's one of those wire affairs that open by slipping a loop off the end post and lifting the bottom of it out of another loop. This one was taut and hard to handle. I just got it opened when Clyde turned the far corner and started back toward me, the plow behind the tractor curling up red-brown ribbons in its wake. It was the last go-round to complete the field.

I yelled, "Hi!" and waved a crutch at him.

He yelled, "Hi!" back at me. What came next was too fast and too far away for me to be sure what actually happened. All I remember was a snort and roar, and the tractor bucked and bowed. There was a short yell from Clyde and the shriek of wires pulling loose from a fence post followed by a choking, smothering silence.

Next thing I knew, I was panting halfway to the tractor, my crutches sinking exasperatingly into the soft, plowed earth. I nightmare year later I knelt by the stalled tractor and called, "Hey, Clyde!"

Clyde looked up at me, a half-grin, half-grimace on his muddy face.

"Hi. Get this thing off me, will you. I need that leg." Then his eyes turned up white and he passed out.

The tractor had toppled him from the seat and then run over top of him, turning into the fence and coming to rest with one huge wheel half burying his leg in the soft dirt and pinning him against a fence post. The far wheel was on the edge of the irrigation ditch that bordered the field just beyond the fence. The huge bulk of the machine was balanced on the raw edge of nothing, and it looked like a breath would send it on over—then God have mercy on Clyde. It didn't help much to notice that the red-brown dirt was steadily becoming redder around the imprisoned leg.

I knelt there paralyzed with panic. There was nothing I could do. I didn't dare to try to start the tractor. If I touched it, it might go over. Dad was gone for an hour. I couldn't make it by foot to the house in time.

Then all at once out of nowhere I heard a startled "Gee whiz!" and there was Thaddeus standing goggle-eyed on the ditch bank.

Something exploded with a flash of light inside my head, and I whispered to myself, Now take it easy. Don't scare the kid, don't startle him.…

"Gee whiz!" said Thaddeus again. "What happened?"

I took a deep breath. "Old Tractor ran over Uncle Clyde. Make it get off."

Thaddeus didn't seem to hear me. He was intent on taking in the whole shebang.

"Thaddeus," I said, "make Tractor get off."

Thaddeus looked at me with that blind, unseeing stare he used to have. I prayed silently, Don't let him be too old. O God, don't let him be too old. And Thaddeus jumped across the ditch. He climbed gingerly through the barbwire fence and squatted down by the tractor, his hands caught between his chest and knees. He bent his head forward, and I stared urgently at the soft, vulnerable nape of his neck. Then he turned his blind eyes to me again.

"Tractor doesn't want to."

I felt a yell ball up in my throat, but I caught it in time. Don't scare the kid, I thought. Don't scare him.

"Make Tractor get off anyway," I said as matter-of-factly as I could manage. "He's hurting Uncle Clyde."

Thaddeus turned and looked at Clyde.

"He isn't hollering."

"He can't. He's unconscious." Sweat was making my palms slippery.

"Oh." Thaddeus examined Clyde's quiet face curiously. "I never saw anybody unconscious before."

"Thaddeus." My voice was sharp. "Make—Tractor—get—off."

Maybe I talked too loud. Maybe I used the wrong words, but Thaddeus looked up at me and I saw the shutters close in his eyes. They looked up at me, blue and shallow and bright.

"You mean start the tractor?" His voice was brisk as he stood up. "Gee whiz! Grampa told us kids to leave the tractor alone. It's dangerous for kids. I don't know whether I know how—"

"That's not what I meant," I snapped, my voice whetted on the edge of my despair. "Make it get off Uncle Clyde. He's dying."

"But I can't! You can't just make a tractor do something. You gotta run it." His face was twisting with approaching tears.

"You could if you wanted to," I argued, knowing how useless it was. "Uncle Clyde will die if you don't."

"But I can't! I don't know how! Honest I don't." Thaddeus scrubbed one bare foot in the plowed dirt, sniffing miserably.

I knelt beside Clyde and slipped my hand inside his dirt-smeared shirt. I pulled my hand out and rubbed the stained palm against my thigh. "Never mind," I said bluntly, "it doesn't matter now. He's dead."

Thaddeus started to bawl, not from grief but bewilderment. He knew I was put out with him, and he didn't know why. He crooked his arm over his eyes and leaned against a fence post, sobbing noisily. I shifted myself over in the dark furrow until my shadow sheltered Clyde's quiet face from the hot afternoon sun. I clasped my hands palm to palm between my knees and waited for Dad.

I knew as well as anything that once Thaddeus could have helped. Why couldn't he then, when the need was so urgent? Well, maybe he really had outgrown his strangeness. Or it might be that he actually couldn't do anything, just because Clyde and I were grown-ups. Maybe if it had been another kid—

Sometimes my mind gets cold trying to figure it out. Especially when I get the answer that kids and grown-ups live in two worlds so alien and separate that the gap can't be bridged even to save a life. Whatever the answer is—I still don't like kids.

The End

© 1951 by Zenna Henderson. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the author's agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1951.

* * * *

Mouse

by Fredric Brown

Bill Wheeler was, as it happened, looking out of the window of his bachelor apartment on the fifth floor on the corner of 83rd Street and Central Park West when the spaceship from Somewhere landed.

It floated gently down out of the sky and came to rest in Central Park on the open grass between the Simon Bolivar Monument and the walk, barely a hundred yards from Bill Wheeler's window.

Bill Wheeler's hand paused in stroking the soft fur of the Siamese cat lying on the windowsill, and he said wonderingly, "What's that, Beautiful?" but the Siamese cat didn't answer. She stopped purring, though, when Bill stopped stroking her. She must have felt something different in Bill—possibly from the sudden rigidness in his fingers or possibly because cats are prescient and feel changes of mood. Anyway she rolled over on her back and said "Miaouw" quite plaintively. But Bill, for once, didn't answer her. He was too engrossed in the incredible thing across the street in the park.

It was cigar-shaped, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter at the thickest point. As far as size was concerned, it might have been a large toy model dirigible, but it never occurred to Bill—even at his first glimpse of it when it was about fifty feet in the air, just opposite his window-that it might be a toy or a model.

There was something about it, even at the most casual look, that said alien. You couldn't put your finger on what it was. Anyway, alien or terrestrial, it had no visible means of support. No wings, propellers, rocket tubes, or anything else—and it was made of metal and obviously heavier than air.

But it floated down like a feather to a point just about a foot above the grass. It stopped there, and suddenly, out of one end of it (both ends were so nearly alike that you couldn't say it was the front or back) came a flash of fire that was almost blinding. There was a hissing sound with the flash, and the cat under Bill Wheeler's hand turned over and was on her feet in a single lithe movement, looking out of the window. She spat once, softly, and the hairs on her back and the back of her neck stood straight up, as did her tail, which was now a full two inches thick.

Bill didn't touch her; if you know cats, you don't when they're like that. But he said, "Quiet, Beautiful. It's all right. It's only a spaceship from Mars, to conquer Earth. It isn't a mouse."

He was right on the first count, in a way. He was wrong on the second, in a way. But let's not get ahead of ourselves like that.

After the single blast from its exhaust tube or whatever it was, the spaceship dropped the last twelve inches and lay inert on the grass. It didn't move. There was now a fan-shaped area of blackened earth radiating from one end of it for a distance of about thirty feet.

And then nothing happened except that people came running from several directions. Cops came running, too, three of them, and kept people from going too close to the alien object. Too close, according to the cops' idea, seemed to be closer than about ten feet. Which, Bill Wheeler thought, was silly. If the thing was going to explode or anything, it would probably kill everyone for blocks around.

But it didn't explode. It just lay there, and nothing happened. Nothing except that flash that had startled both Bill and the cat. And the cat looked bored now, and lay back down on the windowsill, her hackles down.

Bill stroked her sleek, fawn-colored fur again, absentmindedly. He said, "This is a day, Beautiful. That thing out there is from outside, or I'm a spider's nephew. I'm going down and take a look at it."

He took the elevator down. He got as far as the front door, tried to open it, and couldn't. All he could see through the glass was the backs of people, jammed tight against the door. Standing on tiptoes and stretching his neck to see over the nearest ones, he could see a solid phalanx of heads stretching from here to there.

He got back in the elevator. The operator said, "Sounds like excitement out front. Parade going by or something?"

"Something," Bill said. "Spaceship just landed in Central Park, from Mars or somewhere. You hear the welcoming committee out there."

"The hell," said the operator. "What's it doing?"

"Nothing."

The operator grinned. "You're a great kidder, Mr. Wheeler. How's that cat you got?"

"Fine," said Bill. "How's yours?"

"Getting crankier. Threw a book at me when I got home last night with a few under my belt and lectured me half the night because I'd spent three and a half bucks. You got the best kind."

"I think so," Bill said.

By the time he got back to the window, there was really a crowd down there. Central Park West was solid with people for half a block each way, and the park was solid with them for a long way back. The only open area was a circle around the spaceship, now expanded to about twenty feet in radius and with a lot of cops keeping it open instead of only three.

Bill Wheeler gently moved the Siamese over to one side of the windowsill and sat down. He said, "We got a box seat, Beautiful. I should have had more sense than to go down there."

The cops below were having a tough time. But reinforcements were coming, truckloads of them. They fought their way into the circle and then helped enlarge it. Somebody had obviously decided that the larger that circle was, the fewer people were going to be killed. A few khaki uniforms had infiltrated the circle, too.

"Brass," Bill told the cat. "High brass. I can't make out insignia from here, but that one boy's at least a three-star, you can tell by the way he walks."

They got the circle pushed back to the sidewalk, finally. There was a lot of brass inside by then. And half a dozen men, some in uniform, some not, were starting, very carefully, to work on the ship. Photographs first, and then measurements, and then one man with a big suitcase of paraphernalia was carefully scratching at the metal and making tests of some kind.

"A metallurgist, Beautiful," Bill Wheeler explained to the Siamese, who wasn't watching at all. "And I'll bet you ten pounds of liver to one miaouw he finds that's an alloy that's brand new to him. And that it's got some stuff in it he can't identify.

"You really ought to be looking out, Beautiful, instead of lying there like a dope. This is a day, Beautiful. This may be the beginning of the end-or of something new. I wish they'd hurry up and get it open."

Army trucks were coming into the circle now. Half a dozen big planes were circling overhead, making a lot of noise. Bill looked up at them quizzically.

"Bombers, I'll bet, with payloads. Don't know what they have in mind unless to bomb the park, people and all, if little green men come out of that thing with ray guns and start killing everybody. Then the bombers could finish off whoever's left."

But no little green men came out of the cylinder. The men working on it couldn't, apparently, find an opening in it. They'd rolled it over now and exposed the underside, but the underside was the same as the top. For all they could tell, the underside was the top.

And then Bill Wheeler swore. The army trucks were being unloaded, and sections of a big tent were coming out of them, and men in khaki were driving stakes and unrolling canvas.

"They would do something like that, Beautiful," Bill complained bitterly. "Be bad enough if they hauled it off, but to leave it there to work on and still to block off our view—"

The tent went up. Bill Wheeler watched the top of the tent, but nothing happened to the top of the tent and whatever went on inside he couldn't see. Trucks came and went; high brass and civvies came and went.

And after a while the phone rang. Bill gave a last affectionate rumple to the cat's fur and went to answer it.

"Bill Wheeler?" the receiver asked. "This is General Kelly speaking. Your name has been given to me as a competent research biologist. Tops in your field. Is that correct?"

"Well," Bill said. "I'm a research biologist. It would be hardly modest for me to say I'm tops in my field. What's up?"

"A spaceship has just landed in Central Park."

"You don't say," said Bill.

"I'm calling from the field of operations; we've run phones in here, and we're gathering specialists. We would like you and some other biologists to examine something that was found inside the—uh—spaceship. Grimm of Harvard was in town and will be here, and Winslow of New York University is already here. It's opposite Eighty-third Street. How long would it take you to get here?"

"About ten seconds, if I had a parachute. I've been watching you out of my window." He gave the address and the apartment number. "If you can spare a couple of strong boys in imposing uniforms to get me through the crowd, it'll be quicker than if I try it myself. Okay?"

"Right. Send 'em right over. Sit tight."

"Good," said Bill. "What did you find inside the cylinder?"

There was a second's hesitation. Then the voice said, "Wait till you get here."

"I've got instruments," Bill said. "Dissecting equipment. Chemicals. Reagents. I want to know what to bring. Is it a little green man?"

"No," said the voice. After a second's hesitation again, it said, "It seems to be a mouse. A dead mouse."

"Thanks," said Bill. He put down the receiver and walked back to the window. He looked at the Siamese cat accusingly. "Beautiful," he demanded, "was somebody ribbing me, or—"

There was a puzzled frown on his face as he watched the scene across the street. Two policemen came hurrying out of the tent and headed directly for the entrance of his apartment building. They began to work their way through the crowd.

"Fan me with a blowtorch, Beautiful," Bill said. "It's the McCoy." He went to the closet and grabbed a valise, hurried to a cabinet and began to stuff instruments and bottles into the valise. He was ready by the time there was a knock on the door.

He said, "Hold the fort, Beautiful. Got to see a man about a mouse." He joined the policemen waiting outside his door and was escorted through the crowd and into the circle of the elect and into the tent.

There was a crowd around the spot where the cylinder lay. Bill peered over shoulders and saw that the cylinder was neatly split in half. The inside was hollow and padded with something that looked like fine leather, but softer. A man kneeling at one end of it was talking.

"—not a trace of any activating mechanism, any mechanism at all, in fact. Not a wire, not a grain or a drop of any fuel. Just a hollow cylinder, padded inside. Gentlemen, it couldn't have traveled by its own power in any conceivable way. But it came here, and from outside. Gravesend says the material is definitely extraterrestrial. Gentlemen, I'm stumped."

Another voice said, "I've an idea, Major." It was the voice of the man over whose shoulder Bill Wheeler was leaning, and Bill recognized the voice and the man with a start. It was the President of the United States. Bill quit leaning on him.

"I'm no scientist," the president said. "And this is just a possibility. Remember the one blast, out of that single exhaust hole? That might have been the destruction, the dissipation, of whatever the mechanism or the propellant was. Whoever, whatever, sent or guided this contraption might not have wanted us to find out what made it run. It was constructed, in that case, so that, upon landing, the mechanism destroyed itself utterly. Colonel Roberts, you examined that scorched area of ground. Anything that might bear out that theory?"

"Definitely, sir," said another voice. "Traces of metal and silica and some carbon, as though it had been vaporized by terrific heat and then condensed and uniformly spread. You can't find a chunk of it to pick up, but the instruments indicate it. Another thing—"

Bill was conscious of someone speaking to him. "You're Bill Wheeler, aren't you?"

Bill turned. "Professor Winslow!" he said. "I've seen your picture, sir, and I've read your papers in the Journal. I'm proud to meet you and to—"

"Cut the malarkey," said Professor Winslow, "and take a gander at this." He grabbed Bill Wheeler by the arm and led him to a table in one corner of the tent.

"Looks for all the world like a dead mouse," he said, "but it isn't. Not quite. I haven't cut in yet; waited for you and Grimm. But I've taken temperature tests and had hairs under the mike and studied musculature. It's—well, look for yourself."

Bill Wheeler looked. It looked like a mouse all right, a very small mouse, until you looked closely. Then you saw little differences, if you were a biologist.

Grimm got there and—delicately, reverently—they cut in. The differences stopped being little ones and became big ones. The bones didn't seem to be made of bone, for one thing, and they were bright yellow instead of white. The digestive system wasn't too far off the beam, and there was a circulatory system and a white milky fluid in it, but there wasn't any heart. There were, instead, nodes at regular intervals along the larger tubes.

"Way stations," Grimm said. "No central pump. You might call it a lot of little hearts instead of one big one. Efficient, I'd say. Creature built like this couldn't have heart trouble. Here, let me put some of that white fluid on a slide."

Someone was leaning over Bill's shoulder, putting uncomfortable weight on him. He turned his head to tell the man to get the hell away and saw it was the President of the United States. "Out of this world?" the president asked quietly.

"And how," said Bill. A second later he added, "Sir," and the president chuckled. He asked, "Would you say it's been dead long or that it died about the time of arrival?"

Winslow answered that one. "It's purely a guess, Mr. President, because we don't know the chemical makeup of the thing or what its normal temperature is. But a rectal thermometer reading twenty minutes ago, when I got here, was ninety-five three, and one minute ago it was ninety point six. At that rate of heat loss, it couldn't have been dead long."

"Would you say it was an intelligent creature?"

"I wouldn't say for sure, sir. It's too alien. But I'd guess—definitely no. No more so than its terrestrial counterpart, a mouse. Brain size and convolutions are quite similar."

"You don't think it could, conceivably, have designed that ship?"

"I'd bet a million to one against it, sir."

It had been midafternoon when the spaceship had landed; it was almost midnight when Bill Wheeler started home. Not from across the street, but from the lab at New York U., where the dissection and microscopic examinations had continued.

He walked home in a daze, but he remembered guiltily that the Siamese hadn't been fed, and hurried as much as he could for the last block.

She looked at him reproachfully and said "Miaouw, miaouw, miaouw, miaouw" so fast he couldn't get a word in edgewise until she was eating some liver out of the icebox.

"Sorry, Beautiful," he said then. "Sorry, too, I couldn't bring you that mouse, but they wouldn't have let me if I'd asked, and I didn't ask because it would probably have given you indigestion."

He was still so excited that he couldn't sleep that night. When it got early enough, he hurried out for the morning papers to see if there had been any new discoveries or developments.

There hadn't been. There was less in the papers than he knew already. But it was a big story, and the papers played it big.

He spent most of three days at the New York U. lab, helping with further tests and examinations until there just weren't any new ones to try and darn little left to try them on. Then the government took over what was left, and Bill Wheeler was on the outside again.

For three more days he stayed home, tuned in on all news reports on the radio and video and subscribed to every newspaper published in English in New York City. But the story gradually died down. Nothing further happened; no further discoveries were made, and if any new ideas developed, they weren't given out for public consumption.

It was on the sixth day that an even bigger story broke—the assassination of the President of the United States. People forgot the spaceship.

Two days later, the Prime Minister of Great Britain was killed by a Spaniard, and the day after that a minor employee of the Politburo in Moscow ran amuck and shot a very important official.

A lot of windows broke in New York City the next day when a goodly portion of a county in Pennsylvania went up fast and came down slowly. No one within several hundred miles needed to be told that there was—or had been—a dump of A-bombs there. It was in sparsely populated country, and not many people were killed, only a few thousand.

That was the afternoon, too, that the president of the stock exchange cut his throat and the crash started. Nobody paid too much attention to the riot at Lake Success the next day because of the unidentified submarine fleet that suddenly sank practically all the shipping in New Orleans harbor.

It was the evening of that day that Bill Wheeler was pacing up and down the front room of his apartment. Occasionally he stopped at the window to pet the Siamese named Beautiful and to look out across Central Park, bright under lights and cordoned off by armed sentries, where they were pouring concrete for the antiaircraft gun emplacements.

He looked haggard.

He said, "Beautiful, we saw the start of it, right from this window. Maybe I'm crazy, but I still think that spaceship started it. God knows how. Maybe I should have fed you that mouse. Things couldn't have gone to pot so suddenly without help from somebody or something."

He shook his head slowly. "Let's dope it out, Beautiful. Let's say something came in on that ship besides a dead mouse. What could it have been? What could it have done and be doing?

"Let's say that the mouse was a laboratory animal, a guinea pig. It was sent in the ship, and it survived the journey but died when it got here. Why? I've got a screwy hunch, Beautiful."

He sat down in a chair and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. He said, "Suppose the superior intelligence—from Somewhere—that made that ship came in with it. Suppose it wasn't the mouse—let's call it a mouse. Then, since the mouse was the only physical thing in the spaceship, the being, the invader, wasn't physical. It was an entity that could live apart from whatever body it had back where it came from. But let's say it could live in any body, and it left its own in a safe place back home and rode here in one that was expendable, that it could abandon on arrival. That would explain the mouse and the fact that it died at the time the ship landed.

"Then the being, at that instant, just jumped into the body of someone here—probably one of the first people to run toward the ship when it landed. It's living in somebody's body—in a hotel on Broadway or a flophouse on the Bowery or anywhere—pretending to be a human being. That make sense, Beautiful?"

He got up and started to pace again.

"And having the ability to control other minds, it sets about to make the world—the Earth—safe for Martians or Venusians or whatever they are. It sees—after a few days of study—that the world is on the brink of destroying itself and needs only a push. So it could give that push.

"It could get inside a nut and make him assassinate the president and get caught at it. It could make a Russian shoot his Number 1. It could make a Spaniard shoot the Prime Minister of England. It could start a bloody riot in the UN, and make an army man, there to guard it, explode an A-bomb dump. It could—hell, Beautiful, it could push this world into a final war within a week. It practically has done it."

He walked over to the window and stroked the cat's sleek fur while he frowned down at the gun emplacements going up under the bright floodlights.

"And he's done it, and even if my guess is right I couldn't stop him because I couldn't find him. And nobody would believe me now. He'll make the world safe for Martians. When the war is over, a lot of little ships like that—or big ones—can land here and take over what's left ten times as easy as they could now."

He lighted a cigarette with hands that shook a little. He said, "The more I think of it, the more—"

He sat down in the chair again. He said, "Beautiful, I've got to try. Screwy as that idea is, I've got to give it to the authorities, whether they believe it or not. That Major I met was an intelligent guy. So is General Keely. I—"

He started to walk to the phone and then sat down again. "I'll call both of them, but let's work it out just a little finer first. See if I can make any intelligent suggestions how they could go about finding the—the being—"

He groaned. "Beautiful, it's impossible. It wouldn't even have to be a human being. It could be an animal, anything. It could be you. He'd probably take over whatever nearby type of mind was nearest his own. If he was remotely feline, you'd have been the nearest cat."

He sat up and stared at her. He said, "I'm going crazy, Beautiful. I'm remembering how you jumped and twisted just after that spaceship blew up its mechanism and went inert. And, listen, Beautiful, you've been sleeping twice as much as usual lately. Has your mind been out—

"Say, that would be why I couldn't wake you up yesterday to feed you. Beautiful, cats always wake up easily. Cats do."

Looking dazed, Bill Wheeler got up out of the chair. He said, "Cat, am I crazy, or—"

The Siamese cat looked at him languidly through sleepy eyes. Distinctly it said, "Forget it."

And halfway between sitting and rising, Bill Wheeler looked even more dazed for a second. He shook his head as though to clear it.

He said, "What was I talking about, Beautiful? I'm getting punchy from not enough sleep."

He walked over to the window and stared out, gloomily, rubbing the cat's fur until it purred.

He said, "Hungry, Beautiful? Want some liver?"

The cat jumped down from the windowsill and rubbed itself against his leg affectionately.

It said, "Miaouw."

The End

* * * *

Transformer

by Chad Oliver

Our town is turned off now, all gray and lazy, so this seems like a good time to begin.

Let's not kid ourselves about it, Clyde—I know what you're thinking. I don't blame you. You're thinking there's nothing from one wall to the other that's as completely and thoroughly boring as some motherly old dame gushing about the One Hundred and One fugitives from Paradise which are to be found in Her Home Town. A real insomnia killer, that's what you're thinking. A one-bell monologue.

Suppose we get things straight, right from the start.

I may look like one of those sweet little old ladies who spend all their time in the kitchen slipping apple preserves to bleary-eyed children, but I can't help what I look like, and neither can you. I never set foot in a kitchen in my life, and of course there aren't any kids in our town—not physically, anyway. I don't say I'm the most interesting gal you ever met, Clyde, but I'll tell you for sure you never yakked with anyone like me before.

Now, you take our town. If you want it straight, it's the damnedest place you ever heard of. It stinks, but we can't get out. ELM POINT is the name on the station, that's what we have to call it, but it's as crazy as the rest of the place. There's no point in ELM POINT, and the only trees I ever saw are made out of sponge rubber.

You might stick around for a minute and listen, you see—things might get interesting.

One more thing we might as well clear up while we're at it. I can hear you thinking, with that sophisticated mind of yours: "Who's she supposed to be telling the story to? That's the trouble with all these first-person narratives." Well, Clyde, that's a dumb question, if you ask me. Do you worry about where the music comes from when Pinza sings in a lifeboat? I feel sorry for you, I really do. I'll tell you the secret: the music comes from a studio orchestra that's hidden in the worm can just to the left of the Nazi spy. You follow me? The plain, unvarnished truth is that I get restless when the town's turned off for a long time. I can't sleep. I'm talking to myself. I'm bored stiff, and so would you be if you had to live here for your whole life. But I know you're there, Clyde, or this wouldn't be getting through to you. Don't worry about it, though.

This is strictly for kicks.

Okay, so let's have some details. I live in a town that's part of the background for a model railroad. Maybe you think that's funny, but did you ever live in a subway? I want to be absolutely clear about this—you're a little dense sometimes, Clyde. I don't mean that ELM POINT is a town that's located on a big railroad that's operated in an exemplary, model manner. No. I mean I live on a model railroad, a half-baked contraption that's set up in a kid's attic. The kid's name is Willy Roberts, he's thirteen years old, and we don't think he's a god that created our world. In fact, if you want my opinion, Willy is a low-grade moron, and a sadist to boot.

So my world is on a big plywood table in an attic. My town is background atmosphere for a lousy electric train. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. A motherly old soul glimpsed through a house window, I guess. An intimate detail. It gives me a pain.

If you think it's fun to live in a town on a model railroad, you've got rocks in your head.

Look at it from our point of view. In the first place, ELM POINT isn't a town at all—it's a collection of weird buildings that Willy Roberts and his old man took a fancy to and could afford. It isn't even sharp for a model railroad town; the whole thing is disgustingly middle class.

Try to visualize it: there's a well in the middle of the table, a hole for Willy Roberts to get into when he works the transformer and the electric switches. The whole southern end of the table is covered with a sagging mountain made of chicken wire and wet paper towels. The western side has got a bunch of these sponge rubber trees I was telling you about, and just beyond them is an empty area called Texas. There are some real dumb cows there and two objectionable citizens who come to our town every Saturday night and try to shoot up the place. The Ohio River starts in the northwestern corner of the table and flows into the southeast, where I guess it makes a big drop to the floor. (No one has ever gone over to look.) Our town and a mountain take up the northern end of the table and part of the eastern side. That's where I live, as a matter of fact—on the eastern side, between the Ohio River and the water tower.

Now catch this building inventory, Clyde—it'll kill you. We've got a police station and a firehouse in North Flats, at the edge of the mountain where the tunnel comes out. There's a big tin railroad station with a red roof. There's a quaint old frame hotel that was left over from the Chicago Fire, and right behind it there's this diner that was supposed to look like an old streetcar. There's one gas station with three pumps, but no cars. There's a big double spotlight on a tin tower right across from my house; I have to wear dark glasses all the time. There's seven lower-class frame houses with dirty white curtains in the windows; Humphery and I live in one of them. Humphery—that's my husband, or would be if Willy Roberts had thought to put a preacher in this hole-works in the tin switchman's house up the tracks. Whenever one of those damned trains comes by he has to goose-step out and wave his stupid red lantern. Clyde, he hates it. Then there's a cattle pen on a siding, with no wind to blow the smell away, if you get what I mean.

That's about it—a real Paradise.

Willy's got two trains on the table now. One is a flashy passenger job stashed full of stuck-up aristocrats—you know, the kind who are always reading the Times when they go through your town. The other is a freight train that doesn't carry anything; it just grinds around the track like a demented robot, and its only job, as far as I can tell, is to shuttle itself onto a siding and look respectful when the passenger train full of city slickers hisses by. As if all this racket weren't enough, Willy's got him a switch engine, too, and he keeps it in our front yard. It's got a bell.

There's more, too, but we'll get to that.

How do you like our town, Clyde? Interesting? I want to tell you something else: our town is planning to commit a murder.

Guess who.

You just stick around awhile.

You know, our town is all gray and lazy when the current isn't on, just like I said. Nobody's got much energy; I must be just about the only one awake in ELM POINT at night. It gets pretty lonesome.

But the door to the attic is opening now, and here comes Willy the Kid. Hang on, Clyde—all hell will pop loose in a minute. You'll have to excuse me for a minute; I have to wake Humphery up and get him down to his tin house. It's terrible—you almost have to dent Humphery to wake him up like this. And for what? Every time he wakes up, he has to go to the damnfool switchman's house and make with the red lantern.

Fine thing. Well, I'll be back later. And say, Clyde, if you ever see this Willy character, tell him not to shake the whole lousy table when he drags his body into the well, will you?

· · · · ·

Willy Roberts surveyed his model railroad without pleasure. He could remember the time when it had given him a real hoot, but after all he was thirteen years old now. He felt slightly ashamed that he should want to mess with it at all, but it was better than getting kicked around in football by all the big guys in the neighborhood. And Sally had said she was going to the show with Dave Toney, damn her.

Willy clicked on the transformer rheostat and watched the lights come on.

He knocked with his knuckles on the blue tin roof of the switchman's house. "Let's get with it, Humphery boy," he said. He always called the switchman Humphery—always had, ever since he was a kid and had carried on long, friendly conversations with the switchman. Boy, what a creep he had used to be. "Come on Humph, or I'll tear your arm off. Whaddya want, boy—time and a half for overtime? Union shop? On the ball—here comes the Black Express, full of FBI agents after the atom spies …"

He pressed the "start" button, and the passenger train slipped its wheels on the tracks and picked up speed. It zipped by the switchman's shack, and out came Humphery with his red lantern, right on schedule. "What a brain you got, Humph," Willy said. "Boy, you're a genius." He speeded up the passenger train and sent it careening through the tunnel into ELM POINT. He blew the whistle. He made artificial black smoke pour out of the locomotive's smokestack.

Willy waited until the Black Express had got by the siding and wavered into the end mountain tunnel, and then he sent his freight chugging out of the cattle pen onto the main line. He sent that rattling through ELM POINT, tweaking old Humphery's cap when he jerked out with his lantern, and then stopped it on the bridge over the Ohio River. He clapped his hands together.

The Black Express charged full speed across Texas, knocking a cow off the track, and ploughed full-tilt into the stalled freight on the bridge. Both engines jumped the track and landed in the cellophane of the Ohio River. One little man fell out of the caboose and got caught under a wheel.

Willy grinned.

"Pretty good, hey, Humphery?" he said.

He cut the power for a second, righted the trains, and set them in reverse to see how fast they would go. Then he ran the freight back onto a siding and began to send the Black Express backward and forward over the switch, so he could watch old Humphery dart in and out of his tin shack waving his lantern like a demon.

"Get with it, Humphery," cried Willy. "You only live once!"

Humphery didn't say anything, Willy noticed.

Too busy, probably.

· · · · ·

Well, now you've met our lord and master, Clyde. A real All American Junior; I tell you, ELM POINT is a madhouse when that kid is in the attic. It's bad enough on the rest of us, but it's killing Humphery.

Things have settled down a little at the moment. The freight is sitting in the siding by the cow pen, and Willy's got the passenger job on automatic. Once every forty-seven seconds it comes yelling and smoking through my side-yard, and five seconds later poor Humphery has to stagger out and wave his red lantern at the snobs in the club car.

The spotlights are on, too, but Willy hasn't turned off the light in the ceiling yet, so it isn't too bad. Willy's sitting in the well reading a sex magazine, so I guess he won't be wrecking any more trains for a while.

Maybe you wonder what will happen to the man who fell out of the caboose in the wreck. More likely, you don't care. But I'll tell you his name: Carl. None of us have any last names. Carl's too busted up to fix, so Willy will throw him in the wastebasket. Tender, isn't it? It chokes you all up with sentiment. We'll sort of have a funeral for Carl after the town gets turned off again, if we can stay awake, and you know what we'll be thinking? We'll be thinking that's the end of the road for all of us here in ELM POINT—the wastebasket.

It's a great life. You'd love our town, Clyde.

Let me tell you about our town, Clyde. It's different when the current's turned on. You'd hardly know the old dump, believe me.

Everybody has to go through the proper motions, you see? Like poor old Humphery with his lantern. There's Patrick, the cop, out in front of the police station. He just stands there blowing his tin whistle like he was Benny Goodman or somebody. Inside, they've got this one prisoner, name of Lefty. He's never been outside a cell; I don't know what he's supposed to have done. Then there's a joker over at the firehouse. All he's done for the last seven years is slide up and down this silly pole. Maybe you think he isn't sore at night.

Everyone that can, rushes around like mad when the current's on. It's the only time we're really active and feeling good, do you see? We can't add anything to what's already here in ELM POINT, but we can use what we've get as long as Willy can't see us. Some of us, like poor Humphery or the policeman, have to work when the current's on, because that's their job. But some others, the background characters, can sneak off and visit once in a while. The favorite place is inside the hollow mountain. You'd be surprised at what goes on in there, Clyde.

The only restroom in town is in the gas station, and that's all the place is used for. It's ridiculous. They only know how to serve one dish at the diner, because that's all that was on the counter. Bacon and fried eggs and coffee. You think about it, Clyde. Two meals a day, every day for seven years. That's a lot of bacon and eggs. You lose your taste for them after a while.

The train runs right by the side of the hotel, only two inches away. It rattles the whole thing until it's ready to fall apart, and every time it goes by it pours black smoke in through the upstairs window. There's a tenant up there, name of Martin. He looks like he's made out of soot.

The whole town is knee-deep in dust. Did you ever see a kid clean anything that belongs to him? And there's no water, either. That cellophane in the Ohio River may look good from where you stand, but it's about as wet as the gold in Fort Knox. Not only that, but it crinkles all the time where it flows under the bridges. It's enough to drive you bats.

You're beginning to see how it is, Clyde. This town is ripe for one of those lantern-jawed, fearless crusading reporters; you know, the kind that wears the snap-brim hat and the pipe and is always telling the city editor to stop the presses—but Willy forgot to give us a newspaper.

It isn't much of a life, to my way of thinking. You do the best you can, and get up whenever some dumb kid hits a button, and then you get tossed in the wastebasket. It seems sort of pointless.

You can't really blame us for deciding to kill him, can you, Clyde? What else can we do? After we get rid of him, there's no telling what will happen to us. But it's like living in the panther cage, you see—a move in any direction is bound to be an improvement.

Know what we're going to do, Clyde?

We're going to electrocute Willy.

With his own electric train.

We think that's pretty sharp.

· · · · ·

I don't want you to get the idea that I'm just a sour old woman, Clyde, a kind of juvenile delinquent with arthritis. I'm not, really. You know, a long time ago, when Willy was younger, even ELM POINT wasn't so bad.

Humphery wasn't working so hard then, and at night, when our town was all gray and lazy, I used to try and write poetry. I guess you find that pretty hard to swallow, and I admit that it wasn't very good poetry. Maybe you wonder what I found to write about in this dump. Well, one night they left the attic window open and I heard a real train, away off in the distance. I wrote a poem about that. You probably don't care about poetry, Clyde. Anyhow, if you're like the creeps around here, you wouldn't admit it if you did.

I'll tell you, though—it's funny. Sometimes, a long time ago, I'd go and sit down by that silly cellophane river and I'd almost get to where I liked it here.

If it just hadn't been for that damned train every forty-seven seconds whenever the current was on …

It's too bad Willy had to change, huh, Clyde? He wasn't so bad before—just kinda dumb and goggle-eyed. He and Humphery used to get along pretty good, but like I say, it was a long time ago.

I can see I'm boring you, talking about the past and all. You think it's morbid. I guess you're right; I really shouldn't have mentioned it.

Here comes poor old Humphery, dragging in from the switchman's house. Look at him—man, he's really beat to the socks. He can hardly put one foot in front of the other. He's old before his time, Humphery is.

You'll excuse me for a while, won't you? Humphery and I have to go down to the diner for a cup of coffee. Maybe we'll have some bacon and eggs, too, if we can stand it again. I hadn't noticed how late it was getting.

We'll have to go to work on that transformer tonight, if some of us can stay awake. This stuff has got to go, don't you agree?

I'll see you later, Clyde.

· · · · ·

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I last had a bull session with you, Clyde—or at least it would have if there'd been any water in that lousy Ohio River. All it does is crinkle. You have no idea how that can get on your nerves.

Our town is turned off again, all gray and lazy. I know I use that phrase too much, but I'm afraid I've got kind of a literal mind, if you know what I mean. ELM POINT is gray and lazy when the current's turned off, so that's what I say it is.

I guess I'm a realist, Clyde.

I'm not the only one awake tonight, though, I'll tell you that. I swear I've never seen so many people up and around at night in this burg. Even Smoky—he's the guy who has to slide up and down that pole over at the firehouse—is sort of waddling around. He's kind of bowlegged, you know.

To tell you the truth, we're all pretty nervous.

A bunch of the guys have been doing their best on the transformer over in the kid's well. It wasn't easy to get to it, but they managed it by using one of the crane cars from the freight train.

It's awfully quiet here in town tonight, even with all the people up and around. I don't know when I've heard it so quiet. You probably think we've turned chicken or something. You probably think we're scared.

You're right.

I wonder how you would feel. Have you ever been disconnected, Clyde?

We've got a chance, the way we figure it. If we can just get rid of Willy, maybe they'll let us alone for a while. We'd have strength enough to send a crew down to plug in the town once in a while, when nobody was around. It would be so wonderful—you have no idea. It isn't asking very much, is it?

Of course, it can't last long. Maybe we'll all get stuffed back in a box after a while. Maybe they'll melt us down. Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll be given away and go to some other town.

But if we can only live a week like human beings, it'll be worth the effort. I guess I'm getting maudlin. Sorry, Clyde. You know how it is when you get old.

Sure, we're scared. Win or lose, though, what are the odds? I ask you. Anything's better than the wastebasket, that's the way we figure it.

The attic door is opening, Clyde. Light is streaming in from the stairs.

I feel terrible.

Here comes Willy.

· · · · ·

Willy Roberts wiggled under the table and came up in the control well. The train wasn't a kick like the pinball machine, no argument there, but at least it was cheaper. He hadn't won a free game in a month.

He knocked with his knuckles on the blue tin roof of the switchman's house. "Let's get with it, Humphery boy," he said. "Oil up the old leg and light the red lamp."

Willy surveyed the tabletop with a jaundiced eye. Let's see now, what were the possibilities? If he played his cards right, it just might be possible to set the switch engine on the siding down by the cow pen, and then start the Black Express from the gas station and the freight from Texas. That way, he could have a three-way wreck.

It wouldn't be easy, though. It would take some doing.

He swatted the tin roof of the switchman's shack again and drummed on it with his fingernails. "Dig this, Humphery," he said.

The situation, he reflected, had definite possibilities.

Willy took the transformer rheostat between his thumb and index finger and clicked it on.

Then he pressed the red "start" button with the middle finger of his right hand.

There was a small yellow spark and a faint smell of burning insulation. Willy jerked his tingling finger away and stood up straight, staring at his model railroad accusingly.

"Damn it," he said, "that hurt."

He reached out quite deliberately and ripped the transformer from its track connection. He pulled out the wall plug with a jerk on the wire. Then he took careful aim and threw the transformer as hard as he could at the spot where the walls converged in the corner of the attic.

The transformer hit with a thud, chipping the wall plaster. It bounced off the wall, crashed into the top of the mountain, and rebounded off again to land with a squashing smash on the police station. The plastic policeman with his tin whistle was under it when it fell.

Willy socked the tin switchman's house with his fingernail, almost knocking it over. "Think you're pretty cool, don't you, Humphery boy?" he asked, rubbing his smarting finger. "After all I've done for you, too."

He studied his model railroad thoughtfully for a long time. Finally, Willy made his decision. He was getting too old for this junk anyhow, he reasoned. What he needed was something else.

Willy smiled at the railroad. "You know what I'm going to do to you?" he asked loudly. "I'm going to convert you to cash. How do you like that?"

He turned out the light and left the attic.

· · · · ·

No current at all is coming through, and our town is black.

How did you like that, Clyde? All that work on the transformer and what do we get? One stinking spark. Like sticking your finger on a lightning bug. Deadly as a water pistol.

I'm not too surprised, to tell you the truth. Patrick the cop warned us; he was in another town before Willy bought him, and they tried the same thing there. Not enough volts for anything but a little shock. Maybe you've been shocked by a model railroad yourself, Clyde. You think about it a little.

Sure, we knew it wouldn't work. So what? You've got to believe in something, Clyde, even when you know you're kidding yourself. What else is there to do? And maybe we could hope that by some chance, just this once …

But it's over now, been over for a week. This is the first I've felt like talking. You know. There wasn't much left of Patrick when the transformer hit him. I guess Lefty got his inside—nobody's had enough energy to dig in and see.

Poor old Humphery is hardly himself anymore; he got shaken up pretty badly when Willy socked the switchman's shack. I guess the worst part is mental, though. It's hard to see how things can get much worse in ELM POINT.

Do you know a good psychiatrist, Clyde?

I guess I sound like one of those old bats who spend their waking hours giving recitals of their aches and pains and their sleeping hours dreaming about men under their beds. I'm getting to be crummy company. But it is hard to talk now. It used to be that when the transformer was turned off, a little current would seep through anyhow, but not anymore. We don't even have a wire into the wall plug. The joint is like a morgue in a coal mine.

I hear footsteps on the stairs.

The door is opening—the light hurts my eyes.

Here they come, Clyde.

A whole herd of them.

· · · · ·

Willy Roberts rubbed his hands together expectantly. Just about every kid in the neighborhood had showed up, and some of them were fairly well loaded.

"Take it easy, Mac," he said. "One at a time. Let's not mess up the table, guy—this is a valuable set."

