STORIES speculating about the future of science, technology, and society began to appear across the globe over the course of the nineteenth century. But science fiction (SF) only came into its own in the American SF magazines of the early and mid-twentieth century. Tantalizing readers with sensational cover art and even more sensational titles like Amazing Stories, Fantastic Universe, and Astounding Science Fiction, dozens of new periodicals promised to reveal the shape of things to come. They offered not only action-packed adventure narratives but informed, even sometimes prescient, accounts of real-world scientific discovery and technological innovation. Along the way, they became laboratories for aesthetic exploration as well. Authors used these magazines to test the themes and techniques that would become associated with the genre, probing and expanding the limits of fiction; editors distilled the results of these experiments, commenting on shared histories and future trajectories for SF; and fans volunteered ideas and opinions about everything from scientific accuracy to the necessity of sex in speculative writing. This truly collaborative process, still ongoing, has established SF as the premier story form of technoscientific modernity.

As the title of this book asserts, SF was never just about boys and their toys. Instead, the future has always been female as well. This collection presents twenty-five stories written by three generations of American women between the launch of the first specialist genre magazines in the 1920s and the emergence of self-identified feminist SF in the 1970s. Adopting personae ranging from warrior queens and heroic astronauts to unhappy housewives and sensitive aliens, women were pioneers in developing our sense of wonder about the many different futures we might inhabit, partners in forging the creative practices associated with the best speculative fiction, and revolutionaries who blew up the genre when necessary to address the hopes and fears of American women.

So who were the women of early SF? The story of women in this field has long been celebrated by fans, who do the important cultural work of preserving genre history amongst themselves, and, more recently, by authors and scholars who share this history with others outside the SF community. However, such efforts are often overshadowed by “commonsense” assumptions about the historic relations of gender and genre. These assumptions have all but taken on the status of myth and posit that: (1) Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is a foundational SF text, but few other women participated in the genre until the advent of feminist SF; (2) women sometimes wrote SF before the 1970s but had to disguise themselves as men to get published in a community that was inherently hostile to their sex; and (3) even when early women SF authors did write under their own names, they followed the lead of their male counterparts, celebrating science and technology in ways that reinforced rather than transformed our understanding of science and society.

These myths remind us of what we value in the present moment, and enjoy in increasing abundance: women who write scientifically responsible and socially daring fiction that encourages us to see our own world and its many possible futures in startling new ways. But they also beg an important question. Where did all these modern wonder women—writers like C. J. Cherryh, N. K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, Jo Walton, and Martha Wells, to name just some—come from in the first place?

As it turns out, women have been involved in shaping SF all along. Between the mid-1920s and the late 1960s, nearly 300 women published in the principal genre-specialist magazines—about 15 percent of all contributors, just going by the numbers.^{1} Most were fiction writers but some also helped to develop their chosen genre as editors, critics, poets, artists, and science journalists. Still others made their mark in the harder-to-quantify and still-understudied realm of fandom: publishing zines, sharing fan fiction, exerting significant influence on SF as its keenest audience. Women were active within professional organizations (helping to found the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, and the Milford and Clarion Writers’ Workshops), and won every award and honor the community had to confer (see the Biographical Notes to this volume for individual Hugos, Nebulas, and other distinctions).

While it is true that women in SF occasionally met resistance from male writers, editors, and fans who disliked their presence in the field, most recall such incidents as isolated ones. From the start, SF magazine editors appear to have encouraged women’s contributions—as Leigh Brackett put it, “editors aren’t buying sex, they’re buying stories.”^{2} At Amazing Stories, the pioneering Hugo Gernsback “liked the idea of a woman invading the field he had opened,” as Leslie F. Stone remembered.^{3} C. L. Moore “never felt the least bit downed because I was a woman”—indeed Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright is reported to have closed his office for the day in celebration when he received Moore’s now-famous story “Shambleau.”^{4} For Zenna Henderson, Anthony J. Boucher and Francis J. McComas of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction seemed like “midwives” to her career.^{5}

And so the question remains: if women were a small but generally welcome part of the early SF world, why did so many adopt androgynous or male pseudonyms? The short answer is that most didn’t—and those who did had good reasons for their deception that had little to do with their SF careers. Almost all of the twenty-six authors featured in this anthology published primarily under their own, clearly feminine names, or under female pseudonyms; others (Leslie F. Stone, Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley) were given androgynous names at birth but published as women. (Throughout this volume, we’ve used each story’s original byline; real names are provided in the Biographical Notes.) In the few well-known cases where women deliberately concealed their true identities, they did so for complex professional reasons. Catherine Lucille Moore became “C. L.” so as not to jeopardize her banking job during the Great Depression. Alice Mary Norton reinvented herself as Andre Norton (also writing occasionally as Allen Weston or Andrew North) when she first launched a career writing boys’ adventure tales. Alice Sheldon, spotting a jar of Tiptree marmalade on a super­market shelf, came up with the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., to protect her identity as a former CIA agent and budding experimental psychologist. As each of these examples suggests, the problem was not the reception of women in SF per se, but patterns of sexual discrimination across American culture. Pseudonymous authorship was common practice for male SF writers as well, and is one of the genre’s fascinating quirks; a couple of the apparently female authors we considered for the present volume turned out in fact to be men.

