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Back in Olden Times—oh, about the turn of the millennium—Automats had not been games of chance. At any rate, Angelo told himself, they hadn't been thought of that way; and, maybe, in the days when an Automat was no more complicated than a few simple coin relays and a corps of people shoving food into little cubicles, the places had actually worked.
These days, however…
Well (Angelo tried to be fair), maybe the Automatics really did work, for most people. Which proved nothing except that Angelo was not most people, a fact which he had suspected from time to time.
The ready-plate still glowed cheerily at him. A perfectly lovely and enticing picture of natural rhubarb pie looked, to Angelo, as attractive and as inapproachable as any Holy Grail in the business. He had slipped his unicredit card in the proper slot, and even though the card was a temporary substitute (Angelo had acquired, at a surprisingly early age when he came to think of it, the fixed habit of losing I.D. and unicredit cards) he was sure it was within the normal limits of machine error.
The rhubarb pie glowed. The slide did not open. The unicredit card sat in its little niche doing, apparently, nothing whatever; the Automatic hummed away as if it didn't have a single thought in its rapid-relay mind.
When the humming changed to a slow chuckle, Angelo decided he'd had enough. Rhubarb pie was a great food— especially after eight months on a space station, on which rhubarb was not considered a vital in-stock item—but a nice cup of hot tea was, clearly, going to have to do. Collecting a cup and a slice of lemon from a nearby shelf, and remembering (to his own slight surprise) to recover his card, Angelo moved down toward the hot-liquids sector of the wall. He had just about reached it when the two monsters became perceptible behind him.
"You Angelo DiStefano?" one of the monsters said. He was easily eight feet tall, Angelo thought as he turned around—in reality, perhaps six feet five against Angelo's five feet eight and a half, but who cared about reality?— and Angelo's immediate, and irresistible, reflex was to answer:
"No. Never have been, either."
The monster blinked. His partner—perhaps only seven feet, eleven and a half inches high, but looking even more evil and threatening—said in a rasping voice which did not inspire confidence: "Don't kid us, DiStefano."
"I'm not—" Angelo's voice had suddenly become contralto. He swallowed once, hard, and for occupational therapy slid his cup, with the lemon slice inside, under the nearest slot. "I'm not kidding," he said in a lower tone, and put his card in the available niche.
"You're DiStefano," the first monster said. Angelo supposed they were really human beings, but the big bruisers didn't really look like his idea of humanity. They were even bigger and more threatening than John Woorden, the Navigator with whom Angelo had just finished spending eight of the most uncomfortable months of his life. Angelo began to wonder whether Brasilia had developed a large and powerful criminal class since he'd left for Space Station I; whatever was going on, the other customers in the place were paying even less attention than Angelo would have believed possible. A very small old lady at a table piled with dishes of creamed spinach gave Angelo and the monsters one brief look and returned to her—Good Lord! Angelo thought-eighth plate of the slippery stuff. Perhaps it was good for her. But if she'd had any sense, she'd have seen what was happening and…
Tearing his mind away from a fascinating picture of two monsters covered with creamed spinach and bellowing as Angelo and the tiny old lady made their triumphant, if hurried, escape, Angelo focused on the monsters again. Behind him, in the wall, liquid splashed happily. Angelo's teacup was filling up.
"You're wanted at U.N. H.Q.," the shorter monster • said. "We got full descriptions, and the beeper you're wearing checks out for code signal. So come on."
Angelo sighed. "Wanted?" he asked. "What for?" After eight months on duty, he felt he deserved a little rest. Besides, now that Space Station I was very thoroughly exploded, there didn't seem to be any immediate duty for which an Intelligence Officer (Space) was assignable; Space Station II, after all, was the only other little world up there, and Space Station II was manned by people whose melanin level was a lot higher than Angelo's was ever going to be.
On the other hand…
Maybe they wanted to give him a medal. After what had happened in his little world, in fact, Angelo felt that perhaps he even deserved a medal. Of course, he'd lose it, but even so it would be a nice gesture.
The idea seemed improbable. Behind him the liquid splashed on. The bigger, if gentler-appearing, monster said, "You're wanted. I don't know why. We were sent to bring you in."
And, with more menace coming through the gentle words, the second monster said, "We were sent to request your presence. There's a car outside."
The liquid splashed. Belatedly it occurred to Angelo that filling one cup was taking a long time. He turned.
His cup was overflowing with… not, he saw, with joy. Nor with tea, either. With, instead, nice black coffee. At the bottom of the cup, he knew, a lemon slice still reposed. The combination didn't seem very drinkable.
The Automatic, clearly, was trying to make amends for its refusal to serve Angelo rhubarb pie. Angelo gave it full marks for the attempt, but since the excess coffee was flowing down the slot drain, and since he'd wanted tea in the first place, he couldn't really feel joyful about the situation.
He sighed again and jerked the cup out of its niche. This irritated the Automatic, to all appearances. The spout, shaped in the image of a particularly ugly and dignified Gryphon, cleared its throat with a bubbling sound and went on with its gift of coffee.
Now, however, it spat the coffee straight at Angelo, who yelped and moved aside, by no means quickly enough. He was clearly fated to visit U.N. H.Q., Brasilia, dressed in the very latest fashion, and in a great deal of unwanted and undisguisable coffee.
"Okay," the first monster said tiredly. "Okay. You had enough fun playing games, you come along with us now."
Angelo shrugged.
He asked himself what, in less demanding circumstances, he would have recognized as the single most dangerous question in the known universe.
What else can happen?
It is the question which is always answered, and always answered unpleasantly.
"Lead on," Angelo said. "Lead on, Macduff. Straight to the—the United Nostrums."
"The what?" the evil No. 2 monster asked.
"Straight on to H.Q.," Angelo said, having a natural aversion to fights in which he did not think he could break even. "And cursed be he that first cries."
The first monster was a scholarly type. "First cries hold, enough," he said.
"No," Angelo said sadly. "Just first cries. It ought to be enough."
Coffee'd, despondent, confused, Angelo and the pair of monsters left the Automatic. Behind him, Angelo knew, the tiny, old lady was at work on creamed spinach No. 9, or possibly No. 10.
They headed for the official car, parked halfway down the wide and inconvenient esplanade which seemed to be a feature of capital cities anywhere.
That the car had decided not to work did not surprise Angelo very much. The monsters—U.N. Security personnel, he expected—were much more taken with this new event, and wasted a fair amount of time in cursing the car-pool division. Then they decided on a taxi.
The first taxi (and the second), spotting a coffee-soaked little character who looked like a bum, and two official-looking big types who looked like cops, went by without so much as a perceptible pause.
While the monsters were discussing the problem, Angelo went down the block and stood in front of a bus stop. By the time the others realized he was gone, a bus was pulling up. Everybody got aboard.
There were no available seats.
This, Angelo told himself, is traveling to U.N. H.Q. in style. As befit a man in line for a medal.
The ride was long, slow and full of bumps.
Arrival became, rapidly, even worse.
"Who did you say you were?"
"U.N. Security, exterior duty branch," the taller monster said.
"I'm Angelo DiStefano," Angelo said helpfully. "They want me."
The guard at the gate looked him up and down. The monsters, who looked with every passing second more and more goonlike, were not much help. Angelo, coffee-stained and sad, made an impression on nobody. "Sure they do," the guard said grandly. "You're the Secretary-General of the U.N. and they're waiting for you to deliver a speech."
"No," Angelo said patiently. "I'm Angelo DiStefano, and I—"
"I tell you we're U.N. Security," one of the monsters (the shorter, more unpleasant one, Angelo thought) erupted. "We got I.D. You better-"
"Let's see it."
Angelo knew, without thinking about it, that the I.D. was not going to be satisfactory. That, he told himself, would be too easy.
While everyone else was arguing with a maximum of acrimony and a minimum of sense, Angelo wandered over to the booth where U.N. Tour Tickets were sold, and bought three. Theoretically, Intelligence (Space) would reimburse him. Actually, Angelo was completely sure, this would not happen.
But if they had to get inside…
The goons, or monsters, were much irritated at the tour idea. They were not, however (Angelo noticed), irritated enough to refuse to go along with it.
Following a bunch of gawkers ("This building, constructed as far in the past as the year 1996—before the
Compound Delta pandemic—is a fine example of… "), they sauntered inside.
They found a receptionist. The real trouble began right there.
The sign said:
Miss Rambaixa
Receptionist
Office of M. B. Trastevere
M. B. Trastevere, Angelo knew, was a receptionist for a secretary. For a receptionist. For a secretary. For the First Under Minister. But it was a starting-point, and perhaps the only one.
If he had to go through with this (and, obviously, he did; why give the monsters another chance to look for him, and an even lower level of permissible irritation?), he had to start somewhere. The monsters, standing on their dignity, were not about to explain anything to these underlings to the underlings to the Under (ling) Minister.
Angelo had discovered, long ago, just how little dignity was worth standing on, or for. "I'm here to see—" he began.
"It's not here."
"What's not here?"
"Two C It's on the fifth floor. You take the ' elevator—"
"No," Angelo said. "My landlord would never let me keep it." —
"But if you're looking for—"
"I'm looking for M. B. Trastevere," Angelo said.
"But she has nothing to do with Two C."
"Neither do I," Angelo said.
"But just now—"
"Just now I said I was looking to see—"
"See?"
"No. I was looking to see—"
"You see, then? If you're looking for Two C, you don't want to see Miss Trastevere. On the fifth floor—"
"They want me," Angelo said in his most impressive voice. "Questions will be asked if you don't let me through. This is a secret project. What are your clearances?"
The receptionist looked as if she'd been taken perhaps three inches aback. "Well," she said slowly, "I've got clearance for Secret, Confidential, Semi-Top, UnPublic—"
"Not enough. Tell Miss Trastevere that U.N. H.Q., Security, wants to see Angelo DiStefano. Tell her to check if she likes."
"Security H.Q.?" Miss Ramballa said. Her dark face expressed apprehensive surprise. "But I thought you said—"
Seeing no way to straighten out the mess, Angelo went on pitilessly: "A cover story. You understand."
The myth of the Unknown Spy had never died; perhaps it never would. Miss Ramballa looked suitably awed. "Oh," she said. "Yes, sir. Of course, sir."
"We can do without the titles," Angelo said in a kindly fashion. "If you'll just get Miss Trastevere for us…"
"Oh," Miss Ramballa breathed. "Yes, sir. I mean—yes. Certainly. Anything." The access of passion nearly threw Angelo off-balance. But he kept a cool head, due perhaps to the cooling effects of all that coffee on his clothes. Not bad clothes, either… a fine way, he'd thought, to spend accumulated Station pay. Tights of luminescent black shot with deep purple, a Cameron kilt, a loose shirt covered by a waistcoat of intricate, lacy design (called a Garrick, or Garrett, or Aspic, after some mythical sartorial hero), and over that a short bell-cut jacket of light, insistent red—the waistcoat being a highly luminescent red-blue, called Psy-chedelicious, reasons for which Angelo had no idea… a fine outfit. What was more, it almost fit, which was an improvement over his usual clothing.
Coffee, however, did nothing particular to his sartorial credit. Well, there was enough pay left for a new outfit.
If (he thought darkly) he was going to have any use for one.
Miss Trastevere.
Mr. Point.
Mr. Djaba.
Miss Putnam-Allerby.
And then (a two-hour wait while the Under Minster got rid of a good deal of what everyone tried to make Angelo believe was urgent business), at last, Mr. Wyeth-Diaz. Who said: "What took you so long?"
"Miss Putnam-Allerby," Angelo said patiently, setting a shining example he was sure would not be followed by the monsters flanking him, "announced me' on the intercom. She gave you an explanation of—"
"The intercom?" Mr. Wyeth-Diaz said, his dark, blue-eyed face set in tragic lines. "The intercom is mostly static. A Mr.—Mr.—I disremember the name, I'm afraid—a repair expert tried to fix it, but he seemed to be more interested in our large transmitting arrangement. Which did not need repair. Though it does now; Security came along and collected the man before he was finished. He complained, of course, but Security… well, it did little good, you understand."
"I think I do," Angelo said, struck by a horrid idea. "Was the man's name Shaw? Christopher Shaw?"
"Now, by God, you've got it," Mr. Weyeth-Diaz said. "How did you know—"
The temptation was too great to resist. "We have our ways," Angelo said. The two monsters looked surprised; Mr. Wyeth-Diaz, abashed.
"Ah," he said. "Quite."
Mr. Wyeth-Diaz.
Miss Williamson (second under-receptionist).
Mr. Doburt (first under-receptionist).
Miss Mbala (receptionist).
Miss Borinquen (Under Minister).
And at last a reception room—a new one, very impressive if you liked a lot of shiny surface. Angelo found that the impression it made on him was migraine.
Or perhaps the migraine was due to the others waiting in the room.
Dr. Victor Emmis—medical officer on Space Station I, during its strange last months of existence.
Christopher Shaw (of course), Communications Officer. John Woorden, Navigator—as remote, as proud of his white South African ancestry, and his Boer God, as ever. Captain Zugzwang, in charge of Space Station I. In short, everybody but the (forever absent now, forever missing) Korkianovitch, the world's strangest cook, robotech-nician, practical engineer and (unfortunately) menace… And Juli R. Dental, Life-Support technician and, with her startling face and figure, one of the best arguments for life-support Angelo could think of, offhand.
Why was Juli missing? He asked the somewhat imposing Dr. Emmis, rather than Chris, who sat moping in a corner, dreaming in all probability of the beauties of that large transmitter. Chris was a midget who'd made his own adjustment to a life among Big People: he didn't actually dislike humanity, though he was certainly indifferent to it. All his passion went into tubes and relays, transistors and electronic devices of all sorts. Angelo had actually seen little Chris in tears over a burnt-out semiconductor, years before.
So, to Dr. Emmis: "Where's—where's Miss Dental?"
"Ah," Emmis said. "Miss Dental. Yes. Certainly." The scholarly, remote Emmis had never, Angelo thought, been more irritating. "Certainly," he said. "Where is she?" Patience, he knew from long experience, was the only way to persuade the good doctor to unbelt.
"She is living at a—a Y.W.C.A., I understand they are called. An organization of young women who live together." Somehow, in his antiseptic phrasing and tone, the place came out sounding like the pride of the red-light district. "When the men came to get her she refused to come, and barricaded herself. I understand that her viewpoint was, in effect: Who knows what they're really after?"
Ah, yes, Angelo thought: Juli on the Space Station, after the sex-suppressants had run out. Juli of the delightfully horrified one-track mind. "Certainly," he said, giving Dr. Emmis as good as he'd gotten.
"We are waiting for her arrival," Emmis said. "Until she does arrive we cannot be introduced into the—ah—sanctum sanctorum, as it were."
"Certainly," Angelo said, and, feeling that something more was needed, added: "Pax vobiscum." Dr. Emmis looked startled. ,
"At any rate—" he began.
"Here we are," Angelo said. "Waiting."
"She has finally agreed, you understand," Emmis said. "As long as she may arrive by her solitary self, unescorted and unimpeded by these—ah—lechers, I imagine she would call them. It is only a matter of minutes—ah—Angelo."
Angelo appreciated the unbending that went into Emmis' use of the first name. But he had little time to savor it. The door to the waiting room opened and Juli came in. This fact left little if any room for any other facts.
Juli was indescribable. It may be sufficient to state that Angelo was not the only person staring. Even Dr. Emmis developed a light film of perspiration. Like Angelo, Juli had spent a lot of money on new fashions, and the semi-transparents made the whole effect worth every (undoubtedly red-hot) cent. Juli stood like a statue in the doorway for a minute, thereby reminding everyone present, Angelo imagined, of good old Pygmalion and his Godstruck chiseling.
Then she said, "Why—you're all here."
And so they were, Angelo told himself. Korkianovitch was —well, if not better forgotten, certainly not a thought to dwell on. Not any more. Not ever any more.
"Welcome," Dr. Emmis said.
"Ah," Zugzwang said, making the spare little sound seem almost courtly.
"Sure," Chris Shaw said absently.
Woorden, lost in nobody knew what private dreams, said nothing. Angelo took a large gulp of air.
"Hi, there," he said. "Hello. Good to see you. Hi. Welcome. Uh—"
"But why are we all here?" Juli said. She stepped a little way into the room. The temperature rose. "What would Security want with us?"
"Apparently, we will soon find out," Dr. Emmis said.
Juli nodded just as if Dr. Emmis had said something helpful. Then her glance shifted. "Oh—Angelo," she said.
"Angelo," Angelo said. "Me. Yes. Sure. What?"
"Angelo, you're attached to Security. Wouldn't you know what they want with all of us?"
"Well," Angelo said, and took one more large breath.-
"You can tell us," Juli said coaxingly. She took another step forward. A great deal of Juli moved as she walked.
"Well—uh—" Angelo said. "It's—uh—it's top secret. My lips are sealed. I think we'll all find out"—he tossed in the final words with a strong menacing undertone of meaning, real spy-novel meaning—"soon enough. Yes. Soon enough." Restraining a certain impulse to laugh darkly and perhaps even stroke a nonexistent moustache, he let matters go at that.
God alone knew, he thought, what the others made of that. But Juli, he could see, was magnificently impressed.
"My goodness," she breathed. Interesting things happened when she breathed even a little more heavily than usual. "Is it that important, Angelo?"
Juli's clothes had certainly been worth the money. Some day, Angelo thought, he would find out what she looked like tvithout … ah, well. Somehow, Angelo knew perfectly well that Destiny, Fate, Economic Determinism or just plain Damn Bad Luck was not going to let that happen. "We'll have a chance to find out soon, now," he said darkly and importantly. "Very soon, now," he added, improving on his lines a little.
"But, Angelo—" Juli began. At that point the door opened, and the machines came rolling in.
They were, of course, I.D. machines. Aneelo, by now thoroughly confused, allowed himself to be backed into a corner by a squat, rolling collection of parts which wanted to know his name, address, I.D. numbers, hair color, and (he imagined) views on the latest Reclamation Project. Everything had been happening just a little too fast for Angelo DiStefano, and he found himself telling the machine earnestly that he was really a perfectly harmless fellow named Arthur K. Frankenstein, and didn't belong there at all. This did not work. The machine, licking thoughtfully at the I.D. card Angelo had hopelessly supplied to it, registered it properly as a temporary card issued to the serial number listed on a previous temporary card, which was listed through to a substitute for a temporary card, which was…
"Look," Angelo said nervously. "I keep losing these cards, see? I don't mean anything by it. I just keep losing these cards."
Chris Shaw, meanwhile; had engaged his machine in what seemed to be an earnest and passionate conversation. Looking at the midget, Angelo kept expecting to see a small visiplate light up on his forehead.