Not bad, he told himself. Pretty good in fact. No doubt about it—he had a genius for business.

"Whatcha want for the gas station, Willy?" asked Bruce Golder from down the street.

"What'll you give me?"

"Fifty cents."

"Fifty cents?"

"Fifty cents."

"Sold."

Willy pocketed the money. It felt good.

"How about the switchman, Willy?" said Eddie Upman, the rich kid from up the hill.

Willy hesitated, just for a second. He and Humphery had been together for a long time. But what the devil. He wasn't a kid anymore. Humphery had cost five dollars new, and prices had gone up since then.

"Two bucks four bits," Willy announced, crossing his fingers.

"Make it two bucks even," said Eddie Upman, taking out his billfold.

Willy looked around, but no one topped the bid. "Sold," he said, and Eddie Upman took Humphery and put him in a sack.

"Let's get rid of the houses before we start on the track and stuff," Willy said. "Who wants 'em?"

Nobody said anything.

"They're good houses," Willy insisted. "People inside and everything. See?"

Silence.

"Aw, come on. A buck for the lot."

No takers.

"Fifty cents. This is the last chance on these, you guys. I'll burn 'em before I'll give 'em away."

Mark Borden slowly fumbled in his pockets and came up with a quarter, four nickels, and five pennies. "I'll take them," he said. "I guess I can use them."

"Sold!" said Willy, pocketing the money. "Now, what am I offered for the good mountain? I'll make it easy on you. Let see, about a buck ought to be right …"

Willy Roberts felt good. The table was being cleaned quicker than he had hoped, and the table itself ought to bring in some real dough. He smiled broadly when Bruce Golder bought the mountain.

Willy knew that he was a real man now.

· · · · ·

I'm back, Clyde.

I guess you saw how they fought over me. Willy almost had to throw me into the fire. I'm a real queen, I am. I drive men mad.

I wish he'd burn me, Clyde. I really do.

I'm determined not to get all morbid and gloomy, so you won't be hearing from me again. I can't hold out much longer, and if I have to make with the blues I'll do it alone.

Maybe you'll be wondering about me—where I am, what I'm doing. Probably you don't give a damn. You're just like all the rest of them, aren't you? But just in case—

Let me tell you about our new town, Clyde. It'll kill you.

You see, I'm it. Or just about.

That's right. ELM POINT looks like Utopia from where I'm sitting. Mark Borden, the one that bought me, can't afford a real model railroad set-up, and his house doesn't even have an attic. So about once a week he takes us all out of his dirty closet, sets up his lousy circle of track, and starts up his wheezing four-car freight train. It isn't even a scale model. Big deal.

He's got four houses that he spaces alongside the track when he's running the train; he doesn't much like the other three that he got from Willy, so he leaves them in the closet all the time. That's all there is, Clyde. Just me and the train. The other houses aren't even occupied, and the engineer on the freight is so embittered by now that he won't even wave.

I just sit in my stinking rocking chair and look out the window. Oh, it's delightful. I can see an old blue rug, a dresser with initials cut in it, a pile of dirty clothes in the corner, and a bed that's never made.

Once in a while Mark, the little angel, gets out his lead men and plays soldier. The first thing he does, see, is to build him a Lincoln Log fort, about a foot from my house. Then he sticks all these lantern-jawed jokers with broken rifles along the walls, and then he backs off about nine feet and sets up his Coast Defense Gun. You'd love that, Clyde. The Coast Defense Gun is a huge blue job that works on a big spring. Mark puts marbles in the barrel, cocks the spring, and then hollers "Fire!" like a maniac. The whole lousy gun jerks up on two folding stilts and hurls all the marbles at the log fort by my house.

Chaos results, Clyde.

Logs fly all over the place. Marbles swish through the air and roll under the bed like thunder. My house has two big holes in it, and all I can do is sit in this quaint old rocker and pray. I don't know whether to pray for a hit or a miss. Periodically, one of the marbles hits a soldier square in the face and knocks his head off.

Charming.

And there's one other minor detail. Ants. We have ants. I don't think I'll tell you about them, though. You just think about it awhile.

That's about all. You see how it is, Clyde. I've enjoyed talking to you, but now there doesn't seem to be much to say. I won't bother you anymore.

There's only one thing, Clyde. I wouldn't even ask, but I am getting old and corny. It's about Humphery. The one named Eddie Upman bought him, and he's got a lot of money. I heard Willy say so. That probably means a big table and another town and maybe some trees and rivers.

I wouldn't want you to go to any trouble, Clyde. But if you should ever be in Eddie Upman's house, maybe you could go up to the attic for a minute. Maybe you could see Humphery. You wouldn't have to do anything drooley or sentimental; I know you couldn't stand that. But maybe you could sort of accidentally leave the current on low when you leave, without running the trains.

Old Humphery would like that.

Would you do that, Clyde—for me?

The End

© 1954 Fantasy House, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1954. Copyright renewed by Chad Oliver in 1982. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Chad Oliver.

* * * *

The White King's Dream

by Elizabeth A. Lynn

The straps across her shoulders were cutting through the thin cloth gown. I'm cold, she thought. "Okay, Louise, time to wake up now," said a voice warm as honey—but I am awake, Luisa thought, and wondered why she could not see the light that she could feel falling on her eyes.

"Baby, I'll move you into the sun while I change those dirty sheets. You messed the bed again, Louise. I know you can't help it, but I sure wish you wouldn't do it." At least I can hear, Luisa thought. She heard the voice, and a crying sound, quite close. The sheets were clammy under her. She smelled a stale and sour smell. The straps fell away. Something lifted her.

She was afraid.

She was set in a hard chair. The straps came back. The chair was metal and cold. Now she was sitting in the sunlight. She wanted to say thank you but her mouth would not move. The close crying sound increased. It was herself; she was crying. The stale sour scent was her own. Helen. Day shift. Every day began like this, except the days when it rained. Helen still came, then, to change her bedclothes, wash her, feed her, shove pills down her shriveled throat; but there was no sunlight to sit in when it rained, and they would never open the windows so that she could smell the rain. All she smelled was her own melting flesh. In Lord Byron there was a fat man crying to get out, and in me there is a skeleton wailing for release.

"Baby, why you screwing up your face like that? Are you too hot?" No, Luisa wanted to scream, no, but Helen's inexorable hands pulled her out of the warmth and dumped her into her cold, barren bed. "Breakfast in a while, Louise. You just put your head back into the pillow and dream, now."

Even dreams are dreams, Luisa thought. Y los sueños, sueños son. Dreams no longer meant sleep, and what good was sleep when she had to wake from it again? Sleep just meant the night shift, and then the day shift, the sun looking through the windows, busy old fool, unruly sun. Breakfast, she thought with loathing. They fed her with a tube down her throat. Sometimes they put a tube like an arm into her and pumped air through her, making her breathe. She hated tubes. Is that Freudian, she wondered, to hate tubes? She wanted to be back in the sunlight, in the warm. She began to cry again, a cat-mewl of sound. Helen might hear it; Helen listened, sometimes, and might understand; and might put her back into the sun.

· · · · ·

"They just like babies," Helen said. "They're over ninety, most of them, and they can't hardly talk, but they can cry. If you watch their eyes you can figure out what it is they want—I can, anyways. You'll get the hang of it."

I don't give a damn, thought Mark Wald. But he nodded. The odors of feces and ammonia fought in the halls. He hated the geriatrics homes, but it was the only place he could get work anymore; the hospitals wouldn't hire him. The best thing about this place is that the lockers are in the basement and I can go down there to do my drinking in private, the way a man should drink. Unhurried snorts. He would read—he had the latest paperback thriller in his locker now—and drink, slowly, decently. No one would notice on the graveyard shift. During the day there were five aides, three orderlies, two RNs on duty. Graveyard shift there were two orderlies, two aides, one RN, no baths to give or beds to make or people to feed. Stay up all night riding herd on a bunch of whimpering zombies—then go home and sleep till way past noon. Helen was still talking about the patients as if it mattered what they had once done or been. They were zombies now. This one had been a doctor. This one a lawyer. He pretended to listen as she stuck her head into every room.

"Honey, what is it?"

The old lady in the bed had a blind, wrinkled face like a sun-struck turtle. She whimpered. "You wet? No, you not wet. Straps too tight?" She loosened the posey straps that held the thin gawk of a woman in bed. "This is Louise; she was a teacher in a college." The sounds went on. Helen laid a broad black hand on the woman's forehead and reached for her pulse with the other. "Your pulse's okay. You cold? I could put you back in the sun."

The crying stopped.

"That's it, right? Okay, baby, we'll put you in the chair. This is Mark, here, he's a new night shift worker." She was taking off the cloth restraints as she talked. Mark pulled the wheelchair over to the bed. Together they let down the high sides of the bed, helped Luisa to a sitting position, picked her up, and put her in the chair. Her long fingernails scratched lightly against Mark's neck. He shuddered.

I won't get old, he thought. Blind, half-dead, a piece of meat in a bed for others to haul around. I'll die decently. Pills, or gas, or maybe I'll jump off the bridge. The alcohol will do it for me. He saw himself in an alcoholic stupor, staggering along the road … getting hit by a car and dying instantly, no pain, no bedpans or tubes up his arms and in his ass and down his throat.

It was an old vision. Usually it waited till he was decently asleep. It was always night or early morning in the dream, and the car was always a red car. "Excuse me," he said to Helen. He ran downstairs. Let her think he had to piss. He twirled the dial of the combination lock on his locker, got it wrong, did it again, got it right, uncapped the bottle, and took a swallow. The bourbon eased down warmly—that was better. Sometimes he felt it was the only warm thing in the world. He screwed the cap on the bottle, locked it up, and sauntered up the stairs. They would know, of course. That Helen would smell it on him. What the hell, they wouldn't fire him unless he made a mistake. He wouldn't make a mistake.

Helen was waiting for him at the nursing station. "Let's hope he doesn't end up like Harold," he heard her say. Who the hell was Harold? The nurse at the desk was old and stringy, on her way to looking like that senile crock down the hall.

"Hi," he said, smiling. "I'm Mark Wald, the new night shift orderly."

· · · · ·

Graveyard shift was a breeze. The old crocks wheezed and cried and slept. The aides took turns sleeping in the bed in the back room. Mark read paperbacks and sucked on his bottle of bourbon. The other night orderly was an old fag named Morton. He liked playing cards. Mark preferred to read. Morton sulked and played solitaire at the nursing station desk.

"Who was Harold?"

Morton looked up from putting a red queen on a black king. "Oh, it's you."

"Who the hell else would it be?"

"Harold was the dude before you. Black and built. Younger than you."

"He was a fag, too?"

"The word is faggot, sweetie. No. Straight as they come, if you'll excuse the phrase."

"What happened to him—he get tired of this dump?"

Morton looked up again. "No, sweetie. He ripped off dope from the narcotics box and OD'd on it. Morphine, I think."

Now why should that Helen even think he would be like some blood who needled himself to death? He hated drugs.

"Su-i-cide, they called it," said Morton.

"Huh."

"They come and go. I've been working here five years, you know that? Only Helen's been here longer than I have." His hands kept placing the cards. He had soft, pudgy hands.

"Helen said this place is a rich people's dump."

"It is. Look at the equipment we got! Monitors, crash carts. Those things are for hospitals. The nurses all have standing orders, so that if someone goes Code Red they can give the drugs without calling the doctor on the phone. Ever try to find a doctor at dinnertime? Forget it. All these old bags have money, and their sons and daughters have guilt complexes waiting for them to die."

"It's still a dump," Mark said. His knee brushed the table and all the cards slewed sideways off their piles. "Sorry."

Morton bent down. "Sure you are, sweetie," he said. "Sure you are."

Mark went down to his locker again. He sat with the bottle in his hand. The basement walls were dirty gray and nubby, like the stubble of old men's beards. He checked his watch. Near 4 A.M., time for somebody to die. It was true they often died at 4 A.M. They had had one respiratory failure that night already, the old lady in 209. Maybe she would die.

As if his thought had done it, a blinker over the basement door started flashing frantic red. Code Red, cardiac arrest. He stuck the bottle in the locker hastily and went up the stairs.

When he got to the room they were all in there. The EKG was jumping like a scalded mouse and the nurse was using the defibrillator. They all stood clear of the metal bedframe. The body on the bed jerked. Damn, Mark thought, in a nursing home they were supposed to let you die in peace.

"Call St. Francis's admitting," the RN said. "This one has to be in CCU."

Morton went to do that. Waste of time and money, Mark thought. Why can't they just let the bastards die?

· · · · ·

It is a sophism to imagine that there is any strict dividing line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Prospero's Cell, by Lawrence Durrell, Luisa thought. Today she was feeling strong, almost strong enough to tongue the respirator tube out of her throat. They would never let her do that. She had been to Greece, though not to Durrell's Corcyra. Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins. That was the book's first line. She tried to remember the blue and white, all the colors, the scent of lemon trees … "Hi, baby. They told us at report you had a bad night! What'd you want to stop breathing for, huh? You know they won't let you do that around here." Helen was moving closer to the bed. "It was busy here last night. That Friedman in 211, he arrested last night. They took him to St. Francis."

Yes, Luisa thought, oh yes?

Helen's voice was gentle as a kiss. "They called this morning to say he passed, baby." She went on. "Your son's coming in to see you today, baby; won't that be nice? He called to say he be in after lunch."

Johnny—she recalled a little boy named Johnny, who did not at all go with the man-sized voice that sometimes came and talked over her. Be nice, Johnny. She had often had to tell him that, a cranky little boy who liked to fuss … What could she tell him today? That they fed her through a tube and that she could no longer breathe through her own power? That food has no taste when it goes through a tube? That the sea around Greece is blue? How had she borne such an unimaginative child! He had sent her a postcard from Europe, where he had dutifully gone to honeymoon: a picture of the Paris Metro, a giant pneumatic tube. Tubes. Could she tell him she was sick of tubes?

Helen was talking to her. "Baby? Louise? Oh, damn." She half-felt hands on her. I can hear you perfectly, Luisa wanted to say. But Helen was muttering off to the nursing station. Luisa was walking the line between wakefulness and dreams, that was all. She imagined it as a thin line cut in concrete, like the lines in the sidewalks she had skipped over as a child, chanting. "Step on a crack, break your mother's back." If only they would stop pulling her back into life. Even Helen, who understood, who always told her when one of them had gone, even Helen held her to life. One day through the tubes they would feed her arsenic, and then it would all be over.

Fantasy. She built against the dark of her closed eyes the trembling blues of Corfu.

· · · · ·

At six o'clock Mark made his final rounds. The fluorescent lights were watery in the dawn. Out of the beds the old people stared, sleepy, flat-eyed, blind-eyed. He was alone. Morton was in the hospital, St. Francis, cut up by a mugger, rolled on his way to work, left to bleed to death in an alley. What had he gone into an alley for? Su-i-cide; he could hear Morton saying it in that fag drawl.

Someone was moaning. He walked into 209. The old lady was shifting and turning her head. The tape that held the respirator tube was loose. She was supposed to be comatose, or semicomatose. He watched her for a while. The movement looked purposeful. He reached out and patted the tape down again. She moaned. Her eyes were cloudy, and he remembered that she was blind. How did it feel to have hands come out of the night at you like that? Like the hands with the knife that had cut Morton. "Listen, sweetie," he said, "you want me to take that tape off? That tube out? If I do that you'll die, you know, poof, out like a damned light. You know that?" Her body was still, frozen, stiff as a board. He put his hand on the tape again to tease her. Comatose, semicomatose, what did doctors know? he thought. She'd heard him. I'd be scared; Christ, I'd be petrified. "I won't do it," he told her. "I could lose my job."

He drowsed through the report that ritualized the shift change and then went downstairs to collect his book and his bottle. He leaned against the dirty gray wall and took a long drink. Warmer than any woman. One for the road. And one for Morton. He wondered how bad Morton was. He capped the bottle and tucked it, brownbagged, decently clad, under his arm. He wondered what Morton had left uncollected in his locker. A pack of cards?

The wind was bitter. He held tightly to the bottle, glad that his was only a short walk home. It came to him suddenly that he was drinking himself to death. The thought was mildly entertaining. It could be worse. On the ice patches he staggered, and it became a game to see if this one or the next one would trip him. He beat them all. He decided to shortcut through the tunnel under the freeway. There would be few cars through it on a Sunday morning, 7 A.M. on an icy day. The tunnel walls were gray and smooth. He found himself thinking back to 209. He had almost done it to the old lady. Christ. That would have been a mistake.

The car came diving into the neck of the tunnel, a bullet-shaped red toy. Mark watched as it slipped on the street ice. The driver took the skids, slid, and then pulled out, nonchalant as if it were a game for kids. Smooth, he thought.

The car grew suddenly very large and very red.

The dream, he thought, it's the car of the dream. The tunnel wall was flat and cold at his back. He was pressed down and there was nowhere he could go. The bright fender grazed him, and like a bull, the car was gone. The driver honked back at him. Bastard, you missed me, he thought, you missed me! Torn between rage and joy, he threw the bottle into the air. It went up like a rocket. His feet slipped out from under him. "Hey!" He was falling. You bastard, he thought in wonderment as the bottle shattered all around him, you bastard.

· · · · ·

"Morning, baby. You doing any better today? It's raining. Gray outside. I almost didn't want to come to work this morning, it's so ugly. But then I thought, what would Louise think if I weren't there? She'd worry. Honey, you remember that night orderly Mark?" Helen's voice dropped. "You know, they found him under the freeway this morning with his neck broke, and all cut up and covered with whiskey. An accident. Isn't that something? He was young, too. But Morton, you remember Morton, he's okay and coming back to work tonight, so there'll be someone on duty to look after you. Imagine, he just slipped on the ice! Cruel way to die."

Luisa dreamed. Cruel. That was cruel. April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead earth … Lord, must these bones live? The tube in her chest pumped. Her mouth hurt, her back hurt. Mark, she thought, remembering his voice and the thick alcoholic breath of him and the feel of his hand on her cheek. It was cruel of him to tease me. Out like a light, he had said. Out, out, brief candle. The light in Greece stains the air like yellow wine. Why would they not let her go? Arsenic through the tube would be easy. That would be murder; they would never do that. She lay and dreamed of all the ways there were to die. Arsenic, gas, ropes and cliffs, the white cliffs of Dover, steely razor blades with blue edges, blue water to drown in, and cars, bright red lethal cars. So many ways to die, she thought, but not here, and her heart clenched in a sudden fury. Again, she urged it, again, again. They do it for each other, but not for us, the bastards, never for us.

The End

* * * *

Brown Robert

By Terry Carr

Arthur Leacock shuffled quickly down the wooden hall of the small midwestern university where he had worked for thirty-two years and eight months, give or take maybe a week. His sleep-rumpled, peppery hair stuck out from under the old leather cap which he had worn for fully seventeen of those years, and his oft-resoled shoes were almost silent in the hallway, though its echoing properties were so good that Arthur had often fancied he could hear his own breathing whispered back to him from the walls.

He turned right at the large waiting room in the middle of the building and went up the stairs to the second floor two at a time, grasping the handrail with large-knuckled hands to pull himself along. He did not look where he was going, but instead rested his eyes unseeingly on the stairs passing beneath him, his mouth drawn back into the heavy wrinkles of his cheeks.

Robert Ernsohn, full-voiced Robert with brown soul, would already be in his office, of course. Wavy Robert, whose brow was noble as a mannequin's, always arrived half an hour before the time he set for Arthur. When Arthur arrived, he knew, Robert would be rechecking the figures he had pored carefully over till midnight—not because Robert did not trust his own abilities, but because it was his policy always to double-check his figures. Robert, naturally, would never give in to the danger of overconfidence, which might be called conceit; he always made sure that he had made no mistake. And then he always smiled.

At the top of the stairs Arthur pushed through the door to the second floor and crossed to Robert's office. The door creaked twice behind him and then rested shut.

Robert Ernsohn looked up from his pretentiously small desk in the corner by the window and pushed the papers aside. The red-orange sun, slipping silently from behind the roof of the building beyond the courtyard, cast lines of light through the venetian blinds across the desk. Brown-eyed, brown Robert smiled with innocent satyriasis and dropped his pencil in the pencil-glass.

"I've checked it all four times," he said. "Short of going upstate to a computer that's all I can do. I hope it's right."

Arthur watched his mouth as he spoke and then stepped into the cloakroom to hang up his overcoat. He found a cleaning rag and took it with him when he came out and went on across the office, five steps, into the laboratory. A small laboratory, cluttered and dirty. The floor was dirty, at any rate; the equipment was polished. But Arthur set to polishing it again, because this morning it would be used.

There was a reclining couch in the midst of the cacophony of mechanical and electrical complexity. Arthur brushed off the couch, touching the leather softly with his fingertips, and then began carefully rubbing down the metal of the machine. He tested a few levers by hand and oiled one of them, humming to himself. But he noticed himself humming and stopped.

The machine, the time machine, was ready for operation. It was clean and had been checked over for a week; all the parts which were doubtful had been replaced, and on a trial run yesterday it had performed perfectly. Robert's sweater—Robert's, of course, not Arthur's—had been sent two days into the future and had come back. It had been sent six months and then five years into the future, and it had still come back. But of course Arthur had never doubted that it would.

Robert appeared in the doorway and watched him as he threw the switch and warmed the machine. A few dials moved, and Robert stepped forward with his intelligent eyes to read them and glance down at the figures in his hand and nod. Arthur ignored him. He switched the machine off and stepped to the window to look at his watch; it was 7:43 a.m. He unstrapped the watch and handed it to Robert and went into the other room.

In the office he sat in Robert's chair by the window and looked out onto the courtyard. The girl, eighteen and brunette, had a class across the way at eight o'clock, and she always arrived early. Arthur always watched for her and when he saw her he diverted brown Robert's attention, so that he always missed seeing her. He had been doing that ever since he had seen Robert talking with her two months before.

Presently he saw her, walking quickly through the cold and up the steps to the courtyard. It was cold weather and she wore a heavy coat which concealed her figure—which was a good thing. Arthur knew how young men like cheekbone Robert liked the summer months on campus.

"What time you want to go?" he called out, and when Robert came into the room he did not look out the window.

"At eight," said Robert.

"You're sure?"

"Of course. I told you definitely yesterday, and I seldom change my mind."

"Well, you never know," said Arthur. "Something might have come up, might have changed your plans."

Robert smiled as though he were flexing his face muscles. "Nothing is likely to at this point. Except perhaps an act of God."

An act of God, Arthur repeated in his mind, wanting to look out the window to see if the girl was safely out of sight yet.

"There's someone at the door," he said.

Robert went to the door, but there was no one there and he went outside to look down the stairs. Arthur turned and looked for the girl. She had sat down on a bench by the door to her building and was paging through a book, her hair falling softly like water mist across her forehead. Even from this distance Arthur could see that it was clean, free hair, virgin's hair. He knew the way absent Robert would like to run his fingers through it, caressing the girl's neck, tightly, holding her …

Robert was dangerous. No one else realized that, but Arthur had watched young men on that campus for thirty-two years, and he recognized the look he so often saw in Robert's eyes. So many of them, students and young professors, had that look: veiled, covert, waxing and waning behind the eyes, steadily building up to an explosion like an— But Arthur did not want to think about that.

He had tried, once, to warn others about Robert, whose mind was a labyrinth of foggy, dark halls. He had told them, down in the main office, one day after hours. That had been the day he had seen dark Robert with the girl, seen them together. He had told Mr. Lewis' assistant and tried to warn her—fog Robert must be dismissed and sent away. But the woman had hardly listened to him, and as he had stood in the outer room on the way out, looking calmly at a chip in the baseboard, he had heard her speaking to Mr. Lewis, the president of the university. "We have to remember that Arthur is getting on in years," she had said. "He's probably having a little trouble with his memory, playing tricks on him. People who are getting on in years sometimes aren't very much in contact with reality." Mr. Lewis' assistant was a dull, gray woman.

"Robert Ernsohn is one of our most valued young men," Mr. Lewis had said. "We're backing his research as fully as possible, and we have every confidence in him." Arthur had heard some papers rustle and then silence, so he had stopped looking at the baseboard and gone out.

Not in contact with reality? Arthur had been watching the realities of young men and their eyes through all his years at the campus, first as a janitor, then later as an assistant in the chemistry labs and up in the small observatory on the top floor. He had seen them looking at the girls, light and rounded, long hair and tapered ankles and tight, swaying skirts. He knew about realities.

He had read about them, in books from the library's locked shelves. Case histories of sadists and murderers and twisted minds of all sorts. Men who cut girls straight up the belly, dissected their breasts, removed the organs of their abdomens and laid them out neatly on the floor, and then carefully washed what remained of their bodies and put their clothes back on them and went away. Arthur had read all those books carefully, and he knew what reality was. It was all around him and he was certainly in contact with it.

The door behind him opened and frowning, covert Robert came back into the room.

"There was no one," he said, and glanced at the watch and went into the laboratory where the machine was.

"It must be time," Arthur said, and followed him.

"Yes, it is," Robert said, sitting on the couch. Arthur pulled the scanner forward to where it rested directly above Robert's body and set the calibration exactly correctly. He activated the machine and waited while it warmed.

Ambitious Robert was going into the future. Not far, just one hour … but it would make history; he would be the first. No one else seemed to have the slightest inkling of the method, but narrow-eyed Robert had run across it and had built his machine, telling the administration it was something else, keeping it secret, keeping men from the bigger universities and corporations from coming in and taking over his work. "I have to believe in my own abilities," Robert had said.

Arthur watched him as he lay back on the couch under the apparatus of the machine. Robert's eyes, long-lashed, closed softly, and he drew a deep, even breath. "I'm ready."

So brown Robert goes into the future, Arthur thought. And when he comes back he intends to bring witnesses to see him an hour from now, two of him, and to explain it all with his full, rich, curdled voice, and write a paper and go to a larger university and be famous where there are more and more young, rounded girls. Because Robert knows reality almost as well as I do.

Arthur checked the dials and meters of the machine carefully, seeing that they were exactly as Robert had ordered them. Arthur was a good, careful worker, and that was why, even when Mr. Lewis' assistant had scoffed at him, he had not been afraid of being dismissed. Everybody knew that he always did exactly as he was told.

"Good-bye," he said. He flicked the switch and Robert disappeared.

He stepped over to the empty couch and placed his hand on the soft, worn leather cushion, feeling its warmth from the body which had just left it. Robert was in the future.

But he had to bring him back. He reset the machine and threw another switch and Robert reappeared on the couch. Arthur went and stood over him and looked for a long time at the blood flowing from his mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears. There was a small hole torn through his right leg, and that was beginning to bleed too. He was dead.

The gash in his leg must have been from a small meteor, Arthur decided. He had heard about them when he'd been working in the observatory. And one afternoon when he had been working there he had realized what would happen to Robert when he went into the future. Of course he could travel forward in time and reappear an hour later, but the Earth would not be there, because the Earth moved around the sun at about eighteen and half miles a second and for that matter the whole solar system seemed to be moving at about twelve miles a second toward a point in the constellation Hercules. That was what someone in the Astronomy department had told him, anyway, and he had memorized it.

So Robert had landed an hour in the future, but somewhere out in space, and he had died, the pressure of oxygen in his body hemorrhaging his blood vessels and bursting his lungs before he could even suffocate. But of course it hadn't been Arthur's fault.

Humming softly to himself, Arthur closed down the machine and washed as much blood as he could from Robert's head. Some of it was drying already, leaving a brownish crust on the cold skin. He rearranged Robert's clothes and went downstairs to report what had happened.

He went directly, stopping only once to watch a young girl with a soft, full red sweater as she struggled out of her heavy coat.

The End

The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be

By Gahan Wilson

I felt we made an embarrassing contrast to the open serenity of the scene around us. The pure blue of the sky was unmarked by a single cloud or bird, and nothing stirred on the vast stretch of beach except ourselves. The sea, sparkling under the freshness of the early morning sun, looked invitingly clean. I wanted to wade into it and wash myself, but I was afraid I would contaminate it.

We are a contamination here, I thought. We're like a group of sticky bugs crawling in an ugly little crowd over polished marble. If I were God and looked down and saw us, lugging our baskets and our silly, bright blankets, I would step on us and squash us with my foot.

We should have been lovers or monks in such a place, but we were only a crowd of bored and boring drunks. You were always drunk when you were with Carl. Good old, mean old Carl was the greatest little drink pourer in the world. He used drinks like other types of sadists used whips. He kept beating you with them until you dropped or sobbed or went mad, and he enjoyed every step of the process.

We'd been drinking all night, and when the morning came, somebody, I think it was Mandie, got the great idea that we should all go out on a picnic. Naturally, we thought it was an inspiration, we were nothing if not real sports, and so we'd packed some goodies, not forgetting the liquor, and we'd piled into the car, and there we were, weaving across the beach, looking for a place to spread our tacky banquet.

We located a broad, low rock, decided it would serve for our table, and loaded it with the latest in plastic chinaware, a haphazard collection of food, and a quantity of bottles.

Someone had packed a tin of Spam among the other offerings, and, when I saw it, I was suddenly overwhelmed with an absurd feeling of nostalgia. It reminded me of the war and of myself soldierboying up through Italy. It also reminded me of how long ago the whole thing had been and how little I'd done of what I'd dreamed I'd do back then.

I opened the Spam and sat down to be alone with it and my memories, but it wasn't to be for long. The kind of people who run with people like Carl don't like to be alone, ever, especially with their memories, and they can't imagine anyone else might, at least now and then, have a taste for it.

My rescuer was Irene. Irene was particularly sensitive about seeing people alone because being alone had several times nearly produced fatal results for her. Being alone and taking pills to end the being alone.

"What's wrong, Phil?" she asked.

"Nothing's wrong," I said, holding up a forkful of the pink Spam in the sunlight. "It tastes just like it always did. They haven't lost their touch."

She sat down on the sand beside me, very carefully, so as to avoid spilling the least drop of what must have been her millionth Scotch.

"Phil," she said, "I'm worried about Mandie. I really am. She looks so unhappy!"

I glanced over at Mandie. She had her head thrown back and she was laughing uproariously at some joke Carl had just made. Carl was smiling at her with his teeth glistening and his eyes deep down dead as ever.

"Why should Mandie be happy?" I asked. "What, in God's name, has she got to be happy about?"

"Oh, Phil," said Irene. "You pretend to be such an awful cynic. She's alive, isn't she?"

I looked at her and wondered what such a statement meant, coming from someone who'd tried to do herself in as earnestly and as frequently as Irene. I decided that I did not know and that I would probably never know. I also decided I didn't want anymore of the Spam. I turned to throw it away, doing my bit to litter up the beach, and then I saw them.

They were far away, barely bigger than two dots, but you could tell there was something odd about them even then.

"We've got company," I said.

Irene peered in the direction of my point.

"Look, everybody," she cried, "we've got company!"

Everybody looked, just as she had asked them to.

"What the hell is this?" asked Carl. "Don't they know this is my private property?" And then he laughed.

Carl had fantasies about owning things and having power. Now and then he got drunk enough to have little flashes of believing he was king of the world.

"You tell 'em, Carl!" said Horace.

Horace had sparkling quips like that for almost every occasion. He was tall and bald and he had a huge Adam's apple and, like myself, he worked for Carl. I would have felt sorrier for Horace than I did if I hadn't had a sneaky suspicion that he was really happier when groveling. He lifted one scrawny fist and shook it in the direction of the distant pair.

"You guys better beat it," he shouted. "This is private property!"

"Will you shut up and stop being such an ass?" Mandie asked him. "It's not polite to yell at strangers, dear, and this may damn well be their beach for all you know."

Mandie happens to be Horace's wife. Horace's children treat him about the same way. He busied himself with zipping up his windbreaker, because it was getting cold and because he had received an order to be quiet.

I watched the two approaching figures. The one was tall and bulky, and he moved with a peculiar, swaying gait. The other was short and hunched into himself, and he walked in a fretful, zigzag line beside his towering companion.

"They're heading straight for us," I said.

The combination of the cool wind that had come up and the approach of the two strangers had put a damper on our little group. We sat quietly and watched them coming closer. The nearer they got, the odder they looked.

"For heaven's sake!" said Irene. "The little one's wearing a square hat!"

"I think it's made of paper," said Mandie, squinting, "folded newspaper."

"Will you look at the mustache on the big bastard?" asked Carl. "I don't think I've ever seen a bigger bush in my life."

"They remind me of something," I said.

The others turned to look at me.

The Walrus and the Carpenter …

"They remind me of the Walrus and the Carpenter," I said.

"The who?" asked Mandie.

"Don't tell me you never heard of the Walrus and the Carpenter?" asked Carl.

"Never once," said Mandie.

"Disgusting," said Carl. "You're an uncultured bitch. The Walrus and the Carpenter are probably two of the most famous characters in literature. They're in a poem by Lewis Carroll in one of the Alice books."

"In Through the Looking Glass," I said, and then I recited their introduction:

"The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at hand

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand …"

Mandie shrugged. "Well, you'll just have to excuse my ignorance and concentrate on my charm," she said.

"I don't know how to break this to you all," said Irene, "but the little one does have a handkerchief."

We stared at them. The little one did indeed have a handkerchief, a huge handkerchief, and he was using it to dab at his eyes.

"Is the little one supposed to be the Carpenter?" asked Mandie.

"Yes," I said.

"Then it's all right," she said, "because he's the one that's carrying the saw."

"He is, so help me, God," said Carl. "And, to make the whole thing perfect, he's even wearing an apron."

"So the Carpenter in the poem has to wear an apron, right?" asked Mandie.

"Carroll doesn't say whether he does or not," I said, "but the illustrations by Tenniel show him wearing one. They also show him with the same square jaw and the same big nose this guy's got."

"They're goddamn doubles," said Carl. "The only thing wrong is that the Walrus isn't a walrus, he just looks like one."

"You watch," said Mandie. "Any minute now he's going to sprout fur all over and grow long fangs."

Then, for the first time, the approaching pair noticed us. It seemed to give them quite a start. They stood and gaped at us, and the little one furtively stuffed his handkerchief out of sight.

"We can't be as surprising as all that!" whispered Irene.

The big one began moving forward, then, in a hesitant, tentative kind of shuffle. The little one edged ahead, too, but he was careful to keep the bulk of his companion between himself and us.

"First contact with the aliens," said Mandie, and Irene and Horace giggled nervously. I didn't respond. I had come to the decision that I was going to quit working for Carl, that I didn't like any of these people about me, except, maybe, Irene, and that these two strangers gave me the honest creeps.

Then the big one smiled, and everything was changed.

I've worked in the entertainment field, in advertising and in public relations. This means I have come in contact with some of the prime charm boys and girls in our proud land. I have become, therefore, not only a connoisseur of smiles, I am a being equipped with numerous automatic safeguards against them. When a talcumed smoothie comes at me with his brilliant ivories exposed, it only shows he's got something he can bite me with, that's all.

But the smile of the Walrus was something else.

The smile of the Walrus did what a smile hasn't done for me in years—it melted my heart. I use the cornball phrase very much on purpose. When I saw his smile, I knew I could trust him; I felt in my marrow that he was gentle and sweet and had nothing but the best intentions. His resemblance to the Walrus in the poem ceased being vaguely chilling and became warmly comical. I loved him as I had loved the teddy bear of my childhood.

"Oh, I say," he said, and his voice was an embarrassed boom. "I do hope we're not intruding!"

"I daresay we are," squeaked the Carpenter, peeping out from behind his companion.

"The, uhm, fact is," boomed the Walrus, "we didn't even notice you until just back then, you see."

"We were talking, is what," said the Carpenter.

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand …

"About sand?" I asked.

The Walrus looked at me with a startled air.

"We were, actually, now you come to mention it."

He lifted one huge foot and shook it so that a little trickle of sand spilled out of his shoe.

"The stuff's impossible," he said. "Gets in your clothes, tracks up the carpet."

"Ought to be swept away, it ought," said the Carpenter.

"If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose," the Walrus said,

"That they could get it clear?"

"It's too much!" said Carl.

"Yes, indeed," said the Walrus, eying the sand around him with vague disapproval, "altogether too much."

Then he turned to us again, and we all basked in that smile.

"Permit me to introduce my companion and myself," he said.

"You'll have to excuse George," said the Carpenter, "as he's a bit of a stuffed shirt, don't you know?"

"Be that as it may," said the Walrus, patting the Carpenter on the flat top of his paper hat, "this is Edward Farr, and I am George Tweedy, both at your service. We are, uhm, both a trifle drunk, I'm afraid."

"We are, indeed. We are that."

"As we have just come from a really delightful party, to which we shall soon return."

"Once we've found the fuel, that is," said Farr, waving his saw in the air. By now he had found the courage to come out and face us directly.

"Which brings me to the question," said Tweedy. "Have you seen any driftwood lying about the premises? We've been looking high and low, and we can't seem to find any of the blasted stuff."

"Thought there'd be piles of it," said Farr, "but all there is is sand, don't you see?"

"I would have sworn you were looking for oysters," said Carl.

Again, Tweedy appeared startled.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"

The Walrus did beseech …

"Oysters?" he asked. "Oh, no, we've got the oysters. All we lack is the means to cook 'em."

" 'Course we could always use a few more," said Farr, looking at his companion.

"I suppose we could, at that," said Tweedy thoughtfully.

"I'm afraid we can't help you fellows with the driftwood problem," said Carl, "but you're more than welcome to a drink."

There was something unfamiliar about the tone of Carl's voice that made my ears perk up. I turned to look at him, and then had difficulty covering up my astonishment.

It was his eyes. For once, for the first time, they were really friendly.

I'm not saying Carl had fishy eyes, blank eyes—not at all. On the surface, that is. On the surface, with his eyes, with his face, with the handling of his entire body, Carl was a master of animation and expression. From sympathetic, heartfelt warmth, all the way to icy rage, and on every stop in-between, Carl was completely convincing.

But only on the surface. Once you got to know Carl, and it took a while, you realized that none of it was really happening. That was because Carl had died, or been killed, long ago. Possibly in childhood. Possibly he had been born dead. So, under the actor's warmth and rage, the eyes were always the eyes of a corpse.

But now it was different. The friendliness here was genuine, I was sure of it. The smile of Tweedy, of the Walrus, had performed a miracle. Carl had risen from his tomb. I was in honest awe.

"Delighted, old chap!" said Tweedy.

They accepted their drinks with obvious pleasure, and we completed the introductions as they sat down to join us. I detected a strong smell of fish when Tweedy sat down beside me, but, oddly, I didn't find it offensive in the least. I was glad he'd chosen me to sit by. He turned and smiled at me, and my heart melted a little more.

It soon turned out that the drinking we'd done before had only scratched the surface. Tweedy and Farr were magnificent boozers, and their gusto encouraged us all to follow suit.

We drank absurd toasts and were delighted to discover that Tweedy was an incredible raconteur. His specialty was outrageous fantasy: wild tales involving incongruous objects, events, and characters. His invention was endless.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings."

We laughed and drank, and drank and laughed, and I began to wonder why in hell I'd spent my life being such a gloomy, moody son of a bitch, been such a distrustful and suspicious bastard, when the whole secret of everything, the whole core secret, was simply to enjoy it, to take it as it came.

I looked around and grinned, and I didn't care if it was a foolish grin. Everybody looked all right, everybody looked swell, everybody looked better than I'd ever seen them look before.

Irene looked happy, honestly and truly happy. She, too, had found the secret. No more pills for Irene, I thought. Now that she knows the secret, now that she's met Tweedy, who's given her the secret, she'll have no more need of those goddamn pills.

And I couldn't believe Horace and Mandie. They had their arms around each other, and their bodies were pressed close together, and they rocked as one being when they laughed at Tweedy's wonderful stories. No more nagging for Mandie, I thought, and no more cringing for Horace, now they've learned the secret.

And then I looked at Carl, laughing and relaxed and absolutely free of care, absolutely unchilled, finally, at last, after years of—

And then I looked at Carl again.

And then I looked down at my drink, and then I looked at my knees, and then I looked out at the sea, sparkling, clean, remote and impersonal.

And then I realized it had grown cold, quite cold, and that there wasn't a bird or a cloud in the sky.

The sea was wet as wet could be,

The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud, because

No cloud was in the sky:

No birds were flying overhead—

There were no birds to fly.

That part of the poem was, after all, a perfect description of a lifeless earth. It sounded beautiful at first; it sounded benign. But then you read it again and you realized that Carroll was describing barrenness and desolation.

Suddenly Carl's voice broke through and I heard him say:

"Hey, that's a hell of an idea, Tweedy! By God, we'd love to! Wouldn't we, gang?"

The others broke out in an affirmative chorus and they all started scrambling to their feet around me. I looked up at them, like someone who's been awakened from sleep in a strange place, and they grinned down at me like loons.

"Come on, Phil!" cried Irene.

Her eyes were bright and shining, but it wasn't with happiness. I could see that now.

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,

"To play them such a trick …"

I blinked my eyes and stared at them, one after the other.

"Old Phil's had a little too much to drink!" cried Mandie, laughing. "Come on, old Phil! Come on and join the party!"

"What party?" I asked.

I couldn't seem to get located. Everything seemed disorientated and grotesque.

"For Christ's sake, Phil," said Carl, "Tweedy and Farr, here, have invited us to join their party. There's no more drinks left, and they've got plenty!"

I set my plastic cup down carefully on the sand. If they would just shut up for a moment, I thought, I might be able to get the fuzz out of my head.

"Come along, sir!" boomed Tweedy jovially. "It's only a pleasant walk!"

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"

The Walrus did beseech.

"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk"

Along the briny beach …"

He was smiling at me, but the smile didn't work anymore.