SINCE the comparatively recent resumé of the ancient order of agriculture I, Nathano, have been asked to set down the extra­ordinary events of the past two thousand years, at the beginning of which time the supremacy of man, chief of the mammals, threatened to come to an untimely end.

Ever since the dawn of life upon this globe, life, which it seemed had crept from the slime of the sea, only two great types had been the rulers; the reptiles and the mammals. The former held undisputed sway for eons, but gave way eventually before the smaller, but intellectually superior mammals. Man himself, the supreme ­example of the ability of life to govern and control inanimate matter, was master of the world with apparently none to dispute his right. Yet, so blinded was he with pride over the continued exercise of his power on Earth over other lower types of mammals and the nearly extinct reptiles, that he failed to notice the slow but steady rise of another branch of life, different from his own; smaller, it is true, but no smaller than he had been in comparison with the mighty reptilian monsters that roamed the swamps in Mesozoic times.

These new enemies of man, though seldom attacking him personally, threatened his downfall by destroying his chief means of sustenance, so that by the close of the twentieth century, strange and daring projects were laid before the various governments of the world with an idea of fighting man’s insect enemies to the finish. These pests were growing in size, multiplying so rapidly and destroying so much vegetation, that eventually no plants would be left to sustain human life. Humanity suddenly woke to the realization that it might suffer the fate of the nearly extinct reptiles. Would mankind be able to prevent the encroachment of the insects? And at last man knew that unless drastic measures were taken at once, a third great class of life was on the brink of terrestrial sovereignty.

Of course no great changes in development come suddenly. Slow evolutionary progress had brought us up to the point, where, with the application of outside pressure, we were ready to handle a situation, that, a century before, would have overwhelmed us.

I reproduce here in part a lecture delivered by a great American scientist, a talk which, sent by radio throughout the world, changed the destiny of mankind: but whether for good or for evil I will leave you to judge at the conclusion of this story.

“Only in comparatively recent times has man succeeded in conquering natural enemies; flood, storm, inclemency of climate, distance, and now we face an encroaching menace to the whole of humanity. Have we learned more and more of truth and of the laws that control matter only to succumb to the first real danger that threatens us with extermination? Surely, no matter what the cost, you will rally to the solution of our problem, and I believe, friends, that I have discovered the answer to the enigma.

“I know that many of you, like my friend Professor Fair, will believe my ideas too extreme, but I am convinced that unless you are willing to put behind you those notions which are old and not utilitarian, you cannot hope to cope with the present situation.

“Already, in the past few decades, you have realized the utter futility of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that had no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continued to hoard, thus lessening the degree of your life’s efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life’s accomplishments. You have given these things up slowly, but I am now going to ask you to relinquish the rest of them quickly; everything that interferes in any way with the immediate disposal of our enemies, the insects.”

At this point, it seems that my worthy ancestor, Professor Fair, objected to the scientist’s words, asserting that efficiency at the expense of some of the sentimental virtues was undesirable and not conducive to happiness, the real goal of man. The scientist, in his turn, argued that happiness was available only through a perfect adaptability to one’s environment, and that efficiency sans love, mercy and the softer sentiments was the short cut to human bliss.

It took a number of years for the scientist to put over his scheme of salvation, but in the end he succeeded, not so much from the persuasiveness of his words, as because prompt action of some sort was necessary. There was not enough food to feed the people of the earth. Fruit and vegetables were becoming a thing of the past. Too much protein food in the form of meat and fish was injuring the race, and at last the people realized that, for fruits and vegetables, or their nutritive equivalent, they must turn from the field to the laboratory; from the farmer to the chemist. Synthetic food was the solution to the problem. There was no longer any use in planting and caring for food stuffs destined to become the nourishment of man’s most deadly enemy.

The last planting took place in 2900, but there was no harvest, the voracious insects took every green shoot as soon as it appeared, and even trees, that had previously withstood the attacks of the huge insects, were by this time, stripped of every vestige of greenery.

The vegetable world suddenly ceased to exist. Over the barren plains which had been gradually filling with vast cities, man-made fires brought devastation to every living bit of greenery, so that in all the world there was no food for the insect pests.

From the borders of the great state-city of Iowa, I was witness to the passing of one of the great kingdoms of earth—the vegetable, and I can not find words to express the grief that overwhelms me as I write of its demise, for I loved all growing things. Many of us realized that Earth was no longer beautiful; but if beauty meant death; better life in the sterility of the metropolis.

The viciousness of the thwarted insects was a menace that we had foreseen and yet failed to take into adequate account. On the city-state borderland, life is constantly imperiled by the attacks of well organized bodies of our dreaded foe.

(Note: The organization that now exists among the ants, bees and other insects, testifies to the possibility of the development of military tactics among them in the centuries to come.)

Robbed of their source of food, they have become emboldened to such an extent that they will take any risks to carry human beings away for food, and after one of their well organized raids, the toll of human life is appalling.

But the great chemical laboratories where our synthetic food is made, and our oxygen plants, we thought were impregnable to their attacks. In that we were mistaken.

Let me say briefly that since the destruction of all vegetation which furnished a part of the oxygen essential to human life, it became necessary to manufacture this gas artificially for general diffusion through the atmosphere.