The others came through the I.D. ordeal with comparatively unruffled personalities. Woorden muttered once: "What was meant by that?" but what he referred to, once the machines had gone and the door shut again, nobody but Woorden was ever going to know. Perhaps, Angelo thought, the machine had asked him what his religion was—a question guaranteed to unsettle Woorden, who lived with the unbreakable conviction that there was really only one.
A voice cleared its throat and spoke from nowhere.
"Please follow the guide," it said. "A top secret meeting is now going on, and your presence there is necessary."
The door opened again. A robot looking a good deal too much like the ones that had gone violently insane on Space Station I came clicking its way in. A little nervously, the ex-crew of Space Station I formed into a ragged little line and followed the robot through the door.
Seven doors, fourteen corridors and three elevators later, they were in the room where the top secret meeting «was being held.
To the surprise of everyone except Angelo, this was the Main Delegate Dining Room for U.N. H.Q., Brasilia.
"But—" Dr. Emmis began.
"Obvious," Angelo said for the fourth time, in the same whisper. "If reporters, or spies, see a group of top U.N. officials gathering in the same place, they begin to wonder. They may even find one and one to put together and make their usual forty-three. But if they gather in the dining room—well, everybody has to eat. And now that our guide robot has left, nobody's paying any attention to us, either. We could be anybody—and Chris is already known as a repair expert around here anyhow. Safe and simple."
"I suppose so," Dr. Emmis said, sounding just as disappointed as everyone else had. Security, like magic, suffers greatly when explained.
"So let's get over to the table," Angelo said. "They're waiting for us."
The fact that this really was U.N. H.Q. had been seeping into Juli's mood, apparently, since she'd stood framed in the reception room door. Now she was subdued, watchful and very nearly the sort of girl you could imagine taking several degrees in ecology and the like. Not quite: with that face and figure, Angelo thought, she would never be the girl you associated with study and diplomas. All the same, she was coming closer to the type than he'd have thought possible.
She led the way to the table, Angelo a step or so behind and the rest strung out irregularly. Once (he remembered) he had hated Juli Dental with a consuming hatred. The last bit of time on the station had changed that—changed it, apparently, for good and all. Hate and Juli just didn't seem to go together any more.
On the other hand, was it Real Love? Angelo snorted. Real Love was something for the 3Ds. And his musings over Juli would never, never, no matter how low the pressure of censorship got, be allowed over 3D…
The table was a big one. When everyone was arranged, four newcomers were added to the tight-strung little Space Station I group. The Secretary-General of the U.N., Magda Ferris-Gombarlick; the Deputy Director of the Agency for Space, James F. Semmes; the Chief of U.N. Security, General Pauline Wisse, whom Angelo remembered from some rather unpleasant passages over space-ground communications; and, surprisingly, Dr. Harris Lombard Quest, the current Head of the World Health Organization. Briefly, Angelo wondered if he'd picked up some sort of space disease while circling the earth for eight months. This idea was unpleasant.
But then, he asked himself, what wasn't? Waiters came and delivered loaded platters; a great many steaks were set down, admired, and attacked. After a time, Miss Ferris-Gombarlick swallowed and said, in a conversational tone that was calculated to go unheard six inches from the table: "Space Station II is a menace to the security of the world."
Woorden, of course, spat: "Africans. Obviously."
"It is not that it is an African station—" the U.N. Secretary-General said.
General Wisse, her voice as authoritative as Angelo remembered it, cut in. "We can hardly be sure. That they are Africans may be the essential fact behind everything that has happened. In Algeria—"
"Algeria is irrelevant," Miss Ferris-Gombarlick snapped undiplomatically. "The problem is on Space Station II, now, not somewhere else nearly a hundred years ago."
"Nevertheless—"
The Deputy Director of the Agency for Space put in softly, "Perhaps it would be as well if the situation were explained."
Privately, Angelo thought that was a fine idea. Miss Fer-ris-Gombarlick blinked, opened her mouth, and then turned to face a messenger.
"Another one?"
"They sent me down with this," the messenger—a boy with freckles and a worried expression—said. "Satellite Communications."
Miss Ferris-Gombarlick tightened her lips. "Very well," she said. She took the sealed envelope and nodded; the boy left. She tore open the envelope. The D.D. of the Agency for Space said:
"Is that wise?"
"We might as well know," Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said. She scanned the single sheet of flimsy paper quickly, then looked up. "This one says: 'Death to the white lions. The black bath begins. The leopard is King/ "
Dr. Emmis said blankly, "What?"
Angelo only nodded. "The African satellite is beaming down stuff like that?"
"More or less," Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said. "That is, it comes from them. But only, apparently, during the phase of full moon here. And always in what my translators tell me is perfectly terrible and ungrammatical Swahili."
"But they can start—"
"Exactly," Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said. "They must be contained."
"Contained?" General Wisse exploded. "Destroyed. It is the only answer. Always, we discover the answer too late. Now, let us be on time. Let us be punctual. Destruction is the only answer."
"Perhaps something else, something a bit less drastic—" Semmes began, the D.D. looking strained but still nervously, diplomatically polite.
The W.H.O. man spoke for the first time. His voice was soothing, syrupy and surprisingly low-pitched. "We must help them."
General Wisse said with entire satisfaction, "That is your way. The way of those who cannot see the proper reply until it is shoved—yes, shoved"—and she made a gesture with a breadstick, nearly decapitating W.H.O.'s Dr. Quest—"under their noses."
Dr. Emmis broke the tension. "Wait a minute," he said in what was clearly intended to be a resonable tone of voice. "What's going on here? What is all this about? What is the message about?"
"Mr. DiStefano?" Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said. "Since you seem to have grasped the essential elements, and are not yet committed to one or another form of solution…"
Everybody looked at Angelo. Expectantly. "Well," he said. "The African satellite—Space Station II—is beaming broadcasts down, in bad Swahili apparently, calling on Africa to rise up and destroy the non-Africans. The white lions. The leopard—the black African animal—is King. It means what it says."
"Good Lord," Dr. Emmis said.
luli gulped. "And they can use their missiles—" she said, and fell suddenly, whitely silent.
The thought of the two hundred 100-megaton missiles with which the station was provided was enough, Angelo thought, to silence anybody. "They need an arming signal, don't they?" he said.
"Of course," Semmes said. "But there is some feeling here that a pro-African employed in Brasilia by us might be able to create the possibility of making the arming signal available, in which case—"
"Ridiculous," Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said.
General Wisse snorted—a ladylike but entirely distinct sound. "You will learn," she said. "But as it has always been, you will learn—too late."
Miss Ferris-Gombarlick went on, unruffled, "And even if it were possible, they know that there are enough U.N. missiles, in bases they can neither reach nor destroy, to blanket Africa. As far as the missiles are concerned, it's a stalemate. They can't hit us, because if they do we hit out at them. And if we do as the General suggests—even if we attempt to - erase the satellite as well—great damage will be done to every area of our planet. Which cannot be allowed to happen."
Dr. Emmis broke in. "But if their missiles are stymied by bases here—what's the menace?"
"Africa," Dr. Quest said.
Enough broadcasts, and Africa itself might very easily blow up—declare total war on the rest of the world, and start heaving bombs, rockets, and everything else down to tribal curses at everything non-African. ("But doesn't the same stalemate apply?" Juli asked. Miss Ferris-Gombarlick said, "Intelligent idea, but it doesn't. If they do the tossing, they may have enough time to get under real cover—hardened cover. Some of them, anyhow. The decision-makers. That might be enough.")
Jamming the station was, obviously, impossible. Dr. Emmis wanted to know why, and was told by a mixed group that Africa would complain of discrimination if the station were jammed from outside in any manner and for any perceptible period.
"The African states are in their usual mildly chaotic condition," Dr. Quest, who seemed to be the resident African expert, said. "We hoped that Station II would provide a running check, and perhaps help to quiet matters. Instead, they are inflaming the situation. The messages have been getting stranger and stranger. They now claim to have destroyed Station I, and are using that bit of propaganda to bolster their try for supremacy. There've been a lot of drumbeats lately, too."
"Drumbeats?" Angelo said.
"Drumbeats. You'll hear them."
Suddenly, everything fell into horrible, sickening place. "You want us to go up there," Angelo said.
"Since you have the experience," Semmes said. "You might be able to quiet the station diplomatically—at any rate, turn the process sufficiently so that—"
"So that the situation in Africa returns to—ah—normal," Dr. Quest said. "In my years as worker for W.H.O., I've never quite known what 'normal' meant, in regard to Africa; but whatever it is, it's better than the situation we have now."
"Of course, you'll need a replacement," General Wisse said.
Thinking of Korkianovitch, and wondering just how soon even more of the Station I personnel were going to join him in passing to a happy land far, far away, Angelo was quiet. So was everyone else from the Station.
The conversation had been interrupted five times by new messages from Station II. Angelo thought about that, too. It did not make him any more vocal.
Or any happier.
There was, unfortunately, only one thing to do.
Swearing to perform to the best of their ability, and trying to feel patriotic and not very frightened at the notion, the crew of Station I left the dining room for a somewhat less secret spot, the sub-sub-basement. There, in a small but shiningly neat room, they flipped on the tape player they'd been provided with, and began on tapes of the Station II broadcasts.
The tapes were, in several senses, out of this world.
The mutter of Swahili, after a while, began to sound almost like a familiar language. The occasional shouts and commands kept freezing everyone rigid and then doing it all over again just as they relaxed. The threat, the menace, the triumph in the voices was plain, and terrifying, to everyone.
But the drums…
Angelo ignored them, at first. Then Vachel Lindsay's "Congo" began to drift into his mind. It was, for a time, inescapable.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom!
And then…
The room began to waver. Everyone was floating—or dancing… the place was a good deal larger but everything was smaller. Even Angelo was smaller. His hands were hardly big enough to pick up the…
The?
Room… pick up the room and shake it like a rattle while the drums went boom and everyone danced because nothing else existed, only the boomlay drums and the way his mind grew larger and contained boom all the others who were so small, inside his…
The tape ended.
And, Angelo thought—slowly becoming Angelo once more —where were they?
The room—roomlay, roomlay, roomhy room! went irresistibly through his mind one last time—hadn't changed at all.
But the people had.
Juli sat frozen, her eyes staring at nothing, slowly beginning to focus once more. Dr. Emmis, his eyes gently shut, frowned heavily. Captain Zugzwang looked, for the first time since Angelo had known him, positively peaceful. Chris Shaw didn't seem to have changed much—but Angelo wondered just what it would take to change Chris, after all, and decided that he didn't want to know.
Woorden…
Woorden was on his feet. Staring. And, very suddenly, ranting.
"It is the way they are!" he shouted. (Zugzwang began to look less peaceful.) "The drums, the drums, always mean the same—the tribes are gathering, the tribes are coming back to their ancestors. To their terrible heritage—to voodoo and witchcraft, to black magic! Do you understand? Black magic!"
"Now, wait a minute—" Angelo began. This succession of sounds had no effect whatever.
"That is how they defeat white science!" Woorden screamed. "Magic—voodoo—that is what they know, and that is what they say! They tell all the tribes they have strong magic—drum magic—voodoo magic—and they use it to blow up Station I. They tell everyone—"
"Hold it," Angelo said.
No effect. Chris Shaw snapped suddenly, "Hold it right there!" and Woorden stopped in mid-rant.
Angelo looked round at Chris. Some day, he promised himself, he would have to ask Chris to teach him how to do that.
"That's what the drums say?" Chris asked. "You're sure of that?"
"Of course I am sure," Woorden said, considerably calmed, like a man a waterfall has landed on. "I'm certain. The drums are magic: they use their drums to prove that their magic destroyed our satellite, and can protect all of Africa— when Africa rises up. It will not be long."
There was a little silence.
Angelo said with a calmness that literally shocked him, "You know, I think he's right."
"It won't be long," Juli said in a faraway voice.
"Unless we do something," Dr. Emmis said.
"Correct," Zugzwang snapped, quite his old self. "And, as your captain, I will begin by creating a series of orders which will provide us with a smoothly running organization. These orders are to be followed without question—as I need not have said. First: Mr. DiStefano—"
Angelo shut his eyes. From the first second he had seen everyone gathered in the reception room, he had known that nothing less horrible could be expected. Captain Zugzwang— Arcangeli K. Zugzwang, U.N. Space Captain-orderly enough so that he cursed only by reciting tables of random numbers, authoritative enough so that he never merely gave commands, but assigned them, and pigheaded enough to put Angelo, or anyone else, in charge of a detail watching training films on the prevention of athlete's foot (or, in fact, anything else, the less useful the better) — Captain Zugzwang was once more in control.
In a sad, strangled voice, Angelo said, "Yes, sir?"
"Mr. DiStefano, your detail is one of the most important I have ever been called on to assign. As you know, we are threatened, all of us, by the African station—by Space Station II, the second satellite—and it has fallen to us to remove that threat. Your assignment will be to explore ways of relegating the threat to a bearable threshold, if you can find available means with which to make that exploration."
"Angelo," Juli said softly. "You can, can't you?" She was looking at him, he saw when he'd opened his eyes, with a worshipful expression. He had never seen a worshipful expression on her face before. It unnerved him.
"Sure," he said, almost casually. The expression deepened.
"And one thing more," Captain Zugzwang said with elephantine clarity. "You will report, in recordable form, on the results of your search, and your proposed manner of dealing with the threat to all of us. The reports will come to me, Mr.
DiStefano, and I shall wish them in proper form and arrangement. For it is upon your shoulders that the fastest available manner of combating this threat—to make myself clearer, let me say, of reducing the potential of Space Station II to cause damage and dissension upon the Earth-will rest." His head went down and up once, in a precise and decisive manner.
"Sir," Dr. Emmis said suddenly.
Zugswang wheeled to face him. "Yes? Yes, Doctor?"
"I merely want to go on record as stating that I will be glad to assist Mr. DiStefano at any time," Dr. Emmis said, looking as grand as if he had just volunteered for a suicide batallion.
"Noted, Doctor," Zugzwang said. Then: "Well, Mr. DiStefano?"
"Yes, sir," Angelo said.
Then he began to wonder just what it was he'd agreed to. Captain Zugzwang's speech had sounded just great, but when he played it back in his mind it was a little hard to add up.
It took some time, but finally he had it.
He'd been ordered to: (a) find some way of doing the job, and (b) report on what he'd found.
Somehow, it didn't sound nearly as heroic that way.
A discussion group seemed, weirdly enough, the best idea for a start. Angelo threw the topic open for suggestions. "We've got to do something about the station," he said, hoping he sounded as clear and impressive as Captain Zugzwang, but rather doubting that he did. "The only question is, what are we going to do?"
"Do?" Captain Zugzwang exploded. "It is very simple: we will order them to cease their efforts." He drew himself up against one wall of the room. "There, Mr. DiStefano, is the solution to the problem you have been given." If he, his expression said, had to do everybody's work…
Angelo said as tactfully as possible, "well, sir, there may be more to it than that. Suppose they don't obey orders?"
The captain shut his eyes. "Impossible," he said. "They are under command. They know what an order is. How can they refuse?"
"It might just happen," Angelo said. "And if it does, we'd better be ready with some other ideas."
"Maybe we can—ah—explode them," Dr. Emmis said. "After all, they are carrying two hundred one-hundred-megaton missiles. Our own satellite was exploded in that way, when there was no other solution."
"I know," Angelo said. "But in order to do that, you'd need not only an arming signal from down here, but a lot of cooperation from up there. The African weapons' man would have to push the satellite's button—and, somehow, I can't quite see him doing that."
"Besides, it would be horrible," Juli said. "Two satellites —both of them destroyed, exploded…" As a life-support expert, Angelo supposed, she could be expected to feel deeply about such things.
"There must be another way," he said. There was a small silence, which Juli broke.
"Why not—well, look," she began. "They're human beings. They're rational. So if we try to iron things out—invite them to a conference, for instance. All they'd have to do is come down, and we could all meet here, and sort of— settle things. Couldn't we?" she said hopefully.
"That might not work either," Angelo said gently. In her own way, Juli was as stubborn as Captain Zugzwang. "Suppose they didn't come down?"
"Well, we—" She stopped. "We could try," she said at last. "They're rational human beings."
Angelo thought of the drumbeats and the effect they'd had, and decided not to point out just how far that particular proposition was open to doubt. For that matter, he asked himself disquietingly, how was he to know that anybody was rational any more? He might, after all, be dreaming everything, and all the time be stuck away as just one of the standard boobies in some quiet little hatch for same.
But that reminded him of the long arguments he'd had with himself on Station I about the presence of aliens who were sabotaging the station and the Earth. Aliens. Ha.
Experimentally, he said "Ha" out loud. It didn't sound very impressive, but it didn't sound exactly boobylike, either. "There must be another way," he said again. And then, of course, he found it.
"They've been up there for a long time," he said quietly. "And although it became possible to send up supplies again I doubt that the U.N. has been supplying them with anything much."
"No," Dr. Emmis said slowly. "I suppose not."
"Oh, my," Juli said, without amplifying the statement.
"So they're probably short of food," Angelo said.
"Indeed," Dr. Emmis said, as if he were considering something. Then he got to his feet. "Of course."
"We can starve them out," Angelo said.
A subterranean chuckle reminded everybody of the presence of Woorden, who had gone into a comfortable squat in the farthest corner of the room, next to Chris Shaw. Chris was frowning, but not, as far as Angelo could see, at anything in particular.
"We cannot do that," Woorden said.
Angelo looked belligerent. After all, it was his idea, and a good one. "Why not?"
"Because they have a great deal of food up there. Food which keeps well, and is always available."
Angelo blinked. "They do?"
"Of course they do," Woorden said. "It is, for them, only natural. They are Africans."
It took Angelo, and everyone else, a minute to get *hat one. Then the objections began. Everybody except the silent Chris Shaw was on his (or her) feet at once, and everybody was talking.
"But you can't mean—"
"Just because you're from South Africa—"
"It's disgusting even to think about—"
Angelo said wearily after the first burst of speeches, "All right, let's get back to something sensible. Come on, now."
He had to say it three times, but at last the room quieted. Woorden said, a bit sulkily, "I still think it is only natural for them. You will see—when it is too late, you will see."
"Besides, you can't starve them out. The African states won't let you—when things reach a really tough pitch, do you think they won't let the states know about it?" Chris said, surprising everyone.
"That is the point," Angelo said, "When things are really tough, sure… but not until then. Until then, they'll keep quiet; they're magicians, remember, and they don't want to look like weaklings. That's why the plan will work."
"What?" Dr. Emmis said.
"The plan will work because we're going to go up there. As a U.N. inspection team. And they're going to let us up there, because we're going to be bringing food," Angelo said patiently.
"But the African states—" Dr. Emmis began, and then said: "Hmra, I suppose you might be right."
"I am right," Angelo said with a confidence he was a long way from feeling. "They can tell the African states that they're playing fair with everyone, letting an inspection team up. And they don't have to mention the food. They'll look good for everyone—and it gets us on the station."