"You cannot do with more than four," I told him.

"Uhm? What's that?"

"We cannot do with more than four,

To give a hand to each."

"I said, 'You cannot do with more than four.'"

"He's right, you know," said Farr, the Carpenter.

"Well, uhm, then," said the Walrus, "if you feel you really can't come, old chap …"

"What, in Christ's name, are you all talking about?" asked Mandie.

"He's hung up on that goddamn poem," said Carl. "Lewis Carroll's got the yellow bastard scared."

"Don't be such a party pooper, Phil!" said Mandie.

"To hell with him," said Carl. And he started off, and all the others followed him. Except Irene.

"Are you sure you really don't want to come, Phil?" she asked.

She looked frail and thin against the sunlight. I realized there really wasn't much of her, and that what there was had taken a terrible beating.

"No," I said. "I don't. Are you sure you want to go?"

"Of course I do, Phil."

I thought of the pills.

"I suppose you do," I said. "I suppose there's really no stopping you."

"No, Phil, there isn't."

And then she stooped and kissed me. Kissed me very gently, and I could feel the dry, chapped surface of her lips and the faint warmth of her breath.

I stood.

"I wish you'd stay," I said.

"I can't," she said.

And then she turned and ran after the others.

I watched them growing smaller and smaller on the beach, following the Walrus and the Carpenter. I watched them come to where the beach curved around the bluff and watched them disappear behind the bluff.

I looked up at the sky. Pure blue. Impersonal.

"What do you think of this?" I asked it.

Nothing. It hadn't even noticed.

"Now, if you're ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,

Turning a little blue.

"After such kindness, that would be

A dismal thing to do!"

A dismal thing to do.

I began to run up the beach, toward the bluff. I stumbled now and then because I had had too much to drink. Far too much to drink. I heard small shells crack under my shoes, and the sand made whipping noises.

I fell, heavily, and lay there gasping on the beach. My heart pounded in my chest. I was too old for this sort of footwork. I hadn't had any real exercise in years. I smoked too much and I drank too much. I did all the wrong things. I didn't do any of the right things.

I pushed myself up a little and then I let myself down again. My heart was pounding hard enough to frighten me. I could feel it in my chest, frantically pumping, squeezing blood in and spurting blood out.

Like an oyster pulsing in the sea.

"Shall we be trotting home again?"

My heart was like an oyster.

I got up, fell up, and began to run again, weaving widely, my mouth open and the air burning my throat. I was coated with sweat, streaming with it, and it felt icy in the cold wind.

"Shall we be trotting home again?"

I rounded the bluff, and then I stopped and stood swaying, and then I dropped to my knees.

The pure blue of the sky was unmarked by a single bird or cloud, and nothing stirred on the whole vast stretch of the beach.

But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd, because …

Nothing stirred, but they were there. Irene and Mandie and Carl and Horace were there, and four others, too. Just around the bluff.

"We cannot do with more than four …"

But the Walrus and the Carpenter had taken two trips.

I began to crawl toward them on my knees. My heart, my oyster heart, was pounding too hard to allow me to stand.

The other four had had a picnic, too, very like our own. They, too, had plastic cups and plates, and they, too, had brought bottles. They had sat and waited for the return of the Walrus and the Carpenter.

Irene was right in front of me. Her eyes were open and stared at, but did not see, the sky. The pure blue uncluttered sky. There were a few grains of sand in her left eye. Her face was almost clear of blood. There were only a few flecks of it on her lower chin. The spray from the huge wound in her chest seemed to have traveled mainly downward and to the right. I stretched out my arm and touched her hand.

"Irene," I said.

But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd, because

They'd eaten every one.

I looked up at the others. Like Irene, they were, all of them, dead. The Walrus and the Carpenter had eaten the oysters and left the shell.

The Carpenter never found any firewood, and so they'd eaten them raw. You can eat oysters raw if you want to.

I said her name once more, just for the record, and then I stood and turned from them and walked to the bluff. I rounded the bluff and the beach stretched before me, vast, smooth, empty, and remote.

Even as I ran upon it, away from them, it was remote.

The End

· · · · ·

Author's Note:

I distrusted the Alice books from the start. My grown-ups tried to pretend they were children's books and that I should and would enjoy them, so they officially shuffled them in with the Oz and Pooh collection, but I knew better; I knew they were dangerous, and I opened them only rarely and gingerly.

Of course Tenniel's Jabberwock leapt out at me from the start (as it has, I am sure, at many another innocent child), but there were many other horrors: the simultaneously fading and grinning cat; the impeccably cruel Duchess with her "little boy"; something about Bill the Lizard floating helplessly over the chimney; the crazed creatures at the Tea Party—the worst part of it was the thing that pervaded all those images and all the other images in the books (which I knew weren't about any "Wonderland" at all, but about the very world I was trying to grow up in, only seen from some terrifyingly sophisticated point of view); the weird convincingness of Carroll's horrible message that nothing, nothing soever, made any sense at all!

If it hadn't been for brave, stolid Alice (bless her stout, young, British heart), herself a child, I don't think I could have survived those goddamn books.

But there is no Alice in this story.

* * * *

They Don't Make Life

Like They Used To

By Alfred Bester

The girl driving the jeep was very fair and very Nordic. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but it was so long that it was more a mare's tail. She wore sandals, a pair of soiled bluejeans, and nothing else. She was nicely tanned. As she turned the jeep off Fifth Avenue and drove bouncing up the steps of the library, her bosom danced enchantingly.

She parked in front of the library entrance, stepped out, and was about to enter when her attention was attracted by something across the street. She peered, hesitated, then glanced down at her jeans and made a face. She pulled off the pants and hurled them at the pigeons eternally cooing and courting on the library steps. As they clattered up in fright, she ran down to Fifth Avenue, crossed, and stopped before a shop window. There was a plum-colored wool dress on display. It had a high waist, a full skirt, and not too many moth holes. The price was $79.90.

The girl rummaged through old cars skewed on the avenue until she found a loose fender. She smashed the plate-glass shop door, carefully stepped across the splinters, entered, and sorted through the dusty dress racks. She was a big girl and had trouble fitting herself. Finally she abandoned the plum-colored wool and compromised on a dark tartan, size 12, $120 reduced to $99.90. She located a salesbook and pencil, blew the dust off, and carefully wrote: I.O.U. $99.90. Linda Nielsen.

She returned to the library and went through the main doors, which had taken her a week to batter in with a sledgehammer. She ran across the great hall, filthied with five years of droppings from the pigeons roosting there. As she ran, she clapped her arms over her head to shield her hair from stray shots. She climbed the stairs to the third floor and entered the Print Room. As always, she signed the register: Date—June 20, 1981. Name—Linda Nielson. Address—Central Park Model Boat Pond. Business or Firm—Last Man on Earth.

She had had a long debate with herself about Business or Firm the last time she broke into the library. Strictly speaking, she was the last woman on earth, but she had felt that if she wrote that it would seem chauvinistic; and "Last Person on Earth" sounded silly, like calling a drink a beverage.

She pulled portfolios out of racks and leafed through them. She knew exactly what she wanted; something warm with blue accents to fit a twenty-by-thirty frame for her bedroom. In a priceless collection of Hiroshige prints she found a lovely landscape. She filled out a slip, placed it carefully on the librarian's desk, and left with the print.

Downstairs, she stopped off in the main circulation room, went to the back shelves, and selected two Italian grammars and an Italian dictionary. Then she backtracked through the main hall, went out to the jeep, and placed the books and print on the front seat alongside her companion, an exquisite Dresden china doll. She picked up a list that read:

Jap. print

Italian

20 x 30 pict. fr.

Lobster bisque

Brass polish

Detergent

Furn. polish

Wet mop

She crossed off the first two items, replaced the list on the dashboard, got into the jeep, and bounced down the library steps. She drove up Fifth Avenue, threading her way through crumbling wreckage. As she was passing the ruins of St. Patrick's Cathedral at 50th Street, a man appeared from nowhere.

He stepped out of the rubble and, without looking left or right, started crossing the avenue just in front of her. She exclaimed, banged on the horn, which remained mute, and braked so sharply that the jeep slewed and slammed into the remains of a No. 3 bus. The man let out a squawk, jumped ten feet, and then stood frozen, staring at her.

"You crazy jaywalker," she yelled. "Why don't you look where you're going? D'you think you own the whole city?"

He stared and stammered. He was a big man, with thick, grizzled hair, a red beard, and weathered skin. He was wearing army fatigues, heavy ski boots, and had a bursting knapsack and blanket roll on his back. He carried a battered shotgun, and his pockets were crammed with odds and ends. He looked like a prospector.

"My God," he whispered in a rusty voice. "Somebody at last. I knew it. I always knew I'd find someone." Then, as he noticed her long, fair hair, his face fell. "But a woman," he muttered. "Just my goddamn lousy luck."

"What are you, some kind of nut?" she demanded. "Don't you know better than to cross against the lights?"

He looked around in bewilderment. "What lights?"

"So all right, there aren't any lights, but couldn't you look where you were going?"

"I'm sorry, lady. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting any traffic."

"Just plain common sense," she grumbled, backing the jeep off the bus.

"Hey, lady, wait a minute."

"Yes?"

"Listen, you know anything about TV? Electronics, how they say …"

"Are you trying to be funny?"

"No, this is straight. Honest."

She snorted and tried to continue driving up Fifth Avenue, but he wouldn't get out of the way.

"Please, lady," he persisted. "I got a reason for asking. Do you know?"

"No."

"Damn! I never get a break. Lady, excuse me, no offense, got any guys in this town?"

"There's nobody but me. I'm the last man on earth."

"That's funny. I always thought I was."

"So all right, I'm the last woman on earth."

He shook his head. "There's got to be other people; there just has to. Stands to reason. South, maybe you think? I'm down from New Haven, and I figured if I headed where the climate was like warmer, there'd be some guys I could ask something."

"Ask what?"

"Aw, a woman wouldn't understand. No offense."

"Well, if you want to head south you're going the wrong way."

"That's south, ain't it?" he said, pointing down Fifth Avenue.

"Yes, but you'll just come to a dead end. Manhattan's an island. What you have to do is go uptown and cross the George Washington Bridge to Jersey."

"Uptown? Which way is that?"

"Go straight up Fifth to Cathedral Parkway, then over to the West Side and up Riverside. You can't miss it."

He looked at her helplessly.

"Stranger in town?"

He nodded.

"Oh, all right," she said. "Hop in. I'll give you a lift."

She transferred the books and the china doll to the back seat, and he squeezed in alongside her. As she started the jeep she looked down at his worn ski boots.

"Hiking?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't you drive? You can get a car working, and there's plenty of gas and oil."

"I don't know how to drive," he said despondently. "It's the story of my life."

He heaved a sigh, and that made his knapsack jolt massively against her shoulder. She examined him out of the corner of her eye. He had a powerful chest, a long, thick back, and strong legs. His hands were big and hard, and his neck was corded with muscles. She thought for a moment, then nodded to herself and stopped the jeep.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Won't it go?"

"What's your name?"

"Mayo. Jim Mayo."

"I'm Linda Nielsen."

"Yeah. Nice meeting you. Why don't it go?"

"Jim, I've got a proposition for you."

"Oh?" He looked at her doubtfully. "I'll be glad to listen, lady—I mean Linda, but I ought to tell you, I got something on my mind that's going to keep me pretty busy for a long t …" His voice trailed off as he turned away from her intense gaze.

"Jim, if you'll do something for me, I'll do something for you."

"Like what, for instance?"

"Well, I get terribly lonesome, nights. It isn't so bad during the day—there's always a lot of chores to keep you busy—but at night it's just awful."

"Yeah, I know," he muttered.

"I've got to do something about it."

"But how do I come into this?" he asked nervously.

"Why don't you stay in New York for a while? If you do, I'll teach you how to drive and find you a car so you don't have to hike south."

"Say, that's an idea. Is it hard, driving?"

"I could teach you in a couple of days."

"I don't learn things so quick."

"All right, a couple of weeks, but think of how much time you'll save in the long run."

"Gee," he said, "that sounds great." Then he turned away again. "But what do I have to do for you?"

Her face lit up with excitement. "Jim, I want you to help me move a piano."

"A piano? What piano?"

"A rosewood grand from Steinway's on Fifty-seventh Street. I'm dying to have it in my place. The living room is just crying for it."

"Oh, you mean you're furnishing, huh?"

"Yes, but I want to play after dinner, too. You can't listen to records all the time. I've got it all planned; books on how to play, and books on how to tune a piano … I've been able to figure everything except how to move the piano in."

"Yeah, but … but there's apartments all over this town with pianos in them," he objected. "There must be hundreds, at least. Stands to reason. Why don't you live in one of them?"

"Never! I love my place. I've spent five years decorating it, and it's beautiful. Besides, there's the problem of water."

He nodded. "Water's always a headache. How do you handle it?"

"I'm living in the house in Central Park where they used to keep the model yachts. It faces the boat pond. It's a darling place, and I've got it all fixed up. We could get the piano in together, Jim. It wouldn't be hard."

"Well, I don't know, Lena …"

"Linda."

"Excuse me, Linda. I—"

"You look strong enough. What'd you do, before?"

"I used to be a pro rassler."

"There! I knew you were strong."

"Oh, I'm not a rassler anymore. I became a bartender and went into the restaurant business. I opened The Body Slam up in New Haven. Maybe you heard of it?"

"I'm sorry."

"It was sort of famous with the sports crowd. What'd you do before?"

"I was a researcher for BBDO."

"What's that?"

"An advertising agency," she explained impatiently. "We can talk about that later, if you'll stick around. And I'll teach you how to drive, and we can move in the piano, and there're a few other things that I—but that can wait. Afterward you can drive south."

"Gee, Linda, I don't know …"

She took Mayo's hands. "Come on, Jim, be a sport. You can stay with me. I'm a wonderful cook, and I've got a lovely guest room …"

"What for? I mean, thinking you was the last man on earth."

"That's a silly question. A proper house has to have a guest room. You'll love my place. I turned the lawns into a farm and gardens, and you can swim in the pond, and we'll get you a new Jag … I know where there's a beauty up on blocks."

"I think I'd rather have a Caddy."

"You can have anything you like. So what do you say, Jim? Is it a deal?"

"All right, Linda," he muttered reluctantly. "You've a deal."

It was indeed a lovely house with its pagoda roof of copper weathered to verdigris green, fieldstone walls, and deep recessed windows. The oval pond before it glittered blue in the soft June sunlight, and mallard ducks paddled and quacked busily. The sloping lawns that formed a bowl around the pond were terraced and cultivated. The house faced west, and Central Park stretched out beyond like an unkempt estate.

Mayo looked at the pond wistfully. "It ought to have boats."

"The house was full of them when I moved in," Linda said.

"I always wanted a model boat when I was a kid. Once I even—" Mayo broke off. A penetrating pounding sounded somewhere; an irregular sequence of heavy knocks that sounded like the dint of stones under water. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. "What was that?" Mayo asked.

Linda shrugged. "I don't know for sure. I think it's the city falling apart. You'll see buildings coming down every now and then. You get used to it." Her enthusiasm rekindled. "Now come inside. I want to show you everything."

She was bursting with pride and overflowing with decorating details that bewildered Mayo, but he was impressed by her Victorian living room. Empire bedroom, and country kitchen with a working kerosene cooking stove. The colonial guest room, with four-poster bed, hooked rug, and tole lamps, worried him.

"This is kind of girlie-girlie, huh?"

"Naturally, I'm a girl."

"Yeah. Sure. I mean …" Mayo looked around doubtfully. "Well, a guy is used to stuff that ain't so delicate. No offense."

"Don't worry, that bed's strong enough. Now remember, Jim, no feet on the spread, and remove it at night. If your shoes are dirty, take them off before you come in. I got that rug from the museum, and I don't want it messed up. Have you got a change of clothes?"

"Only what I got on."

"We'll have to get you new things tomorrow. What you're wearing is so filthy it's not worth laundering."

"Listen," he said desperately, "I think maybe I better camp out in the park."

"Why on earth?"

"Well, I'm like more used to it than houses. But you don't have to worry, Linda. I'll be around in case you need me."

"Why should I need you?"

"All you have to do is holler."

"Nonsense," Linda said firmly. "You're my guest and you're staying here. Now get cleaned up; I'm going to start dinner. Oh damn! I forgot to pick up the lobster bisque."

She gave him a dinner cleverly contrived from canned goods and served on exquisite Fornasetti china with Danish silver flatware. It was a typical girl's meal, and Mayo was still hungry when it was finished, but too polite to mention it. He was too tired to fabricate an excuse to go out and forage for something substantial. He lurched off to bed, remembering to remove his shoes but forgetting all about the spread.

He was awakened next morning by a loud honking and clattering of wings. He rolled out of bed and went to the windows just in time to see the mallards dispossessed from the pond by what appeared to be a red balloon. When he got his eyes working properly, he saw that it was a bathing cap. He wandered out to the pond, stretching and groaning. Linda yelled cheerfully and swam toward him. She heaved herself up out of the pond onto the curbing. The bathing cap was all that she wore. Mayo backed away from the splash and spatter.

"Good morning," Linda said. "Sleep well?"

"Good morning," Mayo said. "I don't know. The bed put kinks in my back. Gee, that water must be cold. You're all gooseflesh."

"No, it's marvelous." She pulled off the cap and shook her hair down. "Where's that towel? Oh, here. Go on in, Jim. You'll feel wonderful."

"I don't like it when it's cold."

"Don't be a sissy."

A crack of thunder split the quiet morning. Mayo looked up at the clear sky in astonishment. "What the hell was that?" he exclaimed.

"Watch," Linda ordered.

"It sounded like a sonic boom."

"There!" she cried, pointing west. "See?"

One of the West Side skyscrapers crumbled majestically, sinking into itself like a collapsible cup and raining masses of cornice and brick. The flayed girders twisted and contorted. Moments later they could hear the roar of the collapse.

"Man, that's a sight," Mayo muttered in awe.

"The decline and fall of the Empire City. You get used to it. Now take a dip, Jim. I'll get you a towel."

She ran into the house. He dropped his shorts and took off his socks but was still standing on the curb, unhappily dipping his toe into the water when she returned with a huge bath towel.

"It's awful cold, Linda," he complained.

"Didn't you take cold showers when you were a wrestler?"

"Not me. Boiling hot."

"Jim, if you just stand there, you'll never go in. Look at you, you're starting to shiver. Is that a tattoo around your waist?"

"What? Oh, yea. It's a python, in five colors. It goes all the way around. See?" He revolved proudly. "Got it when I was with the Army in Saigon back in '64. It's a Oriental-type python. Elegant, huh?"

"Did it hurt?"

"To tell the truth, no. Some guys try to make out like it's Chinese torture to get tattooed, but they're just showin' off. It itches more than anything else."

"You were a soldier in '64?"

"That's right."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty."

"You're thirty-seven now?"

"Thirty-six going on thirty-seven."

"Then you're prematurely gray?"

"I guess so."

She contemplated him thoughtfully. "I tell you what, if you do go in, don't get your head wet."

She ran back into the house. Mayo, ashamed of his vacillation, forced himself to jump feet first into the pond. He was standing, chest deep, splashing his face and shoulders with water when Linda returned. She carried a stool, a pair of scissors, and a comb.

"Doesn't it feel wonderful?" she called

"No."

She laughed. "Well, come out. I'm going to give you a haircut."

He climbed out of the pond, dried himself, and obediently sat on the stool while she cut his hair. "The beard, too," Linda insisted. "I want to see what you really look like." She trimmed him close enough for shaving, inspected him, and nodded with satisfaction. "Very handsome."

"Aw, go on," he blushed.

"There's a bucket of hot water on the stove. Go and shave. Don't bother to dress. We're going to get you new clothes after breakfast, and then … the piano."

"I couldn't walk around the streets naked," he said, shocked.

"Don't be silly. Who's to see? Now hurry."

They drove down to Abercrombie & Fitch on Madison and 45th Street, Mayo wrapped modestly in his towel. Linda told him she'd been a customer for years and showed him the pile of sales slips she had accumulated. Mayo examined them curiously while she took his measurements and went off in search of clothes. He was almost indignant when she returned with her arms laden.

"Jim, I've got some lovely elk moccasins, and a safari suit, and wool socks, and shipboard shirts, and—"

"Listen," he interrupted, "do you know what your whole tab comes to? Nearly fourteen hundred dollars."

"Really? Put on the shorts first. They're drip-dry."

"You must have been out of your mind, Linda. What'd you want all that junk for?"

"Are the socks big enough? What junk? I needed everything."

"Yeah? Like …" He shuffled the signed sales slips. "Like one Underwater Viewer with Plexiglas Lens, nine ninety-five? What for?"

"So I could see to clean the bottom of the pond."

"What about this Stainless Steel Service for Four, thirty-nine fifty?"

"For when I'm lazy and don't feel like heating water. You can wash stainless steel in cold water." She admired him. "Oh, Jim, come look in the mirror. You're real romantic, like the big-game hunter in that Hemingway story."

He shook his head. "I don't see how you're ever going to get out of hock. You got to watch your spending, Linda. Maybe we better forget about that piano, huh?"

"Never," Linda said adamantly. "I don't care how much it costs. A piano is a lifetime investment, and it's worth it."

She was frantic with excitement as they drove uptown to the Steinway showroom, and helpful and underfoot by turns. After a long afternoon of muscle-cracking and critical engineering involving makeshift gantries and an agonizing dolly-haul up Fifth Avenue, they had the piano in place in Linda's living room. Mayo gave it one last shake to make sure it was firmly on its legs and then sank down, exhausted. "Je-zuz!" he groaned. "Hiking south would've been easier."

"Jim!" Linda ran to him and threw herself on him with a fervent hug. "Jim, you're an angel. Are you all right?"

"I'm okay." He grunted. "Get off me, Linda. I can't breathe."

"I just can't thank you enough. I've been dreaming about this for ages. I don't know what I can do to repay you. Anything you want, just name it."

"Aw," he said, "you already cut my hair."

"I'm serious."

"Ain't you teaching me how to drive?"

"Of course. As quickly as possible. That's the least I can do." Linda backed to a chair and sat down, her eyes fixed on the piano.

"Don't make such a fuss over nothing," he said, climbing to his feet. He sat down before the keyboard, shot an embarrassed grin at her over his shoulder, then reached out and began stumbling through the Minuet in G.

Linda gasped and sat bolt upright. "You play," she whispered.

"Naw. I took piano when I was a kid."

"Can you read music?"

"I used to."

"Could you teach me?"

"I guess so; it's kind of hard. Hey, here's another piece I had to take." He began mutilating "The Rustle of Spring." What with the piano out of tune and his mistakes, it was ghastly.

"Beautiful," Linda breathed. "Just beautiful!" She stared at his back while an expression of decision and determination stole across her face. She arose, slowly crossed to Mayo, and put her hands on his shoulders.

He glanced up. "Something?" he asked.

"Nothing," she answered. "You practice the piano. I'll get dinner."

But she was so preoccupied for the rest of the evening that she made Mayo nervous. He stole off to bed early.

· · · · ·

It wasn't until three o'clock the following afternoon that they finally got a car working, and it wasn't a Caddy, but a Chevy—a hardtop because Mayo didn't like the idea of being exposed to the weather in a convertible. They drove out of the Tenth Avenue garage and back to the East Side, where Linda felt more at home. She confessed that the boundaries of her world were from Fifth Avenue to Third, and from 42nd Street to 86th. She was uncomfortable outside this pale.

She turned the wheel over to Mayo and let him creep up and down Fifth and Madison, practicing starts and stops. He sideswiped five wrecks, stalled eleven times, and reversed through a storefront which, fortunately, was devoid of glass. He was trembling with nervousness.

"It's real hard," he complained.

"It's just a question of practice," she reassured him. "Don't worry. I promise you'll be an expert if it takes us a month."

"A whole month!"

"You said you were a slow learner, didn't you? Don't blame me. Stop here a minute."

He jolted the Chevy to a halt. Linda got out.

"Wait for me."

"What's up?"

"A surprise."

She ran into a shop and was gone for half an hour. When she reappeared she was wearing a pencil-thin black sheath, pearls, and high-heeled opera pumps. She had twisted her hair into a coronet. Mayo regarded her with amazement as she got into the car.

"What's all this?" he asked.

"Part of the surprise. Turn east on Fifty-second Street."

He labored, started the car, and drove east. "Why'd you get all dressed up in an evening gown?"

"It's a cocktail dress."

"What for?"

"So I'll be dressed for where we're going. Watch out, Jim!" Linda wrenched the wheel and sheared off the stern of a shattered sanitation truck. "I'm taking you to a famous restaurant."

"To eat?"

"No, silly, for drinks. You're my visiting fireman, and I have to entertain you. That's it on the left. See if you can park somewhere."

He parked abominably. As they got out of the car, Mayo stopped and began to sniff curiously.

"Smell that?" he asked.

"Smell what?"

"That sort of sweet smell."

"It's my perfume."

"No, it's something in the air, kind of sweet and choky. I know that smell from somewhere, but I can't remember."

"Never mind. Come inside." She led him into the restaurant. "You ought to be wearing a tie," she whispered, "but maybe we can get away with it."

Mayo was not impressed by the restaurant decor, but was fascinated by the portraits of celebrities hung in the bar. He spent rapt minutes burning his fingers with matches, gazing at Mel Allen, Red Barber, Casey Stengel, Frank Gifford, and Rocky Marciano. When Linda finally came back from the kitchen with a lighted candle, he turned to her eagerly.

"You ever see any of them TV stars in here?" he asked.

"I suppose so. How about a drink?"

"Sure. Sure. But I want to talk more about them TV stars."

He escorted her to a bar stool, blew the dust off, and helped her up most gallantly. Then he vaulted over the bar, whipped out his handkerchief, and polished the mahogany professionally. "This is my specialty," he grinned. He assumed the impersonally friendly attitude of the bartender. "Evening, ma'am. Nice night. What's your pleasure?"

"God, I had a rough day in the shop! Dry martini on the rocks. Better make it a double."

"Certainly, ma'am. Twist or olive?"

"Onion."

"Double-dry Gibson on the rocks. Right." Mayo searched behind the bar and finally produced whiskey, gin, and several bottles of soda, as yet only partially evaporated through their sealed caps. "Afraid we're fresh out of martinis, ma'am. What's you second pleasure?"

"Oh, I like that. Scotch, please."

"This soda'll be flat," he warned, "and there's no ice."

"Never mind."

He rinsed a glass with soda and poured her a drink.

"Thank you. Have one on me, bartender. What's your name?"

"They call me Jim, ma'am. No thanks. Never drink on duty."

"Then come off duty and join me."

"Never drink off duty, ma'am."

"You can call me Linda."

"Thank you, Miss Linda."

"Are you serious about never drinking, Jim?"

"Yeah."

"Well, happy days."

"And long nights."

"I like that, too. Is it your own?"

"Gee, I don't know. It's sort of the usual bartender's routine, a specially with guys. You know? Suggestive. No offense."

"None taken."

"Bees!" Mayo burst out.

Linda was startled. "Bees what?"

"That smell. Like inside beehives."

"Oh? I wouldn't know," she said indifferently. "I'll have another, please."

"Coming right up. Now listen, about them TV celebrities, you actually saw them here? In person?"

"Why, of course. Happy days, Jim."

"May they all be Saturdays."

Linda pondered. "Why Saturdays?"

"Day off."

"Oh."

"Which TV stars did you see?"

"You name 'em, I saw 'em." She laughed. "You remind me of the kid next door. I always had to tell him the celebrities I'd seen. One day I told him I saw Jean Arthur in here, and he said, 'With his horse?' "

Mayo couldn't see the point, but was wounded nevertheless. Just as Linda was about to soothe his feelings, the bar began a gentle quivering, and at the same time a faint subterranean rumbling commenced. It came from a distance, seemed to approach slowly, and then faded away. The vibration stopped. Mayo stared at Linda.

"Je-zuz! You think maybe this building's going to go?"

She shook her head. "No. When they go, it's always with that boom. You know what that sounded like? The Lexington Avenue subway."

"The subway?"

"Uh-huh. The local train."

"That's crazy. How could the subway be running?"

"I didn't say it was. I said it sounded like. I'll have another, please."

"We need more soda." Mayo explored and reappeared with bottles and a large menu. He was pale. "You better take it easy, Linda," he said. "You know what they're charging per drink? A dollar seventy-five. Look."

"To hell with the expense. Let's live a little. Make it a double, bartender. You know something, Jim? If you stayed in town, I could show you where all your heroes lived. Thank you. Happy days. I could take you up to BBDO and show you their tapes and films. How about that? Stars like … like Red … Who?"

"Barber."

"Red Barber, and Rocky Gifford, and Rocky Casey, and Rocky the Flying Squirrel."

"You're putting me on," Mayo said, offended again.

"Me, sir? Putting you on?" Linda said with dignity. "Why would I do a thing like that? Just trying to be pleasant. Just trying to give you a good time. My mother told me, 'Linda,' she told me, 'just remember this, about a man. Wear what he wants and say what he likes,' is what she told me. You want this dress?" she demanded.

"I like it, if that's what you mean."

"Know what I paid for it? Ninety-nine fifty."

"What? A hundred dollars for a skinny black thing like that?"

"It is not a skinny black thing like that. It is a basic black cocktail frock. And I paid twenty dollars for the pearls. Simulated," she explained. "And sixty for the opera pumps. And forty for the perfume. Two hundred and twenty dollars to give you a good time. You having a good time?"

"Sure."

"Want to smell me?"

"I already have."

"Bartender, give me another."

"Afraid I can't serve you, ma'am."

"Why not?"

"You've had enough already."

"I have not had enough already," Linda said indignantly. "Where's your manners?" She grabbed the whiskey bottle. "Come on, let's have a few drinks and talk up a storm about TV stars. Happy days. I could take you up to BBDO and show you their tapes and films. How about that?"

"You just asked me."

"You didn't answer. I could show you movies, too. You like movies? I hate 'em, but I can't knock 'em anymore. Movies saved my life when the big bang came."

"How was that?"

"This is a secret, understand? Just between you and me. If any other agency ever found out …" Linda looked around and then lowered her voice. "BBDO located this big cache of silent films. Lost films, see? Nobody knew the prints were around. Make a great TV series. So they sent me to this abandoned mine in Jersey to take inventory."

"In a mine?"

"That's right. Happy days."

"Why were they in a mine?"

"Old prints. Nitrate. Catch fire. Also rot. Have to be stored like wine. That's why. So took two of my assistants with me to spend weekend down there, checking."

"You stayed in the mine a whole weekend?"

"Uh-huh. Three girls. Friday to Monday. That was the plan. Thought it would be a fun deal. Happy days. So … where was I? Oh. So, took lights, blankets, linen, plenty of picnic, the whole schmeer, and went to work. I remember exact moment when blast came. Was looking for third reel of a UFA film, Gekronter Blumenorden an der Pegnitz. Had reel one, two, four, five, six. No three. Bang! Happy days."

"Jesus. Then what?"

"My girls panicked. Couldn't keep 'em down there. Never saw them again. But I knew. I knew. Stretched that picnic forever. Then starved even longer. Finally came up, and for what? For who? Whom?" She began to weep. "For nobody. Nobody left. Nothing." She took Mayo's hands. "Why won't you stay?"

"Stay? Where?"

"Here."

"I am staying."

"I mean for a long time. Why not? Haven't I got lovely home? And there's all New York for supplies. And farm for flowers and vegetables. We could keep cows and chickens. Go fishing. Drive cars. Go to museums. Art galleries. Entertain …"

"You're doing all that right now. You don't need me."

"But I do. I do."

"For what?"

"For piano lessons."

After a long pause he said, "You're drunk."

"Not wounded, sire, but dead."

She laid her head on the bar, beamed up at him roguishly, and then closed her eyes. An instant later, Mayo knew she had passed out. He compressed his lips. Then he climbed out of the bar, computed the tab, and left fifteen dollars under the whiskey bottle.

He took Linda's shoulder and shook her gently. She collapsed into his arms, and her hair came tumbling down. He blew out the candle, picked Linda up, and carried her to the Chevy. Then, with anguished concentration, he drove through the dark to the boat pond. It took him forty minutes.

He carried Linda into her bedroom and sat her down on the bed, which was decorated with an elaborate arrangement of dolls. Immediately she rolled over and curled up with a doll in her arms, crooning to it. Mayo lit a lamp and tried to prop her upright. She went over again, giggling.

"Linda," he said, "you got to get that dress off."

"Mf."

"You can't sleep in it. It cost a hundred dollars."

"Nine'nine-fif'y."

"Now come on, honey."

"Fm."

He rolled his eyes in exasperation and then undressed her, carefully hanging up the basic black cocktail frock, and standing the sixty-dollar pumps in a corner. He could not manage the clasp of the pearls (simulated), so he put her to bed still wearing them. Lying on the pale blue sheets, nude except for the necklace, she looked like a Nordic odalisque.

"Did you muss my dolls?" she mumbled.

"No. They're all around you."

"Tha's right. Never sleep without 'em." She reached out and petted them lovingly. "Happy days. Long nights."

"Women!" Mayo snorted. He extinguished the lamp and tramped out, slamming the door behind him.

· · · · ·

Next morning Mayo was again awakened by the clatter of dispossessed ducks. The red balloon was sailing on the surface of the pond, bright in the warm June sunshine. Mayo wished it was a model boat instead of the kind of girl who got drunk in bars. He stalked out and jumped into the water as far from Linda as possible. He was sluicing his chest when something seized his ankle and nipped him. He let out a yell and was confronted by Linda's beaming face bursting out of the water before him.

"Good morning," she laughed.

"Very funny," he muttered.

"You look mad this morning."

He grunted.

"And I don't blame you. I did an awful thing last night. I didn't give you any dinner, and I want to apologize."

"I wasn't thinking about dinner," he said with baleful dignity.

"No? Then what on earth are you mad about?"

"I can't stand women who get drunk."

"Who was drunk?"

"You."

"I was not," she said indignantly.

"No? Who had to be undressed and put to bed like a kid?"

"Who was too dumb to take off my pearls?" she countered. "They broke and I slept on pebbles all night. I'm covered with black and blue marks. Look. Here and here and—"

"Linda," he interrupted sternly, "I'm just a plain guy from New Haven. I got no use for spoiled girls who run up charge accounts and all the time decorate theirselves and hang around society-type saloons getting loaded."

"If you don't like my company, why do you stay?"

"I'm going," he said. He climbed out and began drying himself. "I'm starting south this morning."

"Enjoy your hike."

"I'm driving."

"What? A kiddie-car?"

"The Chevy."

"Jim, you're not serious?" She climbed out of the pond, looking alarmed. "You really don't know how to drive yet."

"No? Didn't I drive you home falling-down drunk last night?"

"You'll get into awful trouble."

"Nothing I can't get out of. Anyway, I can't hang around here forever. You're a party girl; you just want to play. I got serious things on my mind. I got to go south and find guys who know about TV."

"Jim, you've got me wrong. I'm not like that at all. Why, look at the way I fixed up my house. Could I have done that if I'd been going to parties all the time?"

"You done a nice job," he admitted.

"Please don't leave today. You're not ready yet."

"Aw, you just want me to hang around and teach you music."

"Who said that?"

"You did. Last night."

She frowned, pulled off her cap, then picked up her towel and began drying herself. At last she said, "Jim, I'll be honest with you. Sure, I want you to stay a while. I won't deny it. But I wouldn't want you around permanently. After all, what have we got in common?"

"You're so damn uptown," he growled.

"No, no, it's nothing like that. It's simply that you're a guy and I'm a girl, and we've got nothing to offer each other. We're different. We've got different tastes and interests. Fact?"

"Absolutely."

"But you're not ready to leave yet. So I tell you what; we'll spend the whole morning practicing driving, and then we'll have some fun. What would you like to do? Go window-shopping? Buy more clothes? Visit the Modern Museum? Have a picnic?"

His face brightened. "Gee, you know something? I was never to a picnic in my whole life. Once I was bartender at a clambake, but that's not the same thing; not like when you're a kid."

She was delighted. "Then we'll have a real kid-type picnic."

And she brought her dolls. She carried them in her arms while Mayo toted the picnic basket to the Alice in Wonderland monument. The statue perplexed Mayo, who had never heard of Lewis Carroll. While Linda seated her pets and unpacked the picnic, she gave Mayo a summary of the story and described how the bronze heads of Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare had been polished bright by the swarms of kids playing King of the Mountain.

"Funny, I never heard of that story," he said.

"I don't think you had much of a childhood, Jim."

"Why would you say a—" He stopped, cocked his head, and listened intently.

"What's the matter?" Linda asked.

"You hear that bluejay?"

"No."

"Listen. He's making a funny sound; like steel."

"Steel?"

"Yeah. Like … like swords in a duel."

"You're kidding."

"No. Honest."

"But birds sing; they don't make noises."

"Not always. Bluejays imitate noises a lot. Starlings, too. And parrots. Now why would he be imitating a sword fight? Where'd he hear it?"

"You're a real country boy, aren't you, Jim? Bees and bluejays and starlings and all that …"

"I guess so. I was going to ask; why would you say a thing like that, me not having any childhood?"

"Oh, things like not knowing Alice, and never going on a picnic, and always wanting a model yacht." Linda opened a dark bottle. "Like to try some wine?"

"You better go easy," he warned.

"Now stop it, Jim. I'm not a drunk."

"Did you or didn't you get smashed last night?"

She capitulated. "All right, I did; but only because it was my first drink in years."

He was pleased by her surrender. "Sure. Sure. That figures."

"So? Join me?"

"What the hell, why not?" He grinned. "Let's live a little. Say, this is one swingin' picnic, and I like the plates, too. Where'd you get them?"

"Abercrombie & Fitch," Linda said, deadpan. "Stainless Steel Service for Four, thirty-nine fifty. Skoal."

Mayo burst out laughing. "I sure goofed, didn't I, kicking up all that fuss? Here's looking at you."

"Here's looking right back."

They drank and continued eating in warm silence, smiling companionably at each other. Linda removed her madras silk shirt in order to tan in the blazing afternoon sun, and Mayo politely hung it up on a branch. Suddenly Linda asked, "Why didn't you have a childhood, Jim?"

"Gee, I don't know." He thought it over. "I guess because my mother died when I was a kid. And something else, too; I had to work a lot."

"Why?"

"My father was a schoolteacher. You know how they get paid."

"Oh, so that's why you're anti-egghead."

"I am?"

"Of course. No offense."

"Maybe I am," he conceded. "It sure was a letdown for my old man, me playing fullback in high school and him wanting like an Einstein in the house."

"Was football fun?"

"Not like playing games. Football's a business. Hey, remember when we were kids how we used to choose up sides? Ibbety, bibbety, zibbety, zab?"

"We used to say, Eenie, meenie, miney, mo."

"Remember: April Fool, go to school, tell your teacher you're a fool?"

"I love coffee, I love tea, I love the boys, and the boys love me."

"I bet they did at that," Mayo said solemnly.

"Not me."

"Why not?"

"I was always too big."

He was astonished. "But you're not big," he assured her. "You're just the right size. Perfect. And really built, I noticed when we moved the piano in. You got muscle, for a girl. A specially in the legs, and that's where it counts."

She blushed. "Stop it, Jim."

"No. Honest."

"More wine?"

"Thanks. You have some, too."

"All right."

A crack of thunder split the sky with its sonic boom and was followed by the roar of collapsing masonry.

"There goes another skyscraper," Linda said. "What were we talking about?"

"Games," Mayo said promptly. "Excuse me for talking with my mouth full."

"Oh, yes. Jim, did you play Drop the Handkerchief up in New Haven?" Linda sang. "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket. I sent a letter to my love, and on the way I dropped it …"

"Gee," he said, much impressed. "You sing real good."

"Oh, go on!"

"Yes, you do. You got a swell voice. Now don't argue with me. Keep quiet a minute. I got to figure something out." He thought intently for a long time, finishing his wine and absently accepting another glass. Finally he delivered himself of a decision. "You got to learn music."

"You know I'm dying to, Jim."

"So I'm going to stay awhile and teach you; as much as I know. Now hold it! Hold it!" he added hastily, cutting off her excitement. "I'm not going to stay in your house. I want a place of my own."

"Of course, Jim. Anything you say."

"And I'm still headed south."

"I'll teach you to drive, Jim. I'll keep my word."

"And no strings, Linda."

"Of course not. What kind of strings?"

"You know. Like the last minute you all of a sudden got a Looey Cans couch you want me to move in."

"Louis Quinze!" Linda's jaw dropped. "Wherever did you learn that?"

"Not in the army, that's for sure."

They laughed, clinked glasses, and finished their wine. Suddenly Mayo leaped up, pulled Linda's hair, and ran to the Wonderland Monument. In an instant he had climbed to the top of Alice's head.

"I'm King of the Mountain," he shouted, looking around in imperial survey. "I'm King of the—" He cut himself off and stared down behind the statue.

"Jim, what's the matter?"

Without a word, Mayo climbed down and strode to a pile of debris half-hidden inside overgrown forsythia bushes. He knelt and began turning over the wreckage with gentle hands. Linda ran to him.

"Jim, what's wrong?"

"These used to be model boats," he muttered.

"That's right. My God, is that all? I thought you were sick or something."

"How come they're here?"

"Why, I dumped them, of course."

"You?"

"Yes. I told you. I had to clear out the boathouse when I moved in. That was ages ago."

"You did this?"

"Yes. I—"

"You're a murderer," he growled. He stood up and glared at her. "You're a killer. You're like all women, you got no heart and soul. To do a thing like this!"