I was flying to my work, which is in Oxygen Plant No. 21, when I noticed a peculiar thing on the upper speedway near Food Plant No. 3,439. Although it was night, the various levels of the state-city were illuminated as brightly as by day. A pleasure vehicle was going with prodigious speed westward. I looked after it in amazement. It was unquestionably the car of Eric, my co-worker at Oxygen Plant No. 21. I recognized the gay color of its body, but to verify my suspicions beyond the question of a doubt, I turned my volplane in pursuit and made out the familiar license number. What was Eric doing away from the plant before I had arrived to relieve him from duty?

In hot pursuit, I sped above the car to the very border of the state-city, wondering what unheard of errand took him to the land of the enemy, for the car came to a sudden stop at the edge of what had once been an agricultural area. Miles ahead of me stretched an enormous expanse of black sterility; at my back was the teeming metropolis, five levels high—if one counted the hangar-level, which did not cover the residence sections.

I had not long to wait, for almost immediately my friend appeared. What a sight he presented to my incredulous gaze! He was literally covered from head to foot with the two-inch ants, that next to the beetles, had proved the greatest menace in their attacks upon humanity. With wild incoherent cries he fled over the rock and stubble-burned earth.

As soon as my stunned senses permitted, I swooped down toward him to effect a rescue, but even as my plane touched the barren earth, I saw that I was too late, for he fell, borne down by the vicious attacks of his myriad foes. I knew it was useless for me to set foot upon the ground, for my fate would be that of Eric. I rose ten feet and seizing my poison-gas weapon, let its contents out upon the tiny black evil things that swarmed below. I did not bother with my mask, for I planned to rise immediately, and it was not a moment too soon. From across the waste-land, a dark cloud eclipsed the stars and I saw coming toward me a horde of flying ants interspersed with larger flying insects, all bent upon my annihilation. I now took my mask and prepared to turn more gas upon my pursuers, but alas, I had used every atom of it in my attack upon the non-flying ants! I had no recourse but flight, and to this I immediately resorted, knowing that I could outdistance my pursuers.

When I could no longer see them, I removed my gas mask. A suffocating sensation seized me. I could not breathe! How high had I flown in my endeavor to escape the flying ants? I leaned over the side of my plane, expecting to see the city far, far below me. What was my utter amazement when I discovered that I was scarcely a thousand feet high! It was not altitude that was depriving me of the life-giving oxygen.

A drop of three hundred feet showed me inert specks of humanity lying about the streets. Then I knew; the oxygen plant was not in operation! In another minute I had on my oxygen mask, which was attached to a small portable tank for emergency use, and I rushed for the vicinity of the plant. There I witnessed the first signs of life. Men equipped with oxygen masks, were trying to force entrance into the locked building. Being an employee, I possessed knowledge of the combination of the great lock, and I opened the door, only to be greeted by a swarm of ants that commenced a concerted attack upon us.

The floor seemed to be covered with a moving black rug, the corner nearest the door appearing to unravel as we entered, and it was but a few seconds before we were covered with the clinging, biting creatures, who fought with a supernatural energy born of despair. Two very active ants succeeded in getting under my helmet. The bite of their sharp mandibles and the effect of their poisonous formic acid became intolerable. Did I dare remove my mask while the air about me was foul with the gas discharged from the weapons of my allies? While I felt the attacks elsewhere upon my body gradually diminishing as the insects succumbed to the deadly fumes, the two upon my face waxed more vicious under the protection of my mask. One at each eye, they were trying to blind me. The pain was unbearable. Better the suffocating death-gas than the torture of lacerated eyes! Frantically I removed the head-gear and tore at the shiny black fiends. Strange to tell, I discovered that I could breathe near the vicinity of the great oxygen tanks, where enough oxygen lingered to support life at least temporarily. The two vicious insects, no longer protected by my gas-mask, scurried from me like rats from a sinking ship and disappeared behind the oxygen tanks.

This attack of our enemies, though unsuccessful on their part, was dire in its significance, for it had shown more cunning and ingenuity than anything that had ever preceded it. Heretofore, their onslaughts had been confined to direct attacks upon us personally or upon the synthetic-food laboratories, but in this last raid they had shown an amazing cleverness that portended future disaster, unless they were checked at once. It was obvious they had ingeniously planned to smother us by the suspension of work at the oxygen plant, knowing that they themselves could exist in an atmosphere containing a greater percentage of carbon-dioxide. Their scheme, then, was to raid our laboratories for food.

Although it was evident that the cessation of all plant-life spelled inevitable doom for the insect inhabitants of Earth, their extermination did not follow as rapidly as one might have supposed. There were years of internecine warfare. The insects continued to thrive, though in decreasing numbers, upon stolen laboratory foods, bodies of human-beings and finally upon each other; at first capturing enemy species and at last even resorting to a cannibalistic procedure. Their rapacity grew in inverse proportion to their waning numbers, until the meeting of even an isolated insect might mean death, unless one were equipped with poison gas and prepared to use it upon a second’s notice.

I am an old man now, though I have not yet lived quite two centuries, but I am happy in the knowledge that I have lived to see the last living insect which was held in captivity. It was an excellent specimen of the stag-beetle (Lucanus) and the years have testified that it was the sole survivor of a form of life that might have succeeded man upon this planet. This beetle was caught weeks after we had previously seen what was supposed to be the last living thing upon the globe, barring man and the sea-life. Untiring search for years has failed to reveal any more insects, so that at last man rests secure in the knowledge that he is monarch of all he surveys.