"And what do you expect that to do?" Woorden asked sardonically.
"On the station, we'll be able to…" Well, what? Angelo asked himself. He'd thought of some nice gentle ways of sabotaging the transmitter, but he realized that Chris would never let it happen. Chris was perfectly capable of letting the entire human race go to hell in a hand-basket—even providing the handbasket—to save one poor defenseless transistor.
Keeping the plan from Chris, or telling Chris to stay behind, wouldn't work, either. Chris would smell a rat in about thirteen seconds, Angelo estimated.
It was ridiculous to have what might be the survival of the human race depend on Chris Shaw's feelings about machinery—but, then, he reflected, Chris was a member of the human race, too (whether he wanted to be or not), and no sillier than most of the samples of it, including himself, Angelo had run across.
"Yes?" Dr. Emmis was saying eagerly. "And when we get there?"
"Well…" Angelo began, making it as long and drawn-out as possible in the hopes that an idea of some sort would rise up and bite him on the nose before the pause got too long.
Instead, apparently, the idea seemed to want to rise up and bite Woorden—a much longer climb, Angelo thought. "It is simple," the big Boer said. "If you insist on this hard-way plan, then of course there is only one thing to do when we get to the station."
At this point everybody paused, expectantly but a little nervously. Somebody—who, Angelo could never remember —asked the inevitable question. "What?"
Woorden shrugged. "Magic," he said. "What else?"
Straightening that one out took a fair amount of time. At last it was clear that Woorden was not really suggesting that somebody put a hex on the station. Not quite—though he seemed to have a sneaking idea at the back of his religious mind that it might work. This, in deference both to his own religion and to his notions of absolute and idiotic white supremacy, he suppressed as well as possible.
Instead, he pointed out, it was the Africans themselves who believed this. They really did believe in magic—and if a witch doctor could be found who would put a hex on them ("Some kind of ju-ju or voodoo," he explained. "Voodoo is not African; it is, I believe, West Indian, but who can tell what representatives are on the station? It would be well to include both sorts.") they might become frightened enough to bow to the U.N. edicts.
"More, the hex might actually work," Woorden went on. "I have seen such things—not that I believe them, you understand."
Dr. Emmis, at that point, came to his rescue. "If you believe a hex can harm you, then it can; psychosomatic medicine. A well-known principle."
Woorden looked grateful. Angelo cut in: "We can find out who's on the station easily enough; the Agency for Space will have records easily available."
As for the witch doctor—well, all they had to do was find him. He would be (and, Angelo thought, it was oddly fitting) the replacement for Korkianovitch.
Next question: how do you find a witch doctor in the middle of a highly and even painfully civilized capital city?
The telephone book was no help; the category of Witch Doctor was not listed, and even a fine crop of listings under
Magicians provided only hopeful voices wanting to know the age of the child for whom the party was being given. Angelo called a break for dinner after a time; the crew tiredly went upstairs and ate, then came back down to attack the problem again.
Many suggestions were made, from the silly to the despairing, and sometimes both at once. Angelo himself finally came up with what seemed a better notion than most.
"Let's ask that man—Semmes—from W.H.O.," he said. "He seems to be the resident expert on Africa; that's probably why he was at the meeting anyhow. W.H.O. would have a lot doing out there. Maybe he knows how we can turn up a witch doctor. Even if we have to go to Africa for one."
That seemed the likeliest possibility for a while, but a nice long safari was knocked out of the picture late that night. "I've managed to find someone over at H.A.," Semmes announced, back in the sub-sub-basement.
"Ha?" Angelo said, uncomfortably reminded of aliens.
"H.A.," said the W.H.O. man. "Health Administration. He ought to be here any minute now." With the casual perfection of a 3D script cue, there was a knock on the door. "I expect that's our witch doctor now."
Semmes, nearest to the door, reached over and opened it. A tall, thinnish man strolled in, looking altogether too British to be believed. He was as dark as any human being Angelo had ever see; he wore British-cut clothes, very much subdued in color (though Angelo had never really liked solid-color, kilts, he felt that somehow the dark-brown ones this gentleman wore were strangely fitting and correct); and he actually swung a silver-headed cane of some dark wood (Malacca, of course, Angelo thought instantly), handling it negligently as he came in. He shut the door behind him with an easy gesture, and said, "I've been given to understand you people wanted to see me."
Now that he was seeing it, Angelo couldn't quite believe it. The voice didn't help much: it was pure, clear Oxonian and went perfectly with everything else. Everyone else Angelo had ever met seemed to him suddenly a mixture of types—only this self-possessed individual was drawn, like a character in a novel, out of one set of traits alone. Nobody so British could possibly exist, he told himself.
Semmes spoke quite without awe. "You're Geoffrey Houmes?" he asked.
"I am," the dark Britisher said. "Attached to computer section, H.A., here in Brasilia. I gather you're Mr. Semmes? I've seen your pictures, of course, on the fax."
"That's right," Semmes said, and nodded. "These people are the crew of the former Space Station I." He performed introductions. Woorden seemed absolutely taken aback, and Captain Zugzwang more puzzled than anything else, but otherwise the rite went off smoothly. "Let me tell you our problem," Semmes said when everyone had been named off.
"By all means," Houmes said, and settled himself easily against the door, his cane, in both hands, acting as a casual prop.
Semmes went through a quick digest of the past fourteen-or-so hours. When he was finished, Houmes nodded.
"Thank you; that makes everything quite clear," he said. "I'm certain I can—ah—'handle' the job, as you say."
Angelo couldn't resist one question. "But—but you're not a witch doctor, are you?"
Houmes shook his head. "A computer technician, as I said," he replied. "I'm familiar with the material used on Station II, of course, so I may be helpful there. But my father was a witch doctor—in Dahomey, if you're interested —and, despite the unfortunate handicap—for present purposes—of British education and a Bachelor of Science degree, Oxford—and a few other scattered degrees, I'm afraid—I should be able to recall a good deal of the old material. As a matter of fact, I've quite kept up on it, through the years—rather a hobby, don't you know?"
"Well—" Angelo said.
Semmes broke in. "He's really quite good. And he is the best we can get for you—quite satisfactory, I'm sure." Semmes seemed to be one of the unfortunates who pick up the strongest accent being broadcast in their immediate vicinity; he was rapidly beginning to sound like a BBC announcer, which didn't suit him at all.
Somehow, the notion of a hobbyist witch doctor and computer technician didn't sound exactly marvelous to Angelo. But, if he was the best available…
And, besides, this just hadn't been his day. Few, in fact, were.
"I'm willing," he said, and Io6ked around.
Captain Zugzwang rose magnificently to the occasion. Surveying the little room as if it were the command cabin of his beloved satellite, he turned back to Houmes and said with gravity and punctilious weight: "Welcome aboard, Mr. Houmes. It will be good to have you with us."
"I sincerely hope so," the tall, dark man said.
The Africans were by no means easy to convince. In fact, they weren't even easy to talk to, since they insisted on carrying on their conversations in a brand of Swahili that brought actual pain to Geoffrey Houmes's face. "It's really quite bad, you know," he confided to Angelo and Dr. Emmis during one of their sessions the next day. "It must be deliberate; even a child would know the language better than that. After all, more than half of Africa speaks it, in one version or another, and nearly all understand it."
"Well, I speak English, which has a pretty fair distribution—and I've heard some pretty strange English here and there," Angelo said.
Houmes's face expressed polite doubt, but of which half of Angelo's declaration even Angelo could not be quite sure.
The listing of foods to be supplied, and the safeguards required to make sure that the "inspection team" was not coming up to do exactly what they'd been told to do— i.e., sabotage the warlike nature of the station, one way or another—took all of one day and part of the next. The moon was no longer full, but that rule seemed to have been abrogated for the duration of the argument.
Some time during the second afternoon Houmes came from the communications rooms to the waiting area outside, where Angelo and the others stood or sat. "It's all arranged," he said. "We may go up as soon as a ship can be fitted. Of course, they insist on our taking a circular course—spiral, rather—so that they can exercise their option of refusing us, or even knocking us out of the air, at the last possible minute; but that's no worry. I don't really think they'd bother with anything like that."
Houmes's confidence, Angelo thought, was stunning, and unsharable. But there was nothing else to do. "Tell them we'll leave in the morning," he said, and went off to arrange for takeoff.
To Angelo's great surprise, the trip actually did begin in the morning. The appalling efficiency thus displayed was entirely new to the man, ■ who had watched with resigned terror while Captain Zugzwang, with all available help, had swung the shambles known as Space Station I round its cheery and, in the end, unguessably useful orbit.
Once their ship was off the launch track, however, An-gelo was reassured. The world hadn't changed. The world worked just the way it always had: terribly.
The ship had no name, and Angelo was mentally torn between calling it the Carload Coffin and the Unslung Hero; this meant that, in practice, he called it The Ship. The Ship was equipped with everything available, including a gravity-generator outfit that actually worked, for a change; the jaunt was made under normal gravitic conditions. Unfortunately, the heat shields did not appear to be working at all, and, indeed, seemed to have been tacked onto the ship (The Ship) at the last minute by a small army of beavers who, familiar as they were with attaching equipment, had no notion of the fact that it had to be hooked up to something in order to operate. As the voyage continued, Angelo began to know just how the average roast chicken felt, in those last sad hours.
The transmitter worked beautifully. This was a mistake, since it was locked to Receive and pointed straight for the African Station at all times. The combination of deadly heat and constant drums kept Angelo muttering, "Me Tarzan, you go to hell," for several hours at an exhausted stretch.
Valiantly, he tried to Think Himself into the Knowledge that Things Were Not So Bad. This bit of ancient theology, if that's what it was, somehow did not work for Angelo. Things Were Every Bit As Bad As They Could Get. Soon, he knew with utter certainty, they would be Worse.
The Ship went on through what one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven poets (at last census) had called the Starry Void. The heat increased.
And Angelo began to wonder what had happened to the course corrections.
These were last-minute impulses, to be beamed into The Ship in order to swing it properly over to the Station.
If no beaming occurred, The Ship was going to fall slowly and grandly down into The Sun.
This, Angelo thought, was not a good idea. But as time ticked on, and the drums went steadily thrumming, driving everybody a little farther from their original rockers every hour, no signal came through. Perhaps it was jammed by the drumbeats, Angelo thought; perhaps, on the other hand, there was a missing wire. Or, on the Station, a screw loose.
Perhaps anything. But if the signal didn't come through…
Some parts of the Sun, Angelo hoped, were cooler than others. Maybe they would land in a cool spot and set up a colony. After all, it might only be four hundred thousand degrees…
And the drums went on and on.
Houmes seemed to have disappeared, but nobody cared much. Perhaps, Angelo thought, he had gone A.W.O.L. into the Starry Void; Angelo wasn't at all sure that the idea was a bad one. All the others—Juli, Dr. Emmis, Captain Zugzwang, Chris Shaw and Woorden—were visible at nearly all times, moaning and jerking with the drums and trying to do something, almost anything, about the heat. Juli had stripped down to a degree that would have left her hysterically worrying about sex-suppressants only a few days before, but the subject appeared to have left her mind.
Heat, and drums. He was trapped either in the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Angelo thought, or the kitchen of Gene Krupa.
And the signal was, certainly, absolutely, with complete finality, not going to come through.
At that point in Angelo's cheery musings, the signal came through.
The entire place beeped. For something like nine seconds the drums were silent. Then the place beeped again. The Ship was, at last, ready to dock.
At that moment, Houmes reappeared. Where on the vehicle he had been hiding he never said, but he'd certainly made good use of his time. Before anyone could disembark into the landing-bubble provided, Houmes marched to the fore. Even Zugzwang gave way before an apparition in which Angelo decided at once that he did not even want to believe.
Houmes no longer looked like the Admirable Briton. He now looked like a one-for-one cross between: (a) a historical Native Uprisings 3D show; (b) a mixed stew of the inhabitants of the Central Park Zoo; and (c) a cosmetics counter for robots. He was draped with gear trains, which were stuffed and garnished with feathers and odd bits of what seemed to be claw or beak; cabalistic designs that looked surprisingly like something off Chris's circuit board were drawn on him and appeared again on a blanket which fell from his shoulders both fore and aft. Angelo thought he recognized the blanket, and when he noticed the fur which sprang from Houmes's hair and ears and peeped shyly from between his toes, he was sure he was right. It was— well, it hod been—Juli's blanket.
Juli had carried the fur-bordered blanket through all the Space Station I adventures, and had obviously brought it aboard again; it represented to her some sort of security, Angelo thought mistily, and when she found out that it was missing…
She didn't recognize it just then, though, which was hardly surprising. Houmes was startling enough in his weird dress; the addition of wiring for sound and pyrotechnics made him positively alien. He looked at the others, assembled awestruck around him.
"Let us go," he said with great dignity, and in perfect, slowly phrased English, as if he were speaking a ceremonial . language.
Space Station II had the unusual look of an unfinished structure. It seemed to Angelo as if the crew were still putting the place together out of whatever handy Tinker Toys happened to be floating around in the Starry Void. Even the examination room, to which the bubble led, was a trifle spotty, and for the first time a nagging worry about something he was pretty sure he was going to be able to identify much sooner than he wanted to began to slide around in the DiStefano skull.
Houmes met the squad of three tall Africans, dressed in what were apparently tribal garments, at the entrance to the bubble, and had a long, seemingly fascinating conversation with them. The conversation was entirely in what An-gelo assumed was Swahili, and Angelo got very little out of it. The Africans did not seem pleased when it was over; frowning and moving with ceremonial grace, they put the crew into the start of the usual examination procedures.
For a while, Angelo didn't object. But when he thought he'd had about enough of being X-rayed, pattern-tested, dye-marked and so forth he began to walk off. A medium-sized mechanical stopped him.
A black mechanical—naturally. Angelo said authoritatively, "Let me pass."
The robot made neither sound nor sign.
"The examination is over," Angelo said. "Let me pass."
The robot reached out a small pincer and, almost delicately, grabbed Angelo by the belt.
"You don't understand," Angelo said with what he was sure was perfect accuracy. "I'm going out. I want to leave. The examination is over. Let me—oop."
The robot had pinched the belt and neatly yanked it off, tossing Angelo off balance, giving him a fine new ache in the small of the back as he staggered off toward any handy wall. Staring at the belt and its buckle as if it would have liked to say, "Hmm," the robot backed smoothly away, got to the door of the examination cubicle, and wheeled merrily away.
Angelo grabbed for his pants.
Then he started for the door.
Another mechanical, equally black and equally silent, appeared at once.
"Now wait a minute," Angelo said.
There was a high, thin humming. This was followed by a high, thin voice. The voice said, "This is Central Computer. We are advised that all crew members have now completed examination and are found passable." Angelo privately thought he was a little better than that. Not much—but a little. "We are further advised that all crew members newly arrived are to go to their quarters and remain there. No violations of this order will be countenanced."
The humming came back, and broke off. Angelo looked at the robot, and the robot impassively looked back.
"Okay," Angelo said. "Okay. You have to make such a big deal about everything?"
The robot wheeled about and headed for the door. Angelo followed.
Outside, in the corridor, was the rest of the crew of The Ship, and a robot for each crew member—two, Angelo noticed, for Houmes.
"Well, gang?" Angelo said.
"Mr. DiStefano," Captain Zugzwang said. "Informality, except in necessary moments of stress or hurried communication, will not be excused."
"Yes, sir," Angelo said.
The high humming began again. One of the robots—Angelo couldn't tell which, and couldn't see that it made any difference—said, "You are directed to go to your quarters."
Angelo shrugged. "Yes, sir," he said. There didn't seem to be much of anything else to say.
Sooner or later, he knew, the crew of good old Space Station I was going to have to save the world. Again. At the moment, though, obedience, proper speech and a sprinkling of salutes seemed to be the only possible actions.
Saving the world, he thought, was just going to have to wait.
It took Angelo, and all the rest of the Space Station I crew, just two days to get themselves locked up in the Main Supply Room.
In those two days, the crew did a lot of what the Station personnel called "interfering," and Angelo thought of as legitimate complaining. (He never expressed this thought: Mbudu, his opposite-number Intelligence Officer on II, seemed a good deal colder, and a good deal less friendly, than ever before. And Mbudu was his only real hope for understanding among what Woorden undoubtedly thought of as the Natives. Of course, they were Natives—of Space Station II. But did Woorden think of it that way?)
For one thing, not only the black mechanicals, but the white ones—smaller, clumsier and set to the most menial tasks aboard, of course—began making trouble.
They were stealing things.
Angelo thought dimly of Korkianovitch, who had trained the Station I robots to make him all sorts of strange moonshine. But these robots seemed to have neither rhyme nor reason for their actions.
Dr. Emmis lost a small hypodermic with a blunted point.
Chris lost a tiny screwdriver—and was inconsolable about it.
And Angelo lost a bed.
He almost lost it while he was in it. But the army of robots who came in—four whites, with a black directing them, apparently—thoughtfully tipped him off onto the floor before scurrying away with the bed, pillows, sheets, mattress, springs and all. There had even been a pack of cigarettes on the bed, which did not slide off. The robots got everything.
Angelo went to the main dining room to find someone capable of taking his complaint.
Instead, he found several angry Africans (or Haitians; all the costumes looked a little strange to Angelo, and he was not equipped to distinguish between oddities at the moment), who were not in the least ready to listen.
His complaint, in fact, became a sort of semi-final straw. And when Captain Zugzwang, empurpled with righteous wrath, came boiling up five minutes later to report that the robots had taken his antimagnetic log-log slide rule (without which, as far as Angelo knew, he couldn't even find random numbers to curse with), the Station personnel acted.
"Everyone will be confined to the Main Supply Room."
Mbudu said—a tall and thoughtful-looking man, who seemed a distant cousin of their own Houmes. "It is for the good of the greatest number that this take place." Mbudu, who spoke English at least as well as Angelo—or Houmes—did, now delivered his rare sentences in that language as if it were a foreign, unfamiliar tongue which would soil his mind if he gave it any close attention.
"But we have to—" Dr. Emmis said, and stopped.
"Yes?" Racaille cut in—a lighter Negro, perhaps Haitian, with large liquid eyes, a musical voice and a passion for armament. At the moment, he was carrying what appeared to be two laser pistols, a belt-hung knife and a large museum-piece of a mace slung from one shoulder. "What is it you have to do?"
"Well-"
"We have to be able to eat," Angelo said smoothly—he -hoped. "And make our inspections. There are these inspections, you know. We agreed—"
"We did not agree to disturbances," Mbudu said.
"Certainly not," Racaille added, his hand straying near one of the holstered pistols.
"But we've only been trying to—" Angelo began.
Captain Zugzwang said something that sounded improbable, and was perhaps only the effect of a tight larynx on an irresistible current of air. He choked and then stated grandly: "I am the captain. I insist that—"
"The—ah—captain?" Mbudu said. Angelo had never heard so silky, or so poisonous, a tone from the man. "Of Space Station I, you mean to say?"