He turned and stalked toward the boat pond. Linda followed him, completely bewildered.

"Jim, I don't understand. Why are you so mad?"

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"But I had to have house room. You wouldn't expect me to live with a lot of model boats."

"Just forget everything I said. I'm going to pack and go south. I wouldn't stay with you if you was the last person on earth."

Linda gathered herself and suddenly darted ahead of Mayo. When he tramped into the boathouse, she was standing before the door of the guest room. She held up a heavy iron key.

"I found it," she panted. "Your door's locked."

"Gimme that key, Linda."

"No."

He stepped toward her, but she faced him defiantly and stood her ground.

"Go ahead," she challenged. "Hit me."

He stopped. "Aw, I wouldn't pick on anybody that wasn't my own size."

They continued to face each other, at a complete impasse.

"I don't need my gear," Mayo muttered at last. "I can get more stuff somewheres."

"Oh, go ahead and pack," Linda answered. She tossed him the key and stood aside. Then Mayo discovered there was no lock in the bedroom door. He opened the door, looked inside, closed it, and looked at Linda. She kept her face straight but began to sputter. He grinned. Then they both burst out laughing.

"Gee," Mayo said, "you sure made a monkey out of me. I'd hate to play poker against you."

"You're a pretty good bluffer yourself, Jim. I was scared to death you were going to knock me down."

"You ought to know I wouldn't hurt nobody."

"I guess I do. Now, let's sit down and talk this over sensibly."

"Aw, forget it, Linda. I kind of lost my head over them boats, and I—"

"I don't mean the boats; I mean going south. Every time you get mad you start south again. Why?"

"I told you, to find guys who know about TV."

"Why?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"I can try. Why don't you explain what you're after—specifically? Maybe I can help you."

"You can't do nothing for me; you're a girl."

"We have our uses. At least I can listen. You can trust me, Jim. Aren't we chums? Tell me about it."

· · · · ·

Well, when the blast come (Mayo said) I was up in the Berkshires with Gil Watkins. Gil was my buddy, a real nice guy and a real bright guy. He took two years from M.I.T. before he quit college. He was like chief engineer or something at WNHA, the TV station in New Haven. Gil had a million hobbies. One of them was spee—speel—I can't remember. It meant exploring caves.

So anyway, we were up in this flume in the Berkshires, spending the weekend inside, exploring and trying to map everything and figure out where the underground river comes from. We brought food and stuff along, and bedrolls. The compass we were using went crazy for like twenty minutes, and that should have give us a clue, but Gil talked about magnetic ores and stuff. Only when we come out Sunday night, I tell you it was pretty scary. Gil knew right off what happened.

"By Christ, Jim," he said, "they up and done it like everybody always knew they would. They've blew and gassed and poisoned and radiated themselves straight to hell, and we're going back to that goddamn cave until it all blows over."

So me and Gil went back and rationed the food and stayed as long as we could. Finally we come out again and drove back to New Haven. It was dead like all the rest. Gil put together some radio stuff and tried to pick up broadcasts. Nothing. Then we packed some canned goods and drove all around: Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford, Springfield, Providence, New London … a big circle. Nobody. Nothing. So we come back to New Haven and settled down, and it was a pretty good life.

Daytime, we'd get in supplies and stuff and tinker with the house to keep it working right. Nights, after supper, Gil would go off to WNHA around seven o'clock and start the station. He was running it on the emergency generators. I'd go down to the Body Slam, open it up, sweep it out, and then start the bar TV set. Gil fixed me a generator for it to run on.

It was a lot of fun watching the shows Gil was broadcasting. He'd start with the news and weather, which he always got wrong. All he had was some Farmer's Almanacs and a sort of antique barometer that looked like that clock you got there on the wall. I don't think it worked so good, or maybe Gil never took weather at M.I.T. Then he'd broadcast the evening show.

I had my shotgun in the bar in case of holdups. Anytime I saw something that bugged me, I just up with the gun and let loose at the set. Then I'd take it and throw it out the front door and put another one in its place. I must have had hundreds waiting in the back. I spent two days a week just collecting reserves.

Midnight, Gil would turn off WNHA, I'd lock up the restaurant, and we'd meet home for coffee. Gil would ask how many sets I shot and laugh when I told him. He said I was the most accurate TV poll ever invented. I'd ask him about what shows were coming up next week and argue with him about … oh … about like what movies or football games WNHA was scheduling. I didn't like Westerns much, and I hated them high-minded panel discussions.

But the luck had to turn lousy; it's the story of my life. After a couple of years, I found out I was down to my last set, and then I was in trouble. This night Gil run one of them icky commercials where this smart-aleck woman saves a marriage with the right laundry soap. Naturally I reached for my gun, and only at the last minute remembered not to shoot. Then he run an awful movie about a misunderstood composer, and the same thing happened. When we met back at the house, I was all shook up.

"What's the matter?" Gil asked.

I told him.

"I thought you liked watching the shows," he said.

"Only when I could shoot 'em."

"You poor bastard," he laughed, "you're a captive audience now."

"Gil, could you maybe change the programs, seeing the spot I'm in?"

"Be reasonable, Jim. WNHA has to broadcast variety. We operate on the cafeteria basis; something for everybody. If you don't like a show, why don't you switch channels?"

"Now that's silly. You know damn well we only got one channel in New Haven."

"Then turn your set off."

"I can't turn the bar set off; it's part of the entertainment. I'd lose my whole clientele. Gil, do you have to show them awful movies, like that army musical last night, singing and dancing and kissing on top of Sherman tanks, for Jezus' sake!"

"The women love uniform pictures."

"And those commercials; women always sneering at somebody's girdle, and fairies smoking cigarettes, and—"

"Aw," Gil said, "write a letter to the station."

So I did, and a week later I got an answer. It said: Dear Mr. Mayo: We are very glad to learn that you are a regular viewer of WNHA, and thank you for your interest in our programming. We hope you will continue to enjoy our broadcasts. Sincerely yours, Gilbert O. Watkins, Station Manager. A couple of tickets for an interview show were enclosed. I showed the letter to Gil, and he just shrugged.

"You see what you're up against, Jim," he said. "They don't care about what you like or don't like. All they want to know is if you are watching."

I tell you, the next couple of months were hell for me. I couldn't keep the set turned off, and I couldn't watch it without reaching for my gun a dozen times a night. It took all my willpower to keep from pulling the trigger. I got so nervous and jumpy that I knew I had to do something about it before I went off my rocker. So one night I brought the gun home and shot Gil.

Next day I felt a lot better, and when I went down to the Body Slam at seven o'clock to clean up, I was whistling kind of cheerful. I swept out the restaurant, polished the bar, and then turned on the TV to get the news and weather. You wouldn't believe it, but the set was busted. I couldn't get a picture. I couldn't even get a sound. My last set, busted.

So you see, that's why I have to head south (Mayo explained)—I got to locate a TV repairman.

There was a long pause after Mayo finished his story. Linda examined him keenly, trying to conceal the gleam in her eye. At last she asked with studied carelessness, "Where did he get the barometer?"

"Who? What?"

"Your friend, Gil. His antique barometer. Where did he get it?"

"Gee, I don't know. Antiquing was another one of his hobbies."

"And it looked like that clock?"

"Just like it."

"French?"

"I couldn't say."

"Bronze?"

"I guess so. Like your clock. Is that bronze?"

"Yes. Shaped like a sunburst?"

"No, just like yours."

"That's a sunburst. The same size?"

"Exactly."

"Where was it?"

"Didn't I tell you? In our house."

"Where's the house?"

"On Grant Street."

"What number?"

"Three fifteen. Say, what is all this?"

"Nothing, Jim. Just curious. No offense. Now I think I'd better get our picnic things."

"You wouldn't mind if I took a walk by myself?"

She cocked an eye at him. "Don't try driving alone. Garage mechanics are scarcer than TV repairmen."

He grinned and disappeared; but after dinner the true purpose of his disappearance was revealed when he produced a sheaf of sheet music, placed it on the piano rack, and led Linda to the piano bench. She was delighted and touched.

"Jim, you angel! Wherever did you find it?"

"In the apartment house across the street. Fourth floor, rear. Name of Horowitz. They got a lot of records, too. Boy, I can tell you it was pretty spooky snooping around in the dark with only matches. You know something funny? The whole top of the house is full of glop."

"Glop?"

"Yeah. Sort of white jelly, only it's hard. Like clear concrete. Now look, see this note? It's C. Middle C. It stands for this white key here. We better sit together. Move over …"

The lesson continued for two hours of painful concentration and left them both so exhausted that they tottered to their rooms with only perfunctory good nights.

"Jim," Linda called.

"Yeah?" he yawned.

"Would you like one of my dolls for your bed?"

"Gee, no. Thanks a lot, Linda, but guys really ain't interested in dolls."

"I suppose not. Never mind. Tomorrow I'll have something for you that really interests guys."

· · · · ·

Mayo was awakened next morning by a rap on his door. He heaved up in bed and tried to open his eyes.

"Yeah? Who is it?" he called.

"It's me. Linda. May I come in?"

He glanced around hastily. The room was neat. The hooked rug was clean. The precious candlewick bedspread was neatly folded on top of the dresser.

"Okay. Come on in."

Linda entered, wearing a crisp seersucker dress. She sat down on the edge of the four-poster and gave Mayo a friendly pat. "Good morning," she said. "Now listen. I'll have to leave you alone for a few hours. I've got things to do. There's breakfast on the table, but I'll be back in time for lunch. All right?"

"Sure."

"You won't be lonesome?"

"Where you going?"

"Tell you when I get back." She reached out and tousled his head. "Be a good boy and don't get into mischief. Oh, one other thing. Don't go into my bedroom."

"Why should I?"

"Just don't anyway."

She smiled and was gone. Moments later, Mayo heard the jeep start and drive off. He got up at once, went into Linda's bedroom, and looked around. The room was neat, as ever. The bed was made, and her pet dolls were lovingly arranged on the coverlet. Then he saw it.

"Gee," he breathed.

It was a model of a full-rigged clipper ship. The spars and rigging were intact, but the hull was peeling, and the sails were shredded. It stood before Linda's closet, and alongside it was her sewing basket. She had already cut out a fresh set of white linen sails. Mayo knelt down before the model and touched it tenderly.

"I'll paint her black with a gold line around her," he murmured, "and I'll name her the Linda N."

He was so deeply moved that he hardly touched his breakfast. He bathed, dressed, took his shotgun and a handful of shells, and went out to wander through the park. He circled south, passed the playing fields, the decaying carousel, and the crumbling skating rink, and at last left the park and loafed down Seventh Avenue.

He turned east on 50th Street and spent a long time trying to decipher the tattered posters advertising the last performance at Radio City Music Hall. Then he turned south again. He was jolted to a halt by the sudden clash of steel. It sounded like giant sword blades in a titanic duel. A small herd of stunted horses burst out of a side street, terrified by the clangor. Their shoeless hooves thudded bluntly on the pavement. The sound of steel stopped.

"That's where that bluejay got it from," Mayo muttered. "But what the hell is it?"

He drifted eastward to investigate, but forgot the mystery when he came to the diamond center. He was dazzled by the blue-white stones glittering in the showcases. The door of one jewel mart had sagged open, and Mayo tipped in. When he emerged, it was with a strand of genuine matched pearls which had cost him an I.O.U. worth a year's rent on the Body Slam.

His tour took him to Madison Avenue, where he found himself before Abercrombie & Fitch. He went in to explore and came at last to the gun racks. There he lost all sense of time, and when he recovered his senses, he was walking up Fifth Avenue toward the boat pond. An Italian Cosmi automatic rifle was cradled in his arms, guilt was in his heart, and a sales slip in the store read: I.O.U. 1 Cosmi Rifle, $750.00. 6 Boxes Ammo. $18.00. James Mayo.

It was past three o'clock when he got back to the boathouse. He eased in, trying to appear casual, hoping the extra gun he was carrying would go unnoticed. Linda was sitting on the piano bench with her back to him.

"Hi," Mayo said nervously. "Sorry I'm late. I … I brought you a present. They're real." He pulled the pearls from his pocket and held them out. Then he saw she was crying.

"Hey, what's the matter?"

She didn't answer.

"You wasn't scared I'd run out on you? I mean, well, all my gear is here. The car, too. You only had to look."

She turned. "I hate you!" she cried.

He dropped the pearls and recoiled, startled by her vehemence. "What's the matter?'

"You're a lousy, rotten liar!"

"Who? Me?"

"I drove up to New Haven this morning." Her voice trembled with passion. "There's no house standing on Grant Street. It's all wiped out. There's no Station WNHA. The whole building's gone."

"No."

"Yes. And I went to your restaurant. There's no pile of TV sets out in the street. There's only one set, over the bar. It's rusted to pieces. The rest of the restaurant is a pigsty. You were living there all the time. Alone. There was only one bed in back. It was lies! All lies!"

"Why would I lie about a thing like that?"

"You never shot any Gil Watkins."

"I sure did. Both barrels. He had it coming."

"And you haven't got any TV set to repair."

"Yes, I do.

"And even if it is repaired, there's no station to broadcast."

"Talk sense," he said angrily. "Why would I shoot Gil if there wasn't any broadcast?"

"If he's dead, how can he broadcast?"

"See? And you just now said I didn't shoot him."

"Oh, you're mad! You're insane!" she sobbed. "You just described that barometer because you happened to be looking at my clock. And I believed your crazy lies. I had my heart set on a barometer to match my clock. I've been looking for years." She ran to the wall arrangement and hammered her fist alongside the clock. "It belongs right here. Here. But you lied, you lunatic. There never was a barometer."

"If there's a lunatic around here, it's you," he shouted. "You're so crazy to get this house decorated that nothing's real for you anymore."

She ran across the room, snatched up his old shotgun, and pointed it at him. "You get out of here. Right this minute. Get out or I'll kill you. I never want to see you again."

The shotgun kicked off in her hands, knocking her backward and spraying shot over Mayo's head into a corner bracket. China shattered and clattered down. Linda's face went white.

"Jim! My God, are you all right? I didn't mean to … it just went off …"

He stepped forward, too furious to speak. Then, as he raised his hand to cuff her, the sound of distant reports come, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM. Mayo froze.

"Did you hear that?" he whispered.

Linda nodded.

"That wasn't any accident. It was a signal."

Mayo grabbed the shotgun, ran outside, and fired the second barrel into the air. There was a pause. Then again came the distant explosions in a stately triplet, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM. They had an odd, sucking sound, as though they were implosions rather than explosions. Far up the park, a canopy of frightened birds mounted into the sky.

"There's somebody," Mayo exulted. "By God, I told you I'd find somebody. Come on."

They ran north, Mayo digging into his pockets for more shells to reload and signal again.

"I got to thank you for taking that shot at me, Linda."

"I didn't shoot at you," she protested. "It was an accident."

"The luckiest accident in the world. They could be passing through and never know about us. But what the hell kind of guns are they using? I never heard no shots like that before, and I heard 'em all. Wait a minute."

On the little piazza before the Wonderland monument, Mayo halted and raised the shotgun to fire. Then he slowly lowered it. He took a deep breath. In a harsh voice he said, "Turn around. We're going back to the house." He pulled her around and faced her south.

Linda stared at him. In an instant he had become transformed from a gentle teddy bear into a panther.

"Jim, what's wrong?"

"I'm scared," he growled. "I'm goddamn scared, and I don't want you to be, too." The triple salvo sounded again. "Don't pay any attention," he ordered. "We're going back to the house. Come on!"

She refused to move. "But why? Why?"

"We don't want any part of them. Take my word for it."

"How do you know? You've got to tell me."

"Christ! You won't let it alone until you find out, huh? All right. You want the explanation for that bee smell, and them buildings falling down, and all the rest?" He turned Linda around with a hand on her neck and directed her gaze at the Wonderland monument. "Go ahead. Look."

A consummate craftsman had removed the heads of Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare, and replaced them with towering mantis heads, all saber mandibles, antennae, and faceted eyes. They were of a burnished steel and gleamed with unspeakable ferocity. Linda let out a sick whimper and sagged against Mayo. The triple report signaled once more.

Mayo caught Linda, heaved her over his shoulder, and loped back toward the pond. She recovered consciousness in a moment and began to moan. "Shut up," he growled. "Whining won't help." He set her on her feet before the boathouse. She was shaking but trying to control herself. "Did this place have shutters when you moved in? Where are they?"

"Stacked." She had to squeeze the words out. "Behind the trellis."

"I'll put 'em up. You fill buckets with water and stash 'em in the kitchen. Go!"

"Is it going to be a siege?"

"We'll talk later. Go!"

She filled buckets and then helped Mayo jam the last of the shutters into the window embrasures. "All right, inside," he ordered. They went into the house and shut and barred the door. Faint shafts of the late afternoon sun filtered through the louvers of the shutters. Mayo began unpacking the cartridges for the Cosmi rifle. "You got any kind of gun?"

"A .22 revolver somewhere."

"Ammo?"

"I think so."

"Get it ready."

"Is it going to be a siege?" she repeated.

"I don't know. I don't know who they are, or what they are, or where they come from. All I know is, we got to be prepared for the worst."

The distant implosions sounded. Mayo looked up alertly, listening. Linda could make him out in the dimness now. His face looked carved. His chest gleamed with sweat. He exuded the musky odor of caged lions. Linda had an overpowering impulse to touch him. Mayo loaded the rifle, stood it alongside the shotgun, and began padding from shutter to shutter, peering out vigilantly, waiting with massive patience.

"Will they find us?" Linda asked.

"Maybe."

"Could they be friendly?"

"Maybe."

"Those heads looked so horrible."

"Yeah."

"Jim, I'm scared. I've never been so scared in my life."

"I don't blame you."

"How long before we know?"

"An hour, if they're friendly; two or three, if they're not."

"W-why longer?"

"If they're looking for trouble, they'll be more cautious."

"Jim, what do you really think?"

"About what?"

"Our chances."

"You really want to know?"

"Please."

"We're dead."

She began to sob. He shook her savagely. "Stop that. Go get your gun ready."

She lurched across the living room, noticed the pearls Mayo had dropped, and picked them up. She was so dazed that she put them on automatically. Then she went into her darkened bedroom and pulled Mayo's model yacht away from the closet door. She located the .22 in a hatbox on the closet floor and removed it along with a small carton of cartridges.

She realized that a dress was unsuited to this emergency. She got a turtleneck sweater, jodhpurs, and boots from the closet. Then she stripped naked to change. Just as she raised her arms to unclasp the pearls, Mayo entered, paced to the shuttered south window, and peered out. When he turned back from the window, he saw her.

He stopped short. She couldn't move. Their eyes locked, and she began to tremble, trying to conceal herself with her arms. He stepped forward, stumbled on the model yacht, and kicked it out of the way. The next instant he had taken possession of her body, and the pearls went flying, too. As she pulled him down on the bed, fiercely tearing the shirt from his back, her pet dolls also went into the discard heap along with the yacht, the pearls, and the rest of the world.

The End

* * * *

The Yellow Pill

By Rog Phillips

Dr. Cedric Elton slipped into his office by the back entrance, shucked off his topcoat and hid it in the small, narrow-doored closet, then picked up the neatly piled patient cards his receptionist, Helena Fitzroy, had placed on the corner of his desk. There were only four, but there could have been a hundred if he accepted everyone who asked to be his patient, because his successes had more than once been spectacular and his reputation as a psychiatrist had become so great because of this that his name had become synonymous with psychiatry in the public mind.

His eyes flicked over the top card. He frowned, then went to the small square of one-way glass in the reception-room door and looked through it. There were four police officers and a man in a straitjacket.

The card said the man's name was Gerald Bocek and that he had shot and killed five people in a supermarket, and had killed one officer and wounded two others before being captured.

Except for the straitjacket, Gerald Bocek did not have the appearance of being dangerous. He was about twenty-five, with brown hair and blue eyes. There were faint wrinkles of habitual good nature about his eyes. Right now he was smiling, relaxed, and idly watching Helena, who was pretending to study various cards in her desk file but was obviously conscious of her audience.

Cedric returned to his desk and sat down. The card for Jerry Bocek said more about the killings. When captured, Bocek insisted that the people he had killed were not people at all, but blue-scaled Venusian lizards who had boarded his spaceship, and that he had only been defending himself.

Dr. Cedric Elton shook his head in disapproval. Fantasy fiction was all right in its place, but too many people took it seriously. Of course, it was not the fault of the fiction. The same type of person took other types of fantasy seriously in earlier days, burning women as witches, stoning men as devils—

Abruptly Cedric deflected the control on the intercom and spoke into it. "Send Gerald Bocek in, please," he said.

A moment later the door to the reception room opened. Helena flashed Cedric a scared smile and got out of the way quickly. One police officer led the way, followed by Gerald Bocek, closely flanked by two officers, with the fourth one in the rear, who carefully closed the door. It was impressive, Cedric decided. He nodded toward a chair in front of his desk, and the police officers sat the straitjacketed man in it, then hovered nearby, ready for anything.

"You're Jerry Bocek?" Cedric asked.

The straitjacketed man nodded cheerfully.

"I'm Dr. Cedric Elton, a psychiatrist," Cedric said. "Do you have any idea at all why you have been brought to me?"

"Brought to you?" Jerry echoed, chuckling. "Don't kid me. You're my old pal, Gar Castle. Brought to you? How could I get away from you in this stinking tub?"

"Stinking tub?" Cedric said.

"Spaceship," Jerry said. "Look, Gar. Untie me, will you? This nonsense has gone far enough."

"My name is Dr. Cedric Elton," Cedric enunciated. "You are not on a spaceship. You were brought to my office by the four policemen standing in back of you, and—"

Jerry Bocek turned his head and studied each of the four policemen with frank curiosity. "What policemen?" he interrupted. "You mean these four gear lockers?" He turned his head back and looked pityingly at Dr. Elton. "You'd better get hold of yourself, Gar," he said. "You're imagining things."

"My name is Dr. Cedric Elton," Cedric said.

Gerald Bocek leaned forward and said with equal firmness, "Your name is Gar Castle. I refuse to call you Dr. Cedric Elton, because your name is Gar Castle, and I'm going to keep on calling you Gar Castle because we have to have at least one peg of rationality in all this madness or you will be cut completely adrift in this dream world you've cooked up."

Cedric's eyebrows shot halfway up to his hairline.

"Funny," he mused, smiling. "That's exactly what I was just going to say to you!"

· · · · ·

Cedric continued to smile. Jerry's serious intenseness slowly faded. Finally an answering smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. When it became a grin, Cedric laughed, and Jerry began to laugh with him. The four police officers looked at one another uneasily.

"Well!" Cedric finally gasped. "I guess that puts us on an even footing! You're nuts to me and I'm nuts to you!"

"An equal footing is right!" Jerry shouted in high glee. Then he sobered. "Except," he said gently, "I'm tied up."

"In a straitjacket," Cedric corrected.

"Ropes," Jerry said firmly.

"You're dangerous," Cedric said. "You killed six people, one of them a police officer, and wounded two other officers."

"I blasted five Venusian lizard pirates who boarded our ship," Jerry said, "and melted the door off of one gear locker and seared the paint on two others. You know as well as I do, Gar, how space madness causes you to personify everything. That's why they drill into you that the minute you think there are more people on board the ship than there were at the beginning of the trip, you'd better go to the medicine locker and take a yellow pill. They can't hurt anything but a delusion."

"If that is so," Cedric said, "why are you in a straitjacket?"

"I'm tied up with ropes," Jerry said patiently. "You tied me up. Remember?"

"And those four police officers behind you are gear lockers?" Cedric said. "Okay, if one of those gear lockers comes around in front of you and taps you on the jaw with his fist, would you still believe it's a gear locker?"

Cedric nodded to one of the officers, and the man came around in front of Gerald Bocek and, quite carefully, hit him hard enough to rock his head but not hurt him. Jerry's eyes blinked with surprise, then he looked at Cedric and smiled. "Did you feel that?" Cedric said quietly.

"Feel what?" Jerry said. "Oh!" He laughed. "You imagined that one of the gear lockers—a police officer in your dream world—came around in front of me and hit me?" He shook his head in pity. "Don't you understand, Gar, that it didn't really happen? Untie me and I'll prove it. Before your very eyes I'll open the door on your policeman and take out the pressure suit, or magnetic grapple, or whatever is in it. Or are you afraid to? You've surrounded yourself with all sorts of protective delusions. I'm tied with ropes, but you imagine it to be a straitjacket. You imagine yourself to be a psychiatrist named Dr. Cedric Elton so that you can convince yourself that you're sane and I'm crazy. Probably you imagine yourself a very famous psychiatrist that everyone would like to come to for treatment. World famous, no doubt. Probably you even think you have a beautiful receptionist. What is her name?"

"Helena Fitzroy," Cedric said.

Jerry nodded. "It figures," he said resignedly. "Helena Fitzroy is the expediter at Mars Port. You try to date her every time we land there, but she won't date you."

"Hit him again," Cedric said to the officer. While Jerry's head was still rocking from the blow, Cedric said, "Now! Is it my imagination that your head is still rocking from the blow?"

"What blow?" Jerry said, smiling. "I felt no blow."

"Do you mean to say," Cedric said incredulously, "that there is no corner of your mind, no slight residue of rationality, that tries to tell you your rationalizations aren't reality?"

Jerry smiled ruefully. "I have to admit," he said, "when you seem so absolutely certain you're right and I'm nuts, it almost makes me doubt. Untie me, Gar, and let's try to work this thing out sensibly." He grinned. "You know, Gar, one of us has to be nuttier than a fruitcake."

"If I had the officers take off your straitjacket, what would you do?" Cedric asked. "Try to grab a gun and kill some more people?"

"That's one of the things I'm worried about," Jerry said. "If those pirates came back, with me tied up, you're just space crazy enough to welcome them aboard. That's why you must untie me. Our lives may depend on it, Gar."

"Were would you get a gun?" Cedric asked.

"Where they're always kept," Jerry said. "In the gear lockers."

Cedric looked at the four policemen, at their holstered revolvers. One of them grinned feebly at him.

"I'm afraid we can't take your straitjacket off just yet," Cedric said. "I'm going to have the officers take you back now. I'll talk with you again tomorrow. Meanwhile I want you to think seriously about things. Try to get below this level of rationalization that walls you off from reality. Once you make a dent in it, the whole delusion will vanish." He looked up at the officers. "All right, take him away. Bring him back the same time tomorrow."

The officers urged Jerry to his feet. Jerry looked down at Cedric, a gentle expression on his face. "I'll try to do that, Gar," he said. "And I hope you do the same thing. I'm much encouraged. Several times I detected genuine doubt in your eyes. And—" Two of the officers pushed him firmly toward the door. As they opened it, Jerry turned his head and looked back. "Take one of those yellow pills in the medicine locker, Gar," he pleaded. "It can't hurt you."

· · · · ·

At a little before five-thirty, Cedric tactfully eased his last patient all the way across the reception room and out, then locked the door and leaned his back against it.

"Today was rough," he sighed.

Helena glanced up at him briefly, then continued typing. "I only have a little more on this last transcript," she said.

A minute later she pulled the paper from the typewriter and placed it on the neat stack beside her.

"I'll sort and file them in the morning," she said. "It was rough, wasn't it, Doctor? That Gerald Bocek is the most unusual patient you've had since I've worked for you. And poor Mr. Potts. A brilliant executive, making half a million a year, and he's going to have to give it up. He seems so normal."

"He is normal," Cedric said. "People with above normal blood pressure often have very minor cerebral hemorrhages, so small that the affected area is no larger than the head of a pin. All that happens is that they completely forget things that they knew. They can relearn them, but a man whose judgment must always be perfect can't afford to take the chance. He's already made one error in judgment that cost his company a million and a half. That's why I consented to take him on as a—Gerald Bocek really upset me, Helena. I consent to take a five hundred thousand dollar a year executive as a patient."

"He was frightening, wasn't he?" Helena said. "I don't mean so much because he's a mass murderer as—"

"I know. I know," Cedric said. "Let's prove him wrong. Have dinner with me."

"We agreed—"

"Let's break the agreement this once."

Helena shook her head firmly. "Especially not now," she said. "Besides, it wouldn't prove anything. He's got you boxed in on that point. If I went to dinner with you, it would only show that a wish fulfillment entered your dream world."

"Ouch," Cedric said, wincing. "That's a dirty word. I wonder how he knew about the yellow pills? I can't get out of my mind the fact that if we had spaceships and if there were a type of space madness in which you began to personify objects, a yellow pill would be the right thing to stop that."

"How?" Helena said.

"They almost triple the strength of nerve currents from end organs. What results is that reality practically shouts down any fantasy insertions. It's quite startling. I took one three years ago when they first became available. You'd be surprised how little you actually see of what you look at, especially of people. You look at symbol inserts instead. I had to cancel my appointments for a week. I found I couldn't work without my professionally built symbol inserts about people that enable me to see them—not as they really are—but as a complex of normal and abnormal symptoms."

"I'd like to take one sometime," Helena said.

"That's a twist," Cedric said, laughing. "One of the characters in a dream world takes a yellow pill and discovers it doesn't exist at all except as a fantasy."

"Why don't we both take one?" Helena said.

"Uh-uh," Cedric said firmly. "I couldn't do my work."

"You're afraid you might wake up on a spaceship?" Helena said, grinning.

"Maybe I am," Cedric said. "Crazy, isn't it? But there is one thing today that stands out as a serious flaw in my reality. It's so glaring that I actually am afraid to ask you about it."

"Are you serious?" Helena said.

"I am." Cedric nodded. "How does it happen that the police brought Gerald Bocek here to my office instead of holding him in the psychiatric ward at City Hospital and having me go there to see him? How does it happen the D.A. didn't get in touch with me beforehand and discuss the case with me?"

"I … I don't know!" Helena said. "I received no call. They just showed up, and I assumed they wouldn't have without your knowing about it and telling them to. Mrs. Fortesque was your first patient, and I called her at once and caught her just as she was leaving the house and told her an emergency case had come up." She looked at Cedric with round, startled eyes.

"Now we know how the patient must feel," Cedric said, crossing the reception room to his office door. "Terrifying, isn't it, to think that if I took a yellow pill, all this might vanish—my years of college, my internship, my fame as the world's best-known psychiatrist, and you. Tell me, Helena, are you sure you aren't an expediter at Mars Port?"

He leered at her mockingly as he slowly closed the door, cutting off his view of her.

· · · · ·

Cedric put his coat away and went directly to the small square of one-way glass in the reception-room door. Gerald Bocek, still in straitjacket, was there, and so were the same four police officers.

Cedric went to his desk and, without sitting down, deflected the control on the intercom.

"Helena," he said, "before you send in Gerald Bocek get me the D.A. on the phone."

He glanced over the four patient cards while waiting. Once he rubbed his eyes gently. He had had a restless night.

When the phone rang, he reached for it. "Hello? Dave?" he said. "About this patient, Gerald Bocek—"

"I was going to call you today," the District Attorney's voice sounded. "I called you yesterday morning at ten, but no one answered, and I haven't had time since. Our police psychiatrist, Walters, says you might be able to snap Bocek out of it in a couple of days—at least long enough so that we can get some sensible answers out of him. Down underneath his delusion of killing lizard pirates from Venus, there has to be some reason for that mass killing, and the press is after us on this."

"But why bring him to my office?" Cedric said. "It's okay, of course, but … that is … I didn't think you could! Take a patient out of the ward at City Hospital and transport him around town."

"I thought that would be less of an imposition on you," the D.A. said. "I'm in a hurry on it."

"Oh," Cedric said. "Well, okay, Dave. He's out in the waiting room. I'll do my best to snap him back to reality for you."

He hung up slowly, frowning. "Less of an imposition!" His whispered words floated into his ears as he snapped into the intercom, "Send Gerald Bocek in, please."

· · · · ·

The door from the reception room opened, and once again the procession of patient and police officers entered.

"Well, well, good morning, Gar," Jerry said. "Did you sleep well? I could hear you talking to yourself most of the night."

"I am Dr. Cedric Elton," Cedric said firmly.

"Oh, yes," Jerry said. "I promised to try to see things your way, didn't I? I'll try to cooperate with you, Dr. Elton." Jerry turned to the four officers. "Let's see now, these gear lockers are policemen, aren't they? How do you do, officers." He bowed to them, then looked around him. "And," he said, "this is your office, Dr. Elton. A very impressive office. That thing you're sitting behind is not the chart table but your desk, I gather." He studied the desk intently. "All metal, with a gray finish, isn't it."

"All wood," Cedric said. "Walnut."

"Yes, of course," Jerry murmured. "How stupid of me. I really want to get into your reality, Gar … I mean, Dr. Elton. Or get you into mine. I'm the one who's at a disadvantage, though. Tied up, I can't get into the medicine locker and take a yellow pill like you can. Did you take one yet?"

"Not yet," Cedric said.

"Uh, why don't you describe your office to me, Dr. Elton?" Jerry said. "Let's make a game of it. Describe parts of things and then let me see if I can fill in the rest. Start with your desk. It's genuine walnut? An executive-style desk. Go on from there."

"All right," Cedric said. "Over here to my right is the intercom, made of gray plastic. And directly in front of me is the telephone."

"Stop," Jerry said. "Let me see if I can tell you your telephone number." He leaned over the desk and looked at the telephone, trying to keep his balance in spite of his arms being encased in the straitjacket. "Hm-m-m," he said, frowning. "Is the number Mulberry five dash nine oh three seven?"

"No," Cedric said. "It's Cedar sev—"

"Stop!" Jerry said. "Let me say it. It's Cedar seven dash four three nine nine."

"So you did read it and were just having your fun," Cedric snorted.

"If you say so," Jerry said.

"What other explanation can you have for the fact that it is my number, if you're unable to actually see reality?" Cedric said.

"You're absolutely right, Dr. Elton," Jerry said. "I think I understand the tricks my mind is playing on me now. I read the number on your phone, but it didn't enter my conscious awareness. Instead, it cloaked itself with the pattern of my delusion, so that consciously I pretended to look at a phone that I couldn't see, and I thought, 'His phone number will obviously be one he's familiar with.' The most probable is the home phone of Helena Fitzroy in Mars Port, so I gave you that, but it wasn't it. When you said Cedar, I knew right away it was your own apartment phone number."

Cedric sat perfectly still. Mulberry 5-9037 was actually Helena's apartment phone number. He hadn't recognized it until Gerald Bocek told him.

"Now you're beginning to understand," Cedric said after a moment. "Once you realize that your mind has walled off your consciousness from reality and is substituting a rationalized pattern of symbology in its place, it shouldn't be long until you break through. Once you manage to see one thing as it really is, the rest of the delusion will disappear."

"I understand now," Jerry said gravely. "Let's have some more of it. Maybe I'll catch on."

They spent an hour at it. Toward the end, Jerry was able to finish the descriptions of things with very little error.

"You are definitely beginning to get through," Cedric said with enthusiasm.

Jerry hesitated. "I suppose so," he said. "I must. But on the conscious level I have the idea—a rationalization, of course—that I am beginning to catch on to the pattern of your imagination so that when you give me one or two key elements I can fill in the rest. But I'm going to try, really try—Dr. Elton."

"Fine," Cedric said heartily. "I'll see you tomorrow, same time. We should make the breakthrough then."

When the four officers had taken Gerald Bocek away, Cedric went into the outer office.

"Cancel the rest of my appointments," he said.

"But why?" Helena protested.

"Because I'm upset!" Cedric said. "How did a madman whom I never knew until yesterday know your phone number?"

"He could have looked it up in the phone book."

"Locked in a room in the psychiatric ward at City Hospital?" Cedric said. "How did he know your name yesterday?"

"Why," Helena said, "all he had to do was read it on my desk here."

Cedric looked down at the brass nameplate.

"Yes," he grunted. "Of course. I'd forgotten about that. I'm so accustomed to it being there that I never see it."

He turned abruptly and went back into his office.

· · · · ·

He sat down at his desk, then got up and went into the sterile whiteness of his compact laboratory. Ignoring the impressive battery of electronic instruments, he went to the medicine cabinet. Inside, on the top shelf, was the glass stopped bottle he wanted. Inside it were a hundred vivid yellow pills. He shook out one and put the bottle away, then went back into his office. He sat down, placing the yellow pill in the center of the white notepad.

There was a brief knock on the door to the reception room and the door opened. Helena came in.

"I've canceled all your other appointments for today," she said. "Why don't you go out to the golf course? A change will do you—" She saw the yellow pill in the center of the white note pad and stopped.

"Why do you look so frightened?" Cedric said. "Is it because, if I take this little yellow pill, you'll cease to exist?"

"Don't joke," Helena said.

"I'm not joking," Cedric said. "Out there, when you mentioned about your brass nameplate on your desk, when I looked down it was blurred for just a second, then became sharply distinct and solid. And into my head popped the memory that the first thing I do when I have to get a new receptionist is get a brass nameplate for her, and when she quits I make her a present of it."

"But that's the truth," Helena said. "You told me all about it when I started working for you. You also told me that while you still had your reason about you I was to solemnly promise that I would never accept an invitation from you for dinner or anything else, because business could not mix with pleasure. Do you remember that?"

"I remember," Cedric said. "A nice pat rationalization in any man's reality to make the rejection be my own before you could have time to reject me yourself. Preserving the ego is the first principle of madness."

"But it isn't!" Helena said. "Oh, darling, I'm here! This is real! I don't care if you fire me or not. I've loved you forever, and you mustn't let that mass murderer get you down. I actually think he isn't insane at all, but has just figured out a way to seem insane so he won't have to pay for his crime."

"You think so?" Cedric said, interested. "It's a possibility. But he would have to be as good a psychiatrist as I am—You see? Delusions of grandeur."

"Sure," Helena said, laughing thinly. "Napoleon was obviously insane because he thought he was Napoleon."

"Perhaps," Cedric said. "But you must admit that if you are real, my taking this yellow pill isn't going to change that, but only confirm the fact."

"And make it impossible for you to do your work for a week," Helena said.

"A small price to pay for sanity," Cedric said. "No, I'm going to take it."

"You aren't!" Helena said, reaching for it.

Cedric picked it up an instant before she could get it. As she tried to get it away from him, he evaded her and put it in his mouth. A loud gulp showed he had swallowed it.

He sat back and looked up at Helena curiously.

"Tell me, Helena," he said gently. "Did you know all the time that you were only a creature of my imagination? The reason I want to know is—"

He closed his eyes and clutched his head in his hands.

"God!" he groaned. "I feel like I'm dying! I didn't feel like this the other time I took one." Suddenly his mind steadied, and his thoughts cleared. He opened his eyes.

On the chart table in front of him, the bottle of yellow pills lay on its side, pills scattered all over the table. On the other side of the control room lay Jerry Bocek, his back propped against one of the four gear lockers, sound asleep, with so many ropes wrapped around him that it would probably be impossible for him to stand up.

Against the far wall were three other gear lockers, two of them with their paint badly scorched, the third with its door half melted off.

And in various positions about the control room were the half-charred bodies of five blue-scaled Venusian lizards.

A dull ache rose in Gar's chest. Helena Fitzroy was gone. Gone, when she had just confessed she loved him.

Unbidden, a memory came into Gar's mind. Dr. Cedric Elton was the psychiatrist who had examined him when he got his pilot's license for third-class freighters—

· · · · ·

"God!" Gar groaned again. And suddenly he was sick. He made a dash for the washroom, and after a while he felt better.

When he straightened up from the washbasin, he looked at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, clinging to his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He must have been out of his head for two or three days.

The first time. Awful! Somehow, he had never quite believed in space madness.

Suddenly he remembered Jerry. Poor Jerry!

Gar lurched from the washroom back into the control room. Jerry was awake. He looked up at Gar, forcing a smile to his lips. "Hello, Dr. Elton," Jerry said.

Gar stopped as though shot.

"It's happened, Dr. Elton, just as you said it would," Jerry said, his smile widening.

"Forget that," Gar growled. "I took a yellow pill. I'm back to normal again."

Jerry's smile vanished abruptly. "I know what I did now," he said. "It's terrible. I killed six people. But I'm sane now. I'm willing to take what's coming to me."

"Forget that!" Gar snarled. "You don't have to humor me now. Just a minute and I'll untie you."

"Thanks, Doctor," Jerry said. "It will sure be a relief to get out of this straitjacket."

Gar knelt beside Jerry and untied the knots in the ropes and unwound them from around Jerry's chest and legs.

"You'll be all right in a minute," Gar said, massaging Jerry's limp arms. The physical and nervous strain of sitting there immobilized had been rugged.

Slowly he worked circulation back into Jerry, then helped him to his feet.

"You don't need to worry, Dr. Elton," Jerry said. "I don't know why I killed those people, but I know I would never do such a thing again. I must have been insane."

"Can you stand now?" Gar said, letting go of Jerry.

Jerry took a few steps back and forth, unsteadily at first, then with better coordination. His resemblance to a robot decreased with exercise.

Gar was beginning to feel sick again. He fought it.

"You okay now, Jerry boy?" he asked worriedly.

"I'm fine now, Dr. Elton," Jerry said. "And thanks for everything you've done for me."

Abruptly Jerry turned and went over to the air-lock door and opened it.

"Good-bye now, Dr. Elton," he said.

"Wait!" Gar screamed, leaping toward Jerry.

But Jerry had stepped into the air lock and closed the door. Gar tried to open it, but already Jerry had turned on the pump that would evacuate the air from the lock.

He watched as Jerry glanced toward the side of the air lock and smiled, then spun the wheel that opened the air lock to the vacuum of space and stepped out.