I have heard that long, long ago man used to gaze with a fearful fascination upon the reptilian creatures which he displaced, and just so did he view this lone specimen of a type of life that might have covered the face of the earth, but for man’s ingenuity.

It was this unholy lure that drew me one day to view the captive beetle in his cage in district 404 at Universapolis. I was amazed at the size of the creature, for it looked larger than when I had seen it by television,[1]^, [2] but I reasoned that upon that occasion there had been no object near with which to compare its size. True, the broadcaster had announced its dimensions, but the statistics concretely given had failed to register a perfect realization of its prodigious proportions.

As I approached the cage, the creature was lying with its dorsal covering toward me and I judged it measured fourteen inches from one extremity to the other. Its smooth horny sheath gleamed in the bright artificial light. (It was confined on the third level.) As I stood there, mentally conjuring a picture of a world overrun with billions of such creatures as the one before me, the keeper approached the cage with a meal-portion of synthetic food. Although the food has no odor, the beetle sensed the man’s approach, for it rose on its jointed legs and came toward us, its horn-like prongs moving threateningly; then apparently remembering its confinement, and the impotency of an attack, it subsided and quickly ate the food which had been placed within its prison.

The food consumed, it lifted itself to its hind legs, partially supported by a box, and turned its great eyes upon me. I had never been regarded with such utter malevolence before. The detestation was almost tangible and I shuddered involuntarily. As plainly as if he spoke, I knew that Lucanus was perfectly cognizant of the situation and in his gaze I read the concentrated hate of an entire defeated race.

I had no desire to gloat over his misfortune, rather a great pity toward him welled up within me. I pictured myself alone, the last of my kind, held up for ridicule before the swarming hordes of insects who had conquered my people, and I knew that life would no longer be worth the living.

Whether he sensed my pity or not I do not know, but he continued to survey me with unmitigated rage, as if he would convey to me the information that his was an implacable hatred that would outlast eternity.

Not long after this he died, and a world long since intolerant of ceremony, surprised itself by interring the beetle’s remains in a golden casket, accompanied by much pomp and splendor.

I have lived many long years since that memorable event, and undoubtedly my days here are numbered, but I can pass on happily, convinced that in this sphere man’s conquest of his environment is supreme.

Am I a true product of the year 2928? Sometimes I am convinced that I am hopelessly old-fashioned, an anachronism, that should have existed a thousand years ago. In no other way can I account for the dissatisfaction I feel in a world where efficiency has at last reached a maximum.

I am told that I spring from a line of ancestors who were not readily acclimated to changing conditions. I love beauty, yet I see none of it here. There are many who think our lofty buildings that tower two and three thousand feet into the air are beautiful, but while they are architectural splendors, they do not represent the kind of loveliness I crave. Only when I visit the sea do I feel any satisfaction for a certain yearning in my soul. The ocean alone shows the handiwork of God. The land bears evidence only of man.

As I read back through the diaries of my sentimental ancestors I find occasional glowing descriptions of the world that was; the world before the insects menaced human existence. Trees, plants and flowers brought delight into the lives of people as they wandered among them in vast open spaces, I am told, where the earth was soft beneath the feet, and flying creatures, called birds, sang among the greenery. True, I learn that many people had not enough to eat, and that uncontrollable passions governed them, but I do believe it must have been more interesting than this methodical, unemotional existence. I can not understand why many people were poor, for I am told that Nature as manifested in the vegetable kingdom was very prolific; so much so that year after year quantities of food rotted on the ground. The fault, I find by my reading, was not with Nature but with man’s economic system which is now perfect, though this perfection really brings few of us happiness, I think.

Now there is no waste; all is converted into food. Long ago man learned how to reduce all matter to its constituent elements, of which there are nearly a hundred in number, and from them to rebuild compounds for food. The old axiom that nothing is created or destroyed, but merely changed from one form to another, has stood the test of ages. Man, as the agent of God, has simply performed the miracle of transmutation himself instead of waiting for natural forces to accomplish it as in the old days.

At first humanity was horrified when it was decreed that it must relinquish its dead to the laboratory. For too many eons had man closely associated the soul and body, failing to comprehend the body as merely a material agent, through which the spirit functioned. When man knew at last of the eternal qualities of spirit, he ceased to regard the discarded body with reverential awe, and saw in it only the same molecular constituents which comprised all matter about him. He recognized only material basically the same as that of stone or metal; material to be reduced to its atomic elements and rebuilt into matter that would render service to living humanity; that portion of matter wherein spirit functions.

The drab monotony of life is appalling. Is it possible that man had reached his height a thousand years ago and should have been willing to resign Earth’s sovereignty to a coming order of creatures destined to be man’s worthy successor in the eons to come? It seems that life is interesting only when there is a struggle, a goal to be reached through an evolutionary process. Once the goal is attained, all progress ceases. The huge reptiles of preglacial ages rose to supremacy by virtue of their great size, and yet was it not the excessive bulk of those creatures that finally wiped them out of existence? Nature, it seems, avoids extremes. She allows the fantastic to develop for awhile and then wipes the slate clean for a new order of development. Is it not conceivable that man could destroy himself through excessive development of his nervous system, and give place for the future evolution of a comparatively simple form of life, such as the insects were at man’s height of development? This, it seems to me, was the great plan; a scheme with which man dared to interfere and for which he is now paying by the boredom of existence.