"I am—"
"The captain of a nonexistent Station," Mbudu said briskly. "I think that may presently be ignored."
No amount of subsequent shouting, complaining, arguing or even threatened violence did the least amount of good.
There seemed to be a great many robots.
And the Main Supply Room was as unfinished as the rest of the place. Angelo, once they'd all been locked in, was the first to come up with the obvious notion.
"The mechanicals are building something. That's why they're stealing from us; that's why the station looks mn-finished. They're building something." 't
"I imagine you're right," Houmes said politely and, An-gelo thought with slight disturbance, somewhat distantly. "But what?"
No answers appeared to be available.
Another answer, however, was needed first. Dr. Emmis pointed that out with enviable simplicity.
"How do we get out of here?" he asked the others, as evening fell and the large detachment of black robots cleared away the last of the prisoners' daily meals.
"We've got to get out," Woorden said. He had been silent almost since their takeoff for the Station; Angelo thought he was clearly suffering from some sort of cultural shock. But one thing was clear in his frozen mind. "We've got to escape. This is all impossible."
"So is escape," Juli pointed out glumly.
Angelo was filled, not with hope exactly, but with a sort of burgeoning curiosity. "Is it?" he said. "I mean, they've got robots guarding us, and maybe we can do something to the robots…" The words trailed off into silence. Angelo looked around and found the small face he was looking for. "Chris?"
Chris Shaw looked up. "What?"
"Mightn't there be some way to fix the robots, so that—"
"They're the same type as the ones we had," Chris said. "Most of them have a computer brain, one brain per robot, so knocking out a central control won't do much to those. The little ones—the white ones—might be hurt that way, but the others would just go on. Besides all that, how could we get to a central control?"
"But if we—" Angelo began.
"We haven't even got any tools," Chris said. "They took everything away when they put us in here. No tools, and no way to get at the robots guarding us—to persuade them, I mean—so what are we expected to do?"
Nobody answered that one. Off in a corner, Angelo saw two figures huddled together, and he strolled over.
"Well, then?" Dr. Emmis was saying. "Since we've found the active principle in South American plants and poisons, and since—"
"No. I'm sorry, no," Houmes cut in with a weary accent. He was still dressed in his very best Conglomerate, if that was the name for the style he'd come up with on entering the Station, and in the dimness he barely seemed human; gears, feathers and fur stuck out at odd points all over him.
"No?" Emmis asked.
"No," Houmes said. "You have quite the wrong idea. It is not the—ah—active principle which makes the difference. It is the combination of specific essences, the force involved in, perhaps, the very name of an object; this is what you have never truly understood. What was believed—"
"I see," Emmis said. "I—at any rate, I think I see. Psychosomatic, you might call it."
"If by psychosomatic you properly understand that principle which—" Houmes began, and stopped as he saw An-gelo. "Yes?"
"Who?" Angelo said. "Me?"
"You came to ask me something?" Houmes said.
Angelo shook his head. "Nothing. No. It's just—well, we have to find some way to—" he broke off.
"Tension," Emmis said. "It's getting us all. We won't be able to do any really organized thinking unless we can somehow relax."
"That is an idea," Angelo said.
Everybody looked at him.
He went on after a stunned second or so, "If we have to relax, then why not let go entirely? Why not have a sort of a—well, a show?"
"Angelo, you've gone mad," Chris said in a kindly tone.
"Besides, it might help," Angelo went on doggedly. "If the crew of the Station has us under even occasional surveillance—and I'm sure they do—we might be able to shake them up a little."
Houmes was the first to see where Angelo's thoughts had drifted. "I should think it would do a lot more than that." he said with easy assurance. "It is, of course, why I am dressed in the manner you see."
"Go ahead," Angelo said. "It ought to be quite a show."
"Show?" Captain Zugzwang said suddenly. "What show is this? There is no provision in our orders for any such… Juli whispered something soothing to him, though only God knew what that could have been, and his voice trailed away.
"Go ahead," Juli said. "We'd all like to see it."
Woorden roared out in his great voice, "And, indeed, it is to affright the native with his own belief, which is a most worthy aim; we must recover in such manner as this what is our own." God might perhaps know, Angelo thought, what that meant, too, but he wasn't entirely sure that even Woorden did.
Except that, of course, it did mean: the show must go on.
Which, instantly, it began doing.
Houmes jumped up—literally jumped—from his seated position on the floor and let go with a howl that seemed to wake all the spirits of all the dead who ever were. Juli echoed with a small "Eep" of her own, but the noise appeared to have startled everyone else into silence.
Houmes began to dance.
Angelo had never seen anything like it; neither, he was sure, had any other member of the trapped party. The man's arms flowed from one position to the next, freezing for a second into attitudes that themselves expressed the heights of some unutterable emotional weight; his body seemed to shiver, blur and then stamp itself on the air in patterns of hate, rage, terror and even a sort of love; for the most part he was silent as this first stage of motion flickered by, but a grunt or a howl now and again made an echo of his body or his fixed arms and head, as if the noise and the picture were only, after all, two ways of saying the same thing.
Then the second stage began, and Angelo knew that even Houmes's ancestors^ even the witch doctors of his home continent, had never seen anything like the show Houmes was now putting on for these few people.
They had never seen a witch doctor dance fully wired and fully equipped for pyrotechnics.
Dazzling flame lit one arm, a spot of light appeared in the opposite palm; for a second Houmes's entire face was en-haloed in a totally unearthly manner, and his eyes were bright sparks that burned out past the halo and seemed to remain when it was gone. How much time went by An-relo never knew, but he suspected it was about one-tenth the amount he imagined. During a very brief and dim pause in Houmes's dance he became aware of a voice at his side.
"Fascinating," Emmis said. "What?" Angelo said.
"Houmes," Emmis said. "I had no idea—he's quite a sensible man, you know."
"I'm sure. He's a robot expert."
"I mean his—his medical knowledge," Emmis said. Angelo shrugged, not taking his eyes off the swaying, lightstreaked figure. "Didn't know he had any."
"But—of course he does," Emmis said. "He's the doctor for his tribe. Or he could be; it's more or less an inherited position. The way a good many doctors' sons in the United States, say, turn out to be doctors. Over there—"
"It's the sons of witch doctors, but the same principle?" Angelo said. "Is that what you mean by his medical knowledge?"
"He—" Emmis broke off short. "After all, there was digitalis. Lots of things, taken from native roots and potions and such. He seems to know, somehow—instinctively, perhaps—all sorts of medical facts. And if his remedies are —a bit unusual…"
Angelo was losing track of the conversation. He kept drifting back, almost against his will, to staring at Houmes as the man moved, placed himself rigid as a statue, lit and dimmed, shouted now and howled with the impact of new motion and new light…
Everyone else was watching, too. Even the robots who were set to guard them, three, large black types, were staring at Houmes. Even the…
"Good God," Angelo said, and Emmis jerked.
"What?"
"The robots," Angelo said. "I know how we can escape."
It is obviously impossible to hypnotize a robot. Robots are not human beings, and the combination of fixed attention and eyestrain which results, sometimes, in human trance does nothing in particular to machines, even if the machines happen to look a bit manlike, and move around and talk as if they were rigidly specified carbons of real people.
As far back as the 1950's, though, it had been discovered that a steady pulse of sound in a range calculated in accordance with normal current requirements inside the machine could, and would, immobilize a computer. Whether you called the result hypnosis, hysteresis,' or a Hitherto Unknown Effect of Some Interest, the result was still there; if it weren't hypnosis it would do until hypnosis came along.
The discovery had been lost in the shuffle preceding the onslaught of Compound Delta, the viral form which had killed off most Asians throughout the world, and had been stamped out, to some degree, by men who had no idea whether Compound Delta had been a weapon, a natural disaster or a laboratory accident (all three of which may, in fact, in any available situation, be identical terms). After the realignment, the establishment of two Space Stations overhead—of which Station I was now gone, exploded over Peking in order to stop what might otherwise have been the real thing, the final war—and the resurgence, due to the powers both of the Stations and of the World Health Organizations, of the U.N. in Brasilia, computer work had gone on and found even more surprising things, some of which were embodied in the robots scattered round Station II. But the idea of hypnotizing machines had remained buried.
Buried, but not quite invisible. Somewhere, Angelo remembered seeing it, or seeing a mention of the effect. Even if he were wrong…
Well, what harm could it do to try?
Like several other questions (What else can happen? How bad can it be? and many relatives), this was one which Angelo tried never to utter; it always had an answer, and the answer was always unpleasant. Now, keeping his mind firmly away from the question, he began to outline his plan' to Dr. Emmis—who, shockingly, had no objections at all.
"It's a medical fact, and I imagine Houmes should do very well with it," Emmis said casually. "I tell you, his knowledge of these things is—well, it's uncanny, that's what it is."
Feeling just a bit as if he had been trapped in Chapter Six of a book called The Grisly Secret of the Old Manse, or perhaps the Old Womanse, Angelo waited, his mind straining with the necessity of keeping his vision clear and unhypnotized (whatever Houmes did to machines, he worked wonderfully well on human beings), until he could get the witch doctor's attention.
Honmes's whirling came to a slow stop. Angelo beckoned and he came over; as he did so, lit only by a few remaining sparks here and there among his scattered bits of equipment, Angelo saw the others (robots included) come back to normal.
Hastily, he explained his notion about hypnotizing the mechanicals. "If you can do it, we can escape," he wound up.
Houmes was nodding gravely. "Oh, I can do it, all right, old boy," he said. "I can manage that—I am a robotics man, after all, and finding the right frequency range ought to be fairly simple: these robots will be built to the same pattern as the robots on Station I, or the ones back in Brasilia. Matters may be a bit different in space, but basic requirements shouldn't change much."
"Then if you can—"
"Of course I can," Houmes said. "And if these robots become immobilized, they ought to signal others, who will have to open the hatch here to get in—and once that's done, the new robots can be immobilized and we can duck out the open hatch. There's only one little question, you see."
"Question?" Angelo said, feeling uncomfortably like a straight man. "What's that?"
"Why—what we're to do, after we've escaped, Of course," Houmes said. "I mean to say: we'll still be in this corked bottle of a station, won't we? With all the Africans and robots looking for us?"
"I suppose we will," Angelo said. "But—" He stopped. "We'll think of something," he said at last. "In the meanwhile, it has to be first things first."
"Good," Houmes said, a bit doubtfully. "In that case, I'll get right to work."
Making the robots respond to false instructions, Houmes said later, was always possible, but seemed a bit complicated; immobilizing them, and waiting to see if they'd signal new robots on their own, was the simple way of doing his job. And, to Angelo's surprise, the simple way worked; it took Houmes nearly half an hour, and much leaping back and forth and flickering, but by then the door was open and their way out was guarded only by the immobile hulks of eight large black robots and one small white one which, instead of going into rigidity, had developed a sort of perpetual chill, and was shaking itself in a jangling fashion right into a collection of ill-assorted nuts, bolts and impedimenta.
In that half hour, the crew had made a few plans, too. Dr. Emmis was to accompany Chris to the communications room, serving as his defensive screen, so that Chris could broadcast their discovery that the Africans were even more ill-disposed than they seemed to be down to U.N. H.Q. and then destroy the transmitter so that the Africans could use it no longer. (Destroying the transmitter was a thought that made little Chris tighten his lips, and all the talk in the world about the good of humanity meant nothing to him: what did he care about humanity? But he finally suggested that he simply remove, and safely secrete, a few vital parts, leaving his beloved machinerv whole and un-dam acred, and this seemed just as satisfactory to everyone else.)
Captain Zugzwang, and Woorden, assisting, were to head for The Ship and ready it for an immediate return to Earth. Angelo, Juli and Houmes were assigned to dig out anvthing else of interest that could be found in a hurry, but meet in a spot near The Ship in two hours, where evervone else was going to be.
Juli knew the Station better than anvone else, of course; as an ecologist, she had to memorize every passageway and side alley in the place. With her lead, Angelo and Houmes could go virtually anywhere and find out whatever they could.
It was Juli who asked, her lip trembling just a little: "What do we do if we meet a detachment of crew members?"
Angelo, with a shrug which he considered either hyster-icallv brave or very, very stupid, said, "Try to act as African as possible." This got no particular reaction from anvone except Woorden, who choked on what might have been an entire unprintable paragraph.
Rut in two hours, nobody, nobody at all, met any Africans. The crew of Station II did not stop them; it did not delay them; it did not even appear to them. Among all the awful facts which were brought back to the group's meeting place near The Ship that was perhaps the worst. On the other hand, Angelo thought, picking the Worst-Dressed Fact of the Meeting might prove to be a very close thing, if anybody cared to go about it. He wasn't sure that he did; having them all around was bad enough, and lining them up to parade past his mental vision might be a bit too much.
For instance, Chris's report. The midget electronics man had come back in a state of broken shock, almost beyond tears, as if he'd seen in the communications room the dismembered bodies of his ten best friends in the world. This was. in essence, just what he had seen.
"It's awful," he said, when Juli, Angelo, and Houmes had managed to calm him down a bit. "They've ruined every-thing. The transmitters just aren't there any more. Except the repeaters… they've simply yanked everything loose that they could, and I haven't got any idea what happened to it. It's—just—all gone. Everything they could grab. Empr ty. The whole place is empty."
Or the joint report of Woorden and Captain Zugzwang, which boiled down to two simple sentences. 1: The Ship was gone. 2: The Station's shuttle, meant to transport its personnel back to Earth if and when possible, was also gone.
Adding that to the fact that the Africans themselves were nowhere on the Station, and stirring in some notes and left-behind material, the situation was fairly clear. Hopeless, Angelo told bimself, but clear.
The Africans had agreed to an inspection team with something of the same hope with which their ancestors had awaited small parties of missionaries. The ancestors had wanted food, which the missionaries perforce provided; the Station II personnel wanted another ship. The inspection team had, therefore, kindly flown up and delivered it to them.
The Station II team knew, of course, that sooner or later the U.N. was going to figure out both a way to jam their messages and a justification for doing so that would stand up in the somewhat cloudy vision of public opinion. Before that happened, they wanted to be ready. So they had built a whole new series of transmitters—which explained not only the missing material from the communications room but also the vaguely half-finished look of the Station itself. Then, using the new ship, they had put these transmitters in a neat orbit around the Earth.
Jamming thus became a problem with a dazzling variety of new parameters.
Since the Africans had worked out a way of blanketing wavelengths from one end of the possible spectrum to the other (or, anyhow, that was the way Angelo and Chris put the scraps of left-behind notes together) so that every receiver on Earth, tuned in or not, would receive and resonate to those insistent and mind-destroying drumbeats…
There was, clearly, no way to stop the transmitters from going on. There was, just as clearly, no way to avoid the drumbeats that had, even on a small scale, nearly driven the Station I crew out of its collective mind.
The African Revolution, therefore, was about to begin. The Final War was staring the little group straight in the eye.
The clarity of the situation was matched only by its absolute, entire, total hopelessness.
"All we need is for the Africans to return right now and start to kill us off. Now they've got everything ready to go, there's no reason for them to keep us alive any longer. I suppose—"
Even Angelo could never remember what it was he had been going to suppose.
At that second, the Africans, surrounded by many helpful robots (mostly black), and looking very bloodthirsty, began to come down the passageway.
Escape was impossible.
Luckily, both Africans and the inspection team were hemmed in by the width of the corridor. The robots, marching in ragged lines, made matters even more confusing and prevented any African, even Racaille with his pistols, knife and mace, from getting in an immediate shot to cut down the inspection team right there and then. Instead, there was a frozen bit of time, perhaps as much as two entire seconds, in which nothing of any import happened, except that everybody got a little bit closer to every-bodv else.
Then Angelo turned, and whispered to Houmes, who stood beside him at the front of their small band, "The act! Give 'em the act—robots and Africans both!"
"They're not all Africans," Houmes said in an abstracted tone. "There are Haitians too. That's Voudun—Voodoo, you call it. An entirely different matter. They wouldn't be affected by—"
Angelo said, "This is no time for a Holy War, or a lecture on comparative religion. You're all we've got. And whatever you can make happen is going to be our main advantage."
"Well—" Houmes said, and Angelo, still as death, thought he was considering the matter. Instead, Houmes was gathering his forces. When he let them go there was no doubt at all that action had begun.
He leaped into the air, legs widespread, hands clenched and arms extended straight out at his sides, with a terrible, never-ending wail that sounded like death, destruction and despair all wrapped up in one handy package. Angelo heard the faint sound of a laser pistol go off, and saw a robot jerk and sway as its left arm fell unattached to the ground; the place was just too crowded for laser use, and everyone had known it until Houmes, in his character as witch doctor, had unhinged somebody's trigger finger.
The wail went on as Houmes landed, whirled, pointed an index finger at the oncoming, but slowing personnel. He broke off to mutter to Angelo: "My bag. Where is it?"
"Bag?"
"Black bag. Brought it with me. Maybe—in supply room."
Then Houmes began to chant. His lights came on, all of them at once, and began to flicker in patterns. This time, Angelo began to see, he was not going to be satisfied with immobilizing the robots. This time, he was going to send them messages. One white robot at the edge of the milling crowd had apparently got the message already, Angelo noticed. It was shaking and lifting its arms to the ceiling in a regular beat, about seventeen to the minute, like a sort of mechanical Holy Roller on the way to spasm.
The Africans muttered, and for a second a pathway opened in the crowd of robots. Houmes flung himself straight at that pathway—and nobody fired a shot. Africans and Haitians backed away; the rest of the inspection team followed Houmes. They were swallowed up in the melee; over the sounds of sudden and confused battle Angelo could barely even hear Houmes go on with his chanting.
Angelo had dropped back. He headed for the supply room, where they'd been confined, in a fair approximation of the speed of light. The black bag lay forgotten in a corner. It looked very much like a doctor's bag, and An-gelo thought of Dr. Emmis' enthusiasm for Houmes's methods. Angelo headed back to the battlefield.
He hadn't missed much. Chris was being extraordinarily effective, since the role of a midget in a close-in melee has a great many advantages unless and until somebody steps on the midget. Many Africans were leaping in the air with great abandon, and making sounds that rivaled Houmes's best efforts. Some of them were trying to aim their laser pistols downward, but the very fair possibility that they would shoot off their own toes apparently prevented any serious firing.
Captain Zugzwang had decided to be both precise and heroic. He stood surrounded by robots, one of them the little white one who was still doing his seventeen-to-the-minute arm-raise; every time the white robot began to raise its arms, the captain tried to make sure there was an African (or Haitian; the captain had no prejudices) head in the vicinity. Even a small robot is perfectly capable of delivering knockout blows with its arms if they ane moved suddenly enough. Captain Zugzwang was doing his best to knock out seventeen of the enemy every minute, and if his record was a good deal lower than that the only reason was that the enemy was refusing to cooperate.