Screaming Jerry's name senselessly in horror, Gar watched through the small square of thick glass in the door as Jerry's chest quickly expanded, then collapsed as a mixture of phlegm and blood dribbled from his nostrils and lips, and his eyes enlarged and glazed over. Then one of them ripped open and collapsed, its fluid draining down his cheek.

And when Gar finally stopped screaming and sank to the deck, sobbing, his knuckles were broken and bloody from pounding on bare metal.

The End

© 1 l958, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc, l986, by the Estate of Roger Phillips Graham. Originally appeared in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, October l958 and reprinted by permission of Barry N. Malzberg, agent for the Estate.

Familiar Pattern

By A. Bertram Chandler writing as George Whitley

When Captain Lessing had written his Night Orders the previous night, he had asked to be called either when Hunter Island Light was sighted or, if the light was not seen, when the vessel was within the extreme range. He had, therefore, turned in with the expectation of being aroused at approximately 0530 hours. He did not anticipate being called before; the weather was fine and, according to the forecasts and the behavior of the aneroid barometer, would continue so. His three officers were trustworthy and almost as experienced on the trade as he was himself.

He was awakened by the irritating buzzing of the telephone at the head of his bunk. This, by itself, gave slight cause for alarm—usually, if all was clear, the officer of the watch would come down from the bridge to call the master in person. Before answering the phone, Lessing switched on his bunkside reading lamp and looked at the clock on his cabin bulkhead. The time was 0335. Something, thought the captain, is wrong. To have been within range of the light at this time we should have had to have done twelve knots—and this underpowered tub never did twelve even downhill with a following wind …

The instrument buzzed again.

Lessing lifted the handset from its rest, barked into the receiver, "Yes?"

"Second officer here, Captain. There's a big aircraft just come down in the sea, about five miles ahead of us—"

"I'll be right up," said Lessing as he swung his long legs out of his bunk, his feet searching for his slippers. He pulled his dressing gown on, lit the inevitable cigarette, and hurried up to the bridge.

He found the second officer out in the starboard wing, staring through his binoculars at a pulsing luminosity on the dark horizon. It could have been the loom of a shore light, a lighthouse, but the period was too irregular. It could have been the glare of the bright working lights of a fishing vessel, dipping at intervals as the craft lifted and fell in the swell. It was nothing to get excited about.

"Is that it, Mr. Garwood?" asked Lessing.

The second officer started. Then, "Yes, sir," he replied. "That's it. Big, it was, and all lit up. There seemed to be jets or rockets working—but I don't think it was an airplane. It looked … wrong, somehow—"

"There are so many experimental aircraft these days," said the captain, "to say nothing of the artificial satellites that everybody seems to be throwing about—" Then, half to himself, "I wonder what the salvage on one of those things would be?"

"Plenty, I should imagine," said the second mate.

"I'd imagine the same," said Lessing. "You'd better notify the engine room, Mr. Garwood. The mate'll be up in a few minutes so he can see about clearing a boat away."

"So you're going to take it in tow, sir?" asked the second officer.

"Not so fast!" laughed Lessing. "We don't even know what the thing is yet. Come to that—I don't even know if it is any sort of aircraft. Those lights out there could be … anything."

"You can ask the lookout," said Garwood huffily, "or the man at the wheel."

"I prefer not to doubt the word of my officers," replied the captain stiffly. "But whether or not we tow the thing depends largely upon what it is." He stared ahead. Bright lights were becoming visible now instead of the diffused glare. "And that," he added, "we shall soon find out."

· · · · ·

He left the bridge and went down to his cabin, putting on a uniform over a heavy woollen jersey. He returned to the bridge. The ship had come alive during his brief absence. Shadowy forms were at work on the boat deck, electric torches were flashing, and there was the sound of low-voiced orders and replies, the thud and clatter as equipment not needed in the boat was passed out and stowed well clear of the winch.

The chief officer clattered up the ladder from the boat deck to the starboard cab of the bridge.

"I'll take it you'll be sending away the Fleming boat, sir?"

"Yes, Mr. Kennedy. It'll be the handiest, especially in this swell. There'll be no catching of crabs when there are no oars out." He pointed ahead to the bright lights that lay on the heaving surface of the sea. "What do you make of it?"

Kennedy lifted the ship's binoculars from their box, put them to his eyes. "I don't know," he said slowly. "It's an odd-looking brute, whatever it is. All those vanes and wings or whatever they are. It's like no aircraft that I've ever seen."

"It could be American," said the second mate.

"Or Russian," said Kennedy. "I suppose it is manned—"

"Sparks has been trying to raise it on all the frequencies he can muster," said the second mate, "but there's no reply."

"Perhaps," ventured the third officer diffidently, "it's a flying saucer—"

"All the way from Alpha Centauri or Rigil Kentaurus," laughed the mate, pointing to where Cross and Centaur hung in the dark sky directly over the mystery of gleaming lights and shining metal. "Perhaps we can ask 'em which of the two names for their home sun they prefer. I'm an Alpha Centauri man myself—"

"But it could be," insisted the third mate.

Lessing listened, faintly amused. He neither believed nor disbelieved in flying saucers but thought that they were things that he would prefer not to see—they carried with them a greater aura of disreputability than did sea serpents. But this thing ahead, this affair of lights and metallic surfaces that they were rapidly closing in on, wasn't a flying saucer. It couldn't be. Only cranks saw the things, and then in circumstances remarkable for a paucity of reliable witnesses.

He said, "There's no wind. I'll keep the thing on my starboard side. Who's going away in the boat? You, Mr. Kennedy? Good. Take a torch with you—you might save time by flashing back to us what you find." To Garwood he said, "Put her on standby."

"Standby, sir."

The jangling of the engine room telegraph was startlingly loud.

"Stop her. Full astern."

Lessing looked down from the window of the starboard cab, saw the creamy turbulence created by the reversed screw creep slowly from aft until it was abreast of the bridge.

"Stop her. Switch on the floodlights."

· · · · ·

Kennedy ran down to the boat deck. The starboard boat was already turned out. Six men were sitting at the handles of the Fleming gear, a seventh sitting in the bows. The mate caught hold of a lifeline, swung himself from the boat deck into the stern sheets.

"Lower away!" he shouted.

"Lower away, sir," replied the man at the winch. It was, the captain noted, big Tom Green, the bos'n. Tom Green, who was a pure-blooded Polynesian and proud of it. Good officers are not rare—good bos'ns are rare and precious. Tom Green was a good bos'n.

He lifted the brake. The wire falls whispered from the drum of the winch, through and around the lead blocks. They hummed softly through the purchase blocks, and the boat dropped swiftly from sight. Lessing went again to the starboard cab window, saw the boat hit the water, saw the blocks unhooked and pulled up and clear by the light lines bent to them.

"Give way!" came Kennedy's order. The men at the handles swayed back and forth in the untidy rhythm unavoidable with a Fleming boat; the hand-driven propeller began to spin. The boat pulled slowly away from the ship. Lessing called the bos'n up to the bridge.

"Tom," he said, "I suppose the chief officer's told you what all this is about."

"Yes, Captain. We are ready for all eventualities. The reel of the after towing wire works freely, and we have a good supply of shackles and wire snotters."

Lessing looked at the big dark face that hung over his own and wondered, as he had often wondered, what this man was doing as bos'n of an Australian coaster. Fo'c's'le—and saloon—rumor had it that he had been educated at Oxford, that he was the son of a chief. Certain it was that he spoke impeccable—although pedantic—English and possessed in no mean degree the power of command.

"Tom," said Lessing, "what do you make of it?"

A white grin split the dark face. "It is like no aircraft that I have ever seen, sir, either in actuality or in photographs. It's too big for a satellite—as you know, they are only little balls or cylinders, at the largest big enough to house only a small dog—"

"Well?"

"It happened to us," said the bos'n. "It happened to us. Your ancestral navigators found our islands by chance, putting in to replenish their supplies. Sooner or later it had to happen to you."

"What do you mean, Tom?" asked Lessing.

"What I said, Captain. That it's happening to you."

"Rubbish," said Lessing, after a long pause. "That thing's just some experimental aircraft that's come to grief."

"Is it?" asked the bos'n.

"The chief officer's flashing us!" shouted the second. He came out to the wing of the bridge, carrying the Aldis lamp.

Lessing looked to the enigmatic bulk of the thing in the water and saw a little light, feeble in comparison with the glaring illumination that was streaming from the aircraft—if it was an aircraft—making a succession of short and long flashes. The beam of the Aldis stabbed out into the darkness.

"'Returning with passenger,'" read Lessing. He said, "So the thing is manned—"

"Of course," said the bos'n. "Your ships were manned, weren't they?"

"You'd better get down to the boat deck, Tom," said Lessing.

He picked up his glasses, watched the tiny shape of the lifeboat detach itself from the floating enigma. He watched it as it crept across the water. As it pulled alongside, he could see that there was another figure sitting in the stern with Kennedy. In the glare of the boat floodlights he saw that it was wearing a uniform of some kind—an overall suit of silvery gray with what could have been marks of rank gleaming on the shoulders. He saw Kennedy's bowman catch the painter and make it fast. He saw the gray-clad man coming up the pilot ladder with what was almost, but not quite, the ease of long practice. He saw the chief officer following him.

After a short lapse of time, they were on the bridge.

"Captain," said Kennedy, "this is Malvar Korring vis Korring, chief officer of the Starlady. Mr. Korring, this is Captain Lessing, master of the Woollabra."

Automatically, Lessing put out his hand. The stranger grasped it, said in a voice that was metallic and expressionless, "I hope, sir, that this first meeting of our two races proves auspicious."

"Kennedy," demanded Lessing, "what sort of hoax is this?"

"Sir," replied the chief officer, "this is no hoax. I'm quite convinced that these men are from Space."

"Come down to my room," said Lessing. "Both of you."

· · · · ·

In his cabin, with the bright deck-head lights switched on, Lessing studied the man from the … the spaceship. The stranger sat on the settee, almost insolently at ease. His body, beneath his tightly fitting uniform, seemed human enough, as did his lean, deeply tanned face. The eyes, however, were a disconcerting golden color, and there was a faint tinge of green to his fair hair, which was worn far too long for the exacting standards of any earthly service. His voice came not from his mouth but from a small square box that was strapped around his waist.

"We developed a leak in our water tanks," the stranger was saying. "It was necessary for us to replenish our supplies. This planet was the handiest to our trajectory. We had no idea that it was inhabited."

"You know that this is salt water," said Lessing, rather stupidly.

"We know. The minerals dissolved in the water will be very useful to us."

"I can't believe this," said Lessing, getting up out of his armchair. "It must be a hoax."

"I was inside their ship, sir," said Kennedy. "I didn't see much—but I saw enough to convince me that she was never built on Earth. She's a cargo vessel, like ourselves, and she's on a voyage from some planet around the Southern Cross—it may be one of the planets revolving around Acrux—to somewhere in the Great Bear."

"That's what they told you," said Lessing.

"That's what I told him, Captain," said the spaceman. "And it's true."

"I should report this," said Lessing. "It's my duty to report this. But they'll think I'm mad if I do."

"We'll back you up," said the chief officer.

"Then they'll think that you're mad too."

"Perhaps," suggested Korring, "I could leave proof with you."

From one pocket of his clothing he produced a slim tube, metallic, the size of a pencil. "This," he said, "is a torch—similar to the one that Mr. Kennedy is carrying but rather more efficient. Leave it in bright sunlight for one … hour, I think is the word. Or leave it in artificial light such as this for double the period, and it will burn continuously, if so desired, for all of the night." He handed the torch to Lessing, produced from another pocket a packet of little brown cylinders. "You put this end in your mouth," he said, "and inhale sharply. The other end starts to smolder. You suck in the smoke. It is most refreshing—"

"We smoke too," said Lessing. "Which reminds me—I'm not being a very good host." He produced whisky, and glasses, and opened the cigarette box on his desk. "You do drink, I suppose? This is one of our alcoholic liquors. You might like to try it."

"Thank you," said the spaceman.

Lessing splashed whisky into each of the three glasses. He passed the cigarettes around, struck a match to light them.

"The most interesting thing you have," he said, "is that box you talk through. What is it?"

"A psionic translator. It picks up my thoughts and converts them into your speech. It picks up your thoughts, as you speak, and converts them into my language. A simple device …" He drew on his cigarette, sipped his drink. "You know, you people are quite far advanced. This liquor of yours. These smoking tubes. And those little wooden sticks that burst into flame when you rub them against the box … I know that I am being very primitive, but I wonder if we could barter? This electric torch of mine and a packet of my smoking tubes for, say, a bottle of this subtly flavored alcohol and a packet of your smoking tubes?"

"It'd be a fair trade," said Lessing. And it'll be proof, he thought. Proof I must have. I can't swear the whole ship to silence. "It'll be a fair trade—"

The box at Korring's belt squawked then uttered a few syllables in an unknown language.

"They want me back," said the spaceman. "We must be on our way."

A few minutes later, when he was ferried back to the spaceship, he was carrying a carton of cigarettes, a packet of matches, and a bottle of whisky. A few minutes later still Lessing stood on his bridge and watched the alien vessel take off. There was no flare of rockets, no noise, no bother. There was a flickering luminosity under the vast hull as she lifted up and clear of the water, that was all. She rose slowly at first, then with increasing speed. For a short time she was a waning star among the stars, and then she was gone.

Lessing said to the mate, "We have to make a report on this—but what shall we say?"

"The truth," replied Kennedy. "But we shall never live it down."

· · · · ·

It was, Lessing was to realize, very fortunate that he had made the trade with the alien spaceman. Had it not been for that highly efficient—and absolutely mysterious—torch, he and his crew would have been branded as picturesque liars. They were so regarded at first. Pressmen are justifiably skeptical of flying-saucer stories. Eventually—after it was obvious that Woollabra's entire crew had either suffered a mass hallucination or actually seen something out of the ordinary—the Navy condescended to take an interest in the case. Lessing had returned on board from a rather stormy interview with the company's branch manager and local marine superintendent when he found a young, keen lieutenant commander waiting for him.

"About this flying saucer, Captain," said the two and a half ringer.

"It was not a flying saucer," said Lessing. "It was more like a flying pineapple or flying porcupine. There were all sorts of vanes sticking out at odd angles."

"And you say you really saw the thing? I've been talking to your chief officer, and he tried to convince me that he was actually aboard it."

"He was," said Lessing. "And furthermore, one of the officers from the thing was aboard here." He unlocked the door of the cabin, motioned the naval officer to a seat. "Furthermore, he was sitting where you were sitting."

"Was he human?"

"He looked human."

"What language did he talk?"

"I don't know. He was wearing a little box on his belt that he said was a psionic translator, whatever that might be."

"And so you talked, you say. I suppose he told you that the people of Mars or Venus or Jupiter were watching us, and that if we didn't stop making atomic bombs it'd be just too bad, and all the rest of it."

Lessing flushed. "I've read those silly books too," he said, "and I believe them as little as you do. This spaceship of ours was an interstellar cargo vessel, and she made an emergency landing in the Bass Strait to take on water, her tanks having sprung a leak. We were, it seems, the nearest handy planet. The crew of the spaceship were as surprised to see us as we were to see them—they thought that this world was uninhabited. Anyhow, they took their water and they pushed off to continue their voyage." Lessing opened a drawer of his desk and pulled the key to his safe from under an untidy layer of papers. He got up from his chair, went to his safe, and opened it. He took out the packet of alien cigars, the torch. "I've been waiting," he said, "for the chance to show this evidence to somebody official for a long time. These are cigars—of a sort. They're self-igniting—"

"There was a self-igniting cigarette on the market a few years ago," said the lieutenant commander. "It never caught on."

"All right," said Lessing. "Then what's this script on the packet? Is it Greek, or Arabic, or what? Take one of the cigars and smell it. Does it smell like any tobacco you've ever come across?"

"No," admitted the naval officer.

"Then there's this torch. I don't know how it works. You have to leave it out in bright sunlight for an hour, and it will burn all night. No, there's no way of opening it. I've tried."

"Do you mind if I take these with me?"

"I'd like a receipt."

"You shall have one. Oh, one more thing. Would you mind not saying another word about this to the press?"

"Would you mind," replied Lessing, "telling the press to lay off my crew and myself?"

· · · · ·

It is axiomatic that the tide runs sluggishly in official channels. The press had long forgotten Captain Lessing's flying saucer when he received a letter from the company's head office. This informed him that he was to be relieved of his command and that after handing over his ship he was to proceed to Canberra, there to be interviewed by sundry highly placed gentlemen. Like most Australians, Lessing had a distrust of politicians, maintaining that they came in only two varieties, bad and worse. He did not look forward to his trip to the nation's capital city.

The day of his journey was not an ideal day for flying. During the bumpy passage, a cup of hot coffee was upset over Lessing's lap, and, as he was wearing a light gray suit, his appearance suffered as well as his feelings. He was very bad-tempered when the plane touched down at the airport, and found it hard to be courteous to the obvious civil servants who were there to greet him. They were diplomatic enough to suggest a drink or two before he was taken to see the high officials who had required his presence, and after a couple of stiff whiskies he felt a little better.

He did not feel better for long. He said afterward, "They made me feel as though I were a Russian spy. And I was expecting rubber truncheons and glaring lights and all the rest of it at any minute. The trouble was, they just didn't want to believe me. There was the evidence of the torch, and the evidence of the cigars, but they just didn't want to believe me. But they couldn't explain the things that I got from the spaceship any other way."

Lessing was interviewed. Lessing was interrogated. After the politicians had finished with him, it was the turn of the scientists, and then the lawyers took over to see if they could trap him in any inconsistency. The following day he was joined by his chief and second officers and the bos'n. Their stories tallied with his; there was no reason why they should not have.

The day after that the spaceship landed in the Bass Strait, just twenty miles north of Albatross Island.

Lessing, of course, was one of the last people to hear about it. It was the young lieutenant commander to whom he had given the torch and the cigars who told him the news. He burst into the comfortable hotel room in which the captain was almost a prisoner and said, "They'll have to believe you now. Another of those things has come down, just about where you saw the first one."

But it wasn't another of those things. It was the same one, and she was, apparently, on her return voyage. She lay there in the water until she was sighted by Woollabra, northbound to Melbourne. Woollabra was the only ship on the trade, and she maintained a fairly regular service, so the coincidence was in time rather than in space and was a temporal coincidence only inasmuch as the spacecraft did not have to wait longer than three hours.

Again Woollabra sent a boat, and again the chief officer of Starlady, Malvar Korring vis Korring, was ferried from his own ship to the surface vessel. Apparently he expressed surprise at not being greeted by Captain Lessing and Mr. Kennedy and said that he especially wished to see Captain Lessing to organize some sort of trade agreement.

"They're rushing you down to your old ship," said the lieutenant commander. "There's a special plane laid on from here to Melbourne, and, as luck would have it, there's a destroyer at Williamstown ready for sea. There's all the high brass going with you. I wish they could find room for me—"

So there was another flight, no better than the first one had been, and then an even more uncomfortable sea journey as the destroyer pitched, rolled, and shipped green water in the heavy southwesterly swell. It was late afternoon when she made her rendezvous with Woollabra and Starlady. Woollabra, designed for the rapid and efficient handling of cargo, was her usual unlovely self. Lessing gave her no more than a cursory glance, then stared through a pair of borrowed binoculars at the other ship, the spaceship. It had been at night that he had seen her before, and he retained no more than a confused impression of glaring lights, of gleaming surfaces that reflected the illumination at all kinds of odd angles. Seeing her now, in the light of day, he was pleased to note that his description of her as a "flying pineapple" had not been too unjust. That was what she looked like—a huge pineapple of some black, gleaming metal.

Lessing was aware that orders were being given and reports acknowledged by the destroyer's captain, that the warship's armament was manned and ready. His attention, however, was occupied by the winking daylight lamp from Woollabra's bridge.

"Alien officer on board," he read. "He wishes to speak with Captain Lessing."

"Commander," said Lessing, "that spaceman, Korring was his name, is aboard my old ship. He is waiting for me. Will you send me across in one of your boats?"

The destroyer captain sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.

"I wish they'd given me more specific orders, Lessing," he said at last. "All I have is a sort of roving commission—to find out what cooks and to shoot to defend my own ship if necessary, but on no account to start an interplanetary war. It seems that these people are quite determined to see you—"

One of the civilians on the destroyer's bridge interrupted. "I think that I should go with Captain Lessing."

"All right, Doctor. It seems to me that this situation calls for an astronomer as much as anybody." He turned to his first lieutenant, gave orders for the clearing away of the motor launch.

· · · · ·

In a matter of minutes Lessing was sitting in the boat. With him, in the stern sheets, was Dr. Cappell, the astronomer, and the sublieutenant in charge. The boat was lowered to the water with a run, too fast for Lessing's taste; he was used to the more leisurely procedure of the merchant service. She hit the water just as a huge swell came up beneath her, and the sea fountained on either side of her. The patent slips were released smartly and the lower blocks of the falls whipped up and clear on their tripping lines. The motor was already running and pulled the boat out and clear from the destroyer in a matter of seconds. After the swift efficiency of their launching, the journey across the narrow stretch of water seemed painfully slow.

At last they came alongside the Woollabra and Lessing clambered up the pilot ladder to her low foredeck. He was followed by the scientist. The young sublieutenant, after giving a few curt instructions to a petty officer, followed. The third officer was there to receive them. Lessing acknowledged the courtesy absentmindedly, himself led the way up to the bridge.

Fat Kimberley, who had relieved Lessing, was there to meet him. He was exhibiting all the bad temper of the easygoing fat man jolted out of his comfortable routine.

"Really, Lessing," he said, "this is rather much. First you have to get me called back in the middle of my holidays, and then you have to wish this bloody flying saucer on to me. My wife's flown down from Sydney to be with me for the weekend in Melbourne—and I have to waste precious time loafing around in the Bass Strait standing guard over this … this—"

"I must apologize, Captain," said a metallic voice. It came, as before, from the little box that Malvar Korring vis Korring carried at his belt. "We thought that Captain Lessing would still be here." He advanced to Lessing with outstretched hand. "Greetings, Captain Lessing."

"Greetings," replied Lessing, feeling rather foolish. "And what can I do for you, Mr. Korring?"

"You remember," said the spaceman, "that the last time I saw you we bartered goods. You gave me some of your … cigarettes, and a bottle of the liquor you call whisky, and some boxes of … matches—"

"But this is incredible," the scientist was saying behind Lessing's back. "This is fantastic. The meeting of two races from different worlds, and all this man is worried about is cigarettes and whisky—"

"And wild, wild women?" wondered the sublieutenant audibly.

"We showed what remained of the cigarettes and the whisky to the … commissioner on Maurig, and he was rather impressed. He requested us to call here on our homeward voyage and to make arrangements for regular trade between this planet and the other planets of the galaxy—"

"This is marvelous!" Dr. Cappell was saying. "Marvelous! The secret of the interstellar drive is ours for the asking!"

"Who is this man, Captain?" asked the spaceman.

"One of our astronomers. His name is Dr. Cappell."

"Dr. Cappell," said Korring, "the secret of the interstellar drive will never be yours until you work it out for yourself. We hope to set up a trading station, and you can rest assured that only goods with which you can do no damage will be sold to you."

Lessing remembered what Tom, the big Polynesian bos'n, had said. How was it? The familiar pattern—the chance contact, the trader, the missionary, the incident, and the gunboat … But, he thought, Tom is biased. The early European seamen were a rough lot, and the politicians in their home countries were as bad, although more sophisticated. We can expect nothing but good from a people able to travel between the stars.

"Then," persisted Cappell, "you might allow us, some of us, to make voyages in your ships, as passengers."

"We might," said Korring vis Korring, and the mechanical voice coming from the translator at his belt sounded elaborately uninterested. He turned to Lessing. "You, Captain, are the first native of this planet with whom we made real contact. In our society—I don't pretend to know how it is with you—the masters of merchantmen are persons of consequence. In any case, we want somebody who is, after all, our own sort of people to act as our … our agent? No, that isn't quite the word—or is it?"

"I think it's the nearest you'll get," said Lessing. "But it is only fair to warn you that I am a person of very little consequence on this planet. The masters of some merchantmen are people of consequence—but Woollabra isn't Queen Mary."

"But we know you," replied the spaceman. "Perhaps if you were to come aboard our ship we could draw up a contract."

"May we use your boat?" Lessing asked the sublieutenant.

"I'll have to ask," replied the naval officer. "Have you a signalman?" he demanded of Captain Kimberley.

"We have not," replied the fat man. "But if you're incapable of using the Aldis lamp, doubtless my third mate will be able to oblige. And he can ask your captain if I'm supposed to hang around here while you all play silly beggars. I want to be getting back to Melbourne."

The daylight lamps flickered on the bridges of man-o'-war and merchant vessel in staccato question and answer. After a few minutes Lessing was shaking hands with Kimberley, and in a minute more was clambering down the pilot ladder to the destroyer's boat. The boat was barely clear of the ship when Lessing heard the jangle of engine room telegraphs, saw the frothing wake appear at Woollabra's stern. Woollabra's whistle blurted out the three conventional farewell blasts. And then the alien starship was ahead of them, bulking big and black and ominous in the golden path of light thrown by the setting sun.

· · · · ·

Lessing wasn't quite sure what to expect when he boarded the spaceship, but he was rather disappointed. Entry was effected through an obvious air lock—but thereafter the overall effect was that of one of the larger and more luxurious liners on Earth's seas. Korring vis Korring led Lessing, Cappell, and the sublieutenant through alleyways that were floored with a brightly colored resilient covering whose sides and overheads were coated with a light, easy-to-keep-clean plastic. They passed through what seemed to be public rooms, fitted out as they were with conventional enough chairs and tables and even, in one or two cases, functional-looking bars. Crewmembers and passengers, both men and women, looked at them with polite interest. The women, decided Lessing, were indubitably mammalian and very attractive.

They came at last to a large cabin in which, seated behind a desk, was a middle-aged man wearing a uniform similar to that worn by their guide. Like Korring, he wore one of the translators at his belt. He got to his feet as they entered.

"I am Captain Tardish var Tardish," he said. "Which of you is Captain Lessing?"

"I am," said Lessing.

"Welcome aboard my ship. Please be seated."

The Earthmen lowered themselves into chairs that proved to be as comfortable as they looked. Korring vis Korring busied himself with a bottle and glasses, then, after everybody had a drink in his hand, opened a box of the self-igniting cigars.

Lessing sipped his drink. It was undeniably alcoholic but far too sweet for his taste. He took a pull at the cigar. The smoke was fragrant but lacking in strength.

"My chief officer," said Tardish, "has doubtless told you of the purpose of our return visit. It has been decided that your world produces many commodities that would be valuable elsewhere. We are prepared to open a trading station, and we want you to be in charge of it from your side. One of our own people, of course, will be in overall charge."

"And what do you want?" asked Lessing.

"Your liquor, your cigarettes, your little firesticks. No doubt you have other goods that will be of value on the galactic market."

"No doubt," agreed Lessing. "And what do you offer in exchange?"

The captain pressed a stud at the side of his desk. There was a short silence as the men—Earthmen and aliens—waited. Then two uniformed women came into the cabin. Each of them was carrying a box not unlike a terrestrial suitcase. They put the boxes down on the desk, opened them. Lessing, Cappell, and the sublieutenant got to their feet, stared at the objects that were being unpacked. There were more of the sun-powered electric torches—half a dozen of them. There were slim, convoluted bottles holding a shimmering fluid. There were bolts of dull-gleaming fabric.

Korring vis Korring joined the Earthmen.

"These," he said, "are our samples. You already have one of the torches, but, no doubt, others will be interested in these. I must warn you that the manufacturers of them are very jealous of their secret; each one is a sealed unit and any attempt to open one up will result only in its complete destruction. The bottles contain an alcoholic liquor of which we are rather fond; it is possible that it may appeal to the taste of some of your people, just as your whisky has appealed to ours. The cloth? It is dirt repellent, water repellent, wrinkle proof. Used as clothing, it keeps you cool in summer and warm in winter—"

Cappell interrupted. His thin, bony face was flushed and his carroty hair seemed suddenly to have stood erect. He said, "I'm a scientist, not a shopkeeper. I'd like to know just where you come from, and how your ship is powered, and whether or not you exceed the speed of light—"

"Enough!" The spaceship captain had got to his feet and was looking at the astronomer as though he were a mildly mutinous crewmember. "I am master of a merchant vessel, just as Captain Lessing is. My primary function in the scheme of things is trade, trade, TRADE. I have no intention of seeing this world of yours raise itself to our technological level, of seeing your ships competing with ours along the galactic trade routes. If you find out the secret of the stardrive yourselves—then good luck to you. But we're not helping you." He turned to Lessing. "There you are, then, Captain. You're appointed our agent as and from now. On our next call here we shall bring with us a full cargo of the goods of which we have given you samples. We want you to have assembled a large consignment of such goods as you think might interest us."

"This," said Lessing, "is all very vague. To begin with—when can we expect to see you again?"

"In one-tenth of a revolution of your planet about its primary."

"And where are you landing?"

"Here, of course. Our ships can land only on water. You have surface vessels; you can bring the cargo out to us."

· · · · ·

It was Lessing's turn to feel exasperated.

"To begin with," he said, "I haven't said that I'll take the job. Secondly—you're quite vague about weights and measures. How many tons of cargo do you want—and is it weight or measurement? Thirdly—it's obvious that you don't know that this is one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world. You've landed here twice, and each time you've been lucky. The next time it could well be blowing a gale."

"Don't you have weather control?" asked the captain.

"No. Now, I suppose that you people have made some attempt at photographic survey of this world on your way down?"

"Of course."

"Could I see the photographs?"

The captain opened his desk, handed a dozen or so glossy prints to Lessing. The seaman studied them.

"Here," he said at last, "is your ideal landing place." He put the tip of his finger on Port Phillip Bay. "It's well sheltered, and there are transport facilities, and there's the possibility of knocking up a few warehouses on the foreshore or of taking over warehouses that are already there. I suggest that you come in at night and that you make some sort of signal before you do so. On your next visit, of course, we'll have to tackle the problem of radio communication; meanwhile you could let off some sort of rocket that will explode with a bright green light high in the atmosphere an hour or so before you're due. This will give us a chance to outline your landing area with flares."

It was the haphazardness of it all that appalled Lessing, the way in which the onus had been placed upon Earth to make all the arrangements. Later, when he was back aboard the destroyer and on his way back to Melbourne, he realized that this was the way it must have been in the days of the early explorations. A ship, short of water or other supplies, would stand in for some hitherto undiscovered island, would make fortuitous contact with the inhabitants, would trade a few knives and axes and mirrors for whatever they had to offer, and then, having realized the possibility of commerce, would promise to return at some vague date in the future, bringing further trade goods in return for pearls or spices or anything else that would fetch a high price on the European market.

· · · · ·

The month and the few days were over, and all Earth was waiting for the return of the aliens. From observatories all over the planet reports had poured in that a huge unidentified object was in orbit about the world, something far larger than any of the tiny satellites yet launched. Melbourne had become the Mecca for pressmen and photographers, for radio commentators and television cameramen—and for military observers, trade delegations, and high diplomatic officials from all nations.

Waiting on the observation tower that had been erected on Station Pier was the Terran trade commissioner. Like many shipmasters, Lessing was not inclined to underestimate his own worth, and had driven a hard bargain. The aliens had insisted on dealing only with him—and he had unbiased witnesses to prove it—so it was only fair that he should be given pay and rank to match his unsought responsibilities. With him stood his two assistants—Kennedy and Garwood, who had been his chief and second officers in Woollabra. Lessing wished, as he stood there in the rising, chilly, southerly breeze, that big Tom Green, the bos'n, had been willing to come ashore as well. He was a good man, Tom—and it was just possible that his non-European mind might be able to spot some catch in the seemingly advantageous arrangements.

On the deck below Lessing were the diplomats and the scientists and the service chiefs. Lessing had insisted on this arrangement, not as a further bolstering of his self-esteem but as a hangover from his seafaring days. He was a firm believer in the principle of Unauthorized Personnel Not Allowed On The Bridge. He didn't like to have anybody around except his officers when he had to make decisions—not that there would be many to make in this case. He stared at the clear sky. Cross and Centaur were high in the south, and Jupiter, with Antares, was just rising. He tried to make out the spot of light that would be Starlady. Suddenly there was a brilliance in the heavens, a great sun of vivid green with a core of blazing blue drifting slowly downward.

"All right," he said to Kennedy. "Tell them to switch on the floods on the buoys—and tell them to switch off all the city lights apart from the essential ones."

The glare of lights in the bay came hard on the heels of his command. The brownout of the city took longer. Lessing remembered how long he had had to argue with civic officials about the necessity for this order. He looked shoreward from his high platform, saw the lights going out one by one—the neon signs advertising whisky and biscuits and breakfast foods and beer, two street lamps in every three. While he was watching, the green flare in the sky faded and died. It was suddenly very dark.

There was an eerie flickering along the foreshore. Lessing wondered what it was, then realized that it came from the flaring of matches and lighters as the crowds lighted their cigarettes. He had been against allowing the public so close to the starship's landing place, but in this matter he had been overruled. He was pleased, however, that the bay had been cleared of all pleasure craft and that the entrance had been closed to inward and outward traffic.

It was a long wait. It was some sharp-eyed watcher along the beach who first spotted the spaceship. A long, drawn-out aaahh went up from the crowd. Lessing, Kennedy, and Garwood stared aloft, saw at last the little, but visibly waxing, point of light that was Starlady.

She came in slowly, cautiously. It was all of an hour before the watchers could see the big bulk of her gleaming dimly above the flickering luminescence of her drive. She came in slowly, seemingly at first a little uncertain of her landing place. I should have ordered a complete blackout, thought Lessing. She circled, and then steadied over the rectangle of water marked by the special buoys with their floodlights. With increasing speed she dropped. The wave created by her coming lapped the piles of the pier, drove up in foaming turbulence onto the beach and the road beyond.

Lessing came down from his tower, walked without haste to the head of the steps by which the launch was moored. Kennedy and Garwood followed him. They boarded the launch. The skipper cast off, steered for the dark bulk of the alien ship, for the circle of light that was her air lock. He seemed unimpressed by the momentous occasion. He grunted, "I'd'a thought you'd'a had some o' them admirals and generals along, Cap'n. And a few boys with Owen guns."

"I know these people," said Lessing, "and they know me."

"You're the boss."

They were passing through the line of buoys now. Even the launch skipper fell silent as he looked up to the vast bulk of Starlady. All that he said was, "Can that thing fly?" Then, expertly, he maneuvered his craft alongside the circular, horizontal platform that was the outer valve of the open air lock.

· · · · ·

There were people standing in the air lock itself—men and women. One of them stepped forward—it was Korring vis Korring—and caught the launch's painter, snubbed it around a convenient projection. "Welcome aboard, Captain Lessing," he said. His voice was warmly human and came from his mouth, not from a box at his waist.

Lessing stared at the spaceman. He was wearing colorful garments—a sky blue blouse, scarlet trousers, knee-high boots that could have been made of dark blue suede. "Congratulate me," he said.

"Why?" asked Lessing stupidly.

"Because I've got a planet job. I'm no longer chief officer of this wagon … I'm now the local galactic trade commissioner. I'm to work with you."

"But your translator—"

"Oh, that. We brought along a team of experts this time, and we were picking up the programs of your various broadcast stations before we could pick you up in our telescopes. A few hours under the hypno-tutor, and I'm a linguist. So are those who are staying here with me. I'll introduce 'em all when I have time. There's a professor of linguistics, a sociologist, a dietician, a biologist, and the expert on women's fashions. Oh, and a priest. I'm sure that you have your own religion, but he thinks … he knows, rather … that ours is better. He's still inside getting his baggage packed. He was deep in prayer while the rest of us were packing ours."

Lessing stepped from the launch onto the platform. He shook hands with the professor of linguistics, a scholarly, birdlike, gray-haired man. He shook hands with the sociologist, who was short and fat and merry. He bowed stiffly to the dietician and the biologist, both of whom were women, and attractive women. He wasn't sure whether to shake hands with or bow to the fashion expert then decided that such things were probably the same all through the galaxy as on Earth, and shook hands. He was going to shake hands with the lean, scarlet-robed priest who had just come into the air lock, but Korring, with an unobtrusive gesture, restrained him. The priest raised his arms in benediction and intoned, "The blessing be upon you, my son." Lessing felt embarrassed and vaguely hostile.

They all went then into one of the big ship's public rooms. Soft-footed stewardesses served drinks. Lessing tried to hurry matters, told Korring vis Korring of the crowds of people who were waiting ashore for some word of what was happening. "Let them wait," said the spaceman. "Our cargo consists of only luxury goods."

"Life without luxury is drab, my son," said the priest.

Lessing looked at him with a fresh interest. His figure was lean, but his face was not the face of an ascetic. It was the face of a man who has enjoyed, and who is still enjoying, all the good things of life. Perhaps, he thought, their religion has its points—

"We shall require accommodation," said Korring. "We shall be staying here after the ship leaves. I take it that you will make the necessary arrangements."

"I will. But I should like to find out now what cargo you have brought and what goods you want in exchange. We have a warehouse full of cargo—whisky, gin, all sorts of wines, all sorts of cigarettes and tobacco. There are representatives of other nations waiting ashore, and all of them have brought samples of wares in which you may be interested. Then there's the problem of how you're going to get the cargo from out of your ship onto the lighters and from the lighters into your ship. I'd like to get our stevedore out here to talk it over with whoever has relieved you as chief officer."

"All in good time, Lessing," laughed Korring. "Try to remember that you're no longer a seaman, just as I'm no longer a spaceman. We're persons of importance on this planet now. The world waits upon our decisions—and while the world is waiting, we have another drink."

They had another drink. It was some strong, oversweet and overscented spirit. Lessing would have preferred beer. But he had another drink, and then another, and the next morning, when he awoke in a strange bunk in a strange cabin with a splitting headache, he had vague memories of trying to teach the spacemen some of the bawdier drinking songs in his repertoire and had more vague memories of their having reciprocated in kind.

A stewardess brought him in a cup of steaming fluid and a white capsule. Lessing assumed that the capsule would be good for his headache. It was. He was standing in front of the mirror when Korring came in and told him that the jar of white cream on the shelf was a depilatory. Lessing shaved—if the smearing on and off of cream can be called shaving—and dressed, and felt a lot better. He found Kennedy in the adjoining cabin and was told that Garwood had prevailed upon the launch skipper to take him ashore when the party started getting rough. Garwood was married and was a little afraid of his wife. There would be, said Kennedy, a launch on hail by the air lock until required.

· · · · ·

The sun was high in the sky when at last Lessing and the party from the ship boarded the waiting launch and made their way shoreward. The crowds still packed the road inshore from the beach, and the Station Pier was alive with people. Of the aliens, only Korring was unperturbed. He stood in the bows of the launch, letting the wind play with the black cloak that he was wearing over his finery. He looked, thought Lessing, like a character out of a comic strip.

The launch pulled up alongside the stage to a great coruscation of flashbulbs. Korring stepped down from the bows to allow Lessing to lead the way up the steps. The party from the ship, after a minute or so, stood facing the civil and military dignitaries. Lessing performed the introductions, explained what the arrangement was. Then, at Korring's insistence, a visit was paid immediately to the warehouse in which the goods were stocked. He smiled his approval. He said, "We can take perhaps half of this, and we will discharge an equivalent volume of cargo. The cargo from the ship will have to be discharged first, of course—"

"I've discharged and loaded ships before," said Lessing dryly. "In any case, you still haven't told me what arrangements you want for handling cargo. We'll send lighters and waterside workers out to your ship. What happens then?"

"We discharge our cargo into them," said Korring.

"Yes. But how?"

"You'll see. Come out with me in the first lighter."

Lessing did so. The dozen or so waterside workers who were in the craft were not awed by the civil and military dignitaries who rode with them and were even less awed by Korring. Lessing smiled as he heard him referred to as Superman and Mandrake the Magician. Korring ignored them, told Lessing to tell the tug to pull around to the other side of the ship. There was a larger air lock there, and obviously one used for cargo rather than for personnel.

The lighter was hardly fast when the first bale came floating out and settled with a thud into the open hold. As it was followed by a second and a third, the Earthmen gawked.

"Just a simple application of antigravity," smiled the spaceman.

"Could we have it?" asked the Air commodore who was one of those present. His voice was pleading. "Could we have it?"

"No," said Korring flatly. He said to Lessing, "We aren't stevedores. I suggest that you call a boat and have us taken ashore again. There is still the matter of the accommodation for myself and my people to put in hand. Also, I would like to see your city and your shops."

"You stay in charge, Kennedy," said Lessing. He waved to one of the official launches.

"I think I'll stay here too," said the Air commodore, still looking at the stream of bales with fascination.

"As you please," said Korring. "But I must warn you that there are armed guards throughout the ship who have orders to shoot any unauthorized visitor."

"A taste of his own medicine," laughed one of the wharfies.

The airman did not hear him. When Lessing looked back from the launch he saw him still standing there, still staring at the stream of merchandise flowing from the ship as though on an invisible conveyor belt.

· · · · ·

That, so far as Earth was concerned, was the beginning of interstellar trade. At intervals of roughly a week, the big ships dropped down, each landing in Port Phillip Bay, which had become the world's first spaceport. All sorts of exotic drinks and foodstuffs they brought, and all sorts of fascinating gadgets. There were cameras that took photographs in three dimensions—the result, if a portrait, looking like a little statuette mounted in a cube of clear plastic. There were all sorts of devices that made direct use of solar power—for cooking, for the warming of houses, for the motivation of light machinery. There were bales of the marvelous synthetic cloth that represented the idea toward which all of Earth's manufacturers of synthetic fabrics were striving.