The earth’s population is decreasing so rapidly, that I fear another thousand years will see a lifeless planet hurtling through space. It seems to me that only a miracle will save us now.

My ancestor, Thanor, of ten centuries ago, according to the records he gave to my great grandfather, seems to voice the general despair of humanity which, bad enough in his times, has reached the nth power in my day. A soulless world is gradually dying from self-inflicted boredom.

As I have ascertained from the perusal of the journals of my forebears, even antedating the extermination of the insects, I come of a stock that clings with sentimental tenacity to the things that made life worth while in the old days. If the world at large knew of my emotional musings concerning past ages, it would scarcely tolerate me, but surrounded by my thought-insulator, I often indulge in what fancies I will, and such meditation, coupled with a love for a few ancient relics from the past, has led me to a most amazing discovery.

Several months ago I found among my family relics a golden receptacle two feet long, one and a half in width and one in depth, which I found, upon opening, to contain many tiny square compartments, each filled with minute objects of slightly varying size, texture and color.

“Not sand!” I exclaimed as I closely examined the little particles of matter.

Food? After eating some, I was convinced that their nutritive value was small in comparison with a similar quantity of the products of our laboratories. What were the mysterious objects?

Just as I was about to close the lid again, convinced that I had one over-sentimental ancestor, whose gift to posterity was absolutely useless, my pocket-radio buzzed and the voice of my friend, Stentor, the interplanetary broadcaster, issued from the tiny instrument.

“If you’re going to be home this afternoon,” said Stentor, “I’ll skate over. I have some interesting news.”

I consented, for I thought I would share my “find” with this friend whom I loved above all others, but before he arrived I had again hidden my golden chest, for I had decided to await the development of events before sharing its mysterious secret with another. It was well that I did this for Stentor was so filled with the importance of his own news that he could have given me little attention at first.

“Well, what is your interesting news?” I asked after he was comfortably seated in my adjustable chair.

“You’d never guess,” he replied with irritating leisureliness.

“Does it pertain to Mars or Venus?” I queried. “What news of our neighbor planets?”

“You may know it has nothing to do with the self-satisfied Martians,” answered the broadcaster, “but the Venusians have a very serious problem confronting them. It is in connection with the same old difficulty they have had ever since interplanetary radio was developed forty years ago. You remember, that, in their second communication with us, they told us of their continual warfare on insect pests that were destroying all vegetable food? Well, last night after general broadcasting had ceased, I was surprised to hear the voice of the Venusian broadcaster. He is suggesting that we get up a scientific expedition to Venus to help the natives of his unfortunate planet solve their insect problem as we did ours. He says the Martians turn a deaf ear to their plea for help, but he expects sympathy and assistance from Earth who has so recently solved these problems for herself.”

I was dumbfounded at Stentor’s news.

“But the Venusians are farther advanced mechanically than we,” I objected, “though they are behind us in the natural sciences. They could much more easily solve the difficulties of space-flying than we could.”

“That is true,” agreed Stentor, “but if we are to render them material aid in freeing their world from devastating insects, we must get to Venus. The past four decades have proved that we can not help them merely by verbal instructions.”

“Now, last night,” Stentor continued, with warming enthusiasm, “Wanyana, the Venusian broadcaster, informed me that scientists on Venus are developing interplanetary television. This, if successful, will prove highly beneficial in facilitating communication, and it may even do away with the necessity of interplanetary travel, which I think is centuries ahead of us yet.”

“Television, though so common here on Earth and on Venus, has seemed an impossibility across the ethereal void,” I said, “but if it becomes a reality, I believe it will be the Venusians who will take the initiative, though of course they will be helpless without our friendly cooperation. In return for the mechanical instructions they have given us from time to time, I think it no more than right that we should try to give them all the help possible in freeing their world, as ours has been freed, of the insects that threaten their very existence. Personally, therefore, I hope it can be done through radio and television rather than by personal excursions.”

“I believe you are right,” he admitted, “but I hope we can be of service to them soon. Ever since I have served in the capacity of official interplanetary broadcaster, I have liked the spirit of goodfellowship shown by the Venusians through their spokesman, Wanyana. The impression is favorable in contrast to the superciliousness of the inhabitants of Mars.”

We conversed for some time, but at length he rose to take his leave. It was then I ventured to broach the subject that was uppermost in my thoughts.

“I want to show you something, Stentor,” I said, going into an adjoining room for my precious box and returning shortly with it. “A relic from the days of an ancestor named Delfair, who lived at the time the last insect, a beetle, was kept in captivity. Judging from his personal account, Delfair was fully aware of the significance of the changing times in which he lived, and contrary to the majority of his contemporaries, possessed a sentimentality of soul that has proved an historical asset to future generations. Look, my friend, these he left to posterity!”

I deposited the heavy casket on a table between us and lifted the lid, revealing to Stentor the mystifying particles.

The face of Stentor was eloquent of astonishment. Not unnaturally his mind took somewhat the same route as mine had followed previously, though he added atomic-power-units to the list of possibilities. He shook his head in perplexity.

“Whatever they are, there must have been a real purpose behind their preservation,” he said at last. “You say this old Delfair witnessed the passing of the insects? What sort of a fellow was he? Likely to be up to any tricks?”