Dr. Emmis was on the fringes of battle, distastefully attempting to crack a skull or break an arm here and there —displaying, now that Angelo came to think of it, much the same reluctance Chris displayed when faced with the notion of destroying precious electronic equipment. Juli was yelping, "Eep! Yeep!" with reassuring steadiness from somewhere within the mob, and God only knew what she was doing, but the satisfied and almost happy sound of her voice was enough to tell Angelo she was in no danger.
Woorden was a 3D picture of the Avenging God, picking up Africans and Haitians and tossing them into moving piles of other forces, his face stone-rigid. He waded through the battle with a complete and terrifying calm.
The Station II personnel were regrouping fast, and Angelo looked for Houmes. He was hitting on all fours, crouching and snarling something in a language Angelo knew at once he did not want to understand. His arms went up suddenly, lights flickered, and the snarl changed to a whine which got higher and higher and then…stopped.
Angelo scurried forward into the morass with the bag. Houmes gave him one grateful glance.
He opened the bag, drew out a plastic package of mud-colored gunk, and looked around as he hefted it. Africans shrunk back; Haitians showed their difference to Angelo by remaining fixed. Nobody apparently wanted to advance. Houmes called the doctor and Emmis' head turned around.
He said something inaudible, whirled back again Just in time to catch a rather small African by the ears and, swinging him nearly off his feet, deposited him gently on the ground.
Houmes shouted again: "Dr. Emmis! Come here! I want you!"
Emmis swung around himself and trotted over. "Yes?"
Angelo, feeling that the two men might need some sort of defense while they were cooking up whatever peculiar hell they were cooking up, stayed nearby. The main center of the fight was elsewhere, swirling around the captain, Chris and (judging by sound alone) Juli, while Woorden, the Avenger, created havoc on a scale beyond anything previously imaginable; the robots kept getting in everybody's way regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin.
"What is that?" Emmis said.
Houmes, hefting the bag of gunk, said, "It's a specific against penicillin."
Emmis blinked. "What?"
"My people believe that in many cases it is the strange pills and powders of Europe and America which give rise to entirely new diseases," Houmes said. It seemed to Angelo a very odd time for a medical seminar. But perhaps Houmes knew what he was doing.
On the other hand… the Africans were beginning to realize that the witch doctor was paying them no present attention. That meant trouble, not only for Houmes, but for everybody: even Woorden staggered under the sudden brute impact of three Station II personnel who had, for the moment, nothing else to worry about.
"Well, it's true that penicillin-resistant strains… you know you may have something there," Emmis said.
"I'll need you to help me," Houmes said. "There are some powerful spells here—prescriptions, you might say—and they need more than one person."
"Anything you want me to—yug!" Emmis said, as a thrown laser pistol went whizzing half an inch over his head.
Houmes hefted the bag of gunk once more, chanted six separate syllables in a language that seemed to make the Africans pale a little, and swung it like a beanbag into the crowd of the enemy.
It burst, with a sound all out of proportion to its size. A dense cloud of smoke arose, blinding everybody (Juli's voice from somewhere said, "I can't see! What am I supposed to do about it?") and rapidly condensing into a much smaller smoke-cloud, developing at the same time a stench of appalling and magnificent strength.
"Akaja!" somebody screamed—one of the Africans, presumably.
Houmes nodded in an abstracted way. He was assembling something with roots and several blobs of vari-colored hair. There were other items Angelo did not take a close look at. "Used for scurvy, mostly," Houmes said in an aside to Emmis.
"Ah, yes," Emmis said. "Fascinating."
"Hold this," Houmes said. "Don't let it shake at all." He passed over a piece of the assembly—two tufts of hair and a carefully knotted string—which Emmis took with a graceful medical gesture, holding it quite still.
"In a moment, now…" Houmes muttered, rummaging in the bag. Angelo looked away from him, and was just in time to see Woorden go down—falling square on top of Captain Zugzwang as a flying wedge of the enemy overwhelmed him at last.
A great shout went * up from the enemy. Juli became visible at last, hanging on to the robe-collars of two Africans, pulling with all her might. The men, unable either to shake her loose or to get out of their cloaks, since their arms were thoroughly tangled and the tightly fastened cloaks needed a little working on, were starting to turn a fascinating shade of purple. Juli was saying "Eep!" again, and every time she made a sound she pulled a little harder.
Chris seemed to have been trapped by robots, with whom he was apparently attempting to negotiate. He seemed • to think that if he could only make them understand, they would change sides… but the robots ignored all this, and were coming closer and closer.
Houmes muttered: "I'm going to work pn the machinery. Angelo—take this." He handed Angelo a series of small, somewhat oily little balls, made up of God only knew what. "Give it to the doctor when he asks you." Emmis made an inquiring sound. "Ultimate weapon," Houmes said. "Never been used, as far as I know. Don't try it except as a last resort. But if you have to use it—go ahead."
"But—what does it do?" Emmis sputtered.
"Part of it's a medical specific," Houmes said. "Cholera—the cholera germs are round, aren't they?"
"No," Emmis said. "Sort of long."
"Oh," Houmes said. "In that case, you'd have to add river mud." He began to rise, in the teeth of the African advance. "But the rest of it—nobody knows. The ultimate weapon. My grandfather's invention, really—very inventive old boy. Still has some fine ideas."
"Oh. I'd like to meet him—"
"Sorry," Houmes said tersely as the Africans came on. "Can't manage that. Only the family. You see, he's been dead six years."
Emmis made some sound—but it was lost in Houmes's screech. The lights were going again; Juli and a slightly-recovered Woorden were helping to tackle the enemy while Houmes went to work on the robots. The curving patterns of light, sound and motion made Angelo dizzy, but he couldn't look away. Too, Houmes seemed to have mined himself with many small witch doctor type grenades; every so often, he'd reach into the folds of his cloak, draw out something, and toss it. A large bang and a small, horribly odorous smoke-cloud resulted; this, too, kept the Africans at bay.
Then, with a grinding screech, one of the robots turned, waved its big arms wildly, and attacked—another robot.
Within seconds, the passageway was loaded with litter. The robots were fighting each other—all the black ones, at any rate. The few small whites had mostly given way to tremor, and were doing what Angelo thought of as their Holy Roller bit in any clear space.
Captain Zugzwang was rising; Chris, freed, was attempting to calm down a white robot in a far corner; Woorden staggered forward into the fray again and Juli, two figures limp at her feet, went after two more. Dr. Emmis, watching with a nervous eye, muttered, "He's got the robots believing that all the other robots are part of an invasion force, or something. Fighting each other. The man's a wonder."
Angelo tended to agree. But the fight was by no means over. Houmes was still screeching and tossing his sbsnch-grenades; the Africans and Haitians milled about.
"Give it to me," Emmis said.
Angelo blinked and then remembered. With some relief, he handed over the collection of slimy little balls. "But it's only as a last resort—"
"We've got to be ready," Emmis said. "This is Condition Yellow."
Angelo hoped the squatting doctor knew what he was doing.
An exceptionally large cloud of smoke appeared in front of them. Enemy howls and Houmes's screeching rose to an unbelievable pitch…
And stopped dead.
The repeaters in the communications room, too large to carry away, were still connected, and still working. The message blared through the entire Station.
"One thousand ships have landed on Earth. These ships are alien. We are under attack. Ships are armed with great power, invasion is underway. We request help from…"
The message dissolved into static, crackles, squawks.
Then, as the repeaters tried vainly to recapture it, the Station sounded to the terrific whistle of a single enormous feedback, as abrupt and startling as the crack of doom.
THE HIGH HEX
Which, Angelo thought instantly, it might have been…
Because, shocked by it, Dr. Emmis had done the only thing he could think of to do.
He had thrown Houmes's last reserve into the smoke-cloud before them.
He had finally used the ultimate weapon.
Slowly, the smoke cleared.
It did not entirely clear; in fact, what happened to it was more in the nature of a series of local solidifications. Houmes's little grenades were turning out to have a great many unusual properties. The latest was that the passageway became cluttered with, comparatively small gobs of smoke, which remained more or less still, drifting now and then as the air circulation devices in the Station moved them, but dissipating not at all. Many of them were strangely, even beautifully colored: green, pink, a dashing blue-and-yellow-speckled gob, a very sober one in a kind of midnight brown…
Many of them—almost all, in fact—had at least one sort of local aura. Some of them shimmered and shone, developing haloes that looked, on puffs of smoke, practically sacrilegious. Others emitted simple, practical noxious fumes, enough to drive even the noseless away from their vicinity; a purple-and-white one (stripes) was dubbed by Angelo, as it drifted up to him, as Superskunk. One or two seemed to have developed an unpleasant nagging whine, at nearly the bottom level of audibility, but Angelo wasn't sure about that, and thought he might be imagining it.
In fact, he rather thought he was imagining the entire situation, and that at any minute he was going to wake up either in a hospital in Brasilia or in some sort of reasonable afterlife. Unless, of course, this was hell…
But, then, it looked too inexplicable for any self-respecting Eternal Roast. It was either a hospital nightmare, or exactly what it seemed to be.
And what it seemed to be…
Well: the sudden announcement that Earth was being invaded by aliens (which was ridiculous in itself) had stopped the war between the personnel of Stations I and II. The robots, however, having been firmly directed by the U.N.'s witch doctor (try that over on your abacus, Angelo told himself bleakly), were going right on with the Satellite War. And they were rather difficult to stop.
Robots, when fighting other robots, seemed to get original and rather difficult ideas. These particular specimens were tearing off bulkheads wherever possible, swinging with everything at their command, using welding torches where torches happened to be part of their equipment…
Angelo's idea—and that of everyone else, apparently—was to get to the communications area and find out what in the name of all the gods of Houmes was happening back on Earth. But getting there required passing through the field of battle. It took Angelo, the rest of the inspection team, and all the Africans and Haitians of Station II something like half an hour to get past the robots and around a corner of the passage. Even then, one small white robot followed them, twitching pitifully. Chris kept looking back until it was at last outdistanced, and out of sight.
"They'll stop," one of the Station II personnel said— Mbudu, Angelo thought, but it was hard to tell. "They'll reach a level of functioning too low to allow their battle to continue; it won't take long."
"You're quite correct," Houmes said. "By the time we have some idea what this news from Earth is all about…" Very shortly, they began to get the news. Communication was spotty, but there was a hook-in remaining with the U.N.'s sky-eye satellites, and that, along with a little mes-age here and there, began to provide a picture. It was, Angelo thought, a picture which made all his previous troubles look like Life at Sunnybrook Farm.
First of all, the statement that there were one thousand alien ships now looked like the wildest and most hopeful kind of understatement. Angelo was sure he had (by the time they were temporarily through with the sky-eyes) personally counted more than that. Second, attack wasn't really the right word for what they were doing.
A series of pictures were burned into Angelo's brain.
The Eiffel Tower, shrinking, disappeared as they watched —until the space where it had stood was empty. The space was being covered by a shining new dome.
The Empire State Building—Pennsylvania Station—the just-rebuilt and relocated (on One Hundred and Tenth Street) Madison Square Garden—the U.N. Buildings… same story, same result.
The Taj Mahal.
The Museum of Capitalist Atrocities (whatever its right name was, Angelo could never quite remember, and thought the block was probably Freudian and not worth his attention) in Moscow.
London's brand-new one-hundred-and-four-story Trades Congress Building.
Almost all of Detroit (Michigan).
Almost all of Manchester (England).
The outskirts of Brasilia.
Lagos. Mbuele. Capetown. (Not much of Africa, though, for reasons which were rapidly becoming clear).
Swathes of Lima. Of Mexico City. Of Panama. Of (skipping from continent to continent) Jerusalem, Addis Ababa…
The list seemed endless. And everywhere the same picture.
Two ships (always two). Their slow destruction (it looked like eating) of a big structure, a building or something with metals in it. The creation of a dome over the now-emptied site. Then the retraction of that dome to reveal the original two ships, and one more.
Metals, then; that was what the aliens were after. This gradually became obvious.
But they were also after something else.
Radioactives.
That dome…
Angelo remembered seeing a dome, or some sort of round thing, back in the passageway. Not one of Houmes's smoke-effects (an African had blundered into one of those and come out covered with feathers to the waist, a sight which made everybody move just a little bit faster). No. A sort of sphere… that wasn't a sphere. A sort of…
A sort of nothing. A hole straight into nothing.
The ultimate weapon?
Or just an error in perception?
It didn't seem, somehow, as important as what he was actually seeing: aliens invading the Earth, eating its buildings, robbing it of metals and radioactives…
Reproducing themselves with the results.
What, no matter how unthinkable, was going to be their next move?
Angelo groaned. The Station was magnificently equipped with missiles—none of which could be used on the alien ships. Any strike would destroy the city near which the ships were parked, and the aliens naturally preferred cities —more readily available metal and fissionables were there.
Earth was doing everything it could, which, from scattered reports, was not very good.
But if the aliens were allowed to continue…
No more metal. No more fissionables.
"Back to the Stone Age," Angelo muttered. An African he didn't know looked up from a foot or so away.
"What was that you said?"
"Never mind," Angelo said. "Nothing personal."
The process of simply finding out what was happening seemed to go on forever. It was Chris who broke it off, by coming up with an idea which Chris was uniquely equipped to think of.
"They're not aliens," he said.
"What?" Angelo said.
Captain Zugzwang barked: "You have gone mad!"
"They're not," Chris insisted, and several Station II personnel hissed polite suggestions that sounded as if they might have been repeats of the captain's, if they'd been in English. "Then what are they?" Woorden demanded. Woorden, bloodied and heroic in appearance, was still in a sort of shock, but he was recovering rapidly.
"They're machines," Chris said. "Alien machines. They act as if they're programmed—no initiative, no new ideas, always the same thing—"
"It works, doesn't it?" Angelo said.
Chris shrugged impatiently. "That isn't the point. They react too regularly to be anything but machines. I'd stake my—I'd stake my life on it. Actually, I would."
"Hmm," Houmes said. "They're always in units of two, they get the metals and form a third… even if a job is too big for two, they keep at it, don't get any more help and apparently aren't asking for it. They move right in, not even paying any attention to life-forms—not even blasting them out of the way. As if life-forms didn't exist for them."
"The Second Robot War," Emmis said thoughtfully. "We've got the first up here—"
"Probably stopped by now," a very dark Station II man put in—a Haitian, judging from the lilt of his accent.
"—and the second is going on down there," Emmis finished.
"We've got to stop it, then," Angelo said instantly. This suggestion was not greeted with glad cries.
After a time, Emmis asked, "Any idea how?"
"Yes," Captain Zugzwang said. "It is your job to implement your suggestion, Mr. DiStefano."
"I know you can do it," Juli said.
Well, Angelo thought, that made one. Now, if Angelo himself could be convinced, that would make two. "Would they be directed by a central system, like some robotic teams?" he asked, to gain a little time.
"I'm sure they would," Chris said. "The work's too steady for anything else. The real aliens must be using computers to direct… that is, if there are any real aliens."
"Where do you think those things were built?" Angelo demanded. "Kansas City?"
Chris shook his head, busily staring through a glass at a set of circuits which might not ever be put back into working order. "I think maybe the whole thing is the machines. Just machines, self-directed, more or less, with a central computer. There really isn't any need for anything else, is there?"
That, Angelo thought, sounded like the archetypal Chris Shaw idea. The machines were real. Any possible life-forms directing them were not part of Chris Shaw's world— which needed, after all, only machines to keep itself entirely occupied and entirely happy.
"Let's not be silly," Dr. Emmis put in. "Of course there are aliens—to program the computers which direct the machines. What are the ships for, if there's nobody inside them?"
A general murmur of agreement followed that, and Chris nodded slowly and sadly. Alien life, very clearly, was by no means as fascinating to Chris as the prospect of thousands, millions, of self-programing, eager machines.
"They go after metal," Chris said.
"That and fissionables," Angelo put in. "We've seen the stockpile sites… they seem to need fissionables as much as they do ordinary metals."
"Okay," Chris said. "So why don't they go after each other? They get some metal, go into a quick-built dome, and come out with a brand-new ship. Why don't they cannibalize each other for the metal?"
"The aliens who control them—" Angelo began.
"No living beings can ride herd on that many ships all at once," Chris said. "And they're increasing in number every minute; every time two of them find a metal deposit, or a mixed metals-and-fissionables deposit, a third ship results. The precise way they work is what convinced me they're programmed from one source. A computer, or a computerlike mechanism. What prevents them from going after each other?"
"They're all identical," Dr. Emmis said.
Juli nodded. "They all look alike, don't they?"
A rumble from the African and Haitian contingent seemed to mark agreement. Only Chris shook his head.
"You're not thinking this through," he said. "No two things can be absolutely identical."
"For all practical purposes—" Dr. Emmis began, but was cut off, first by one of the Haitians ("Who can know what is practical for an alien?") and then by Captain Zugzwang.
"Statistically, it is impossible," the captain said. "Two things must be made different from each other, or neither can exist. The idea of two identical things is a monstrosity."
"Look," Chris said patiently. "There have to be differences
—maybe very small ones, but differences fust the same. And those differences have to get bigger as time goes on—you see that, don't you?"
Everybody, Angelo decided, either saw Chris's point or was determined to act as if he did; there was a vague mutter throughout the communications room.
"Then eventually the ships would go for each other, because they wouldn't recognize each other as the same breed of being," Chris went on. "But that hasn't happened. Therefore, they must broadcast some kind of recognition signal at each other. Something that tells Machine A that Machine B, even though it looks a little different, is really part of the Job, not part of the target."
Chris concluded and leaned back as comfortably as if he were in his own communications room aboard the now-gone Station I, surveying the others—his own mates from the destroyed station and the contingent of Africans and Haitians that made up Station H's personnel.
Angelo let the explanation settle a bit in his mind before asking, gently: "But where does that leave us?"
"Don't you see?" Chris asked.
There was quite a long silence.
One of the Africans said, in a rumbling voice that seemed to make Woorden just a little paler than usual: "Apparently, my friend, none of us see at all. Perhaps your vision is better than ours, or more subtle."
This struck Angelo as a great advance in friendliness over the war that had been going on ten minutes before, but Chris only sighed and Woorden's shoulders tensed as the big man appeared to go on the defensive. Being surrounded by heaping helpings of melanin did not, Angelo thought, do Woorden's psyche any particular good.
"If they broadcast a recognition signal then the chances are that they broadcast other signals as well. Irritant-signals, for instance, to let the other machines know where a new metals cache is," Chris said. "If they do broadcast such a signal, it's possible for us to derive it. And if we can derive it-"
"Aha," Houmes said. Angelo had never before heard the word pronounced with such offhand precision. "I see. We can ourselves signal the aliens—"
"And lure them away from the Earth, out here into space," Chris said.