They took away whisky and cigarettes, brandy and chocolate, wine and honey, books and paintings. They took away things of value and things that most Earthmen considered trash. They took away living animals of every species to stock the interstellar zoos throughout the galaxy.

Malvar Korring vis Korring and the biologist, the slim brunette Edile Kular var Kular, who was his wife, stayed. The other technicians and experts came and went. The aliens were not unpopular guests in the hotel that they had made their headquarters. The priest, Glandor, stayed also. (Lessing was never able to work out the system of nomenclature used by the aliens. It involved complex family relationships, and the priesthood was held to be related by bonds of love to all men and women.)

The priest stayed, and he was joined after a while by more scarlet-robed priests and priestesses; all of them young, all of them attractive. A church was built to his specifications on the outskirts of the city. Lessing was not particularly interested in religion and did not know, for a long time, what went on in the building. He did not know, in fact, until he accorded an interview to a delegation of representative churchmen in his office.

"Mr. Lessing," said their leader, "these people are pagans. They preach the gratification of every lust, every desire. They say, What shall it profit a man if he die before he has lived?"

"Fair enough," said Lessing.

"But, Mr. Lessing, you don't understand. We, in this state, have always prided ourselves upon our rectitude. In Victoria, if nowhere else in Australia, the Sabbath is still the Sabbath. These aliens are desecrating the Sabbath."

"How?" asked Lessing, interested.

"In that so-called temple of theirs they serve alcoholic liquor to all comers. There is music—profane, not sacred music—and dancing. There is at least tacit encouragement of immorality."

"Immorality?" asked Lessing. "What do you mean by the word? Usury was once one of the seven deadly sins—but your churches are now among the usurers themselves. Murder is an immoral act, and so is lying—"

"You know what I mean," said the churchman. "What we want to know is this—what are you doing about it?"

"Nothing," said Lessing. "I am merely the trade commissioner. These people have signed a treaty with the sovereign government of this country—this country, not this state—giving them, among other things, freedom to make converts to their religion. It may be an odd one—but there have been some odd ones on this planet. There still are, in all probability."

That, as far as Lessing was concerned, was that.

But when trouble came—and it was not long in coming—it came not from the churches but from those who were, officially, their enemies. The big breweries, who are also the hotel owners, hate competition. It was never proved that they were the paymasters of the mob that destroyed the aliens' temple, but the riot was too well organized to have been spontaneous. The high priest was killed; two of the priestesses were murdered. A dozen earthly converts lost their lives.

· · · · ·

It was Korring vis Korring who brought the news to Lessing, bursting into his hotel room and shaking him into wakefulness.

"Lessing," he said. "I like you. I'm telling you to get out and to take any friends of yours with you."

Lessing was still drowsy. "Why?" he asked vaguely.

"Because, my friend, we're pulling out. All of us. We're pulling out before the retaliation starts."

"Retaliation? What for?"

"What for, you ask! A mob of puritans or wowsers or whatever you call them has just destroyed the temple. There has been bloodshed, murder. Our fleet is already in orbit about your planet and will be opening fire in a matter of minutes."

"What?" Lessing was fully awake now. He sat up in the bed and caught Korring vis Korring's arm. "Korring," he said quietly, "tell me something. Were you people as ignorant of Earth as you made out at our first contact?"

"Let go of me!" snarled Korring.

"Not so fast. Tell me, did you pick a state notorious for its blue laws, its restrictive legislation, in which to make your headquarters, in which your missionaries could start preaching their gospel? Was it deliberate?"

"Let me go!" shouted the spaceman, breaking free. He was through the door in a second. Lessing, following, tripped in his bedclothes and fell heavily to the floor. When he got out into the corridor he found that the rooms in which the aliens had lived were all empty. He had to wait a long time for the elevator to come back up to his floor. Then, at the hotel entrance, the night porter informed him that the "space ladies and gentlemen" had just been picked up by some sort of aircraft.

All that Lessing could do was to use the telephone. But it is one thing knowing whom to call and another thing to convince them of the truth of what you are saying. From the politicians and service chiefs he got little joy. When at last, in desperation, he thought of calling the city's high-ranking police officers, it was too late. The telephone went dead just as the first rumble of dreadful thunder deafened him, just as the first glare of the aliens' lightning blinded his eyes.

He remembered little of what happened afterward. He was a seaman, and his instinct was to make for the water. Kennedy was with him, and Garwood, and Garwood's young wife. Somehow they passed unscathed through the fire and the falling wreckage; somehow they found a car and in it joined the press of refugees making for the bay. Something hit Lessing—he never found out what it was—and he lost consciousness. He recovered when the cold salt spray drove over his face, and realized that he was in an overcrowded, open launch just clear of the Heads.

There were the lights of a ship toward which they were steering.

Lessing was not surprised when he found that for him the business had ended where it started, felt a sense of the essential fittingness of things when he dragged himself painfully up the pilot ladder and found himself standing on the familiar deck of his old ship, the Woollabra.

Somebody was supporting him. He saw, in the reflected glare from the overside floodlights, that it was Tom, the big Polynesian bos'n.

"Captain," asked Tom, "is it true that Melbourne has been destroyed?"

"Yes. And other cities too, perhaps …"

"The familiar pattern," said the bos'n, as though to himself. "The chance contact— The trader— The missionary— The incident— And the gunboat—"

"And after the gunboat?" asked Lessing.

"We learned the answer to that question many years ago," said Tom. "Now it's your turn."

The End

* * * *

Beam Us Home

By James Tiptree, Jr.

Hobie's parents might have seen the first signs if they had been watching about eight-thirty on Friday nights. But Hobie was the youngest of five active bright-normal kids. Who was to notice one more uproar around the TV?

A couple of years later, Hobie's Friday-night battles shifted to ten PM, and then his sisters got their own set. Hobie was growing fast then. In public he featured chiefly as a tanned streak on the tennis courts and a ninety-ninth percentile series of math grades. To his parents, Hobie featured as the one without problems. This was hard to avoid in a family that included a diabetic, a girl with an IQ of 185 and another with controllable petit mal, and a would-be ski star who spent most of his time in a cast. Hobie's own IQ was in the fortunate 140s, the range where you're superior enough to lead but not too superior to be followed. He seemed perfectly satisfied with his communications with his parents, but he didn't use them much.

Not that he was in any way neglected when the need arose. The time he got staph in a corneal scratch, for instance, his parents did a great job of supporting him through the pain bit and the hospital bit and so on. But they couldn't know all the little incidents. Like the night when Hobie called so fiercely for Dr. McCoy that a young intern named McCoy went in and joked for half an hour with the feverish boy in his dark room.

To the end, his parents probably never understood that there was anything to understand about Hobie. And what was to see? His tennis and his model rocket collection made him look almost too normal for the small honors school he went to first.

Then his family moved to an executive bedroom suburb where the school system had a bigger budget than Monaco and a soccer team loaded with National Merit Science finalists. Here Hobie blended right in with the scenery. One more healthy, friendly, polite kid with bright gray eyes under a blond bowl-cut and very fast with any sort of ball game.

The brightest eyes around him were reading The Double Helix to find out how to make it in research, or marking up the Dun & Bradstreet flyers. If Hobie stood out at all, it was only that he didn't seem to be worried about making it in research or any other way, particularly. But that fitted in too. Those days a lot of boys were standing around looking as if they couldn't believe what went on, as if they were waiting for—who knows?—a better world, their glands, something. Hobie's faintly aghast expression was not unique. Events like the installation of an armed patrol around the school enclave were bound to have a disturbing effect on the more sensitive kids.

People got the idea that Hobie was sensitive in some indefinite way. His usual manner was open but quiet, tolerant of a put-on that didn't end.

His advisor did fret over his failure to settle on a major field in time for the oncoming threat of college. First his math interest seemed to evaporate after the special calculus course, although he never blew an exam. Then he switched to the precollege anthropology panel the school was trying. Here he made good grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie had no trouble with things like chi-square, of course. But after making his A in the final, he gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded. His advisor found him spending a lot of hours polishing a six-inch telescope lens in the school shop.

So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an underachiever, but nobody knew what kind because of those grades. And something about that smile bothered them; it seemed to stop sound.

The girls liked him, though, and he went through the usual phases rather fast. There was the week he and various birds went to thirty-five drive-in movies. And the month he went around humming "Mrs. Robinson" in a meaningful way. And the warm, comfortable summer when he and his then-girl and two other couples went up to Stratford, Ontario, with sleeping bags to see the Czech multimedia thing.

Girls regarded him as different, although he never knew why. "You look at me like it's always good-bye," one of them told him. Actually, he treated girls with an odd detached gentleness, as though he knew a secret that might make them all disappear. Some of them hung around because of his quick brown hands or his really great looks, some because they hoped to share the secret. In this they were disappointed. Hobie talked and he listened carefully, but it wasn't the mutual talk-talk-talk of total catharsis that most couples went through. But how could Hobie know that?

Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from heavies and agreed that pot was preferable to getting juiced. His friends never crowded him too much after the beach party where he spooked everybody by talking excitedly for hours to people who weren't there. They decided he might have a vulnerable ego-structure.

The official high school view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this they were supported by a test battery profile that could have qualified him as the ideal normal control. Certainly there was nothing to get hold of in his routine interviews with the high school psychologist.

Hobie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew he was not at his most intuitive. They went through the usual openers, Hobie sitting easily, patient and interested, with an air of listening to some sound back of the acoustical ceiling tiles.

"I meet a number of young people involved in discovering who they really are. Searching for their own identities," Morehouse offered. He was idly trueing up a stack of typing headed Sex Differences in the Adolescent Identity Crisis.

"Do you?" Hobie asked politely.

Morehouse frowned at himself and belched disarmingly.

"Sometimes I wonder who I am," he smiled.

"Do you?" inquired Hobie.

"Don't you?"

"No," said Hobie.

Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it wasn't. Not passive aggression. What? His intuition awoke briefly. He looked into Hobie's light hazel eyes and suddenly found himself slipping toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real pubescent preschiz, he wondered hopefully? No again, he decided, and found himself thinking, What if a person is sure of his identity, but it isn't his identity? He often wondered that; perhaps it could be worked up into a creative insight.

"Maybe it's the other way around," Hobie was saying before the pause grew awkward.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, maybe you're all wondering who you are." Hobie's lips quirked; it was clear he was just making conversation.

"I asked for that," Morehouse chuckled. They chatted about sibling rivalry and psychological statistics and wound up in plenty of time for Morehouse's next boy, who turned out to be a satisfying High Anx. Morehouse forgot about the empty place he had slid into. He often did that too.

It was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning. "Dog" she was called then, although her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy little bird who cocked her head to listen up at him in a way Hobie liked. Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and the pediatrician later on, but neither of them knew that.

They had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite prosperous and peaceful. That is to say, about seventy million people were starving to death, a number of advanced nations were maintaining themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being fought over, Hobie's family's maid had just been cut up by the suburban peacekeeper squad, and the school had added a charged wire and two dogs to its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and the U.S.-Sino-Soviet détente was a twenty-year reality.

Dog was holding Hobie's head over the side of her car because he had been the one who found the maid crawling on her handbones among the azaleas.

"If you feel like that, why don't you do something?" Dog asked him between spasms. "Do you want some Slurp? It's all we've got."

"Do what?" Hobie quavered.

"Politics?" guessed Dog. She really didn't know. The Protest Decade was long over, along with the New Politics and Ralph Nader. There was a school legend about a senior who had come back from Miami with a busted collarbone. Sometime after that the kids had discovered that flowers weren't really very powerful and that movement organizers had their own bag. Why go on the street when you could really do more in one of the good jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie running for something, a sincere face on TV.

"You could join the Young Statesmen."

"Not to interfere," gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then he pulled himself together and tried some of the Slurp. In the dashlight his seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and beautiful.

"Oh, it's not so bad," said Hobie. "I mean, it's not unusually bad. It's just a stage. This world is going through a primitive stage. There's a lot of stages. It takes a long time. They're just very, very backward, that's all."

"They," said Dog, listening to every word.

"I mean," he said.

"You're alienated," she told him. "Rinse your mouth out with that. You don't relate to people."

"I think you're people," he said, rinsing. He'd heard his before. "I relate to you," he said. He leaned out to spit. Then he twisted his head to look up at the sky and stayed that way awhile, like an animal's head sticking out of a crate. Dog could feel him trembling the car.

"Are you going to barf again?" she asked.

"No."

But then suddenly he did, roaringly. She clutched at his shoulders while he heaved. After a while he sagged down, his head lolling limply out at one arm.

"It's such a mess," she heard him whispering. "It's such a s——ting miserable mess mess mess MESS MESS—"

He was pounding his hand on the car side.

"I'll hose it," said Dog, but then she saw he didn't mean the car.

"Why does it have to go on and on?" he croaked. "Why don't they just stop it? I can't bear it much longer, please, please, I can't—"

Dog was scared now.

"Honey, it's not that bad. Hobie, honey, it's not that bad," she told him, patting at him, pressing her soft front against his back.

Suddenly he came back into the car on top of her, spent.

"It's unbearable," he muttered.

"What's unbearable?" she snapped, mad at him for scaring her. "What's unbearable for you and not for me? I mean, I know it's a mess, but why is it so bad for you? I have to live here too."

"It's your world," he told her absently, lost in some private desolation.

Dog yawned.

"I better drive you home now," she said.

He had nothing more to say and sat quietly. When Dog glanced at his profile, she decided he looked calm. Almost stupid, in fact; his mouth hung open a little. She didn't recognize the expression, because she had never seen people looking out of cattle cars.

Hobie's class graduated that June. His grades were well up, and everybody understood that he was acting a little unrelated because of the traumatic business with the maid. He got a lot of sympathy.

It was after the graduation exercises that Hobie surprised his parents for the first and last time. They had been congratulating themselves on having steered their fifth offspring safely through the college crisis and into a high-status Eastern. Hobie announced that he had applied for the United States Air Force Academy.

This was a bomb, because Hobie had never shown the slightest interest in things military. Just the opposite, really. Hobie's parents took it for granted that the educated classes viewed the military with tolerant distaste. Why did their son want this? Was it another of his unstable motivational orientations?

But Hobie persisted. He didn't have any reasons, he had just thought carefully and felt that this was for him. Finally they recalled that early model rocket collection; his father decided he was serious and began sorting out the generals his research firm did business with. In September Hobie disappeared into Colorado Springs. He reappeared for Christmas in the form of an exotically hairless, erect, and polite stranger in uniform.

During the next four years, Hobie the person became effectively invisible behind a growing pile of excellent evaluation reports. There seemed to be no doubt that he was working very hard, and his motivation gave no sign of flagging. Like any cadet, he bitched about many of the Academy's little ways and told some funny stories. But he never seemed discouraged. When he elected to spend his summers in special aviation skills training, his parents realized that Hobie had found himself.

Enlightenment—of a sort—came in his senior year when he told them he had applied for and been accepted into the new astronaut training program. The U.S. space program was just then starting up again after the revulsion caused by the tragic loss of the manned satellite lab ten years before.

"I bet that's what he had in mind all along," Hobie's father chuckled. "He didn't want to say so before he made it." They were all relieved. A son in the space program was a lot easier to live with, statuswise.

When she heard the news, Dog, who was now married and called herself Jane, sent him a card with a picture of the Man in the Moon. Another girl, more percipient, sent him a card showing some stars.

But Hobie never made it to the space program.

It was the summer when several not-very-serious events happened all together. The British devalued their wobbly pound again, just when it was found that far too many dollars were going out of the States. North and South Korea moved a step closer to reunion, which generated a call for strengthening the U.S. contribution to the remains of SEATO. Next there was an expensive, though luckily nonlethal, fire at Kennedy, and the Egyptians announced a new Soviet aid pact. And in August it was discovered that the Guévarrista rebels in Venezuela were getting some very unpleasant-looking hardware from their Arab allies.

Contrary to the old saying that nations never learn from history, the U.S. showed that it had learned from its long agony in Vietnam. What it had learned was not to waste time messing around with popular elections and military advisory and training programs, but to ball right in. Hard.

When the dust cleared, the space program and astronaut training were dead on the pad and a third of Hobie's graduating class was staging through Caracas. Technically, he had volunteered.

He found this out from the task force medico.

"Look at it this way, Lieutenant. By entering the Academy, you volunteered for the Air Force, right?"

"Yes. But I opted for the astronaut program. The Air Force is the only way you can get in. And I've been accepted."

"But the astronaut program has been suspended. Temporarily, of course. Meanwhile, the Air Force—for which you volunteered—has an active requirement for your training. You can't expect them just to let you sit around until the program resumes, can you? Moreover, you have been given the very best option available. Good God, man, the Volunteer Airpeace Corps is considered a superelite. You should see the fugal depressions we have to cope with among men who have been rejected for the VAC."

"Mercenaries," said Hobie. "Regressive."

"Try 'professional,' it's a better word. Now—about those headaches."

The headaches eased up some when Hobie was assigned to long-range sensor recon support. He enjoyed the work of flying, and the long, calm, lonely sensor missions were soothing. They were also quite safe. The Guévarristas had no air strength to waste on recon planes and the U.A.R. SAM sites were not yet operational. Hobie flew the pattern, and waited zombielike for the weather, and flew again. Mostly he waited, because the fighting was developing in a steamy jungle province where clear sensing was a sometimes thing. It was poorly mapped. The ground troops could never be sure about the little brown square men who gave them so much trouble; on one side of an unknown line they were Guévarristas who should be obliterated, and on the other side they were legitimate national troops warning the blancos away. Hobie's recon tapes were urgently needed, and for several weeks he was left alone.

Then he began to get pulled up to a forward strip for one-day chopper duty when their tactical duty roster was disrupted by gee-gee. But this was relatively peaceful too, being mostly defoliant spray missions. Hobie, in fact, put in several months without seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling the war at all. He would have been grateful for this if he had realized it. As it was, he seemed to be trying not to realize anything much. He spoke very little, did his work, and moved like a man whose head might fall off if he jostled anything.

Naturally he was one of the last to hear the rumors about gee-gee when they filtered back to the coastal base where Hobie was quartered with the long-range stuff. Gee-gee's proper name was Guairas Grippe. It was developing into a severe problem in the combat zone. More and more replacements and relief crews were being called forward for temporary tactical duty. On Hobie's next trip in, he couldn't help but notice that people were acting pretty haggard and the roster was all scrawled up with changes. When they were on course, he asked about it.

"Are you kidding?" his gunner grunted.

"No. What is it?"

"B.W."

"What?"

"Bacteriological weapon, skyhead. They keep promising us vaccines. Stuck in their zippers—look out, there's a ground burst."

They held Hobie up front for another mission, and another after that, and then they told him that a sector quarantine was now in force.

The official notice said that movement of personnel between sectors would be reduced to a minimum as a temporary measure to control the spread of respiratory ailments. Translation: you could go from the support zone to the front, but you couldn't go back.

Hobie was moved into a crowded billet and assigned to Casualty and Supply. Shortly he discovered that there was a translation for respiratory ailments too. Gee-gee turned out to be a multiform misery of groin rash, sore throat, fever, and unending trots. It didn't seem to become really acute; it just cycled along. Hobie was one of those who were only lightly affected, which was lucky because the hospital beds were full. So were the hospital aisles. Evacuation of all casualties had been temporarily suspended until a controlled corridor could be arranged.

The Gués did not, it seemed, get gee-gee. The ground troops were definitely sure of that. Nobody knew how it was spread. Rumor said it was bats one week, and then the next week they were putting stuff in the water. Poisoned arrows, roaches, women, disintegrating canisters, all had their advocates. However it was done, it was clear that the U.A.R. technological aid had included more than hardware. The official notice about a forthcoming vaccine yellowed on the board.

Ground fighting was veering closer to Hobie's strip. He heard mortars now and then, and one night the Gués ran in a rocket launcher and nearly got the fuel dump before they where chased back.

"All they got to do is wait," said the gunner. "We're dead."

"Gee-gee doesn't kill you," said C/S control. "You just wish it did."

"They say."

The strip was extended, and three attack bombers came in. Hobie looked them over. He had trained on AX92's all one summer; he could fly them in his sleep. It would be nice to be alone.

He was pushing the C/S chopper most of the daylight hours now. He had gotten used to being shot at and to being sick. Everybody was sick, except a couple of replacement crews who were sent in two weeks apart, looking startlingly healthy. They said they had been immunized with a new antitoxin. Their big news was that gee-gee could be cured outside the zone.

"We're getting reinfected," the gunner said. "That figures. They want us out of here."

That week there was a big drive on bats, but it didn't help. The next week the first batch of replacements were running fevers. Their shots hadn't worked, and neither did the stuff they gave the second batch.

After that, no more men came in except a couple of volunteer medicos. The billets and the planes and the mess were beginning to stink. That dysentery couldn't be controlled after you got weak.

What they did get was supplies. Every day or so another ton of stuff would drift down. Most of it was dragged to one side and left to rot. They were swimming in food. The staggering cooks pushed steak and lobster at men who shivered and went out to retch. The hospital even had ample space now, because it turned out that gee-gee really did kill you in the end. By that time, you were glad to go. A cemetery developed at the far side of the strip, among the skeletons of the defoliated trees.

On the last morning, Hobie was sent out to pick up a forward scout team. He was one of the few left with enough stamina for long missions. The three-man team was far into Gué territory, but Hobie didn't care. All he was thinking about was his bowels. So far he had not fouled himself or his plane. When he was down by their signal, he bolted out to squat under the chopper's tail. The grunts climbed in, yelling at him.

They had a prisoner with them. The Gué was naked and astonishingly broad. He walked springily; his arms were lashed with wire and a shirt was tied over his head. This was the first Gué Hobie had been close to. As he got in, he saw how the Gué's firm brown flesh glistened and bulged around the wire. He wished he could see his face. The gunner said the Gué was a Sirionó, and this was important because the Sirionós were not known to be with the Gué's. They were a very primitive nomadic tribe.

When Hobie began to fly home, he realized he was getting sicker. It became a fight to hold onto consciousness and keep on course. Luckily nobody shot at them. At one point he became aware of a lot of screaming going on behind him but couldn't pay attention. Finally he came over the strip and horsed the chopper down. He let his head down on his arms.

"You okay?" asked the gunner.

"Yeah," said Hobie, hearing them getting out. They were moving something heavy. Finally he got up and followed them. The floor was wet. That wasn't unusual. He got down and stood staring in, the floor a foot under his nose. The wet stuff was blood. It was sprayed around, with one big puddle. In the puddle was something soft and fleshy-looking.

Hobie turned his head. The ladder was wet. He held up one hand and looked at the red. His other hand too. Holding them out stiffly, he turned and began to walk away across the strip.

Control, who still hoped to get an evening flight out of him, saw him fall and called the hospital. The two replacement parameds were still in pretty good shape. They came out and picked him up.

When Hobie came to, one of the parameds was tying his hands down to the bed so he couldn't tear the IV out again.

"We're gong to die here," Hobie told him.

The paramed looked noncommittal. He was a thin dark boy with a big Adam's apple.

"'But I shall dine at journey's end with Landor and with Donne,'" said Hobie. His voice was light and facile.

"Yeats," said the paramed. "Want some water?"

Hobie's eyes flickered. The paramed gave him some water.

"I really believed it, you know," Hobie said chattily. "I had it all figured out." He smiled, something he hadn't done for a long time.

"Landor and Donne?" asked the medic. He unhooked the empty IV bottle and hung up a new one.

"Oh, it was pathetic, I guess," Hobie said. "It started out … I believed they were real, you know? Kirk, Spock, McCoy, all of them. And the ship. To this day, I swear … one of them talked to me once; I mean, he really did … I had it all figured out; they had me left behind as an observer." Hobie giggled.

"They were coming back for me. It was secret. All I had to do was sort of fit in and observe. Like a report. One day they would come back and haul me up in that beam thing; maybe you know about that? And there I'd be back in real time where human beings were, where they were human. I wasn't really stuck here in the past. On a backward planet."

The paramed nodded.

"Oh, I mean, I didn't really believe it; I knew it was just a show. But I did believe it too. It was like there, in the background, underneath, no matter what was going on. They were coming for me. All I had to do was observe. And not to interfere. You know? Prime directive … Of course, after I grew up, I realized they weren't; I mean, I realized consciously. So I was going to go to them. Somehow, somewhere. Out there … Now I know. It really isn't so. None of it. Never. There's nothing … Now I know I'll die here."

"Oh, now," said the paramed. He got up and started to take things away. His fingers were shaky.

"It's clean there," said Hobie in a petulant voice. "None of this shit. Clean and friendly. They don't torture people," he explained, thrashing his head. "They don't kill—" He slept. The paramed went away.

Somebody started to yell monotonously.

Hobie opened his eyes. He was burning up.

The yelling went on, became screaming. It was dusk. Footsteps went by, headed for the screaming. Hobie saw they had put him in a bed by the door.

Without his doing much about it, the screaming seemed to be lifting him out of the bed, propelling him through the door. Air. He kept getting close-ups of his hands clutching things. Bushes, shadows. Something scratched him.

After a while the screaming was a long way behind him. Maybe it was only in his ears. He shook his head, felt himself go down onto boards. He thought he was in the cemetery.

"No," he said. "Please. Please no." He got himself up, balanced, blundered on, seeking coolness.

The side of the plane felt cool. He plastered his hot body against it, patting it affectionately. It seemed to be quite dark now. Why was he inside with no lights? He tried the panel; the lights worked perfectly. Vaguely he noticed some yelling starting outside again. It ignited the screaming in his head. The screaming got very loud—loud—LOUD—and appeared to be moving him, which was good.

He came to above the overcast and climbing. The oxy-support tube was hitting him in the nose. He grabbed for the mask, but it wasn't there. Automatically, he had leveled off. Now he rolled and looked around.

Below him was a great lilac sea of cloud, with two mountains sticking through it, their western tips on fire. As he looked, they dimmed. He shivered, found he was wearing only sodden shorts. How had he got here? Somebody had screamed intolerably and he had run.

He flew along calmly, checking his board. No trouble except the fuel. Nobody serviced the AX92's any more. Without thinking about it, he began to climb again. His hands were a yard away and he was shivering, but he felt clear. He reached up and found his headphones were in place; he must have put them on along with the rest of the drill. He clicked on. Voices rattled and roared at him. He switched off. Then he took off the headpiece and dropped it on the floor.

He looked around: 18,000, heading 88-05. He was over the Atlantic. In front of him the sky was darkening fast. A pinpoint glimmer ten o'clock high. Sirius, probably.

He thought about Sirius, trying to recall his charts. Then he thought about turning and going back down. Without paying much attention, he noticed he was crying with his mouth open.

Carefully he began feeding his torches and swinging the nose of his pod around and up. He brought it neatly to a point on Sirius. Up. Up. Behind him, a great pale swing of contrail fell away above the lilac shadow, growing, towering to the tiny plane that climbed at its tip. Up. Up. The contrail cut off as the plane burst into the high cold dry.

As it did so, Hobie's ears skewered and he screamed wildly. The pain quit; his drums had burst. Up! Now he was gasping for air, strangling. The great torches drove him up, up, over the curve of the world. He was hanging on the star. Up! The fuel gauges were knocking. Any second they would quit, and he and the bird would be a falling stone. "Beam us up, Scotty!" he howled at Sirius, laughing, coughing—coughing to death, as the torches faltered—

· · · · ·

—And was still coughing as he sprawled on the shining resiliency under the arcing grids. He gagged, rolled, finally focused on a personage leaning toward him out of a complex chair. The personage had round eyes, a slitted nose, and the start of a quizzical smile.

Hobie's head swiveled slowly. It was not the bridge of the Enterprise. There were no viewscreens, only a View. And Lieutenant Uhura would have had trouble with the freeform flashing objects suspended in front of what appeared to be a girl wearing spots. The spots, Hobie made out, were fur.

Somebody who was not Bones McCoy was doing something to Hobie's stomach. Hobie got up a hand and touched the man's gleaming back. Under the mesh it was firm and warm. The man looked up, grinned; Hobie looked back at the captain.

"Do not have fear," a voice was saying. It seemed to be coming out of a globe by the captain's console. "We will tell you where you are."

"I know where I am," Hobie whispered. He drew a deep, sobbing breath.

"I'm HOME!" he yelled. Then he passed out.

The End

* * * *

Gather Blue Roses

By Pamela Sargent

I cannot remember ever having asked my mother outright about the tattooed numbers. We must have known very early that we should not ask; perhaps my brother Simon or I had said something inadvertently as very small children and had seen the look of sorrow on her face at the statement; perhaps my father had told us never to ask.

Of course, we were always aware of the numbers. There were those times when the weather was particularly warm, and my mother would not button her blouse at the top, and she would lean over to hug us or pick us up, and we would see them written across her, an inch above her breasts.

(By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich's edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, "The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive." And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)

By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college nearby, turning down offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for Mother. We had a lot of elms and oaks and a huge weeping willow that hovered sadly over the house. Our pond would be invaded in the early spring and late fall by a few geese that would usually keep their distance before flying on. ("You can tell those birds are Jewish," my father would say, "they go to Miami in the winter," and Simon and I would imagine them lying on a beach, coating their feathers with Coppertone and ordering lemonades from the waitresses; we hadn't heard of Collinses yet.)

Even out in the country, there were often those times when we would see our mother packing her clothes in a small suitcase, and she would tell us that she was going away for a while, just a week, just to get away, to find solitude. One time it was to an old camp in the Adirondacks that one of my aunts owned, another time to a cabin that a friend of my father's loaned her, always alone, always to an isolated place. Father would say that it was nerves, although we wondered, since we were so isolated as it was. Simon and I thought she didn't love us, that Mother was somehow using this means to tell us that we were being rejected. I would try very hard to behave; when Mother was resting, I would tiptoe and whisper. Simon reacted more violently. He could contain himself for a while; but then, in a desperate attempt at drawing attention to himself, would run through the house, screaming horribly, and hurl himself headfirst at one of the radiators. On one occasion, he threw himself through one of the large living room windows, smashing the glass. Fortunately, he was uninjured, except for cuts and bruises, but after that incident, my father put chicken wire over the windows on the inside of the house. Mother was very shaken by that incident, walking around for a couple of days, her body aching all over, then going away to my aunt's place for three weeks this time. Simon's head must have been strong; he never sustained any damage from the radiators worse than a few bumps and a headache, but the headaches would often keep Mother in bed for days.

(I pick up my binoculars to check the forest again from my tower, seeing the small lakes like puddles below, using my glasses to focus on a couple in a small boat near one of the islands, and then turn away from them, not wanting to invade their privacy, envying the girl and boy who can so freely, without fear of consequences, exchange and share their feelings, and yet not share them, not at least in the way that would destroy a person such as myself. I do not think anyone will risk climbing my mountain today, as the sky is overcast, cirrocumulus clouds slowly chasing each other, a large storm cloud in the west. I hope no one will come; the family who picnicked beneath my observation tower yesterday bothered me; one child had a headache and another indigestion, and I lay in my cabin taking aspirins all afternoon and nursing the heaviness in my stomach. I hope no one will come today.)

Mother and Father did not send us to school until we were as old as the law would allow. We went to the small public school in town. An old yellow bus would pick us up in front of the house. I was scared the first day and was glad Simon and I were twins so that we could go together. The town had built a new school; it was a small, square brick building, and there were fifteen of us in the first grade. The high-school students went to classes in the same building. I was afraid of them but soon discovered that their classes were all on the second floor; so we rarely saw them during the day except when they had gym classes outside. Sitting at my desk inside, I would watch them, wincing every time someone got hit with a ball, or got bruised. (Only three months in school, thank God, before my father got permission to tutor me at home; three months were too much of the constant pains, the turmoil of emotions; I am sweating now, and my hands shake when I remember it all.)

The first day was boring to me for the most part; Simon and I had been reading and doing arithmetic at home for as long as I could remember. I played dumb and did as I was told; Simon was aggressive, showing off, knowing it all. The other kids giggled, pointing at me, pointing at Simon, whispering. I felt some of it, but not enough to bother me too much; I was not then as I am now, not that first day.

Recess: kids yelling, running, climbing the jungle gym, swinging and chinning themselves on bars, chasing a basketball. I was with two girls and a piece of chalk on the blacktop; they taught me hopscotch, and I did my best to ignore the bruises and bumps of the other students.

(I need the peace, the retreat from easily communicated pain. How strange, I think objectively, that our lives are such that discomfort, pain, sadness, and hatred are so easily conveyed and so frequently felt. Love and contentment are only soft veils which do not protect me from bludgeons; and with the strongest loves, one can still sense the more violent undercurrents of fear, hate, and jealousy.)

It was at the end of the second week that the fight occurred during recess. I was again playing hopscotch, and Simon had come over to look at what we were doing before joining some other boys. Five older kids came over, I guess they were in third or fourth grade, and they began their taunts.

"Greeeenbaum," at Simon and me. We both turned toward them, I balancing on one foot on the hopscotch squares we had drawn, Simon clenching his fists.

"Greeeenbaum, Esther Greeeenbaum, Simon Greeeenbaum," whinnying the green, thundering the baum.

"My father says you're Yids."

"He says you're the Yids' kids." One boy hooted and yelled. "Hey, they're Yid kids." Some giggled, and then they chanted, "Yid kid, Yid kid," as one of them pushed me off my square.

"You leave my sister alone," Simon yelled and went for the boy, fists flying, and knocked him over. The boy sat down suddenly, and I felt pain in my lower back. Another boy ran over and punched Simon. Simon whacked him back, and the boy hit him in the nose, hard. It hurt, and I started crying from the pain, holding my nose; I pulled away my hand and saw blood. Simon's nose was bleeding, and then the other kids started in, trying to pummel my brother, one boy holding him, another boy punching. "Stop it," I screamed, "stop it," as I curled on the ground, hurting, seeing the teachers run over to pull them apart. Then I fainted, mercifully, and came to in the nurse's office. They kept me there until it was time to go home that day.

Simon was proud of himself, boasting, offering self-congratulations. "Don't tell Mother," I said when we got off the bus, "don't, Simon, she'll get upset and go away again, please. Don't make her sad."

(When I was fourteen, during one of the times Mother was away, my father got drunk downstairs in the kitchen with Mr. Arnstead, and I could hear them talking, as I hid in my room with my books and records, Father speaking softly, Mr. Arnstead bellowing.

"No one, no one, should ever have to go through what Anna did. We're beasts anyway, all of us, Germans, Americans, what's the difference?"

Slamming of a glass on the table and a bellow: "God dammit, Sam, you Jews seem to think you have a monopoly on suffering. What about the guy in Harlem? What about some starving guy in Mexico? You think things are any better for them?"

"It was worse for Anna."

"No, not worse, no worse than the guy in some street in Calcutta. Anna could at least hope she would be liberated, but who's gonna free that guy?"

"No one," softly, "no one is ever freed from Anna's kind of suffering."

I listened, hiding in my room, but Mr. Arnstead left after that; and when I came downstairs, Father was just sitting there, staring at his glass; and I felt his sadness softly drape itself around me as I stood there, and then the soft veil of love over the sadness, making it bearable.)

I began to miss school at least twice a week, hurting, unable to speak to Mother, wanting to say something to Father but not having the words. Mother was away a lot then, and this made me more depressed (I'm doing it, I'm sending her away), the depression endurable only because of the blanket of comfort that I felt resting over the house.

They had been worried, of course, but did not have their worst fears confirmed until Thanksgiving was over and December arrived (snow drifting down from a gray sky, Father bringing in wood for the fireplace, Mother polishing the menorah, Simon and me counting up our saved allowances, plotting what to buy for them when Father drove us to town). I had been absent from school for a week by then, vomiting every morning at the thought that I might have to return. Father was reading and Simon was outside trying to climb one of our trees. I was in the kitchen, cutting cookies and decorating them while Mother rolled the dough, humming, white flour on her apron, looking away and smiling when I sneaked small pieces of dough and put them in my mouth.

And then I fell off my chair onto the floor, holding my leg, moaning, "Mother, it hurts," blood running from my nose. She picked me up, clutching me to her, and put me on the chair, blotted my nose with a tissue. Then we heard Simon yelling outside, and then his banging on the back door. Mother went and pulled him inside, his nose bleeding. "I fell outa the tree," and, as she picked him up, she looked back at me; and I knew that she understood, and felt her fear and her sorrow as she realized that she and I were the same, that I would always feel the knife thrusts of other people's pain, draw their agonies into myself and, perhaps, be shattered by them.

(Remembering: Father and Mother outside after a summer storm, standing under the willow, Father putting his arm around her, brushing her black hair back and kissing her gently on the forehead. Not for me, too much shared anguish with love for me. I am always alone, with my mountain, my forest, my lakes like puddles. The young couple's boat is moored at the island.)

I hear them downstairs.

"Anna, the poor child, what can we do?"

"It is worse for her, Samuel," sighing, the sadness reaching me and becoming a shroud, "it will be worse with her, I think, than it was for me."

The End

* * * *

Transfer

By Barry N. Malzberg

I have met the enemy and he is me. Or me is he. Or me and he are we; I really find it impossible to phrase this or to reach any particular facility of description. The peculiar and embarrassing situation in which I now find myself has lurched quite out of control, ravaging its way toward what I am sure will be a calamitous destiny, and, yet, I have always been a man who believed in order, who believed that events no matter how chaotic would remit, would relent, would suffer containment in the pure limpidity of The Word engraved patiently as if upon stone. I must stop this and get hold of myself.

I have met the enemy and he is me.

Staring into the mirror, watching the waves and the ripples of The Change, seeing in the mirror that beast take shape (it is always in the middle of the night; I am waiting for the transference to occur during the morning or worse yet at lunch hour in the middle of a cafeteria; waves may overtake me and I will become something so slimy and horrible even by the standards of midtown Manhattan that I will cause most of the congregants to lose their lunch), I feel a sense of rightness. It must always have been meant to be this way. Did I not feel myself strange as a child, as a youth, as an adolescent? Even as an adult I felt the strangeness within me; on the streets they stared with knowledge which could not have possibly been my own. Women turned away from me with little smiles when I attempted to connect with them, my fellow employees here at the Bureau treated me with that offhandedness and solemnity which always bespeaks private laughter. I know what they think of me.

I know what they think of me.

I have spent a lifetime in solitude gauging these reactions to some purpose, and I know that I am separate from the run of ordinary men as these men are separate from the strange heavings and commotion, ruins and darkness which created them. Staring in the mirror. Staring in the mirror I see.

Staring in the mirror I see the beast I have become, a thing with tentacles and spikes, strange loathsome protuberances down those appendages which my arms have become, limbs sleek and horrible despite all this devastation, limbs to carry me with surging power and constancy through the sleeping city, and now that I accept what I have become, what the night will strike me, I am no longer horrified but accepting. One might even say exalted at this moment because I always knew that it would have to be this way, that in the last of all the nights a mirror would be held up to my face and I would see then what I was and why the mass of men avoided me. I know what I am, those calm, cold eyes staring back at me in the mirror from the center of the monster know too well what I am also, and turning them from the mirror, confronting the rubbled but still comfortable spaces of my furnished room, I feel the energy coursing through me in small flashes and ripples of light, an energy which I know, given but that one chance it needs, could redeem the world. The beast does not sleep. In my transmogrification I have cast sleep from me like the cloak of all reason and I spring from these rooms, scuttle the three flights of the brownstone to the street and, coming upon it in the dense and sleeping spaces of the city, see no one, confront no one (but I would not, I never have) as I move downtown to enact my dreadful but necessary tasks.

The beast does not sleep, therefore I do not sleep. At first the change came upon me once a week and then twice … but in recent months it has been coming faster and faster, now six or seven times a week, and furthermore I can will the change. Involuntary at first, overtaking me like a stray bullet, it now seems to be within my control as my power and facility increase. A latent characteristic then, some recessive gene which peeked its way out shyly at the age of twenty-five, first with humility and then with growing power, and, finally as I became accustomed to the power, it fell within my control.

I can now become the beast whenever I wish.

Now it is not the beast but I who pokes his way from the covers during the hours of despair and lurches his way to the bathroom; standing before that one mirror, I call the change upon myself, ring the changes, and the beast, then, confronts me, a tentacle raised as if in greeting or repudiation. Shrugging, I sprint down the stairs and into the city. At dawn I return. In between that time—

—I make my travels

My travels, my errands! Over manhole covers, sprinting as if filled with helium (the beast is powerful; the beast has endless stamina) in and out of the blocks of the West Side, vaulting to heights on abandoned stoops, then into the gutter again, cutting a swath through the city, ducking the occasional prowl cars which come through indolently, swinging out of sight behind gates to avoid garbage trucks, no discovery ever having been made of the beast in all the months that this has been going on … and between the evasions I do my business.

Pardon. Pardon if you will. I do not do my business. The beast does his business.

I must separate the beast and myself because the one is not the other and I have very little to do with the beast although, of course, I am he. And he is me.

And attack them in the darkness.

Seize hapless pedestrians or dawn drunks by the throat, coming up from their rear flank, diving upon them then with facility and ease, sweeping upon them to clap a hand upon throat or groin with a touch as sure and cunning as any I have ever known, and then, bringing them to their knees, straddling them in the gutter, I—

Well, I—

—Well, now, is it necessary for me to say what I do? Yes, it is necessary for me to say, I suppose; these recollections are not careless nor are they calculated but merely an attempt, as it were, to set the record straight. The rumors, reports, and evasions about the conduct of the beast have reached the status of full-scale lies (there is not a crew of assassins loose in the streets but merely one; there is not a carefully organized plan to terrorize the city but merely one beast, one humble, hard-working animal wreaking his justice), so it is to be said that as I throttle the lives and misery out of them, I often turn them over so that they can confront the beast, see what it is doing to them, and that I see in their eyes past the horror, the heartbreak, the beating farewell signal of their mortality.