“Not at all,” I asserted rather indignantly, “he seemed a very serious minded chap; worked in an oxygen-plant and took an active part in the last warfare between men and insects.”

Suddenly Stentor stooped over and scooped up some of the mi­nute particles into the palm of his hand—and then he uttered a maniacal shriek and flung them into the air.

“Great God, man, do you know what they are?” he screamed, shaking violently.

“No, I do not,” I replied quietly, with an attempt at dignity I did not feel.

“Insect eggs!” he cried, and shuddering with terror, he made for the door.

I caught him on the threshold and pulled him forcibly back into the room.

“Now see here,” I said sternly, “not a word of this to anyone. Do you understand? I will test out your theory in every possible way but I want no public interference.”

At first he was obstinate, but finally yielded to threats when supplications were impotent.

“I will test them,” I said, “and will endeavor to keep hatchings under absolute control, should they prove to be what you suspect.”

It was time for the evening broadcasting, so he left, promising to keep our secret and leaving me regretting that I had taken another into my confidence.

For days following my unfortunate experience with Stentor, I experimented upon the tiny objects that had so terrified him. I subjected them to various tests for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not they bore evidence of life, whether in egg, pupa or larva stages of development. And to all my experiments, there was but one answer. No life was manifest. Yet I was not satisfied, for chemical tests showed that they were composed of organic matter. Here was an inexplicable enigma! Many times I was on the verge of consigning the entire contents of the chest to the flames. I seemed to see in my mind’s eye the world again over-ridden with insects, and that calamity due to the indiscretions of one man! My next impulse was to turn over my problem to scientists, when a suspicion of the truth dawned upon me. These were seeds, the germs of plant-life, and they might grow. But alas, where? Over all the earth man has spread his artificial dominion. The state-city has been succeeded by what could be termed the nation-city, for one great floor of concrete or rock covers the country.

I resolved to try an experiment, the far-reaching influence of which I did not at that time suspect. Beneath the lowest level of the community edifice in which I dwell, I removed, by means of a small atomic excavator, a slab of concrete large enough to admit my body. I let myself down into the hole and felt my feet resting on a soft dark substance that I knew to be dirt. I hastily filled a box of this, and after replacing the concrete slab, returned to my room, where I proceeded to plant a variety of the seeds.

Being a product of an age when practically to wish for a thing in a material sense is to have it, I experienced the greatest impatience, while waiting for any evidences of plant-life to become manifest. Daily, yes hourly, I watched the soil for signs of a type of life long since departed from the earth, and was about convinced that the germ of life could not have survived the centuries, when a tiny blade of green proved to me that a miracle, more wonderful to me than the works of man through the ages, was taking place before my eyes. This was an enigma so complex and yet so simple, that one recognized in it a direct revelation of Nature.

Daily and weekly I watched in secret the botanical miracle. It was my one obsession. I was amazed at the fascination it held for me—a man who viewed the marvels of the thirty-fourth century with unemotional complacency. It showed me that Nature is manifest in the simple things which mankind has chosen to ignore.

Then one morning, when I awoke, a white blossom displayed its immaculate beauty and sent forth its delicate fragrance into the air. The lily, a symbol of new life, resurrection! I felt within me the stirring of strange emotions I had long believed dead in the bosom of man. But the message must not be for me alone. As of old, the lily would be the symbol of life for all!

With trembling hands, I carried my precious burden to a front window where it might be witnessed by all who passed by. The first day there were few who saw it, for only rarely do men and women walk; they usually ride in speeding vehicles of one kind or another, or employ electric skates, a delightful means of locomotion, which gives the body some exercise. The fourth city level, which is reserved for skaters and pedestrians, is kept in a smooth glass-like condition. And so it was only the occasional pedestrian, walking on the outer border of the fourth level, upon which my window faced, who first carried the news of the growing plant to the world, and it was not long before it was necessary for civic authorities to disperse the crowds that thronged to my window for a glimpse of a miracle in green and white.

When I showed my beautiful plant to Stentor, he was most profuse in his apology and came to my rooms every day to watch it unfold and develop, but the majority of people, long used to business-like efficiency, were intolerant of the sentimental emotions that swayed a small minority, and I was commanded to dispose of the lily. But a figurative seed had been planted in the human heart, a seed that could not be disposed of so readily, and this seed ripened and grew until it finally bore fruit.

It is a very different picture of humanity that I paint ten years after the last entry in my diary. My new vocation is farming, but it is farming on a far more intensive scale than had been done two thousand years ago. Our crops never fail, for temperature and rainfall are regulated artificially. But we attribute our success principally to the total absence of insect pests. Our small agricultural areas dot the country like the parks of ancient days and supply us with a type of food, no more nourishing, but more appetizing than that produced in the laboratories. Truly we are living in a marvelous age! If the earth is ours completely, why may we not turn our thoughts toward the other planets in our solar-system? For the past ten or eleven years the Venusians have repeatedly urged us to come and assist them in their battle for life. I believe it is our duty to help them.