Houmes went on happily, "Where we can destroy them with our missiles."
"With our missiles," Mbudu said angrily.
Houmes shrugged. "Just so they're destroyed," he said.
"Wonderful," Dr. Emmis said. "We can get rid of every alien ship that way—a wholesale fob. If we can make the signal strong enough to get them all out here—"
Chris was, very suddenly, standing against the communications room door. "Now wait a minute," he said tensely. He seemed to have grown at least to normal human height, and perhaps a little above. "Now wait just a minute there," he said.
"Wait?" Emmis said.
"Yes," an African—the big bass-voiced man—put in. "Wait for what?"
Chris faced them heroically. "We can't just—just destroy them. They're machines. They're even more than machines."
"Of course they are," Dr. Emmis said. "They're aliens, too. But right now they're busily destroying the Earth. I have the distinct feeling that we've got a certain duty in this matter."
The word duty acted as a magnet on Captain Zugzwang, who roared: "Mr. Shaw, I hereby order you to aid in the destruction of all aliens! This will mean any alien being whatever, and includes any craft he, or she, or it, or they may be happening to be traveling in."
Chris said, "But they're—look." Desperately, tears in his eyes, he tried to make them understand. "They're like—like human beings, I suppose. Two of them get together and have a third—like families. How can you expect me to destroy—to kill, even—families of machines, the new ones, like little babies?…" His voice trailed off. He seemed, slowly, to shrink again. Soon he was Chris Shaw-sized; but his growth had made everyone, for the moment, stop.
For Chris, the tragedy was very real.
Unfortunately, another tragedy, that of the Earth, was even more so.
Making Chris see that took time. During that time the alien ships were taking over more and more of the Earth. Radio reports came in now and then as the crew tuned across every possible band, and the reports were becoming worse.
"Is anybody out there? Can anybody help? Am being attacked by strange ship like machines, they seem to like metal. Tractor and pressor beams, something like that… they take up metal and it disappears. In fact, there goes the transmi…"
That was a fair sample.
Even when Chris had agreed, new problems began to present themselves.
The original personnel on Station II had been Haitian/ American one shift, African the next, as the result of some U.N. committee compromise. The back-and-forth shift had worked fairly well—any frictions were smoothed over by the fact that, on duty, crews were composed entirely of one type or the other. However, just as Angelo and company had been stuck up on Station I for months, so the African crew running Station II had been stuck. They had a relief force, though: the relief force had been the last shipment up.
And neither had been able to get down.
This meant that the station was carrying a double complement—half Haitian/American, half African. Friction caused by simple crowding had already taken its toll (a normal-sized station crew, Angelo thought, might never even have started such a wild notion as revolt); and friction between one Negro group and the other now began to show up in a major way.
The aliens, in fact, were beginning to look like allies to the African group.
After all, if the world were reduced to a non-metallic group of cultures, a group of cultures with only the most modest of machine availabilities, the African nations would find simple parity, and perhaps more than that: it was a type of culture with which they could claim long and recent familiarity.
The Haitians, on the other hand, were on an island. The island needed a fairly high technology just to survive: it needed to be supplied, very much as the Station itself needed to be supplied.
They were all for immediate action against the aliens.
But the Africans were beginning to want to wait and see. Or, maybe, fust wait…
The Haitians, aided by the Station I personnel, carried the day in an uneasy majority; and Angelo went off to a corner with Chris and Houmes to discuss ways and means of deriving, matching and feeding back the alien signals, if any (though the notion that such signals did exist became more plausible with every passing minute). After a time the three drifted out into the corridor (no robots visible, Angelo noted to his immense relief: he just plain didn't like the way robots fought); and, after a somewhat longer time, Angelo came back alone. The discussion, turning as it did on such common and everyday notions as input voltages on the minor triode for phase effect in the lattice (if that was what he'd heard, which didn't sound probable), was not one to which he felt he could really contribute.
Besides, he wanted to work out a private worry. A few Station II personnel—Africans, he thought—had been discussing something themselves, where the corridor angled off into shadow. And they had looked not only like Africans, but like Trouble. Trouble for a group more immediately available than alien spaceships.
The worry paced around in his skull and got a fine workout. He tried to count the number in the communications room, came up with a different answer four times running, and decided that even if a few people were missing he still wouldn't know anything worth mentioning.
After that he just waited, worry and all. So did everyone else. Juli spent some of the time trying to make friends with the Station II personnel, as did Dr. Emmis, but by the time Chris and Houmes came back into the room they were little further along than Woorden, who, sunk in his continuing gloom, had made no efforts at all to do anything.
Houmes announced, "Theoretically, we have a signal. Based on what the Station has been able to receive, and based on our own figures and deductions, we have some idea of the possible range; synchronization of the Station's transmitter with some of the target scopes will enable us to try out signals within that range and hit on just the one we want without too much time-consuming cut-and-try work. And we're going to need power, of course—quite a lot of power."
At this point something came in the door.
It was one of Houmes's strangely surviving smoke-clouds. It stank, and it shone a deep, rich blue. Juli made a sound which was not a word, and everybody tried to go through the metal walls of the room before the cloud touched them. Drawn on by some gust from the automatic air-flow machinery of the place, the cloud drifted here and there, nearly wrapping itself around Captain Zugzwang, who turned a much richer set of colors and began the only sort of cursing he knew—a vicious recital of random numbers—and then went softly and smoothly out the door, leaving behind only a memory and a very bad smell.
"I'm afraid we may have some more of those," Houmes said apologetically, when matters had calmed down a little. "You see, they don't just break up and go away; they have what we call an essential material existence— I'm translating, of course—and what you might call a half-life."
"How long a half-life?" Dr. Emmis said angrily. "I haven't smelled anything like that since the sewers of Coshocton, Ohio, all backed up at once during the storm of '99."
"Oh, nothing over six months—and some much shorter." Houmes seemed to think the others would find the fact relieving; nobody, however, did. Six months of living with clouds of stench and feathers and God-only-knew-what-else seemed like a terribly long time. In fact, Angelo thought, it was a terribly long time.
But, then, they could always flush out the Station, when they had a few minutes for everybody to climb into suits. Presumably, since air-flow affected the things, they'd go right out into space when whooshed by sufficient atmospheric pressure.
Angelo idly wondered if the smell would still exist in a vacuum. It seemed unlikely that anything whatever would serve to nullify it; Houmes might have hit on a brand-new effect, he realized, and a lovely weapon for space battles. If you didn't have to occupy the area you'd conquered, of course.
Did the aliens have a sense of smell? Because, if so…
Realizing that his mind was wandering, Angelo returned it grimly to the subject, and the crowd, immediately at hand. Houmes had asked for volunteers, and the Haitians seemed to have volunteered in a body—leaving the African contingent sullen and unhelpful. Houmes was saying, "Someone will have to get into a suit and go out to align that transmitter. It's going to be a hand job, and a damned careful one; it simply can't be done from in here."
Four Haitians volunteered before he'd finished. Angelo, by now distrusting everybody, made a fifth, and Houmes (perhaps self-conscious about the color difference) chose him.
Grimly, he went out to get suited up. While he was doing this, one of the world's most uncomfortable jobs, Houmes came to join him.
"Listen," the witch doctor said in a hurried whisper. "Three of the Africans have disappeared. They're not on the Station—anyhow, we can't find them. Anywhere. They don't want this metals thing to be stopped; they may try to stop you. They may be suiting up to go out there and take care of you."
Angelo thought what perfectly wonderful news that was. It was not something he could bring himself to believe.
"I think you'd better be prepared to defend yourself," Houmes said.
Angelo, slowly and sadly, nodded. "A laser pistol, I suppose."
"Unfortunately…" Houmes's voice seemed to come from an immense distance. "Well, there aren't any. We needed the power rubies. Had to cannibalize them; of course you understand."
"But-"
"There are other weapons, you know," Houmes said. "For instance—well, this one is remarkably frightening, and very effective. Silent—easy to aim—a child could learn to use it in ten seconds. In fact, a good many children have, where I come from—though of course their models are hardly as technologically superior as this." He produced, from some corner of the robe he was still wearing, something Angelo took several seconds recognizing.
It was, of course, a blowgun, complete with darts.
"The darts will puncture even thin metal; the blowgun itself is prefabricated, comes apart in sections, as you see—" Houmes twisted it here and there and, indeed, it did. "Sighted in perfectly. Just insert dart, and blow. That's about it." He hesitated. "There is only one thing, Angelo."
"What?" Angelo said, still stunned by the sight of this prefabricated triumph of modern technology.
"Don't inhale," Houmes said, and left him.
The transmitter was not located on the Station. Not any more.
Instead, it was out on one of the handy-dandy satellites the Station II crew had been scattering around with so lavish and haphazard a hand.
Angelo, directions as firm in his mind as they were ever going to be, stood in full suit on the outside of the Station and thought about jetting off. His back-pack jets were sufficient to maneuver him out to the satellite and back again, and there was even a fair margin of safety. But the ballistics of space eat up margin in a great hurry; one miscalculation, one little moment of fogged forgetfulness as to exactly where his destination was, and Angelo would be heading full speed for the Sun.
This did not appeal to him.
He went over the directions again, fixed the comparative positions of the Station and the satellite in his mind, and prepared to jet.
Before he could move, he saw something else moving.
His first red thought was: Aliens!
He was wrong.
The three Africans on the outside of the Station, their suits painted in tribal patterns, were moving in, he was certain, for the kill. In one gloved hand he held the parts of his blowgun, and he began frantically to assemble the thing before he thought of the one thing Houmes had not thought of—Houmes, who was familiar with robotics and the niceties of witch doctoring, but who had never been in space before.
A blowgun is not a very threatening object in space. Angelo's jets were on his back, and the thought of trying to use them to fire the gun seemed a little awkward. Other than that, all he could do would be to take off his faceplate and use the gun. This was not only awkward, but flatly impossible; he might live ninety seconds or so in a vacuum, but one of the things you do not do in a vacuum is exhale.
Angelo stuffed the blowgun in a suit pouch, which took him about a second. In that second, the Africans had begun their final advance. Three against one; and his one was unarmed. He had nothing except…
Well, he did have his suit, didn't he?
And Angelo DiStefano, the Human Bowling Ball, inside it?
With a single nod, he took a breath, tucked himself into as neat a pattern as he could manage, aimed himself straight at the Africans—sort of a one-six-ten shot, he thought —and blasted off with his jets.
African spacesuits, with Africans inside them, went spinning off the Station in three different directions. It had been easy, Angelo congratulated himself as he used the side vents of his Jets to make a neat slow turn and head off for the transmitter; there had been nothing to it.
He had just, he went on without being able to stop, killed three men.
Easy.
Perfectly ducky, in fact.
Houmes took the transmitter, once Angelo was back, and went off with it to begin dark work of his own. Meanwhile, Angelo, the rest of the Station I crew, and both Station II crews packed the communications room—reminding Angelo of the crowds that packed bars to watch 3Ds of the. World Series—and kept trying for news of Earth.
They got quite a lot of it. Station after station was located, drifted off, lost power or was cut off suddenly. The aliens were no longer content with ships, but were beginning to manufacture, out of the material they'd been salvaging, small ground-effects vehicles, equipped with pincers and everything else down to picks and shovels, designed to bring in even smaller metals deposits or stockpiles of radioactives. One station seemed to have gone entirely mad: reports on alien activity (the station was apparently somewhere in Kansas, where alien activity was going on but was not the sort of major menace from which New York, for instance, was suffering) were interspersed with the chatter of a single live voice, a man who had been either a very dull disc jockey or an exceptionally slangy news reporter, and with occasional music. God only knew, Angelo told himself, who the madman thought he was broadcasting to. Those on Station II received his messages with a good deal of interest, and speculation about his rationale, his audience and his degree of sanity, if any, ran as rife as could be expected.
"Now, boys and girls, there doesn't seem to be any trouble right around here, unless you count the phoned report of Mrs. Bessie Snow, which I gave you a few minutes back, about the alien tank that landed in her back yard and is rounding up gophers and rabbits to conquer the world… and I don't think that really gives us too much to worry about. Unless you're a relative of Mrs. Snow, of course. If you are, I think maybe you ought to go over to the Snow house on the double, because who knows what might come next?"
"Good Lord, the man's gone mad," Emmis said into the brief silence that followed that cheery Kansan announcement.
"That is not surprising," Captain Zugzwang put in.
"We have been listening for five minutes to his broadcast," an African said. "It is even more insane than most broadcasts emanating from the United States."
"But, Brother—" a Haitian began.
Somebody—African or Haitian—said in a shattering voice: "Silence!" The conversation died while Kansas chattered on.
"So, until there's more news to report, I want you all to keep tuned to this station, while we regale your listening apparatus with a few of the latest hits. For a starter, here's one from that old-time classic operetta, Hair. …"
Some music began. Further tuning added nothing to the information available. But it was obvious that the Earth was now in a danger for which a word like immediate was an understatement.
Unless the aliens could be lured into space in a tearing hurry, U.N. H.Q. would not have any metals left, and there wouldn't be any way of getting enough, fast enough, to create the mechanisms necessary to send the arming signal to Station II. Without the arming signal from H.Q. in Brasilia, the missiles could not be fired.
It was, Angelo thought, an interesting situation.
In a second or so it got even more interesting.
Chris came storming into the communications room, Houmes behind him.
"I will not," the little man was saying. "You can't make me—nobody can make me. It's murder, cold and deliberate murder."
"But you've got to help," Houmes was saying. "You're the only person who can—if the transmitters are going to be synchronized. It takes a better hand than mine, and you've got it. The job has to be done—"
"Not on machines. Mothers and fathers—that's what they are. And children. You're asking me to destroy them."
In the background, a voice said: "And now, boys and girls, a fill-in on the latest out here. And the news is not good, boys and girls, not good at all. Those aliens do seem to be making a lot of trouble out and around here, and I'm going to be moving to a portable transmitter in just a minute—with a full stock of the latest records, don't you worry—so I can go on broadcasting to all of you out there in radioland. The aliens have been advancing on our station here, and I'm signing off, to return as soon as the portable transmitter's in action and I'm in that trailer rolling away to safety. So, boys and girls…"
"You've got to," Houmes said.
"I can't. I won't. You can't make me do it."
One of the Africans stepped forward. He said in a smooth deep voice, "Boy, I know just how you feel. You take the orders you want to take—you don't mess yourself up taking any others. That's the way the world is now."
Zugzwang roared, "As captain, I order you to aid Mr. —ah—Mr. Houmes in his efforts. It is urgent. You are to obey me at once, Mr. Shaw. You are to obey your captain."
"Captain?" the African said, swinging around. "Captain of what?"
Zugzwang's mouth opened, shut, opened and shut again. He began to turn a rich, ripe purple. Into the strangled silence Dr. Emmis strode like a hero.
"Now, I mean to say, Chris, you know we've got to save the Earth," he said. "All this argument can be carried on some other time, because if we don't save the Earth, I mean—well, where would that leave us? We're supposed to save the Earth, and if you can help—"
"What do I care about the Earth?" Chris said. "Looking down on me, looking down on me since the day I was born—"
"That's it, Brother," an African said ecstatically. "You got the message. You have certainly got the message."
"They don't mean anything to me," Chris said. "I won't work on your damned thing to kill machines—families of machines—I won't—"
"But if the world is not preserved—" a worried-looking Haitian (not the one who liked all those weapons, Angelo noticed) began.
"Then it's not," Chris said. "Doesn't worry me any."
"But Chrjs—Chris…" Juli, somehow, had disappeared from one corner of the room and reappeared at Chris's elbow. Her voice trailed away to a whisper that was totally inaudible to Angelo.
"Why work to aid the planet which has caused us suffering?" an African demanded. Woorden turned on him.
"Now you are to listen," the big man said. "You keep yourself quiet. There will be no more of that talk."
To Angelo's enormous surprise, the ultimatum worked; apparently the Africans had been thoroughly impressed by the prowess of the Avenging God.
Juli went on talking to Chris…
After what seemed to Angelo about four days, and was actually something like twelve minutes, Chris turned. He started out the door.
Houmes, not moving, asked, "Does this mean—"
"I'll do your dirty work," Chris said in a tight little voice. "I'll—I'll do the work, damn you."
No one had any idea what Juli had really said. She told the others she'd spun him a story about zeroing in on the main computer control and not hurting the alien "families" of ships. Angelo privately thought it didn't sound terribly convincing. Perhaps, he decided, the decisive factor had simply been that she was, after all, Juli, and that even Chris was still just human enough to react accordingly— with fust about as much freedom as a Pavlovian wolfhound.
Anyhow, he thought, it had worked. Now, the aliens would be destroyed.
That didn't make him feel a murderer, not in the least.
But when a searching party was organized to turn up the three missing Africans, and they didn't turn up— though a few still-warring robots did, and were carefully avoided, and though one of the search party, a bony Haitian with an exceptionally large number and variety of beads in his costume, managed to trip and fall into a cloud of Houmes's gunk and come up smelling like anything in the known universe but a rose—Angelo's feelings began to take on a distinctly guilty and doom-laden turn.
He was a murderer. He had murdered three human beings. (They'd been aiming to kill him at the time—but, after all, that was their business. The fact that he'd killed them was his business—and a very bad business it seemed to be.) Three lives were on his sloping shoulders, three souls on his conscience.
He felt terrible, and felt guilty for even noticing that he felt terrible. The Africans, after all, weren't feeling anything at all. Not any more. And it was all his fault.
Angelo DiStefano: murderer.
Black gloom descended. And didn't rise.
At last, they were ready.
Everyone gathered around Houmes, who was standing before an enormous assemblage that looked to Angelo like any average electrician's nightmare. It had coils where no coils had ever been before, and circuits and little things sticking out of it and a great many other oddities. It spread over several feet of corridor wall and some distance of ceiling; it was connected to something that had been poked through the corridor wall, through a hastily manufactured little hole.
"It's set to go," Houmes said, and Angelo, eyeing it nervously, rather wished it would. Almost anywhere.
Another cloud became visible at the head of the corridor. Everyone ducked, and the cloud, dropping a feather here and there, sailed by without damage.
"Just a bother," Houmes said. "Nothing more."
The question was, what had the witch doctor forgotten this time? Angelo thought.
Captain Zugzwang said, "As captain, sir, I hereby order you to begin operations."
"Captain?" that same African said softly.
Zugzwang turned, opened his mouth and, after what seemed long and purpling thought, said, "Gug." The African smiled.
"As captain of this Station, I give you permission to continue your operation at once," the African said.
Houmes eyed one and then the other, gave an obedient nod precisely distributed between them, which satisfied nobody, and reached forward. There was a small lever near one end of the horrid electronic growth on the walls. His hand reached it, touched it…
"There it isl" Angelo shouted.
"There's what?" someone else said.