But beyond that I see something else.

Let me tell you of this, it is crucial: I see an acceptance so enormous as almost to defy in all of its acceptance because it is religious. The peace that passeth all understanding darts through their eyes and finally passes through them, exiting in the last breath of life as with a crumpling sigh they die against me. I must have killed hundreds, no, I do not want to exaggerate, it is not right, I must have killed in the high seventies. At first I kept a chart of my travels and accomplishments, but when it verged into the high twenties I realized that this was insane, leaving physical evidence of any sort of my accomplishments that is, and furthermore, past that ninth murder or the nineteenth there is no longer a feeling of victory but only necessity. It is purely business.

All of it has been purely business.

Business in any event for the beast. He needs to kill as I need to breathe, that creature within me who I was always in the process of becoming ( all the strangeness I felt as a child I now attribute to the embryonic form of the beast, beating and huddling its growing way within) takes the lives of humans as casually as I take my midday sandwich and drink in the local cafeteria before passing on to my dismal and clerkly affairs at the Bureau, accumulating time toward the pension credits that will be mine after twenty or thirty years. The beast needs to kill; he draws his strength from murder as I do mine from food and since I am merely his tenant during these struggles, a helpless (but alertly interested) altar which dwells within the beast watching all that goes on, I can take no responsibility myself for what has happened but put it squarely on him where it belongs.

Perhaps I should have turned myself in for treatment or seen a psychiatrist of some kind when all this began, but what would have been the point of it? What? They would not have believed that I was possessed; they would have thought me harmlessly crazy, and the alternative, if they did believe me, would have been much worse: implication, imprisonment, fury. I could have convinced them. I know that now, when I became strong enough to will myself into becoming the beast, I could have, in their very chambers, turned myself into that monster and then they would have believed, would have taken my fears for certainty … but the beast, manic in his goals, would have fallen upon those hapless psychiatrists, interns, or social workers as he fell upon all of his nighttime victims and what then?

What then? He murders as casually and skillfully as I annotate my filings at the Bureau. He is impossible to dissuade. No, I could not have done that. The beast and I, sentenced to dwell throughout eternity or at least through the length of my projected life span: there may be another judgment on this someday of some weight, but I cannot be concerned with that now. Why should I confess? What is there to confess? Built so deeply into the culture—I am a thoughtful man and have pondered this long despite my lack of formal educational credits—as to be part of the madness is the belief that confession is in itself expiation, but I do not believe this. The admission of dreadful acts is merely to compound them through multiple refraction and lies are thus more necessary than the truth in order to make the world work.

Oh, how I believe this. How I do believe it.

I have attempted discussions with the beast. This is not easy, but at the moment of transfer there is a slow, stunning instant when the mask of his features has not settled upon him fully and it is possible for me, however weakly, to speak. "Why must you do this?" I ask him. "This is murder, mass murder. These are human beings, you know, it really is quite dreadful." My little voice pipes weakly as my own force diminishes and the beast, transmogrified, stands before the mirror, waving his tentacles, flexing his powerful limbs, and says then (he speaks a perfect English when he desires, although largely he does not desire to speak), "Don't be a fool. This is my destiny, and besides, I am not human, so this is not my problem."

This is unanswerable; it is already muted by transfer. I burrow within, and the beast takes to the streets singing and crouching, ready once again for his tasks. Why does he need to murder? I understand that his lust for this is as gross and simple as my own for less dreadful events; it is an urge as much a part of him as that toward respiration. The beast is an innocent creature, immaculately conceived. He goes to do murder as his victim goes to drink. He sees no shades of moral inference or dismay even in the bloodiest and most terrible of the strangulations but simply does what must be done with the necessary force. Never more. Some nights he has killed ten. The streets of the city scatter north and south with his victims.

But his victims! Ah, they have, so many of them, been waiting for murder so long, dreaming of it, touching it in the night (as I touch the self-same beast), that this must be the basis of that acceptance which passes through them at the moment of impact. They have been looking, these victims, for an event so climactic that they will be able to cede responsibility for their lives, and here, in the act of murder, have they at last that confirmation. Some of them embraced the beast with passion as he made his last strike. Others have opened themselves to him on the pavement and pointed at their vitals. For the city, the very energy of that city or so I believe this now through my musings, is based upon the omnipresence of death, and to die is to become at last completely at one with the darkened heart of a city constructed for death. I become too philosophical. I will not attempt to justify myself further.

For there is no justification. What happens, happens. The beast has taught me at least this much (along with so much else). Tonight we come upon the city with undue haste; the beast has not been out for two nights previous, having burrowed within with a disinclination for pursuit, unavailable even to summons, but now at four in the morning of this coldest of all the nights of winter he has pounded within me, screaming for release, and I have allowed him his way with some eagerness because (I admit this truly) I too have on his behalf missed the thrill of the hunt.

Now the beast races down the pavements, his breath a plume of fire against the ice. At the first intersection we see a young woman paused for the light, a valise clutched against her, one hand upraised for a taxi that will not come. (I know it will not come.) An early dawn evacuee from the city, or so I murmur to the beast. Perhaps it would be best to leave this one alone since she looks spare and there must be tastier meat in the alleys beyond … but the creature does not listen. He listens to nothing I have to say. This is the core of his strength, and my own repudiation is nothing as to his.

For listen, listen now: he sweeps into his own purposes in a way which can only make me fill with admiration. He comes upon the girl then. He comes upon her. He takes her from behind.

He takes her from behind.

She struggles in his grasp like an insect caught within a huge, indifferent hand, all legs and activity, grasping and groping, and he casually kicks the valise from her hand, pulls her into an alley for a more sweeping inspection, the woman's skull pinned against his flat, oily chest, her little hands and feet waving, and she is screaming in a way so dismal and hopeless that I know she will never be heard and she must know this as well. The scream stops. Small moans and pleas which have pieced out the spaces amid the sound stop too and with an explosion of strength she twists within his grasp, then hurls herself against his chest and looks upward toward his face to see at last the face of the assassin about which she must surely have dreamed, the bitch, in so many nights. She sees the beast. He sees her.

I too know her.

She works at the Bureau. She is a fellow clerk two aisles down and three over, a pretty woman, not indifferent in her gestures but rather, as so few of these bitches at the Bureau are, kind and lively, kind even to me. Her eyes are never droll but sad as she looks upon me. I have never spoken to her other than pleasantries, but I feel, feel, that if I were ever to seek her out, she would not humiliate me.

"Oh," I say within the spaces of the beast, trapped and helpless as I look upon her, "oh, oh."

"No!" she says, looking upon us. "Oh no, not you, it can't be you!" and the beast's grasp tightens upon her then. "It can't be you! Don't say that it's you doing this to me!" and I look upon her then with tenderness and infinite understanding, knowing that I am helpless to save her and thus relieved of the responsibility but saddened too. Saddened because the beast has never caught a victim known to me before. I say in a small voice which she will never hear (because I am trapped inside), "I'm sorry, I'm sorry but it's got to be done, you see. How much of this can I take anymore?" and her eyes, I know this, her eyes lighten with understanding, darken too, lighten and darken with the knowledge I have imparted.

And as the pressure begins then, the pressure that in ten seconds will snap her throat and leave her dead, as the freezing colors of the city descend, we confront one another in isolation, our eyes meeting, touch meeting, and absolutely nothing to be done about it. Her neck breaks, and in many many many ways I must admit—I will admit everything—this has been the most satisfying victim of them all. Of them all.

The End

* * * *

Two Weeks In August

by Frank M. Robinson

I suppose there's a guy like McCleary in every office.

Now, I'm not a hard man to get along with, and it usually takes quite a bit more than overly bright remarks from the office boy to bother me. But try as I might, I could never get along with McCleary. To be as disliked as he was, you have to work at it.

What kind of guy was he? Well, if you came down to the office one day proud as Punch because of something little Johnny or Josephine had said, it was a sure cinch that McCleary would horn in with something his little Louie had spouted off that morning. At any rate, when McCleary got through, you felt like taking Johnny to the doctor to find out what made him subnormal.

Or maybe you happened to buy a new super-eight that week and were bragging about the mileage, the terrific pick-up, and how quickly it responded to the wheel. Leave it to McCleary to give a quick rundown on his own car that would make you feel like selling yours for junk at the nearest scrap heap.

Well, you see what I mean.

But by far the worst of it was when vacation time rolled around. You could forgive a guy for topping you about how brainy his kids are, and you might even find it in your heart to forget the terrific bargain he drove to work in. But vacation time was when he'd really get on your nerves. You could pack the wife and kids in Old Reliable and roll out to the lake for your two weeks in August. You might even break the bank and spend the two weeks at a poor man's Sun Valley. But no matter where you went, when you came back, you'd have to sit in silence and listen to McCleary's account of his Vacation in the Adirondacks, or his Tramp in the Canadian Wilds, or maybe even the Old French Quarter.

The trouble was he always had the photographs, the ticket stubs, and the souvenirs to prove it. Where he got the money, I'll never know. Sometimes I'd tell the wife about it and she'd sniff and wonder what kind of shabby house they lived in that they could afford all the other things. I never looked him up myself. Tell you the truth, I was afraid I'd find the McClearys lived on Park Avenue.

· · · · ·

Now, you look forward to a vacation all year, but particularly during the latter part of July, when, what with the heat and the stuffy office, you begin to feel like a half-done hotdog at a barbecue. I was feeling even worse than usual as I was faced with spending my two weeks in my own backyard, most of my vacation dough having gone to pay the doctor. The only thing I minded was having McCleary find out about it and seeing that phony look of sympathy roll across his fat face while he rambled on about the vacation he was going to have.

It was lunchtime, and we had just finished talking about the latest on television and what was wrong with the Administration and who'd win the pennant when Bob Young brought up the subject of vacations. It turned out he was due for a trip to the Ozarks and Donley was going after walleyed pike in northern Wisconsin. I could sense McCleary prick up his ears clear across the room.

"How about you, Bill?" Donley asked me. "Got any plans?"

I winked heavily and jerked a thumb warningly toward McCleary, making sure McCleary couldn't see the gesture.

"My vacation is really going to be out of the world this time," I said. "Me and the wife are going to Mars. Dry, you know. Even better than Arizona for her sinus."

Even with the wink they were caught off guard for a minute.

"Mars?" Donley said feebly, edging his chair away. "Yeah, sure. Great place. Never been there myself though."

Young just gaped, then grinned as he caught on. "I understand it's a wonderful spot," he chipped in.

I casually peeled a hard-boiled egg the wife had packed in my lunch bucket and leaned back in my swivel chair. "It's really swell," I said dreamily but loud enough so McCleary couldn't help but overhear. "Drifting down the Grand Canal at evening, the sun a faint golden disk behind the crystal towers of Marsport …" I let my voice drift into a long sigh and reached for Donley's sack of grapes.

About this time McCleary had gnawed his way through a big pastrami sandwich and waddled over. He stood there expectantly, but we carefully ignored him.

"Always wanted to go myself," Donley said in the same tone of voice he would have used to say he'd like to go to California someday. "Pretty expensive though, isn't it?"

"Expensive?" I raised a studiedly surprised eyebrow. "Oh, I suppose a little, but it's worth it. The wife and I got a roomette on the Princess of Mars for $139.50. That's one way, of course."

"Mars!" Young sighed wistfully.

There was a moment of silence, with all three of us paying silent tribute to the ultimate in vacations. McCleary slowly masticated a leaf of lettuce, his initial look of suspicion giving way to half-belief.

"Let's hear some more about it," Young said enthusiastically, suddenly recovering from his reverie.

"Oh, there isn't much more," I said indifferently. "We plan to stay at the Redsands Hotel in Marsport—American plan. Take in Marsport, with maybe a side trip to Crystallite. If we have time we might even take a waterway cruise to the North Pole …"

I broke off and dug Donley in the ribs.

"Man, you never fished until you have a Martian flying fish at the end of the line!" I grabbed a ruler off the desk and began using it as an imaginary rod and reel. "Talk about fight … oh, sorry, Mac." My ruler had amputated part of a floppy lettuce leaf that hung from McCleary's sandwich.

I settled down in my chair again and started paying attention to my lunch. "Nothing like it," I added between mouthfuls of liverwurst.

"How about entertainment?" Young winked slyly.

"Well, you know—the wife will be along," I said. "But some of the places near the Grand Canal—and those Martian mist maidens! Brother, if I was unattached …"

"There ain't any life on Mars," McCleary said, suspicious again.

All three of us looked at him in shocked silence.

"He says there's no life on Mars!" Donley repeated.

"You ever been there, McCleary?" I asked sarcastically.

"No, but just the same …"

"All right," I cut in, "then you don't know whether there is or isn't. So kindly reserve your opinion until you know a little about the subject under discussion."

I turned back to Donley and Young.

"Really a wonderful place for your health. Dry, thin air, nice and cool at night. And beautiful! From Marsport you can see low-slung mountains in the distance, dunes of soft, red sand stretching out to them. If I were you, Bob, I'd forget all about the Ozarks and sign up on the rocket."

"There ain't any rockets going to Mars," McCleary said obstinately.

"Isn't," I corrected. "I mean, there is. Besides, McCleary, just because you never heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

"The government's still working on V-2," McCleary said flatly. "They haven't even reached the moon yet."

I sighed softly, acting disgusted at having to deal with somebody as stupid as McCleary. "Mac, that's the government, and besides, they're dealing with military rockets. And did you ever hear of the government perfecting something before private industry? Who perfected the telephone, the radio, television? The government? No, private industry, of course! Private industry has always been ahead of the government on everything, including rockets. Get on the stick, Mac."

McCleary started in on his lettuce leaf again, looking very shrewd.

"How come I never heard of it before now?" he asked, springing the clincher argument.

"Look, Mac, this is relatively new. The company's just starting, can't afford to take full-page ads and that sort of thing. Just give 'em time, that's all. Why, a couple of years from now you'll be spending your vacation on Venus or Jupiter or some place like that. From now on, California and the Bahamas will be strictly old hat."

McCleary looked half-believing.

"Where'd you get your tickets?"

I waved vaguely in the direction of downtown. "Oh, there must be at least a couple of agencies downtown. Might even be able to find them in the phone book. Look under "Interplanetary Rocket Lines" or something like that. You might have a little difficulty, of course. Like I say, they're not too well advertised."

McCleary was about to say something more, but then the one o'clock bell rang and we went back to the office grind.

· · · · ·

Well, McCleary didn't say anything more about it the next day, even though we'd throw in a chance comment about Mars every now and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but Mac didn't rise to the bait. We gradually forgot about it.

The next couple of weeks came and went and then my two weeks in August. As I said before, my vacation dough had gone to pay the doctor, so I stayed at home and watered the begonias.

The Monday morning after vacation, we were all back in the office, if anything looking more fagged than we had when we left. When lunchtime rolled around, Donley and Young and I piled our lunches on Donley's desk—his desk was near a window on the north side of the building so we could get the breeze—and talked about what we had done during vacation.

McCleary ambled up, and like it usually does after McCleary comes around, the conversation just naturally died down. After a two-minute silence, I finally took the hook.

"Okay, Mac," I said, "I know you're just dying to tell us. Where did you go?"

He almost looked surprised. "To Mars," he said, like he might have said Aunt Minnie's.

The three of us looked blank for a minute, and then we caught on. It took us a while to recover from laughing, and my sides were still aching when I saw McCleary's face. It definitely had a hurt look on it.

"You don't think I did," he accused us.

"Oh, come off it, McCleary," I said crossly. "A gag's a gag, but it can be carried too far. Where'd you go? California, Oregon, some place like that?"

"I said I went to Mars," McCleary repeated hotly, "and I can prove it!"

"Sure," I said. "Like I can prove the world's flat and it's supported by four elephants standing on a turtle's back like the old Greeks …"

I cut off. McCleary had thrown a couple of pasteboards on the desk, and I picked them up. The printing on them was like you see on a Pullman ticket. It said something about a roomette, first-class passage on the Martian Prince, for $154.75, and there was even a place where they had the tax figured. In two blanks at the top of the ticket, they had it filled out to E. C. McCleary and wife. The bottom half was torn off, just like they do with train tickets.

"Very clever," I said, "but you shouldn't have gone to all that trouble to have these printed up."

McCleary scowled and dropped a little bunch of kodachrome slides on the desk. I took one and held it up to the light. It showed Mac and his wife mounted on something that looked like a cross between a camel and a zebra. They were at the top of a sand dune, and in the distance you could see the towers of a city. The funny thing was the towers looked a little—but not much—like minarets, and the sand dunes were colored a beautiful pink.

I passed it on to Donley and Young and started leafing through the rest. They were beautiful slides. McCleary and spouse in front of various structures in a delicately tinted marble and crystal city. McCleary in a pink and black boat on a canal that looked as wide as the Mississippi. McCleary standing on a strangely carved sandstone parapet, admiring a sunset caused by a sun looking half as big as ours. And everywhere were the dunes of pink sand.

"Pictures can be faked, Mac," I said.

He looked hurt and got some things out of his desk—a sateen pillow with scenes like those on his snapshots, an urn filled with pink sand, a tiny boat like a gondola, only different, a letter opener made out of peculiar bubbly pink glass. They were all stamped "Souvenir of Mars," and that kind of junk you don't have made up for a gag. I know mass-produced articles when I see them.

"We couldn't afford the first-class tour," McCleary said expansively, "but I figure we can cover that next year." He turned to me puzzledly. "I asked the passenger agent about the Princess of Mars, and he said he had never heard of the ship. And it's Mars City, not Marsport. Couldn't understand how you made a mistake."

"It was easy," I said weakly. I pointed to the pasteboard ducats. "Where'd you get these, Mac?"

He waved generously in the direction of downtown. "Like you said, there's a couple of agencies downtown …"

· · · · ·

You know, sometimes I think we misjudged McCleary. It takes a while to get to know a guy like Mac. Maybe his Louie is brighter than Johnny, and maybe his chugmobile is something terrific.

For the last few years, all on account of Mac, my two weeks in August have really been well spent. Beautiful! Why, from Mars City you can see low-slung mountains in the distance and dunes of soft, red sand stretching out to them. And the sunsets when you're standing on the parapets of that delicate crystal city … And, man, fishing in the Grand Canal …

How do you get to Mars? There's probably a couple of agencies in your own town. You can look them up in your phone book under "Vacation at the Planets of Pleasure" or something like that. They might be a little difficult to find though.

You see, they're not very well advertised yet.

The End

* * * *

Bagatelle

by John Varley

There was a bomb on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the promenade from Prosperity Plaza.

"I am a bomb," the bomb said to passersby. "I will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrololuene."

A small knot of people gathered to look at it.

"I will go off in four hours, four minutes, and thirty-seven seconds."

A few people became worried as the bomb talked on. They remembered business elsewhere and hurried away, often toward the tube trains to King City. Eventually, the trains became overcrowded and there was some pushing and shoving.

The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on four steerable wheels. There was an array of four television cameras mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning through ninety degrees. No one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the municipal street-cleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because of that.

"I am rated at fifty kilotons," the bomb said, with a trace of pride.

The police were called.

"A nuclear bomb, you say?" Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach felt sourness in the pit of her stomach and reached for a box of medicated candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the rate she went through them on her job, coupled with the size of her paycheck, had caused her to rely more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned transplants was going up.

"It says fifty kilotons," said the man on the screen. "I don't see what else it could be. Unless it's just faking, of course. We're moving in radiation detectors."

"You said 'it says.' Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?"

"No. It's talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven't gotten around to asking it to disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness won't extend that far."

"No doubt." She ate another candy. "Call in the bomb squad, of course. Then tell them to do nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation over. I'm going to make a few calls, then I'll be there. No more than thirty minutes."

"All right. Will do."

There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever been used on Luna. Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb crew. She brought her computer on line.

Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn't so much the working conditions—which were appalling—but the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty days, twenty-four hours a day, at a salary that was nearly astronomical. Then he got eleven months' paid vacation. He was paid for the entire year whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his thirty days' duty. In that way, he was like a firefighter. In a way, he was a firefighter.

He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he did so; had they asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a subconscious conviction that one day the entire planet Earth would blow up in one glorious fireball. He didn't want to be there when it happened.

Birkson's job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit called CommEcon Europe. On a busy shift he might save the lives of twenty million CE Europeans.

Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of the Leystrasse bomb scare, Birkson happened to be closest to the projected epicenter of the blast. The Central Computer found him twenty-five seconds after Chief Bach rang off from her initial report. He was lining up a putt on the seventeenth green of the Burning Tree underground golf course, a half kilometer from Prosperity Plaza, when his bag of clubs began to ring.

Birkson was wealthy. He employed a human caddy instead of the mechanical sort. The caddy dropped the flag he had been holding and went to answer it. Birkson took a few practice swings but found that his concentration had been broken. He relaxed and took the call.

"I need your advice," Bach said, without preamble. "I'm the Chief of Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach. I've had a report on a nuclear bomb on the Leystrasse, and I don't have anyone with your experience in these matters. Could you meet me at the tube station in ten minutes?"

"Are you crazy? I'm shooting for a seventy-five with two holes to go, an easy three-footer on seventeen and facing a par five on the last hole, and you expect me to go chasing after a hoax?"

"Do you know it to be a hoax?" Bach asked, wishing he would say yes.

"Well, no, I just now heard about it, myself. But ninety percent of them are, you know."

"Fine. I suggest you continue your game. And since you're so sure, I'm going to have Burning Tree sealed off for the duration of the emergency. I want you right there."

Birkson considered this.

"About how far away is this 'Leystrasse'?"

"About six hundred meters. Five levels up from you, and one sector over. Don't worry. There must be dozens of steel plates between you and the hoax. You just sit tight, all right?"

Birkson said nothing.

"I'll be at the tube station in ten minutes," Bach said. "I'll be in a special capsule. It'll be the last one for five hours." She hung up.

Birkson contemplated the wall of the underground enclosure. Then he knelt on the green and lined up his putt. He addressed the ball, tapped it, and heard the satisfying rattle as it sank into the cup.

He looked longingly at the eighteenth tee, then jogged off to the clubhouse.

"I'll be right back," he called over his shoulder.

Bach's capsule was two minutes late, but she had to wait another minute for Birkson to show up. She fumed, trying not to glance at the timepiece embedded in her wrist.

He got in, still carrying his putter, and their heads were jerked back as the capsule was launched. They moved for only a short distance, then came to a halt. The door didn't open.

"The system's probably tied up," Bach said, squirming. She didn't like to see the municipal services fail in the company of this Terran.

"Ah," Birkson said, flashing a grin with an impossible number of square teeth. "A panic evacuation, no doubt. You didn't have the tube system closed down, I suppose?"

"No," she said. "I … well, I thought there might be a chance to get a large number of people away from the area in case this thing does go off."

He shook his head, and grinned again. He put this grin after every sentence he spoke, like punctuation.

"You'd better seal off the city. If it's a hoax, you're going to have hundreds of dead and injured from the panic. It's a lost cause trying to evacuate. At most, you might save a few thousand."

"But …"

"Keep them stationary. If it goes off, it's no use anyway. You'll lose the whole city. And no one's going to question your judgment because you'll be dead. If it doesn't go off, you'll be sitting pretty for having prevented a panic. Do it. I know."

Bach began to really dislike this man right then but decided to follow his advice. And his thinking did have a certain cold logic. She phoned the station and had the lid clamped on the city. Now the cars in the cross-tube ahead would be cleared, leaving only her priority capsule moving.

They used the few minutes' delay while the order was implemented to size each other up. Bach saw a blond, square-jawed young man in a checkered sweater and gold knickers. He had a friendly face, and that was what puzzled her. There was no trace of worry on his smooth features. His hands were steady, clasped calmly around the steel shaft of his putter. She wouldn't have called his manner cocky or assured, but he did manage to look cheerful.

She had just realized that he was looking her over, and was wondering what he saw, when he put his hand on her knee. He might as well have slapped her. She was stunned.

"What are you … get your hand off me, you … you groundhog."

Birkson's hand had been moving upward. He was apparently unfazed by the insult. He turned in his seat and reached for her hand. His smile was dazzling.

"I just thought that since we're stalled here with nothing else to do, we might start getting to know each other. No harm in that, is there? I just hate to waste any time, that's all."

She wrenched free of his grasp and assumed a defensive posture, feeling trapped in a nightmare. But he relented, having no interest in pursuing the matter when he had been rebuffed.

"All right. We'll wait. But I'd like to have a drink with you, or maybe dinner. After this thing's wrapped up, of course."

"'This thing …' How can you think of something like that …?"

"At a time like this. I know. I've heard it. Bombs get me horny, is all. So okay, so I'll leave you alone." He grinned again. "But maybe you'll feel different when this is over."

For a moment she thought she was going to throw up from a combination of revulsion and fear. Fear of the bomb, not this awful man. Her stomach was twisted into a pretzel, and here he sat, thinking of sex. What was he, anyway?

The capsule lurched again, and they were on their way.

The deserted Leystrasse made a gleaming frame of stainless steel storefronts and fluorescent ceiling for the improbable pair hurrying from the tube station in the Plaza: Birkson in his anachronistic golf togs, cleats rasping on the polished rock floor, and Bach, half a meter taller than him, thin like a Lunarian. She wore the regulation uniform of the Municipal Police, which was a blue armband and cap with her rank of chief emblazoned on them, a shoulder holster, an equipment belt around her waist from which dangled the shining and lethal-looking tools of her trade, cloth slippers, and a few scraps of clothing in arbitrary places. In the benign environment of Lunar corridors, modesty had died out ages ago.

They reached the cordon that had been established around the bomb, and Bach conferred with the officer in charge. The hall was echoing with off-key music.

"What's that?" Birkson asked.

Officer Walters, the man to whom Bach had been speaking, looked Birkson over, weighing just how far he had to go in deference to this grinning weirdo. He was obviously the bomb expert Bach had referred to in an earlier call, but he was a Terran, and not a member of the force. Should he be addressed as 'sir'? He couldn't decide.

"It's the bomb. It's been singing to us for the last five minutes. Ran out of things to say, I guess."

"Interesting." Swinging the putter lazily from side to side, he walked to the barrier of painted steel crowd-control sections. He started sliding one of them to the side.

"Hold it … ah, sir," Walters said.

"Wait a minute, Birkson," Bach confirmed, running to the man and almost grabbing his sleeve. She backed away at the last moment.

"It said no one's to cross that barrier," Walter supplied to Bach's questioning glance. "Says it'll blow us all to the Farside."

"What is that damn thing, anyway?" Bach asked, plaintively.

Birkson withdrew from the barrier and took Bach aside with a tactful touch on the arm. He spoke to her with his voice just low enough for Walters to hear.

"It's a cyborged human connected to a bomb, probably a uranium device," he said. "I've seen the design. It's just like one that went off in Johannesburg three years ago. I didn't know they were still making them."

"I heard about it," Bach said, feeling cold and alone. "Then you think it's really a bomb? How do you know it's a cyborg? Couldn't it be tape recordings, or a computer?"

Birkson rolled his eyes slightly, and Bach reddened. Damn it, they were reasonable questions. And to her surprise, he could not defend his opinion logically. She wondered what she was stuck with. Was this man really the expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter?

"You can call it a hunch. I'm going to talk to this fellow, and I want you to roll up an industrial X-ray unit on the level below this while I'm doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the idea?"

"You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won't that be dangerous?"

"Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?"

Bach said nothing, but gave the orders. A million questions were spinning through her head, but she didn't want to make a fool of herself by asking a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big industrial X-ray machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a feeling she wouldn't like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn't handle it. He was about the only hope she had.

And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddamn putter behind him, whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the bomb. What was a career police officer to do? Back him up on the harmonica?

The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion. One of them began to track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest and waved to it. The music stopped.

"I am a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-235 type," it said. "You must stay behind the perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must not disobey this order."

Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers.

"You got me, bud. I won't bother you. I was just admiring your casing. Pretty nice job, there. It seems a shame to blow it up."

"Thank you," the bomb said, cordially. "But that is my purpose. You cannot divert me from it."

"Never entered my mind. Promise."

"Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe distance. Do not attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely protected, and I have a response time of three milliseconds. I can ignite long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the allotted time has come."

Birkson whistled. "That's pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I'm sure. It must be nice, being able to move like that after blundering along all your life with neural speeds."

"Yes, I find it very gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of becoming a bomb."

This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not blinded her to the fact that he had been checking out his hunch. And her questions had been answered: no tape array could answer questions like that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human being at one time.

Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing. He paused, and said in a low voice, "Check out that time."

"What time?"

"What time did you say you were going to explode?" he yelled.

"In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds," the bomb supplied.

"That time," he whispered. "Get your computers to work on it. See if it's the anniversary of any political group, or the time something happened that someone might have a grudge about." He started to turn away, then thought of something. "But most important, check the birth records."

"May I ask why?"

He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. "I'm just feeling this character out. I've got a feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who was born at that time—it can't be too many, down to the second—and try to locate them all. The one you can't find will be our guy. I'm betting on it."

"What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it's a man?"

That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask questions. Why should he make her feel defensive about it?

"Because he's chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that's not conclusive, but you get hunches after a while. As to what I'm betting … no, it's not my life. I'm sure I can get this one. How about dinner tonight if I'm right?" The smile was ingenuous, without the trace of lechery she thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still crawling. She turned away without answering.

For the next twenty minutes, nothing much happened. Birkson continued his slow stroll around the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his head in admiration. The thirty men and women of Chief Bach's police detail stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover.

Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering from a command post that had been set up around the corner, in the Elysian Travel Agency. It had phones and a computer output printer. She sensed the dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing going on. Had they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in the Plaza, taking bearings to within a thousandth of a millimeter, they might have felt a little better. And on the floor below, the X-ray had arrived.

Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the silent, echoing corridor from her position halfway between the travel agency and the bomb. She turned and met a young officer with the green armband of a rookie. The woman's hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and below that, some dates and events listed.

"This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem," the officer explained. "Very low probability stuff. The three people were all born either on the second or within a three-second margin of error, in three different years. Everyone else has been contacted."

"Keep looking for these three, too," Bach said. As she turned away, she noticed that the young officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She thought briefly of sending her away from the scene, but what was the use?

Birkson saw her coming and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He took the paper from her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part without being told it was low probability, crumpled it, and let it drop to the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb.

"Hans?" he called out.

"How did you know my name?" the bomb asked.

"Ah, Hans, my boy, credit us with some sense. You can't have got into this without knowing that the Munipol can do very fast investigations. Unless I've been underestimating you. Have I?"

"No," the bomb conceded. "I knew you would find out who I was. But it doesn't alter the situation."

"Of course not. But it makes for easier conversation. How has life been treating you, my friend?"

"Terrible," mourned the man who had become a fifty-kiloton nuclear weapon.

Every morning Hans Leiter rolled out of bed and padded into his cozy water closet. It was not the standard model for residential apartment modules but a special one he had installed after he moved in. Hans lived alone, and it was the one luxury he allowed himself. In his little palace, he sat in a chair that massaged him into wakefulness, washed him, shaved him, powdered him, cleaned his nails, splashed him with scent, then made love to him with a rubber imitation that was a good facsimile of the real thing. Hans was awkward with women.

He would dress, walk down three hundred meters of corridor, and surrender himself to a pedestrian slideway that took him as far as the Cross-Crisium Tube. There, he allowed himself to be fired like a projectile through a tunnel below the Lunar surface.

Hans worked in the Crisium Heavy Machinery Foundry. His job there was repairing almost anything that broke down. He was good at it; he was much more comfortable with machines than with people.

One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was not a serious accident, because the fail-safe systems turned off the machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it hurt terribly and completely ruined the leg. It had to be taken off. While he was waiting for the cloned replacement limb to be grown, Hans had been fitted with a prosthetic.

It had been a revelation to him. It worked like a dream, as good as his old leg and perhaps better. It was connected to his severed leg nerve but was equipped with a threshold cut-off circuit, and one day when he barked his artificial shin he saw that it had caused him no pain. He recalled the way that same injury had felt with his flesh and blood leg, and again he was impressed. He thought, too, of the agony when his leg had been caught in the machine.

When the new leg was ready for transplanting, Hans had elected to retain the prosthetic. It was unusual but not unprecedented.

From that time on, Hans, who had never been known to his co-workers as talkative or social, withdrew even more from his fellow humans. He would speak only when spoken to. But people had observed him talking to the stamping press, and the water cooler, and the robot sweeper.

At night, it was Hans' habit to sit on his vibrating bed and watch the holovision until one o'clock. At that time, his kitchen would prepare him a late snack, roll it to him in his bed, and he would retire for the night.

For the last three years Hans had been neglecting to turn the set on before getting into bed. Nevertheless, he continued to sit quietly on the bed staring at the empty screen.

When she finished reading the personal data printout, Bach was struck once more at the efficiency of the machines in her control. This man was almost a cipher, yet there were nine thousand words in storage concerning his uneventful life, ready to be called up and printed into an excruciatingly boring biography.

"… so you came to feel that you were being controlled at every step in your life by machines," Birkson was saying. He was sitting on one of the barriers, swinging his legs back and forth. Bach joined him and offered the long sheet of printout. He waved it away. She could hardly blame him.

"But it's true!" the bomb said. "We all are, you know. We're part of this huge machine that's called New Dresden. It moves us around like parts on an assembly line, washes us, feeds us, puts us to bed and sings us to sleep."

"Ah," Birkson said, agreeably. "Are you a Luddite, Hans?"

"No!" the bomb said in a shocked voice. "Roger, you've missed the whole point. I don't want to destroy the machines. I want to serve them better. I wanted to become a machine, like my new leg. Don't you see? We're part of the machine, but we're the most inefficient part."

The two talked on, and Bach wiped the sweat from her palms. She couldn't see where all this was going, unless Birkson seriously hoped to talk Hans Leiter out of what he was going to do in—she glanced at the clock—two hours and forty-three minutes. It was maddening. On the one hand, she recognized the skill he was using in establishing a rapport with the cyborg. They were on a first-name basis, and at least the damn machine cared enough to argue its position. On the other hand, so what? What good was it doing?

Walters approached and whispered into her ear. She nodded and tapped Birkson on the shoulder.

"They're ready to take the picture whenever you are," she said.

He waved her off.

"Don't bother me," he said, loudly. "This is getting interesting. So if what you say is true," he went on to Hans, getting up and pacing intently back and forth, this time inside the line of barriers, "maybe I ought to look into this myself. You really like being cyborged better than being human?"

"Infinitely so," the bomb said. He sounded enthusiastic. "I need no sleep now, and I no longer have to bother with elimination or eating. I have a tank for nutrients, which are fed into the housing where my brain and central nervous system are located." He paused. "I tried to eliminate the ups and downs of hormone flow and the emotional reactions that followed," he confided.

"No dice, huh?"

"No. Something always distracted me. So when I heard of this place where they would cyborg me and get rid of all that, I jumped at the chance."

Inactivity was making Bach impulsive. She had to say or do something.

"Where did you get the work done, Hans?" she ventured.

The bomb started to say something, but Birkson laughed loudly and slapped Bach hard on the back. "Oh, no, Chief. That's pretty tricky, right, Hans? She's trying to get you to rat. That's not done, Chief. There's a point of honor involved."

"Who is that?" the bomb asked, suspiciously.

"Let me introduce Chief Anna-Louise Bach, of the New Dresden Police. Ann, meet Hans."

"Police?" Hans asked, and Bach felt goose-pimples when she detected a note of fright in the voice. What was this maniac trying to do, frightening the guy like that? She was close to pulling Birkson off the case. She held off because she thought she could see a familiar pattern in it, something she could use as a way to participate, even if ignominiously. It was the good guy-bad guy routine, one of the oldest police maneuvers in the book.

"Aw, don't be like that," Birkson said to Hans. "Not all cops are brutes. Ann here, she's a nice person. Give her a chance. She's only doing her job."

"Oh, I have no objection to police," the bomb said. "They are necessary to keep the social machine functioning. Law and order is a basic precept of the coming new Mechanical Society. I'm pleased to meet you, Chief Bach. I wish the circumstances didn't make us enemies."

"Pleased to meet you, Hans." She thought carefully before she phrased her next question. She wouldn't have to take the hard-line approach to contrast herself with affable, buddy-buddy Birkson. She needn't be an antagonist, but it wouldn't hurt if she asked questions that probed at his motives.

"Tell me, Hans. You say you're not a Luddite. You say you like machines. Do you know how many machines you'll destroy if you set yourself off? And even more important, what you'll do to this social machine you've been talking about? You'll wipe out the whole city."

The bomb seemed to be groping for words. He hesitated, and Bach felt the first glimmer of hope since this insanity began.

"You don't understand. You're speaking from an organic viewpoint. Life is important to you. A machine is not concerned with life. Damage to a machine, even the social machine, is simply something to be repaired. In a way, I hope to set an example. I wanted to become a machine—"

"And the best, the very ultimate machine," Birkson put in, "is the atomic bomb. It's the end point of all mechanical thinking."

"Exactly," said the bomb, sounding very pleased. It was nice to be understood. "I wanted to be the very best machine I could possibly be, and it had to be this."

"Beautiful, Hans," Birkson breathed. "I see what you're talking about. So if we go on with that line of thought, we logically come to the conclusion …" and he was off into an exploration of the fine points of the new Mechanistic worldview.

Bach was trying to decide which was the crazier of the two, when she was handed another message. She read it, then tried to find a place to break into the conversation. But there was no convenient place. Birkson was more and more animated, almost frothing at the mouth as he discovered points of agreement between the two of them. Bach noticed her officers standing around nervously, following the conversation. It was clear from their expressions that they feared they were being sold out, that when zero hour arrived they would still be here watching intellectual ping-pong. But long before that, she could have a mutiny on her hands. Several of them were fingering their weapons, probably without even knowing it.

She touched Birkson on the sleeve, but he waved her away. Damn it, this was too much. She grabbed him and nearly pulled him from his feet, swung him around until her mouth was close to his ear and growled.

"Listen to me, you idiot. They're going to take the picture. You'll have to stand back some. It's better if we're all shielded."

"Leave me alone," he shot back and pulled from her grasp. But he was still smiling. "This is just getting interesting," he said, in a normal tone of voice.

Birkson came near to dying in that moment. Three guns were trained on him from the circle of officers, awaiting only the order to fire. They didn't like seeing their Chief treated that way.

Bach herself was damn near to giving the order. The only thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that with Birkson dead, the machine might go off ahead of schedule. The only thing to do now was to get him out of the way and go on as best she could, knowing that she was doomed to failure. No one could say she hadn't given the expert a chance.

"But what I was wondering about," Birkson was saying, "was why today? What happened today? Is this the day Cyrus McCormick invented the combine harvester or something?"

"It's my birthday," Hans said, somewhat shyly.

"Your birthday?" Birkson managed to look totally amazed to learn what he already knew. "Your birthday. That's great, Hans. Many happy returns of the day, my friend." He turned and took in all of the officers with an expansive sweep of his hands. "Let's sing, people. Come on, it's his birthday, for heaven's sake. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Hans …"

He bellowed, he was off-key, he swept his hands in grand circles with no sense of rhythm. But so infectious was his mania that several of the officers found themselves joining in. He ran around the circle, pulling the words out of them with great scooping motions of his hands.

Bach bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep herself steady. She had been singing, too. The scene was so ridiculous, so blackly improbable …

She was not the only one who was struck the same way. One of her officers, a brave man who she knew personally to have shown courage under fire, fell on his face in a dead faint. A woman officer covered her face with her hands and fled down the corridor, making helpless coughing sounds. She found an alcove and vomited.

And still Birkson capered. Bach had her gun halfway out of the shoulder holster, when he shouted.

"What's a birthday without a party?" he asked. "Let's have a big party." He looked around, fixed on the flower shop. He started for it, and as he passed Bach he whispered, "Take the picture now."

It galvanized her. She desperately wanted to believe he knew what he was doing, and just at the moment when his madness seemed total he had shown her the method. A distraction. Please, let it be a distraction. She turned and gave the prearranged signal to the officer standing at the edge of Prosperity Plaza.

She turned back in time to see Birkson smash in the window of the flower shop with his putter. It made a deafening crash.

"Goodness," said Hans, who sounded truly shocked. "Did you have to do that? That's private property."

"What does it matter?" Birkson yelled. "Hell, man, you're going to do much worse real soon. I'm just getting things started." He reached in and pulled out an armload of flowers, signaling to others to give him a hand. The police didn't like it, but soon were looting the shop and building a huge wreath just outside the line of barriers.

"I guess you're right," said Hans, a little breathlessly. A taste of violence had excited him, whetted his appetite for more to come. "But you startled me. I felt a real thrill, like I haven't felt since I was human."

"Then let's do it some more." And Birkson ran up and down one side of the street, breaking out every window he could reach. He picked up small articles he found inside the shops and threw them. Some of them shattered when they hit.

He finally stopped. Leystrasse had been transformed. No longer the scrubbed and air-conditioned Lunar environment, it had become as shattered, as chaotic and uncertain, as the tension-filled emotional atmosphere it contained. Bach shuddered and swallowed the rising taste of bile. It was a precursor of things to come, she was sure. It hit her deeply to see the staid and respectable Leystrasse ravaged.

"A cake," Birkson said. "We have to have a cake. Hold on a minute, I'll be right back." He strode quickly toward Bach, took her elbow and turned her, pulled her insistently away with him.

"You have to get those officers away from here," he said, conversationally. "They're tense. They could explode at any minute. In fact," and he favored her with his imbecile grin, "they're probably more dangerous right now than the bomb."