Tomorrow will be a great day for us and especially for Stentor, as the new interplanetary television is to be tested, and it is possible that for the first time in history, we shall see our neighbors in the infinity of space. Although the people of Venus were about a thousand years behind us in many respects, they have made wonderful progress with radio and television. We have been in radio communication with them for the last half century and they shared with us the joy of the establishment of our Eden. They have always been greatly interested in hearing Stentor tell the story of our subjugation of the insects that threatened to wipe us out of existence, for they have exactly that problem to solve now; judging from their reports, we fear that theirs is a losing battle. Tomorrow we shall converse face to face with the Venusians! It will be an event second in importance only to the first radio communications interchanged fifty years ago. Stentor’s excitement exceeds that displayed at the time of the discovery of the seeds.

Well it is over and the experiment was a success, but alas for the revelation!

The great assembly halls all over the continent were packed with humanity eager to catch a first glimpse of the Venusians. Prior to the test, we sent our message of friendship and good will by radio, and received a reciprocal one from our interplanetary neighbors. Alas, we were ignorant at that time! Then the television receiving apparatus was put into operation, and we sat with breathless interest, our eyes intent upon the crystal screen before us. I sat near Stentor and noted the feverish ardor with which he watched for the first glimpse of Wanyana.

At first hazy mist-like spectres seemed to glide across the screen. We knew these figures were not in correct perspective. Finally, one object gradually became more opaque, its outlines could be seen clearly. Then across that vast assemblage, as well as thousands of others throughout the world, there swept a wave of speechless horror, as its full significance burst upon mankind.

The figure that stood facing us was a huge six-legged beetle, not identical in every detail with our earthly enemies of past years, but unmistakably an insect of gigantic proportions! Of course it could not see us, for our broadcaster was not to appear until afterward, but it spoke, and we had to close our eyes to convince ourselves that it was the familiar voice of Wanyana, the leading Venusian radio broadcaster. Stentor grabbed my arm, uttered an inarticulate cry and would have fallen but for my timely support.

“Friends of Earth, as you call your world,” began the object of horror, “this is a momentous occasion in the annals of the twin planets, and we are looking forward to seeing one of you, and preferably Stentor, for the first time, as you are now viewing one of us. We have listened many times, with interest, to your story of the insect pests which threatened to follow you as lords of your planet. As you have often heard us tell, we are likewise molested with insects. Our fight is a losing one, unless we can soon exterminate them.”

Suddenly, the Venusian was joined by another being, a colossal ant, who bore in his fore-legs a tiny light-colored object which he handed to the beetle-announcer, who took it and held it forward for our closer inspection. It seemed to be a tiny ape, but was so small we could not ascertain for a certainty. We were convinced, however, that it was a mammalian creature, an “insect” pest of Venus. Yet in it we recognized rudimentary man as we know him on earth!

There was no question as to the direction in which sympathies instinctively turned, yet reason told us that our pity should be given to the intelligent reigning race who had risen to its present mental attainment through eons of time. By some quirk or freak of nature, way back in the beginning, life had developed in the form of insects instead of mammals. Or (the thought was repellent) had insects in the past succeeded in displacing mammals, as they might have done here on earth?

There was no more television that night. Stentor would not appear, so disturbed was he by the sight of the Venusians, but in the morning, he talked to them by radio and explained the very natural antipathy we experienced in seeing them or in having them see us.

Now they no longer urge us to construct ether-ships and go to help them dispose of their “insects.” I think they are afraid of us, and their very fear has aroused in mankind an unholy desire to conquer them.

I am against it. Have we not had enough of war in the past? We have subdued our own world and should be content with that, instead of seeking new worlds to conquer. But life is too easy here. I can plainly see that. Much as he may seem to dislike it, man is not happy, unless he has some enemy to overcome, some difficulty to surmount.

Alas my greatest fears for man were groundless!

A short time ago, when I went out into my field to see how my crops were faring, I found a six-pronged beetle voraciously eating. No—man will not need to go to Venus to fight “insects.”

HOLA, my daughters (sighed the Matriarch) it is true indeed, I am the only living one upon Gola who remembers the invasion from Detaxal, I alone of all my generation survive to recall vividly the sights and scenes of that past era. And well it is that you come to me to hear by free communication of mind to mind face to face with each other.

Ah, well I remember the surprise of that hour when through the mists that enshroud our lovely world, there swam the first of the great smooth cylinders of the Detaxalans, fifty tas* in length, as glistening and silvery as the soil of our land, propelled by the man-things that on Detaxal are supreme even as we women are supreme on Gola.

In those bygone days, as now, Gola was enwrapped by her cloud mists that keep from us the terrific glare of the great star that glows like a malignant spirit out there in the darkness of the void. Only occasionally when a particularly great storm parts the mist of heaven do we see the wonders of the vast universe, but that does not prevent us, with our marvelous telescopes handed down to us from thousands of generations before us, from learning what lies across the dark seas of the outside.

Therefore we knew of the nine planets[4] that encircle the great star and are subject its rule. And so are we familiar enough with the surfaces of these planets to know why Gola should appear as a haven to their inhabitants who see in our cloud-enclosed mantle a sweet release from the blasting heat and blinding glare of the great sun.

So it was not strange at all to us to find that the people of Detaxal, the third planet of the sun, had arrived on our globe with a wish in their hearts to migrate here, and end their days out of reach of the blistering warmth that had come to be their lot on their own world.

Long ago we, too, might have gone on exploring expeditions to other worlds, other universes, but for what? Are we not happy here? We who have attained the greatest of civilizations within the confines of our own silvery world. Powerfully strong with our mighty force rays, we could subjugate all the universe, but why?