He saw it, in the shadows at the corridor's end.
"The ball! The ball!" it was what he thought he'd seen before. And it suddenly seemed very dangerous.
"The ball? Of what?"
"Nothing!" Angelo shouted. "Nothing at all!"
The African captain said, "Well, then, if it's nothing—"
"You don't understand!" Angelo shouted. "It's nothing! Look for yourself! It's nothing!"
"Exactly," the African said. "And therefore—" luli said "Eep!" very suddenly, and then: "You're right! I see it! It is nothing!"
"All this disturbance, merely to reassure us that—"
"I'm not reassuring you!" Angelo said wildly. "Nothing. The ball. Stop. We can't-"
Captain Zugzwang and the African captain spoke at once. Out of their jumble one word came clear:
"… begin…"
Angelo screamed: "Wait!"
Too late. Houmes pulled the lever, straight down.
A great many things began to break loose. Hell was among them.
The signal was, as Houmes had implied, not exactly accurate. The Station didn't much care about that, because Houmes had not been satisfied with a simple frequency beam. He had added a few frills—notably a signal which caused anything of heavy metallic concentration to vibrate in the same frequency, or die trying.
Unfortunately, the Station was not built to serve as a loudspeaker.
There was no sound in the signal: it was out of that spectrum. But there was a great deal of sound from everywhere else. Houmes's little gadget had one more tiny requirement built into it: it needed power. It needed, in fact, a great deal of power.
Since that power had to come from somewhere, the Station gravity generators went off with a sudden sound like glish, or possibly berth.
The Station personnel went off with somewhat different sounds, over a much wider range. There were screams and shouts ("When in danger," Angelo's mind said to him, "or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout"; it seemed a perfectly sensible axiom), there were shrieks and curses, there were booms and rumbles and whines, whistles and whoops and grunts…
Most of which did not come, even, from the personnels The Station was taking part in this lastest Festival of Stochastic Music, and Angelo, flung against one wall (luckily, a wall which did not, at that point, have circuitry littered all over it), almost wished for the insane Kansas broadcasts, with their classic operettas. Everyone was flung everywhere—and then reflung.
The Station was vibrating. (Outside, the little satellites must have been shaking themselves to pieces, too, but Angelo had little attention to spare for them just then.) The plates were going rong and birik, corridors were echoing to long whines that varied in pitch from high to tooth-clenching, whole rooms were resounding with jigenk and raboom and pang.
Upside-down, Angelo focused his eyes on the shadows at the end of the corridor. When the transmitter suddenly went wild, bringing them a medley of cries from Earth, all at top volume and all scrambled together (with no way to shut it off, no way just then to reach the thing), it was extraordinarily difficult even to see; the noise level appeared to interfere with all sensory processes.
But he managed it at last (just as, due to some convulsion, he was turned slowly and grandly right-side-up again, and then as grandly reversed). Nauseated, deafened, and full of grim forebodings, he saw the ball of nothingness.
It was beginning to pulse.
"Houmes!" he shouted. "Houmes! Turn it off!"
Somehow, he was audible. The witch doctor, from a position perilously near the circuitry, seated at an angle of thirty degrees from normal on empty air, shouted back a reply of which Angelo caught only a few words. They were, however, enough.
"… can't… fully automatic… no way to… very sorry, seem to have… slight error…"
Witch doctors were just not worth the price, Angelo reflected
Everyone was screaming at once. The ball, now approaching slowly, sailing down the corridor as if it were (say) Captain Zugzwang on a regular inspection trip, was pulsing in several colors, brighter with each passing second.
Some people were screaming at the sight of that. Others were screaming because they were battered, bruised, somewhat the worse for wear, or just frightened. Still others were just screaming—for the hell of it, so to speak. It seemed to be, at that moment, definitely the thing to do.
Even the ball appeared to agree. It began its own scream, a howl that reminded Angelo (insofar as he was capable of thinking at all) of all the worst feedback howls he had heard in a short but unpleasant life. The howl got worse, and the pulsing got brighter. The ball continued its approach.
When the situation was three minutes past the imaginary line labeled unbearable, the pulsing stopped. The ball glowed a bright fierce gold. The howl hit one horrible note and stuck there.
One second ticked by.
Then the entire world went spung.
Gravity came back on. It wavered between one-half and two-and-a-half for a minute, and steadied. The communications circuits reached a pitch of insane babble beyond imagination, and then began, with great suddenness, to behave as if they had never gone wrong.
Screaming continued for a bit, as if out of habit, and then stopped.
The b*all was back to its state of apparent nothingness, a hole in the universe floating in the air.
The Station, thoroughly shielded (as a few checks showed) from virtually everything but Earth-to-Station communication, was running as smoothly as even Captain Zugzwang could ever dream.
"It won't last," Angelo said.
The time was fifteen minutes later. Houmes's rig was still sending out its signal, and Houmes was fiddling with it, trying to find just the right spot to tell the aliens that metal awaited them up in the air—alien pie, as it were, in the sky. One broken bone, a good many bruises and some cuts had been bound up and everyone was now back in, or near, the communications room.
"You may be right," Mbudu said. Apparently Intelligence work made for a basic pessimism—or, if you liked to think of it that way, a basic good sense.
"Everybody ought to get into spacesuits."
"Correct."
Captain Zugzwang, his nose bandaged, cleared his throat. "I hereby order—"
The African captain cleared his. "As captain of this Station, I hereby order—"
The much-armed Haitian cleared his. "As captain of the relief forces of this Station, I hereby—"
"Oh, hell," Angelo said. "Everybody find a suit and get into it."
Tension relaxed momentarily.
Suits were scurried for.
And the ball of nothingness came floating by.
"Houmes," Angelo said nervously. "Did you—"
"I must have, dear boy," Houmes said, a bit nervous himself. "I mean—the ultimate weapon and all that."
"But it shielded the Station—"
"Apparently, that's one of the things it does. You see, it never has been used, and one can't really tell…" Houmes made a gesture expressing doubt, calm and ac-ceptance-of-Karma, as nearly as Angelo could read it.
"In any case," he went on, "I do have to get this signal right, or we'll all have gone through—well—all that we have gone through, for nothing at all. If you'll excuse me—"
"Find a suit first," Angelo said.
"Naturally, dear boy," Houmes said, going off to do so. "Naturally."
As he left, the ball appeared to turn, and then to follow him. It stopped long enough to circle the head of Captain Zugzwang, whose mouth opened and then snapped shut.
"Captain?" Angelo said.
"It—it—it—" the captain said. "Never mind. You would not understand."
At the doorway it circled Woorden, giving a bass chuckle that sounded definitely African. Woorden paled. "By the God, if this tiny marble thinks it will have its way with me—" He reached for it.
His hand went through it. It chuckled again. Then, leaving Woorden, and everyone else, speechless, it sailed away after Houmes.
"The ultimate weapon," Angelo said. "Who knows? Maybe it is."
Ten seconds went by, while the scramble into suits continued. Then Juli, from a private dressing room, screamed.
Everyone stopped. Angelo raced for the private room, and collided with Juli, who was coming out.
Angelo said "Umg" and Juli made a sound with too many consonants to describe. By the time both had recovered a little breath, almost the entire personnel of the Station had surrounded them. It was Dr. Emmis who asked, in a voice that was alert, concerned and every inch the professional case history voice:
"What happened?"
"It leered at me," Juli said.
"What did?"
"The hole," Angelo said, struck by inspiration.
"The what?" Chris put in.
"It leered at me," Juli said. "I was changing into my suit and it came in. And it looked at me."
"The hole?" Dr. Emmis said.
"With what?" Angelo said.
"With what what?" Juli said. "I tell you it isn't funny. It honestly just came up and—and—"
"While you were changing?" Chris said. "You found a hole in the suit, and—"
"What?" Juli said.
"The suit," an African said patiently.
"What? I was changing, and—"
"No," Angelo said. "The hole. Not the suit. The hole."
For some reason this seemed to strike everyone as a deep metaphysical statement. A thoughtful silence descended like one of Houmes's gas clouds. After a time Juli looked around at the others.
"But it did," she said plaintively.
"Go back and change," Angelo suggested. "Maybe it's gone now."
"I order you—" Captain Zugzwang began.
Perhaps to forestall another Gilbert and Sullivan or-dering-around session, Juli said, looking at no one in particular, "Yes, sir," and went off. As she reached the door she looked back. "Angelo—it won't, will it?"
"Certainly not," Angelo said, summing up all the confidence he wished he felt.
Juli went. Dr. Emmis said, "What won't what?"
Angelo said slowly and carefully, "On reflection, I don't even understand the question."
More silence reigned.
The ships began to rise.
Mbudu, who had been keeping at least one careful eye on the screens at all times—a damned good Intelligence man, Angelo thought—gave the first notice. Everyone crowded around the screens and began to make comments. None of the comments were either original or helpful.
The ships were numbered in the thousands—a gigantic flight, the biggest ever to leave Earth (and, unless a cosmic disaster overtook the planet, probably the biggest ever, Angelo thought): an armada in space winging toward one tiny Station.
He went to the firing console (he'd been given this post by the Haitian contingent, over some African muttering which Mbudu, who seemed to be several different sorts of man all under one skin, had managed casually to quell) to wait for the arming signal from Earth. Without it, the missiles could not be fired.
And without it, the Station was just one more piece of metal for the aliens—with a few nonmetallic and throw-away components, once members of the human race.
The arming signal did not come.
Angelo squirmed around to Chris and his opposite number, a stolid African who was sitting in the official communications chair and letting his eyelids droop with the consciousness of power.
"Get me the U.N.," he said.
"All of it?" the African drawled. "We've got all these ships coming now. You sure we have enough hors d'oeuvres for them and the U.N. too?"
Responding to needling would be unwise, Angelo thought. "I want the—" He thought for a minute. "U.N. Security," he said at last, dreading the woman but knowing it was his best chance.
"That white woman?" the African said.
"We need the arming signal," Angelo said. "If a chimpanzee were Secretary-General of the U.N.—which is not entirely impossible—I would want to talk to the chimpanzee."
The African grunted, turned and began plugging things into other things, while Chris watched with what was obviously an itching desire to do some plugging and connecting of his own. Time passed.
The armada continued to close on the Station.
Angelo was sweating gently when the African turned back to him. "Connection established with your chimpanzee," he said casually.
Angelo took one deep breath, said "Fine" and turned to the showup board.
The General was staring at him with steely, unfriendly eyes. "Well?" she asked.
"The arming signal," Angelo said. "We're going to destroy the aliens, but we need the arming signal."
"And you are the reason why they have left the planet?" she asked.
Angelo sorted the sentence out. "Right," he said. "But without the arming signal—and time is getting short—"
"I am carrying the devices personally," the General said with pride. "They cannot be trusted in other hands."
"Fine," Angelo said. "Then you can give us the signal right now."
"Where are the ships?" the General asked.
"You can track them on your—"
"Our equipment is gone," she said flatly.
There was a long silence while Angelo digested that bit of news and what it meant. "Well—" he began.
"This transmission relay is all we have," the General said. "Where are the ships?"
"On the way."
"Until the last minute—"
Angelo looked at the view screens. "This is the last minute."
"You are sure?"
"I am absolutely sure."
"Well, if you are certain—"
"We are now in the last ten seconds," Angelo said.
The General shrugged, in a French manner. Out of sight of the screen, she did something to a large whatsit full of wires.
Suddenly the sky had several thousand small, very bright suns in it.
Transmission ended. The view screens had cut out most of the overbrightness, but everyone was blinking a little. Angelo made an equation in his worried head. Several thousand ships, plus whatever was added to the list en route, multiplied by two hundred missiles… all right, one missile could take care of several ships. But even so…
"The rest of them are—deranged, I suppose. Their guidance systems are out of whack. I suppose most of their systems are. They're heading for the blasts, or for each other, or straight for the Sun." Houmes's voice was awed. It was destruction on a scale never before contemplated. The sight was awesome—if you cared for such things, Angelo thought.
"All the missiles are going nuts?" he asked.
"All," Houmes said. "Every last one."
An African grudgingly said, "It is a remarkable feat."
"All in the day's work," Angelo said. Which might even have been true—there had been some extremely odd days lately, he thought.
"The recognition code must have turned into a kind of lemmings system for most of them," Houmes said.
"Lemmings?" Angelo said.
"Little animals," Houmes said. "Came the right time, they'd head for the sea by the thousands. No logic, no reason, just irresistible compulsion."
"Ah," Angelo said. "Like tourists."
"Well…" Houmes screwed up his face. "Something like that," he finished at last.
There was a very short silence. Then the Station exploded.
The vision of the alien ships going to their grand assorted dooms had gotten to everyone, African, Haitian, white South African (Woorden, to Angelo's sad surprise, was singing "Rock of Ages" in a rumbling, authoritative bass), American, Oxford witch doctor (Houmes was making sounds that seemed to represent joy, but whether in unconsonanted British or some ancient African tongue Angelo could not decide), and even one hundred percent Prussian. Captain Züg-zwang, gripping an African earnestly by the shoulders, was praising God, or Fate, or whatever, in his own joyous way, reciting slowly and proudly with an almost religious awe the positive integers and their squares, in perfect proper order.
The celebration included, in fact, everyone—except Mme. la General. Who was on the view screen within less than a minute.
"A few ships remain," she snapped without preliminary. "Those undergoing the pairing process, a few for whose difference we cannot account… and their rate of reproduction has increased."
The Station shut up.
"Well, we'll have to—do something about that, won't we?" Chris's voice broke suddenly and strangely.
"Something will have to be done," Mbudu spat.
"I agree," the General said. "But what?"
The ball of nothing, picking that moment to reenter, circle twice around Woorden, chuckle and add in a distinctly African voice, "Big white man," did not aid matters. Woorden said "Gaah" with rage, reached for the ball, went through it as usual, and said "Gaah" again on a slightly lower note.
The ball chuckled, spiraled to the ceiling casually, recited six rapid random numbers (Captain Zugzwang went white, then purple) and hung silent. Chris reached up for it, and the ball skittered away and left the room.
"Something will have to be done," Woorden said through clenched teeth.
"That is an order," Captain Zugzwang said.
Silence fell once more.
The Genebal had long since faded back to whatever section of Brasilia-that-used-to-be she was traveling with her portable relays. The celebration had faded, too. Something, clearly, had to be done.
But nobody knew what.
The ball of nothing had been popping back and forth, always staying far away from Chris. Mostly it followed Houmes around, though no one knew why for sure; sometimes it went to irritate Woorden or Zugzwang. To Angelo and Emmis and the entire crew of Africans and Haitians it was more or less neutral, and though it sidled toward Juli now and again it didn't actually do anything. Angelo began wondering whether or not the thing was an alien, perhaps the single alien who controlled the computer that ran the ships, that killed the rat that nibbled the corn that…
Was ridiculous.
It didn't act like an alien. It showed no interest in killing anybody, and no interest whatever in the ships, or their destruction. It just—well, it just acted strange.
But, then, Angelo asked himself, didn't everything?
"You know?" Woorden erupted suddenly. "We ought to get an alien here and wring its neck. That would be a good thing."
An African chuckled (Woorden's lips tightened). "The solution of violence," he said. "It is always your solution, isn't it?"
"You talk to me of violence?" Woorden erupted. "You—"
"All right, now," Dr. Emmis said. "That's enough of that. We've got to work together—and, besides, the suggestion is a good one."
"But what good would—" Juli began.
"You don't understand," Emmis said. "Wring it's neck-why, how do we know the aliens have necks? But we ought to get one, and find out. Find out everything we can. They must ride their ships, control them some way—if we can find out ihow, we can send them all somewhere else."
"No bombs left," Mbudu said slowly. "Not much else we can do. I see. A good point."
Captain Zugzwang cleared his throat. "Very well." He looked around. "Mr. DiStefano, I order you—"
"We order you jointly," said the Haitian captain casually. Zugzwang cleared his throat again, and went on without appearing to notice that anyone else had spoken.
"—to capture an alien."
Angelo saluted. There was very little else to do. "Yes, sir," he said to no one in particular. "How?"
Silence, which was descending as often as the blade of a guillotine during the French Revolution, did its job again. This time, Houmes broke the stillness.
"All you'll have to do is take the shuttle ship back to Earth, broadcast the same signal that got the aliens up here, arid wait for one to notice you. Then you head back for the Station, with the alien following."
"And suppose he catches up with-me?" Angelo suggested as delicately as possible.
"There's nothing to worry about," Houmes assured him. "Look at me. Am I worried?"
Angelo sighed. "If you were going out on a job like that, I wouldn't be worried either."
"As captain of—" Zugzwang's voice began.
"As Station captain—" began the voice of an African.
"As-"
Angelo sighed again.
"Okay," he said. "Lead me to the take. Or however that goes."
With a sense that what was going to happen was going to be worse—much worse—than anything in his previous experience, Angelo wrestled the little shuttle-craft back to Earth. He had seen one alien ship on a view screen from the Station; now he headed for that location, or nearby, hoping that the ship wasn't really as hungry as it had looked. Maybe, even, it had gone away. Angelo wondered whether he hoped so. It was an interesting question.
He flipped a switch and checked the ship screen. Nothing at all showed up.
The screen did not go on.
He flipped several more switches.
The switches went back and forth, or sometimes in and out, very nicely.
Nothing else happened at all.
"Sabotage," Angelo muttered, feeling that he had been right at last. The horrible happening was, in fact, happening on schedule.
The Africans, clearly, had sabotaged the ship—all the outside sensors were gone. Whether an alien ship was even now creeping up on him, intent on eating the ship and spitting Angelo out like an unwanted and somewhat mashed grape seed, was something Angelo had no way whatever of telling.
There was, of course, one obvious thing to do.
Angelo almost did it.
But at the last second he determined not to leave. Not just yet. After all, when the alien (if any) got hungry and began to nibble, Angelo would be able to feel the impact and the nibbling.
Then (if possible) he would take off. And the hungry alien would follow.
This did not sound probable.
However…
Time passed. Angelo estimated this time as about three hundred million years, give or take a week.
Twice, he thought he felt the beginnings of faint nips from a hungry alien. The first time, he convinced himself he was mistaken.
The second time, the nips went on, and grew more and more alarming. The ship began to rock gently back and forth. Angelo, helplessly broadcasting the signal Houmes had built into the ship, pushed one last button.
That one, he thanked any god who happened to be around, worked.
The ship took off.
The ride back to the Station was full of incident. The alien was eating away and each bite changed slightly the aerodynamic qualities of the ship. It bucked and swayed and otherwise acted as if it had been possessed by the soul of a particularly nasty horse. Any second, Angelo kept telling himself, and he was going to look out of the ship through a window that was distinctly not supposed to be there.
The trip from Station to Earth had lasted approximately the usual time, measured in hours and fractions thereof. The trip from Earth to Station lasted, Angelo always thought, about the same; but that one time he knew perfectly well how long it had gone on.