"You mean you think it's a fake?"

"No. It's for real. I know the psychological pattern. After this much trouble, he won't want to be a dud. Other types, they're in it for the attention and they'd just as soon fake it. Not Hans. But what I mean is, I have him. I can get him. But I can't count on your officers. Pull them back and leave only two or three of your most trusted people."

"All right." She had decided again, more from a sense of helpless futility than anything else, to trust him. He had pulled a neat diversion with the flower shop and the X-ray.

"We may have him already," he went on, as they reached the end of the street and turned the corner. "Often, the X-ray is enough. It cooks some of the circuitry and makes it unreliable. I'd hoped to kill him outright, but he's shielded. Oh, he's probably got a lethal dosage, but it'd take him days to die. That doesn't do us any good. And if his circuitry is knocked out, the only way to find out is to wait. We have to do better than that. Here's what I want you to do."

He stopped abruptly and relaxed, leaning against the wall and gazing out over the trees and artificial sunlight of the Plaza. Bach could hear songbirds. They had always made her feel good before. Now all she could think of was incinerated corpses. Birkson ticked off points on his fingers.

She listened to him carefully. Some of it was strange, but no worse than she had already witnessed. And he really did have a plan. He really did. The sense of relief was so tremendous that it threatened to create a mood of euphoria in her, one not yet justified by the circumstances. She nodded curtly to each of his suggestions, then again to the officer who stood beside her, confirming what Birkson had said and turning it into orders. The young man rushed off to carry them out, and Birkson started to return to the bomb. Bach grabbed him.

"Why wouldn't you let Hans answer my question about who did the surgical work on him? Was that part of your plan?" The question was half-belligerent.

"Oh. Yeah, it was, in a way. I just grabbed the opportunity to make him feel closer to me. But it wouldn't have done you any good. He'll have a block against telling that, for sure. It could even be set to explode the bomb if he tries to answer that question. Hans is a maniac, but don't underestimate the people who helped him get where he is now. They'll be protected."

"Who are they?"

Birkson shrugged. It was such a casual, uncaring gesture that Bach was annoyed again.

"I have no idea. I'm not political, Ann. I don't know the Antiabortion Movement from the Freedom for Mauretania League. They build 'em, I take 'em apart. It's as simple as that. Your job is to find out how it happened. I guess you ought to get started on that."

"We already have," she conceded. "I just thought that … well, coming from Earth, where this sort of thing happens all the time, that you might know … damn it, Birkson. Why? Why is this happening?"

He laughed, while Bach turned red and went into a slow boil. Any of her officers, seeing her expression, would have headed for the nearest blast shelter. But Birkson laughed on. Didn't he give a damn about anything?

"Sorry," he forced out. "I've heard that question before, from other police chiefs. It's a good question." He waited, a half smile on his face. When she didn't say anything, he went on.

"You don't have the right perspective on this, Ann."

"That's Chief Bach to you, damn you."

"Okay," he said, easily. "What you don't see is that this thing is no different from a hand grenade tossed into a crowd or a bomb sent through the mail. It's a form of communication. It's just that today, with so many people, you have to shout a little louder to get any attention."

"But … who? They haven't even identified themselves. You're saying that Hans is a tool of these people. He's been wired into the bomb, with his own motives for exploding. Obviously he didn't have the resources to do this himself, I can see that."

"Oh, you'll hear from them. I don't think they expect him to be successful. He's a warning. If they were really serious, they could find the sort of person they want, one who's politically committed and will die for the cause. Of course, they don't care if the bomb goes off; they'll be pleasantly surprised if it does. Then they can stand up and pound their chests for a while. They'll be famous."

"But where did they get the uranium? The security is …"

For the first time, Birkson showed a trace of annoyance.

"Don't be silly. The path leading to today was irrevocably set in 1945. There was never any way to avoid it. The presence of a tool implies that it will be used. You can try your best to keep it in the hands of what you think of as responsible people, but it'll never work. And it's no different, that's what I'm saying. This bomb is just another weapon. It's a cherry bomb in an anthill. It's gonna cause one hill of ants a hell of a lot of trouble, but it's no threat to the race of ants."

Bach could not see it that way. She tried, but it was still a nightmare of entirely new proportions to her. How could he equate the killing of millions of people with a random act of violence where three or four might be hurt? She was familiar with that. Bombs went off every day in her city, as in every human city. People were always dissatisfied.

"I could walk down … no, it's up here, isn't it?" Birkson mused for a moment on cultural differences. "Anyway, give me enough money, and I'll bet I could go up to your slum neighborhoods right this minute and buy you as many kilos of uranium or plutonium as you want. Which is something you ought to be doing, by the way. Anything can be bought. Anything. For the right price, you could have bought weapons-grade material on the black market as early as 1960 or so. It would have been very expensive; there wasn't much of it. You'd have had to buy a lot of people. But now … well, you think it out." He stopped, and seemed embarrassed by his outburst.

"I've read a little about this," he apologized.

She did think it out as she followed him back to the cordon. What he said was true. When controlled fusion proved too costly for wide-scale use, humanity had opted for fast breeder reactors. There had been no other choice. And from that moment, nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists had been the price humanity accepted. And the price they would continue to pay.

"I wanted to ask you one more question," she said. He stopped and turned to face her. His smile was dazzling.

"Ask away. But are you going to take me up on that bet?"

She was momentarily unsure of what he meant.

"Oh. Are you saying you'd help us locate the underground uranium ring? I'd be grateful …"

"No, no. Oh, I'll help you. I'm sure I can make a contact. I used to do that before I got into this game. What I meant was, are you going to bet I can't find some? We could bet … say, a dinner together as soon as I've found it. Time limit of seven days. How about it?"

She thought she had only two alternatives: walk away from him, or kill him. But she found a third.

"You're a betting man. I guess I can see why. But that's what I wanted to ask you. How can you stay so calm? Why doesn't this get to you like it does to me and my people. You can't tell me it's simply that you're used to it."

He thought about it. "And why not? You can get used to anything, you know. Now, what about that bet?"

"If you don't stop talking about that," she said, quietly, "I'm going to break your arm."

"All right." He said nothing further, and she asked no further questions.

The fireball grew in milliseconds into an inferno that could scarcely be described in terms comprehensible to humans. Everything in a half-kilometer radius simply vanished into super-heated gases and plasma: buttresses, plate-glass windows, floors and ceilings, pipes, wires, tanks, machines, gewgaws and trinkets by the million, books, tapes, apartments, furniture, household pets, men, women, and children. They were the lucky ones. The force of the expanding blast compressed two hundred levels below it like a giant sitting on a Dagwood sandwich, making holes through plate steel turned to putty by the heat as easily as a punch press through tinfoil. Upward, the surface bulged into the soundless Lunar night and split to reveal a white hell beneath. Chunks flew away, chunks as large as city sectors, before the center collapsed back on itself to leave a crater whose walls were a maze of compartments and ant tunnels that dripped and flowed like warm gelatin. No trace was left of human bodies within two kilometers of the explosion. They had died after only the shortest period of suffering, their bodies consumed or spread into an invisible layer of organic film by the combination of heat and pressure that passed through walls, entered rooms where the doors were firmly shut. Further away, the sound was enough to congeal the bodies of a million people before the heat roasted them, the blast stripped flesh from bones to leave shrunken stick figures. Still the effects attenuated as the blast was channeled into corridors that were structurally strong enough to remain intact, and that very strength was the downfall of the inhabitants of the maze. Twenty kilometers from the epicenter, pressure doors popped through steel flanges like squeezed watermelon seeds.

What was left was five million burnt, blasted corpses and ten million injured so hideously that they would die in hours or days. But Bach had been miraculously thrown clear by some freak of the explosion. She hurtled through the void with fifteen million ghosts following her, and each carried a birthday cake. They were singing. She joined in.

"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday …"

"Chief Bach."

"Huh?" She felt a cold chill pass over her body. For a moment she could only stare down into the face of Roger Birkson.

"You all right now?" he asked. He looked concerned.

"I'm … what happened?"

He patted her on both arms, then shook her heartily.

"Nothing. You drifted off for a moment." He narrowed his eyes. "I think you were daydreaming. I want to be diplomatic about this … ah, what I mean … I've seen it happen before. I think you were trying to get away from us."

She rubbed her hands over her face.

"I think I was. But I sure went in the wrong direction. I'm all right now." She could remember it now, and knew she had not passed out or become totally detached from what was going on. She had watched it all. Her memories of the explosion, so raw and real a moment before, were already the stuff of nightmares.

Too bad she hadn't come awake into a better world. It was so damn unfair. That was the reward at the end of a nightmare, wasn't it? You woke up to find everything was all right.

Instead, here was a long line of uniformed officers bearing birthday cakes to a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb.

Birkson had ordered the lights turned off in the Leystrasse. When his order had not been carried out, he broke out the lights with his putter. Soon, he had some of the officers helping him.

Now the beautiful Leystrasse, the pride of New Dresden, was a flickering tunnel through hell. The light of a thousand tiny birthday candles on five hundred cakes turned everything red-orange and made people into shadowed demons. Officers kept arriving with hastily wrapped presents, flowers, balloons. Hans, the little man who was now nothing but a brain and nerve network floating in a lead container; Hans, the cause of all this, the birthday boy himself, watched it all in unconcealed delight from his battery of roving television cameras. He sang loudly.

"I am a bomb! I am a bomb!" he yelled. He had never had so much fun.

Bach and Birkson retreated from the scene into the darkened recess of the Bagatelle Flower Shoppe. There, a stereo viewing tank had been set up.

The X-ray picture had been taken with a moving plate technique that allowed a computer to generate a three dimensional model. They leaned over the tank now and studied it. They had been joined by Sergeant McCoy, Bach's resident bomb expert, and another man from the Lunar Radiation Laboratory.

"This is Hans," said Birkson, moving a red dot in the tank by means of a dial on the side. It flicked over and around a vague gray shape that trailed dozens of wires. Bach wondered again at the pressures that would allow a man to like having his body stripped from him. There was nothing in that lead flask but the core of the man, the brain and central nervous system.

"Here's the body of the bomb. The two subcritical masses. The H.E. charge, the timer, the arming barrier, which is now withdrawn. It's an old design, ladies and gentlemen. Old, but reliable. As basic as the bow and arrow. It's very much like the first one dropped on the Nippon Empire at Hiroshima."

"You're sure it'll go off, then?" Bach put in.

"Sure as taxes. Hell, a kid could build one of these in the bathroom, given only the uranium and some shielding equipment. Now let me see." He pored over the phantom in the tank, tracing out wiring paths with the experts. They debated possibilities, lines of attack, drawbacks. At last they seemed to reach a consensus.

"As I see it, we have only one option," Birkson said. "We have to go for his volitional control over the bomb. I'm pretty sure we've isolated the main cable that goes from him to the detonator. Knock that out, and he can't do a thing. We can pry that tin can open by conventional means and disarm that way. McCoy?"

"I agree," said McCoy. "We'd have a full hour, and I'm sure we can get in there with no trouble. When they cyborged this one, they put all their cards on the human operator. They didn't bother with entry blocks, since Hans could presumably blow it up before we could get close enough to do anything. With his control out, we only have to open it up with a torch and drop the damper into place."

The LRL man nodded his agreement. "Though I'm not quite as convinced as Mr. Birkson that he's got the right cable in mind for what he wants to do. If we had more time …"

"We've wasted enough time already," Bach said, decisively. She had swung rapidly from near terror of Roger Birkson to total trust. It was her only defense. She knew she could do nothing at all about the bomb and had to trust someone.

"Then we go for it. Is your crew in place? Do they know what to do? And above all, are they good? Really good? There won't be a second chance."

"Yes, yes, and yes," Bach said. "They'll do it. We know how to cut rock on Luna."

"Then give them the coordinates, and go." Birkson seemed to relax a bit. Bach saw that he had been under some form of tension, even if it was only excitement at the challenge. He had just given his last order. It was no longer in his hands. His fatalistic gambler's instinct came into play, and the restless, churning energy he had brought to the enterprise vanished. There was nothing to do about it but wait. Birkson was good at waiting. He had lived through twenty-one of these final countdowns.

He faced Bach and started to say something to her, then thought better of it. She saw doubt in his face for the first time, and it made her skin crawl. Damn it, she had thought he was sure.

"Chief," he said, quietly, "I want to apologize for the way I treated you these last few hours. It's not something I can control when I'm on the job. I …"

This time it was Bach's turn to laugh, and the release of tension it brought with it was almost orgasmic. She felt like she hadn't laughed for a million years.

"Forgive me," she said. "I saw you were worried, and thought it was about the bomb. It was just such a relief."

"Oh, yeah," he said, dismissing it. "No point in worrying now. Either your people hit it or they don't. We won't know if they don't. What I was saying, it just sort of comes over me. Honestly. I get horny, I get manic, I totally forget about other people except as objects to be manipulated. So I just wanted to say I like you. I'm glad you put up with me. And I won't pester you anymore."

She came over and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Can I call you Roger? Thanks. Listen, if this thing works, I'll have dinner with you. I'll give you the key to the city, a ticker-tape parade, and a huge bonus for a consultant fee … and my eternal friendship. We've been tense, okay? Let's forget about these last few hours."

"All right." His smile was quite different this time.

Outside, it happened very quickly. The crew on the laser drill were positioned beneath the bomb, working from ranging reports and calculations to aim their brute at precisely the right spot.

The beam took less than a tenth of a second to eat through the layer of rock in the ceiling and emerge in the air above the Leystrasse. It ate through the metal sheath of the bomb's underside, the critical wire, the other side of the bomb, and part of the ceiling like they weren't even there. It had penetrated into the level above before it could be shut off.

There was a shower of sparks, a quick sliding sound, then a muffled thud. The whole structure of the bomb trembled, and smoke screeched from the two drilled holes in the top and bottom. Bach didn't understand it but could see that she was alive and assumed it was over. She turned to Birkson, and the shock of seeing him nearly stopped her heart.

His face was a gray mask, drained of blood. His mouth hung open. He swayed and almost fell over. Bach caught him and eased him to the floor.

"Roger … what is it? Is it still … will it go off? Answer me, answer me. What should I do?"

He waved weakly, pawed at her hands. She realized he was trying to give her a reassuring pat. It was feeble indeed.

"No danger," he wheezed, trying to get his breath back. "No danger. The wrong wire. We hit the wrong wire. Just luck is all, nothing but luck."

She remembered. They had been trying to remove Hans' control over the bomb. Was he still in control? Birkson answered before she could speak.

"He's dead. That explosion. That was the detonator going off. He reacted just too late. We hit the disarming switch. The shield dropped into place so the masses couldn't come together even if the bomb was set off. Which he did. He set it off. That sound, that mmmmmmwooooph!" He was not with her. His eyes stared back into a time and place that held horror for him.

"I heard that sound—the detonator—once before, over the telephone. I was coaching this woman, no more than twenty-five, because I couldn't get there in time. She had only three more minutes. I heard that sound, then nothing, nothing."

She sat near him on the floor as her crew began to sort out the mess, haul the bomb away for disposal, laugh and joke in hysterical relief. At last Birkson regained control of himself. There was no trace of the bomb except a distant hollowness in his eyes.

"Come on," he said, getting to his feet with a little help from her. "You're going on twenty-four-hour leave. You've earned it. We're going back to Burning Tree, and you're going to watch me make a par five on the eighteenth. Then we've got a date for dinner. What place is nice?"

The End

* * * *

View from a Height

by Joan D. Vinge

SATURDAY, THE 7TH

I want to know why those pages were missing! How am I supposed to keep up with my research if they leave out pages—?

(Long sighing noise.)

Listen to yourself, Emmylou: You're listening to the sound of fear. It was an oversight, you know that. Nobody did it to you on purpose. Relax, you're getting Fortnight Fever. Tomorrow you'll get the pages, and an apology too, if Harvey Weems knows what's good for him.

But still, five whole pages; and the table of contents. How could you miss five pages? And the table of contents.

How do I know there hasn't been a coup? The Northwest's finally taken over completely, and they're censoring the media—and like the Man without a Country, everything they send me from now on is going to have holes cut in it.

In Science?

Or maybe Weems has decided to drive me insane—?

Oh, my God … it would be a short trip. Look at me. I don't have any fingernails left.

("Arrwk. Hello, beautiful. Hello? Hello?")

("Ozymandias! Get out of my hair, you devil." Laughter. "Polly want a cracker? Here … gently! That's a boy.")

It's beautiful when he flies. I never get tired of watching him, or looking at him, even after twenty years. Twenty years … What did the Psittacidae do, to win the right to wear a rainbow as their plumage? Although the way we've hunted them for it, you could say it was a mixed blessing. Like some other things.

Twenty years. How strange it sounds to hear those words, and know they're true. There are gray hairs when I look in the mirror. Wrinkles starting. And Weems is bald! Bald as an egg, and all squinty behind his spectacles. How did we get that way, without noticing it? Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.

Twelve days is a long time to wait for somebody to return your call. Twenty years is a long time gone. But I feel somehow as though it was only last week that I left home. I keep the circuits clean, going over them and over them, showing those mental home movies until I could almost step across, sometimes, into that other reality. But then I always look down, and there's that tremendous abyss full of space and time, and I realize I can't, again. You can't go home again.

Especially when you're almost one thousand astronomical units out in space. Almost there, the first rung of the ladder. Next Thursday is the day. Oh, that bottle of champagne that's been waiting for so long. Oh, the parallax view! I have the equal of the best astronomical equipment in all of near-Earth space at my command, and a view of the universe that no one has ever had before; and using them has made me the only astrophysicist ever to win a Ph.D. in deep space. Talk about your fieldwork.

Strange to think that if the Forward Observatory had massed less than its thousand-plus tons, I would have been replaced by a machine. But because the installation is so large, I, in my infinite human flexibility, even with my infinite human appetite, become the most efficient legal tender. And the farther out I get, the more important my own ability to judge what happens, and respond to it, becomes. The first—and maybe the last—manned interstellar probe, on a one-way journey into infinity … into a universe unobscured by our own system's gases and dust … equipped with eyes that see everything from gamma to ultra-long wavelengths, and ears that listen to the music of the spheres.

And Emmylou Stewart, the captive audience. Adrift on a star … if you hold with the idea that all the bits of inert junk drifting through space, no matter how small, have star potential. Dark stars, with brilliance in their secret hearts, only kept back from letting it shine by Fate, which denied them the critical mass to reach their kindling point.

Speak of kindling: the laser beam just arrived to give me my daily boost, moving me a little faster, so I'll reach a little deeper into the universe. Blue sky at bedtime; I always was a night person. I'm sure they didn't design the solar sail to filter light like the sky … but I'm glad it happened to work out that way. Sky blue was always my passion—the color, texture, fluid purity of it. This color isn't exactly right; but it doesn't matter, because I can't remember how anymore. This sky is a sun-catcher. A big blue parasol. But so was the original, from where I used to stand. The sky is a blue parasol … did anyone ever say that before, I wonder? If anyone knows, speak up—

Is anyone even listening? Will anyone ever be?

("Who cares, anyway? Come on, Ozzie—climb aboard. Let's drop down to the observation porch while I do my meditation, and try to remember what days were like.")

Weems, damn it, I want satisfaction!

· · · · ·

SUNDAY, THE 8TH

That idiot. That intolerable moron—how could he do that to me? After all this time, wouldn't you think he'd know me better than that? To keep me waiting for twelve days, wondering and afraid: twelve days of all the possible stupid paranoias I could weave with my idle hands and mind, making myself miserable, asking for trouble—

And then giving it to me. God, he must be some kind of sadist. If I could only reach him, and hurt him the way I've hurt these past hours—

Except that I know the news wasn't his fault, and that he didn't mean to hurt me … and so I can't even ease my pain by projecting it onto him.

I don't know what I would have done if his image hadn't been six days stale when it got here. What would I have done, if he'd been in earshot when I was listening; what would I have said? Maybe no more than I did say.

What can you say, when you realize you've thrown your whole life away?

He sat there behind his faded blotter, twiddling his pen, picking up his souvenir moon rocks and laying them down—looking for all the world like a man with a time bomb in his desk drawer—and said, "Now don't worry, Emmylou. There's no problem …" Went on saying it, one way or another, for five minutes; until I was shouting, "What's wrong, damn it?"

"I thought you'd never even notice the few pages …," with that sidling smile of his.

And while I'm muttering, "I may have been in solitary confinement for twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn't turned my brain to mush," he said, "So maybe I'd better explain, first"—and the look on his face; oh, the look on his face. "There's been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on Earth, you … well, your body's immune responses could be … made normal …" And then he looked down, as though he could really see the look on my own face.

Made normal. Made normal. It's all I can hear. I was born with no natural immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No. No, no, no, that's all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit … And now it's all changed. They could cure me. But I can't go home. I knew this could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that fact, and now it's too late to do anything about it.

Then why can't I forget that I could have been f-free …

… I didn't answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There's nothing to say. Nothing at all.

I'm so tired.

· · · · ·

MONDAY, THE 9TH

Couldn't sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind … Finally took some pills. Slept all day, feel like hell. Stupid. And it didn't go away. It was waiting for me, still waiting, when I woke up.

It isn't fair—!

I don't feel like talking about it.

· · · · ·

TUESDAY, THE 10TH

Tuesday, already. I haven't done a thing for two days. I haven't even started to check out the relay beacon, and that damn thing has to be dropped off this week. I don't have any strength; I can't seem to move, I just sit. But I have to get back to work. Have to …

Instead I read the printout of the article today. Hoping I'd find a flaw! If that isn't the greatest irony of my entire life. For two decades I prayed that somebody would find a cure for me. And for two more decades I didn't care. Am I going to spend the next two decades hating it, now that it's been found?

No … hating myself. I could have been free, they could have cured me; if only I'd stayed on Earth. If only I'd been patient. But now it's too late … by twenty years.

I want to go home. I want to go home … But you can't go home again. Did I really say that, so blithely, so recently? You can't: You, Emmylou Stewart. You are in prison, just as you have always been in prison.

It's all come back to me so strongly. Why me? Why must I be the ultimate victim? In all my life I've never smelled the sea wind, or plucked berries from a bush and eaten them, right there! Or felt my parents' kisses against my skin, or a man's body … Because to me they were all deadly things.

I remember when I was a little girl, and we still lived in Victoria—I was just three or four, just at the brink of understanding that I was the only prisoner in my world. I remember watching my father sit polishing his shoes in the morning, before he left for the museum. And me smiling, so deviously, "Daddy … I'll help you do that, if you let me come out—"

And he came to the wall of my bubble and put his arms into the hugging gloves, and said, so gently, "No." And then he began to cry. And I began to cry too, because I didn't know why I'd made him unhappy …

And all the children at school, with their "spaceman" jokes, pointing at the freak; all the years of insensitive people asking the same stupid questions every time I tried to go out anywhere … worst of all, the ones who weren't stupid, or insensitive. Like Jeffrey … no, I will not think about Jeffrey! I couldn't let myself think about him then. I could never afford to get close to a man, because I'd never be able to touch him …

And now it's too late. Was I controlling my fate, when I volunteered for this one-way trip? Or was I just running away from a life where I was always helpless; helpless to escape the things I hated, helpless to embrace the things I loved?

I pretended this was different, and important … but was that really what I believed? No! I just wanted to crawl into a hole I couldn't get out of, because I was so afraid.

So afraid that one day I would unseal my plastic walls, or take off my helmet and my suit; walk out freely to breathe the air, or wade in a stream, or touch flesh against flesh … and die of it.

So now I've walled myself into this hermetically sealed tomb for a living death. A perfectly sterile environment, in which my body will not even decay when I die. Never having really lived, I shall never really die, dust to dust. A perfectly sterile environment; in every sense of the word.

I often stand looking at my body in the mirror after I take a shower. Hazel eyes, brown hair in thick waves with hardly any gray … and a good figure; not exactly stacked, but not unattractive. And no one has ever seen it that way but me. Last night I had the Dream again … I haven't had it for such a long time … this time I was sitting on a carved wooden beast in the park beside the Provincial Museum in Victoria; but not as a child in my suit. As a college girl, in white shorts and a bright cotton shirt, feeling the sun on my shoulders, and—Jeffrey's arms around my waist … We stroll along the bayside hand in hand, under the Victorian lamp posts with their bright hanging flower-baskets, and everything I do is fresh and spontaneous and full of the moment. But always, always, just when he holds me in his arms at last, just as I'm about to … I wake up.

When we die, do we wake out of reality at last, and all our dreams come true? When I die … I will be carried on and on into the timeless depths of uncharted space in this computerized tomb, unmourned and unremembered. In time all the atmosphere will seep away; and my fair corpse, lying like Snow White's in inviolate sleep, will be sucked dry of moisture, until it is nothing but a mummified parchment of shriveled leather and bulging bones …

("Hello? Hello, baby? Good night. Yes, no, maybe … Awk. Food time!")

("Oh, Ozymandias! Yes, yes, I know … I haven't fed you, I'm sorry. I know, I know …")

(Clinks and rattles.)

Why am I so selfish? Just because I can't eat, I expect him to fast, too … No. I just forgot.

He doesn't understand, but he knows something's wrong; he climbs the lamp pole like some tripodal bem, using both feet and his beak, and stares at me with that glass-beady bird's eye, stares and stares and mumbles things. Like a lunatic! Until I can hardly stand not to shut him in a cupboard, or something. But then he sidles along my shoulder and kisses me—such a tender caress against my cheek, with that hooked prehensile beak that could crush a walnut like a grape—to let me know that he's worried, and he cares. And I stroke his feathers to thank him, and tell him that it's all right … but it's not. And he knows it.

Does he ever resent his life? Would he, if he could? Stolen away from his own kind, raised in a sterile bubble to be a caged bird for a caged human …

I'm only a bird in a gilded cage. I want to go home.

· · · · ·

WEDNESDAY, THE 11TH

Why am I keeping this journal? Do I really believe that sometime some alien being will find this, or some starship from Earth's glorious future will catch up to me … glorious future, hell. Stupid, selfish, short-sighted fools. They ripped the guts out of the space program after they sent me away, no one will ever follow me now. I'll be lucky if they don't declare me dead and forget about me.

As if anyone would care what a woman all alone on a lumbering space probe thought about day after day for decades, anyway. What monstrous conceit.

I did lubricate the bearings on the big scope today. I did that much. I did it so that I could turn it back toward Earth … toward the sun … toward the whole damn system. Because I can't even see it. All the planets out to Saturn, all the planets the ancients saw, are crammed into the space of two moon diameters; and too dim and small and faraway below me for my naked eyes, anyway. Even the sun is no more than a gaudy star that doesn't even make me squint. So I looked for them with the scope …

Isn't it funny how when you're a child you see all those drawings and models of the solar system with big, lumpy planets and golden wakes streaming around the sun? Somehow you never get over expecting it to look that way in person. And here I am, one thousand astronomical units north of the solar pole, gazing down from a great height … and it doesn't look that way at all. It doesn't look like anything; even through the scope. One great blot of light, and all the pale tiny diamond chips of planets and moons around it, barely distinguishable from half a hundred undistinguished stars trapped in the same arc of blackness. So meaningless, so insignificant … so disappointing.

Five hours I spent, today, listening to my journal, looking back and trying to find—something, I don't know, something I suddenly don't have anymore.

I had it at the start. I was disgusting; Pollyanna Grad-student skipping and singing through the rooms of my very own observatory. It seemed like heaven, and a lifetime spent in it couldn't possibly be long enough for all that I was going to accomplish, and discover. I'd never be bored, no, not me …

And there was so much to learn about the potential of this place, before I got out to where it supposedly would matter, and there would be new things to turn my wonderful extended senses toward … while I could still communicate easily with my dear mentor Dr. Weems, and the world. (Who'd ever have thought, when the lecherous old goat was my thesis adviser at Harvard, and making jokes to his other grad students about "the lengths some women will go to protect their virginity," that we would have to spend a lifetime together.)

There was Ozymandias' first word … and my first birthday in space, and my first anniversary … and my doctoral degree at last, printed out by the computer with scrolls made of little x's and taped up on the wall …

Then day and night and day and night, beating me black and blue with blue and black … my fifth anniversary, my eighth, my decade. I crossed the magnetopause, to become truly the first voyager in interstellar space … but by then there was no one left to talk to anymore, to really share the experience with. Even the radio and television broadcasts drifting out from Earth were diffuse and rare; there were fewer and fewer contacts with the reality outside. The plodding routines, the stupifying boredom—until sometimes I stood screaming down the halls just for something new; listening to the echoes that no one else would ever hear, and pretending they'd come to call; trying so hard to believe there was something to hear that wasn't my voice, my echo, or Ozymandias making a mockery of it.

("Hello, beautiful. That's a crock. Hello, hello?")

("Ozymandias, get away from me—")

But always I had that underlying belief in my mission: that I was here for a purpose, for more than my own selfish reasons, or NASA's (or whatever the hell they call it now), but for Humanity, and Science. Through meditation I learned the real value of inner silence, and thought that by creating an inner peace I had reached equilibrium with the outer silences. I thought that meditation had disciplined me, I was in touch with myself and with the soul of the cosmos … But I haven't been able to meditate since—it happened. The inner silence fills up with my own anger screaming at me, until I can't remember what peace sounds like.

And what have I really discovered, so far? Almost nothing. Nothing worth wasting my analysis or all my fine theories—or my freedom—on. Space is even emptier than anyone dreamed, you could count on both hands the bits of cold dust or worldlet I've passed in all this time, lost souls falling helplessly through near-perfect vacuum … all of us together. With my absurdly long astronomical tapemeasure I have fixed precisely the distance to NGC 2419 and a few other features, and from that made new estimates about a few more distant ones. But I have not detected a miniature black hole insatiably vacuuming up the vacuum; I have not pierced the invisible clouds that shroud the ultra-long wavelengths like fog; I have not discovered that life exists beyond the Earth in even the most tentative way. Looking back at the solar system I see nothing to show definitively that we even exist, anymore. All I hear anymore when I scan is electromagnetic noise, no coherent thought. Only Weems every twelfth night, like the last man alive … Christ, I still haven't answered him.

Why bother? Let him sweat. Why bother with any of it? Why waste my precious time?

Oh, my precious time … Half a lifetime left that could have been mine, on Earth.

Twenty years—I came through them all right. I thought I was safe. And after twenty years, my facade of discipline and self-control falls apart at a touch. What a self-deluded hypocrite I've been. Do you know that I said the sky was like a blue parasol eighteen years ago? And probably said it again fifteen years ago, and ten, and five—

Tomorrow I pass 1000 AUs.

· · · · ·

THURSDAY, THE 12TH

I burned out the scope. I burned out the scope. I left it pointing toward the Earth, and when the laser came on for the night it shone right down the scope's throat and burned it out. I'm so ashamed … Did I do it on purpose, subconsciously?

("Good night starlight. Arrk. Good night. Good …")

("Damn it, I want to hear another human voice—!")

(Echoing, "voice, voice, voice, voice, voice …")

When I found out what I'd done I ran away. I ran and ran through the halls … But I only ran in a circle: This observatory, my prison, myself … I can't escape. I'll always come back in the end, to this green-walled room with its desk and its terminals, its cupboards crammed with a hundred thousand dozens of everything, toilet paper and magnetic tape and oxygen tanks … And I can tell you exactly how many steps it is to my bedroom or how long it took me to crochet the afghan on the bed … how long I've sat in the dark and silence, setting up an exposure program or listening for the feeble pulse of a radio galaxy two billion light-years away. There will never be anything different, or anything more.

When I finally came back here, there was a message waiting. Weems, grinning out at me half-bombed from the screen— "Congratulations," he cried, "on this historic occasion! Emmylou, we're having a little celebration here at the lab; mind if we join you in yours, one thousand astronomical units from home—?" I've never seen him drunk. They really must have meant to do something nice for me, planning it all six days ahead …

To celebrate I shouted obscenities I didn't even know I knew at him, until my voice was broken and my throat was raw.

Then I sat at my desk for a long time with my jackknife lying open in my hand. Not wanting to die—I've always been too afraid of death for that—but wanting to hurt myself. I wanted to make a fresh hurt, to take my attention off the terrible thing that is sucking me into my self like an imploding star. Or maybe just to punish myself, I don't know. But I considered the possibility of actually cutting myself quite calmly; while some separate part of me looked on in horror. I even pressed the knife against my flesh … and then I stopped and put it away. It hurts too much.

I can't go on like this. I have duties, obligations, and I can't face them. What would I do without the emergency automechs? … But it's the rest of my life, and they can't go on doing my job for me forever—

Later.

I just had a visitor. Strange as that sounds. Stranger yet—it was Donald Duck. I picked up half of a children's cartoon show today, the first coherent piece of nondirectional, unbeamed television broadcast I've recorded in months. And I don't think I've ever been happier to see anyone in my life. What a nice surprise, so glad you could drop by … Ozymandias loves him; he hangs upside down from his swing under the cabinet with a cracker in one foot, cackling away and saying, "Give us a kiss, smack-smack-smack" … We watched it three times. I even smiled, for a while; until I remembered myself. It helps. Maybe I'll watch it again until bedtime.

· · · · ·

FRIDAY, THE 13TH

Friday the Thirteenth. Amusing. Poor Friday the Thirteenth, what did it ever do to deserve its reputation? Even if it had any power to make my life miserable, it couldn't hold a candle to the rest of this week. It seems like an eternity since last weekend.

I repaired the scope today; replaced the burned-out parts. Had to suit up and go outside for part of the work … I haven't done any outside maintenance for quite a while. Odd how both exhilarating and terrifying it always is when I first step out of the airlock, utterly alone, into space. You're entirely on your own, so far away from any possibility of help, so far away from anything at all. And at that moment you doubt yourself, suddenly, terribly … just for a moment.

But then you drag your umbilical out behind you and clank along the hull in your magnetized boots that feel so reassuringly like lead ballast. You turn on the lights and look for the trouble, find it and get to work; it doesn't bother you anymore … When your life seems to have torn loose and be drifting free, it creates a kind of sea anchor to work with your hands; whether it's doing some mindless routine chore or the most intricate of repairs.

There was a moment of panic, when I actually saw charred wires and melted metal, when I imagined the damage was so bad that I couldn't repair it again. It looked so final, so—masterful. I clung there by my feet and whimpered and clenched my hands inside my gloves, like a great shining baby, for a while. But then I pulled myself down and began to pry here and unscrew there and twist a component free … and little by little I replaced everything. One step at a time; the way we get through life.

By the time I'd finished I felt quite calm, for the first time in days; the thing that's been trying to choke me to death this past week seemed to falter a little at my demonstration of competence. I've been breathing easier since then; but I still don't have much strength. I used up all I had just overcoming my own inertia.

But I shut off the lights and hiked around the hull for a while, afterward—I couldn't face going back inside just then: looking at the black convex dish of the solar sail I'm embedded in, up at the radio antenna's smaller dish occluding stars as the observatory's cylinder wheels endlessly at the hub of the spinning parasol …

That made me dizzy, and so I looked out into the starfields that lie on every side. Even with my own poor, unaugmented senses there's so much more to see out here, unimpeded by atmosphere or dust, undominated by any sun's glare. The brilliance of the Milky Way, the depths of star and nebula and farthest galaxy breathlessly suspended … as I am. The realization that I'm lost for eternity in an uncharted sea.

Strangely, although that thought aroused a very powerful emotion when it struck me, it wasn't a negative one at all: It was from another scale of values entirely; like the universe itself. It was as if the universe itself stretched out its finger to touch me. And in touching me, singling me out, it only heightened my awareness of my own insignificance.

That was somehow very comforting. When you confront the absolute indifference of magnitudes and vistas so overwhelming, the swollen ego of your self-important suffering is diminished …

And I remembered one of the things that was always so important to me about space—that here anyone has to put on a spacesuit before they step outside. We're all aliens, no one better equipped to survive than another. I am as normal as anyone else, out here.

I must hold onto that thought.

· · · · ·

SATURDAY, THE 14TH

There is a reason for my being here. There is a reason.

I was able to meditate earlier today. Not in the old way, the usual way, by emptying my mind. Rather by letting the questions fill up the space, not fighting them; letting them merge with my memories of all that's gone before. I put on music, that great mnemonic stimulator; letting the images that each tape evoked free-associate and interact.

And in the end I could believe again that my being here was the result of a free choice. No one forced me into this. My motives for volunteering were entirely my own. And I was given this position because NASA believed that I was more likely to be successful in it than anyone else they could have chosen.

It doesn't matter that some of my motives happened to be unresolved fear or wanting to escape from things I couldn't cope with. It really doesn't matter. Sometimes retreat is the only alternative to destruction, and only a madman can't recognize the truth of that. Only a madman … Is there anyone "sane" on Earth who isn't secretly a fugitive from something unbearable somewhere in their life? And yet they function normally.

If they ran, they ran toward something, too, not just away. And so did I. I had already chosen a career as an astrophysicist before I ever dreamed of being a part of this project. I could have become a medical researcher instead, worked on my own to find a cure for my condition. I could have grown up hating the whole idea of space and "spacemen," stumbling through life in my damned ugly sterile suit …

But I remember when I was six years old, the first time I saw a film of suited astronauts at work in space … they looked just like me! And no one was laughing. How could I help but love space, then?

(And how could I help but love Jeffrey, with his night-black hair, and his blue flightsuit with the starry patch on the shoulder. Poor Jeffrey, poor Jeffrey, who never even realized his own dream of space before they cut the program out from under him … I will not talk about Jeffrey. I will not.)

Yes, I could have stayed on Earth, and waited for a cure! I knew even then there would have to be one, someday. It was both easier and harder to choose space, instead of staying.

And I think the thing that really decided me was that those people had faith enough in me and my abilities to believe that I could run this observatory and my own life smoothly for as long as I lived. Billions of dollars and a thousand tons of equipment resting on me; like Atlas holding up his world.

Even Atlas tried to get rid of his burden; because no matter how vital his function was, the responsibility was still a burden to him. But he took his burden back again too, didn't he; for better or worse …

I worked today. I worked my butt off getting caught up on a week's worth of data processing and maintenance, and I'm still not finished. Discovered while I was at it that Ozymandias had used those missing five pages just like the daily news: crapped all over them. My sentiments exactly! I laughed and laughed.

I think I may live.

· · · · ·

SUNDAY, THE 15TH

The clouds have parted.

That's not rhetorical—among my fresh processed data is a series of photo reconstructions in the ultra-long wavelengths. And there's a gap in the obscuring gas up ahead of me, a break in the clouds that extends thirty or forty light-years. Maybe fifty! Fantastic. What a view. What a view I have from here of everything, with my infinitely extended vision: of the way ahead, of the passing scene—or looking back toward Earth.

Looking back. I'll never stop looking back, and wishing it could have been different. That at least there could have been two of me, one to be here, one who could have been normal, back on Earth; so I wouldn't have to be forever torn in two by regrets—

("Hello. What's up, doc? Avast!")

("Hey, watch it! If you drink, don't fly.")

Damn bird … If I'm getting maudlin, it's because I had a party today. Drank a whole bottle of champagne. Yes; I had the party … we did. Ozymandias and I. Our private 1000 AU celebration. Better late than never, I guess. At least we did have something concrete to celebrate—the photos. And if the celebration wasn't quite as merry as it could have been, still I guess it will probably seem like it was when I look back on it from the next one, at 2000 AUs. They'll be coming faster now, the celebrations. I may even live to celebrate 8000. What the hell, I'll shoot for 10,000 …

After we finished the champagne …Ozymandias thinks '98 was a great year, thank God he can't drink as fast as I can … I put on my Strauss waltzes, and the Barcarolle: Oh, the Berliner Philharmonic; their touch is what a lover's kiss must be. I threw the view outside onto the big screen, a ballroom of stars, and danced with my shadow. And part of the time I wasn't dancing above the abyss in a jumpsuit and headphones, but waltzing in yards of satin and lace across a ballroom floor in nineteenth-century Vienna. What I wouldn't give to be there for a moment out of time. Not for a lifetime, or even a year, but just for an evening; just for one waltz.

Another thing I shall never do. There are so many things we can't do, any of us, for whatever the reasons—time, talent, life's callous whims. We're all on a one-way trip into infinity. If we're lucky we're given some life's work we care about, or some person. Or both, if we're very lucky.

And I do have Weems. Sometimes I see us like an old married couple who have grown to a tolerant understanding over the years. We've never been soul mates, God knows, but we're comfortable with each other's silences …

I guess it's about time I answered him.

The End

Contents

The Great Wall of Mexico

by John Sladek

Star Light, Star Bright

by Alfred Bester

My Vacatoin

by Stuart Buchanan

The Man Who Never Forgot

by Robert Silverberg

The Beautiful People

by Robert Bloch

Painwise

by James Tiptree, Jr.

The Water Sculptor

by George Zebrowski

Under the Hollywood Sign

by Tom Reamy

To Be Continued...

by Robert Silverberg

A Life in the Day of . . .

by Frank M. Robinson

The Tenants

by William Tenn

Come On, Wagon

by Zenna Henderson

Mouse

by Fredric Brown

Transformer

by Chad Oliver

The White King's Dream

by Elizabeth A. Lynn

Brown Robert

By Terry Carr

They Don't Make Life

Like They Used To

By Alfred Bester

The Yellow Pill

By Rog Phillips

Beam Us Home

By James Tiptree, Jr.

Gather Blue Roses

By Pamela Sargent

Transfer

By Barry N. Malzberg

Two Weeks In August

by Frank M. Robinson

Bagatelle

by John Varley

View from a Height

by Joan D. Vinge