It had gone on for the entire life of the Universe, with enough time left over, if a Universeless void had such a thing as time knocking around its nonexistent corners, to build at least one Kiddie Universe, authentically- scaled and easy to put together according to the diagrams.
Angelo had finished the diagrams, in a state bordering quiet, resigned hysteria, when the ship finally found its place on the Station, according to the course locked into it before he'd set off, all those billions of years ago.
The alien ship had gnawed away half of a stabilizing fin and a fair proportion of a side jet which Angelo was very glad he hadn't needed; it wouldn't have been there, not in any quantity that would have been helpful.
Angelo scurried into the comparative safety of the Station while Hpumes went to work on the alien ship.
The signal he believed to be a confuser didn't seem to do anything much, though, and he was forced back on time-tested remedies.
Angelo, fascinated despite himself, watched from a safe distance. A witch doctor doing wild dances in front of an alien spaceship was not, he thought, something you saw every day.
In a way, he was grateful for that.
The dance this time was more concerned with arm-flicks and less with howls and moans… but it did its job. ("A visual analogue of what we know of its basic circuitry," Houmes explained later. Perhaps, Angelo thought, that really did mean something.)
The African and Haitian crews were watching Houmes with awe. Woorden was watching him with a tempered and smoldering dislike. Everyone else seemed just as glassy-eyed as Angelo himself.
The ship nibbled away. It nibbled perhaps a bit slower.
Slower.
Slower yet.
And…
Then…
Stop.
"Quick," Houmes muttered to anyone within earshot. "Grapple it inside where we can work on it. It's stabilized —cataleptic, I suppose you'd say."
Crews went to do the work. Emmis, left behind, muttered in the tone of one who had just watched Harvey demonstrate the circulation of the blood (backwards, but who cared?): "Marvelous. Unbelievable."
"The alien's inside. Helpless now," Houmes said. "If we can cut away the port—or anything that provides entry—"
This was done. A clearly visible hatch-type arrangement was selected as primary target. Africans, plus Captain Zug-zwang, began work on cutting it out.
Everyone else, watched, facinated—and a little terrified.
At long last, they were about to experience the first meeting betwen humanity and an alien race.
It was a historic moment.
But History, that careless jade, has her own ideas…
As the hatch was about to come loose—cherry-red at the edges, just about ready—it popped loose of its own accord.
And an alien popped out.
Not a living alien: a ground-effects machine, fully equipped with most alarming pincers.
"Good Lord," Chris whispered from somewhere near the floor. "It's—it was pregnant. Angelo, did you have to get a pregnant one?"
"I didn't get it. It got me. Maybe it had strange cravings."
That was all the talk they had time for. The ground-ef-fects offspring of this hungry alien ship had turned and was coming toward the entire group, its pincers waving in what Angelo could not even try to make himself believe was a friendly manner.
The battle with the pincered machine-child deserved, perhaps, an epic. But it didn't get one: with all those people milling around and screaming, and waving cutting torches and blowguns and God only knew what else, and the pincers clicking, and a great many other things going on, nobody could ever remember, with any certainty, just what had happened.
An Iliad may have been lost to posterity, but posterity, who didn't know that, didn't really care much.
The Station personnel cared deeply—not about the Iliad, but about whether it was going to have a happy ending (so defined by the Station personnel, of course).
And, in the end, it did.
Unfortunately…
Unfortunately, the alien ship was now empty.
In the melee, the alien inside it had disappeared.
Once before, Angelo had been convinced that an alien was loose on a Space Station he was inhabiting. Now, he was not convinced: he was unalterably certain.
What with one thing and another, the alien was hardly disposed to be friendly.
Leaving a small crew (Houmes, Chris and a Haitian who seemed to be an engineering type) to continue dismantling the ship, the inhabitants of Space Station II went on an alien hunt. Woorden expressed great satisfaction at being able to aid in this odd piece of work.
"I have hunted many things, as you may know," he said. "This is, for me, just one further hunt."
"Yes," Mbudu said acidly, poisonously. "We know your hunts, white man. Too well we know them—and of long time."
Woorden just snorted and took a small band up a corri-dor. Mbudu went down another corridor; Angelo, Dr. Em-mis and the Haitian captain down still another…
And so forth.
The hunt was on.
In a way, it was even a successful hunt.
Angelo, temporarily split off from the main group while Dr. Emmis and the Haitian captain explored a small side-issue of a tunnel, noticed that he was walking past three black mechanicals.
None of them, clearly, was the alien. Unless perhaps inside one of them… but…
He shrugged. He got two steps past the quiet little group.
Then he heard a sneeze.
Feeling both heroic and extremely silly, he whirled and shouted: "Aha!"
Silence.
A catch of breath. A strangled noise of the mpf variety.
And another sneeze.
"All right," Angelo said. "So I'm not a murderer. Come on out of there."
From the interior of three gutted mechanicals emerged three disheveled Africans. "Now we have you," one of them said. "For our own purposes we will retake the Station. We will rule the world, and—"
"There may not be any world left to rule, or any Station either." In the time that bought him, Angelo explained.
"This" is the truth?" one of the Africans said, and sneezed again.
"I swear it. Gesundheit," Angelo said.
"But can we believe you, traitorous white man? Thank you," said the African.
"You must. The evidence will be plain before you. You're welcome," Angelo said.
But the evidence (when Angelo had called Dr. Emmis and the Haitian and, with their help, brought the Africans back to where Houmes and Ghris and an engineering Haitian were still finishing up their work) turned out to be odd. Just slightly odd.
Like (of course) everything else.
"Alien?" Houmes said. "There isn't any."
"But-"
"None. We're quite sure of that."
"But-"
"The ship's run by computer, and the hookup enables us to infer a computer working quite independently. Conceivably alien life-forms built these ships, but they're on their own now. Scavenging, I suppose you'd call it. Wherever their home base is, the alien life-forms (if any) certainly aren't doing any controlling now. And there may not be any aliens at all, anywhere."
"But-'*
"The machines may have taken over entirely. It's quite a possible notion, you know." ,
"Very much possible," Chris said casually, a small glint in his eye.
"But-"
The others had returned, too. Captain Zugzwang said flatly, "I do not believe it. It is incompetent work, nothing more."
"But-"
"We're going off to review some possibilities," Houmes said. Chris, too, was gone, and so was the Haitian.
The ball of nothing popped up, recited nine random numbers, chuckled at Woorden, circled Angelo in dead silence, and went out trailing Houmes.
But damn it, Angelo thought, if the ball wasn't an alien— and more and more it seemed that it wasn't—then what in the name of the God of Rhubarb Pie was it?
He was still staring at it when Captain Zugzwang began.
"There is an alien. There must be. You, Angelo, will explain this to me."
He tried. God knows he tried. But Captain Zugzwang was unmoved.
"It is nonsense. It is not in accordance with orders. Machines cannot…"
Angelo, inspired, said suddenly, "Captain, what about the prisoners?"
"The what?"
"The three Africans. I suppose they are prisoners, but they'll have to be taken into custody."
Zugzwang mulled that over. "Mr. DiStefano, I thank you for your work in this matter. I will take charge of—"
"My apologies, Mr. Zugzwang," the African captain began silkily, "but—"
"My title is that of captain," Zugzwang roared.
"Captain?" the African said. "Indeed? Captain of what?
"I—" Zugzwang halted. "Sixteen," he barked suddenly. "Thirty-seven. Five. One hundred and ninety-two. Eighty. Eighty-four."
The African blinked. "What?"
Angelo happily faded into a bulkhead.
A little time passed in comparative peace as long as you didn't listen r to the argument over who had what authority where. Angelo, musing on a fine specimen of obscene lim-erickery, did his best.
Then the next explosion began.
Houmes (followed by his improbable pet, the ball of nothing) came storming in. "We've solved it," he said in a voice that sounded anything but victorious.
Dr. Emmis looked up. "How?" he asked.
Houmes shrugged, an easy Oxfordian gesture. "The ship's circuitry gave us the exact frequency of that recognition signal—completely accurate, you see. Now, since any alteration in that code will be fatal to the ships, all we have to do is broadcast an interference blanket that will go out of phase with it. The aliens will destroy themselves, cannibalizing themselves for metals, each ship against every other ship. Outside of sending the signal, we won't have to do a thing."
"That's wonderful!" Juli said.
"Quite ingenious." But—why do you seem so sad about it?" Emmis asked.
"Well, there is one problem," Houmes said. "Our main transmitter won't cover the entire Earth. The satellite string is gone now—shaken to pieces in that last broadcasting job, and by now probably fine dust drifting, as near as we can figure, to somewhere near the orbit of Venus. But that isn't much of a problem, not really. Not compared with the other one."
Feeling a sense of fatality, Angelo asked, "What other one?"
"Shaw," Houmes said. "Chris. He disappeared."
"The ball?" Angelo asked. "Do you mean the ball—",
"No. Not at all," Houmes said. "He was trying to investigate it, but his hand went through it, and his instruments give very odd readings." He went on thoughtfully, "You know, I'm not at all sure what Grandfather was thinking of when he came up with the formula for that ball. I wish the old—ah—gentleman would be more specific about the matter. But whatever it was, its effects are a bit strange even to me." Houmes shrugged again.
"But—Chris," Angelo said, determined to know the worst.
"He's barricaded himself in the main computer control compartment," Houmes said. "He just left—disappeared—all at once. He's got charge of all the mechanicals on the Station now."
"Why would he want…" Angelo began, and let his voice trail off.
"Who knows?" Houmes said, but Angelo wasn't listening.
Angelo was thinking of Station I, and the revolt of the mechanicals there. He was thinking of the Robot War they'd just been through.
And now Chris—who had no love for human beings especially but who would lay down his life for a really sexy transistor—had control of the mechanicals.
"Oh, by the way," Houmes said. "When we went to look for him—well, while we were out of it, he closed down the main supply room. Where the alien ship is. So no one can get at it. Until Chris agrees, no one can get there at all."
Angelo began to get that old nervous feeling.
Why wouldn't matters stay simple?
There had to be a reason, he thought darkly. The question was, would he like the reason any better than he liked the events?
Probably not, he thought.
Then Captain Zugzwang insisted on an attack in force on the main supply room, and matters got even more complex, even more unlikable, than before.
The mechanicals stopped any such attack, of course. No real effort for them: they had the numbers and the weapons. Houmes tried his dance, but when he went into it the Station intercom network echoed to a small, midgetlike chuckle.
"Nothing doing," Chris said. "There's a way to guard against that—a blockage circuit. While I'm watching the boards here the dance will do no good—and I'll be watching the boards, you can believe that."
"Chris—" Houmes began. ,
"Don't you talk to me," Chris said. "You're a murderer. Just like all the rest. You want to murder these machines. They're wonderful. Vital. Alive. You gave me the chance to get to know one intimately, and that was your mistake."
"But, Chris—"
"You can't talk me around any more. You want to kill them. You all do. But you won't. I'm working on that. I'll have the answer soon."
"But—" Houmes said.
"Mr. Shaw—" Captain Zugzwang began.
"Chris—" Juli sighed.
"I'll have the answer," Chris said. "And don't bother talking to me again. Believe me: you'd better watch out. All of you. You'd just better watch out."
Unfortunately, Chris was not even the main problem.
Earth was.
There were still a few stations broadcasting, mostly one-man outfits, though the maniac with his Kansas trailer kept popping up as well. From the shards of information a very detailed picture could be built up. The picture was not a pleasant one.
The technological world—essentially the white Western world, since the Compound Delta reshufflings—was simply not fitted for survival. Adaptable man had run himself into the stone wall of a set of societies which were not nearly so adaptable. Without much metal, without large-scale communications and large-scale machine-run production, the Western world was slowly but very, very surely heading for the nearest drain.
The news hit Angelo and his Station I mates like a fatal disease. The Haitians, too—tied as they were to machine technology by living on an island which was, at the high technological level of civilization to which they'd become accustomed, a deathtrap without regular supplies (supplies which were now, as machines sank into myth and memory, undeliverable)—the Haitians, too, began to sink into gloom.
Only the Africans were jubilant.
They acted, in fact, as if they'd inherited the Earth. Which attitude might very well have a solid basis in fact, Angelo thought.
Maybe (he thought) everybody would be better off just staying on the Station. A return to Earth didn't, for a minute, have much to recommend it.
Then, quite suddenly, it did. For if there were no way to supply the Station…
Return, very definitely, was indicated.
But—to what sort of an Earth? The aliens had been destroyed (or shortly would be, to judge from Houmes's purposeful mood), but the victory was as Pyhrric as any Angelo could think of: they had destroyed Western civilization, and the existing balance of power, in the battle. Very little was left.
For a time, even Houmes seemed to share the general gloom; the grandiose posturings of the Africans didn't help matters. (In all fairness, Angelo noticed, Mbudu was a good deal less jubilant than the others; perhaps even then he saw the necessary course of Earthly events. A good Intelligence man, Angelo thought once more; a really dependable type. Anyhow, most of the time.)
Exactly an hour after Chris's last broadcast—and it would be an exact hour, Angelo thought—the intercom cleared its raspy throat again.
"All right," the midget's voice boomed through the Station. "All right, now, here are my orders. You're going to leave the Station. At once."
"Orders?" Zugzwang said, turning more purple than usual. The challenge to his authority brought by the African and Haitian captains had been bad enough, but that his own communications man should turn against him outraged the order of nature. "From you—"
"From me," Chris's voice said flatly. There was no trace in it of the gentle man Angelo had known; he remembered Chris's voice breaking as the aliens' destruction was discussed, and thought that perhaps he had seen Chris's last moment of human emotion. ''I can use the alien drive and take the Station with me. And if you don't get off—and right now—right now—I'll do just that."
Earth's problems receded into the background, many miles away.
"We cannot do that," the African captain said stolidly. "We have our duty—"
"Unless your duty involves suicide, you can't do it. I'm not going to give you much time. And I'm not going to give you any more discussion," said the metallic, authoritative voice of the midget.
Nevertheless, Angelo said, "Chris—why?" He was faintly
bothered by the ball of nothing, which was floating nearby humming "Mother Machree" for no reason Angelo could even imagine, but he clearly heard Chris's answer.
"Because you're human beings," Chris said. "And what do I need human beings for?"
There were a number of practical answers. There was no satisfactory one—not satisfactory to Chris.
"He isn't kidding," Angelo said. "We'd better hop to it."
"But if there are no sensors on the shuttle—" the Haitian captain put in.
"There are sensors," Chris's disembodied voice said. "I've replaced them. Jf you want to leave, you can. You haven't got much time. I'll begin countdown in thirty seconds."
Countdown?
Angelo and the rest headed for the shuttle. It was going to be overcrowded, but the shuttle could stand the weight. Whether the human beings inside could stand tibe overcrowding, Angelo had no idea.
However, he was about to find out.
The door to the parking room for the shuttle-craft was free of mechanicals or other obstructions. Thoughtful of Chris, Angelo mused; but somewhere inside that fiercely electronic personality was still the gentle and kind Chris Angelo had always known. It was just that his gentleness and his kindness were more usually directed toward transistors than toward human beings.
And now the direction had become total—and final.
Boarding began.
Angelo, at the last possible second (perhaps twenty-nine of Chris's thirty seconds had gone by, perhaps thirty-one), remembered the transmitter.
"You can't, Angelo," Juli said to him, wide-eyed. "You'll be killed. It isn't safe."
"I'll be back," Angelo said, and the momentary flash of heroism he felt was worth the undertaking, he told himself without being really convincing. Then he wished he had thought of almost any other word than undertaking.
The ball of nothing was already in the shuttle-craft. Apparently, attached to Houmes (and wary of Chris, whom it had avoided at all times, Angelo remembered), it wanted to go back to Earth with them.
Angelo cursed Houmes's grandfather. Then he wondered what the ball would do on Earth. It wasn't actually harmful, but…
He'd left it spiraling in a distinctly lewd manner around Juli.
Well…
Transmitter. That was the thing he had to remember. And—fast!
A squad of mechanicals blocked him at a corridor turn. Angelo stood for a second and then bawled: "Chris!"
The intercom said, "Yes?"
"I've got to get the transmitter. We're leaving, but I've got to-"
Chris did not reply in words. The mechanicals moved and left him a path.
The countdown began.
Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
Transmitter.
Any second now…
Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen.
Angelo DiStefano, Hero.
The title wasn't worth it, he decided.
Nine. Eight. Seven.
He had the transmitter.
Back along the passageways. No mechanicals this time; Chris was probably tracking him by interior eye-spy.
Five. Four. Three.
The shuttle-craft.
Door opening. Closing.
Takeoff.
Away. Away. Faster and faster…
Two. One…
The Station did not take off, nor did it explode.
The Station disappeared.
Houmes's voice: "Warp drive. They had it—we will too, now. Faster-than-light. A good deal faster."
"Yes, indeedy." A strange voice. Angelo located it after a second. It belonged to the ball of nothing.
Somehow, a semi-supernatural object saying "Yes, indeedy" was the last straw. Angelo began to laugh…
And could not stop.
Juli?
Juli. "It's all right. It's all right, Angelo. Really it is. The transmitter is bringing in the news now—what Houmes talked about."
He was lying in a tiny space against a wallplate. He opened his eyes. Juli. It really was Juli.
"Houmes?"
"The Africans," she said. "They're experts now—experts on how to live in a world without much metal or much high technology. They're wanted—needed—by the whole world. They're part of the world now. Not outsiders, not half a world at war."
Part of the world.
Angelo shut his eyes again for a second. In the background the transmitter was chattering away with Earth broadcasts.
Yes. What Houmes had thought, what Juli had said, it was all true. Even the overcrowded ship felt more—more peaceful.
And Chris…
Was gone. To a world of machines, apparently—his own world. At last. His own…
Angelo wanted to cry, and couldn't.
The transmitter chattered on. The Kansas station came in with a squeal. "And now, all you fine folks out there, a special broadcast…'*
The maniac had a fine touch for the appropriate, Angelo thought.
What followed nearly brought him back to normal.
Ten minutes since my heart said "white"—
It now says "black." It then said "left"—it now says "right"—
Hearts often tack.
RUDDIGORE?
Well, why not? Angelo thought. In a way, it brought him back to reality. Angelo DiStefano, Hero—and still alive.
Angelo DiStefano, Hero…
"Mr. DiStefano," a familiar voice said. (And the ball of nothing whispered: "Six. Fourteen. Thirteen. Eighty-nine.") Captain Zugzwang.
Ah, Angelo told himself. A medal.
"Mr. DiStefano," the captain's voice repeated relentlessly. "You know, of course, that you will be held responsible for all damage done to this craft by the alien ship which you brought back to the Station?"
"We will speak of this before the U.N.," Zugzwang said.
Well, no medal.
Home again.
And nothing (except everything) had changed.
Nothing at all.