Are we not content with life as it is, with our lovely cities, our homes, our daughters, our gentle consorts? Why spend physical energy in combative strife for something we do not wish, when our mental processes carry us further and beyond the conquest of mere terrestrial exploitation?

On Detaxal it is different, for there the peoples, the ignoble male creatures, breed for physical prowess, leaving the development of their sciences, their philosophies, and the contemplation of the abstract to a chosen few. The greater part of the race fares forth to conquer, to lay waste, to struggle and fight as the animals do over a morsel of worthless territory. Of course we can see why they desired Gola with all its treasures, but we can thank Providence and ourselves that they did not succeed in “commercializing” us as they have the remainder of the universe with their ignoble Federation.

Ah yes, well I recall the hour when first they came, pushing cautiously through the cloud mists, seeking that which lay beneath. We of Gola were unwarned until the two cylinders hung directly above Tola, the greatest city of that time, which still lies in its ruins since that memorial day. But they have paid for it—paid for it well in thousands and in tens of thousands of their men.

We were first apprised of their coming when the alarm from Tola was sent from the great beam station there, advising all to stand in readiness for an emergency. Geble, my mother, was then Queen of all Gola, and I was by her side in Morka, that pleasant seaside resort, where I shall soon travel again to partake of its rejuvenating waters.

With us were four of Geble’s consorts, sweet gentle males, that gave Geble much pleasure in these free hours away from the worries of state. But when the word of the strangers’ descent over our home city, Tola, came to us, all else was forgotten. With me at her side, Geble hastened to the beam station and there in the matter transmitter we dispatched our physical beings to the palace at Tola, and the next moment were staring upward at the two strange shapes etched against the clouds.

What the Detaxalan ships were waiting for we did not know then, but later we learned. Not grasping the meaning of our beam stations, the commandants of the ships considered the city below them entirely lacking in means of defense, and were conferring on the method of taking it without bloodshed on either side.

It was not long after our arrival in Tola that the first of the ships began to descend toward the great square before the palace. Geble watched without a word, her great mind already scanning the brains of those whom she found within the great machine. She transferred to my mind but a single thought as I stood there at her side and that with a sneer, “Barbarians!”

Now the ship was settling in the square and after a few moments of hesitation, a circular doorway appeared at the side and four of the Detaxalans came through the opening. The square was empty but for themselves and their flyer, and we saw them looking about surveying the beautiful buildings on all sides. They seemed to recognize the palace for what it was and in one accord moved in our direction.

Then Geble left the window at which we stood and strode to the doorway opening upon the balcony that faced the square. The Detaxalans halted in their tracks when they saw her slender graceful form appear and removing the strange coverings they wore on their heads they each made a bow.

Again Geble sneered for only the male-things of our world bow their heads, and so she recognized these visitors for what they were, nothing more than the despicable males of the species! And what creatures they were!

Imagine a short almost flat body set high upon two slender legs, the body tapering in the middle, several times as broad across as it is through the center, with two arms almost as long as the legs attached to the upper part of the torso. A small column-like neck of only a few inches divides the head of oval shape from the body, and in this head only are set the organs of sight, hearing, and scent. Their bodies were like a patch work of a misguided nature.

Yes, strange as it is, my daughters, practically all of the creature’s faculties had their base in the small ungainly head, and each organ was perforce pressed into serving for several functions. For instance, the breathing nostrils also served for scenting out odors, nor was this organ able to exclude any disagreeable odors that might come its way, but had to dispense to the brain both pleasant and unpleasant odors at the same time.

Then there was the mouth, set directly beneath the nose, and here again we had an example of one organ doing the work of two for the creature not only used the mouth with which to take in the food for its body, but it also used the mouth to enunciate the excruciatingly ugly sounds of its language forthwith.

Never before have I seen such a poorly organized body, so unlike our own highly developed organisms. How much nicer it is to be able to call forth any organ at will, and dispense with it when its usefulness is over! Instead these poor Detaxalans had to carry theirs about in physical being all the time so that always was the surface of their bodies entirely marred.

Yet that was not the only part of their ugliness, and proof of the lowliness of their origin, for whereas our fine bodies support themselves by muscular development, these poor creatures were dependent entirely upon a strange structure to keep them in their proper shape.

Imagine if you can a bony skeleton somewhat like the foundations upon which we build our edifices, laying stone and cement over the steel framework. But this skeleton instead is inside a body which the flesh, muscle and skin overlay. Everywhere in their bodies are these cartilaginous structures—hard, heavy, bony structures developed by the chemicals of the being for its use. Even the hands, feet and head of the creatures were underlaid with these bones, ugh, it was terrible when we dissected one of the fellows for study. I shudder to think of it.

Yet again there was still another feature of the Detaxalans that was equally as horrifying as the rest, namely their outer covering. As we viewed them for the first time out there in the square we discovered that parts of the body, that is the part of the head which they called the face, and the bony hands were entirely naked without any sort of covering, neither fur nor feathers, just the raw, pinkish-brown skin looking as if it had been recently plucked.

Later we found a few specimens that had a type of fur on the lower part of the face, but these were rare. And when they doffed the head coverings which we had first taken for some sort of natural covering, we saw that the top of the head was overlaid with a very fine fuzz of fur several inches long.

We did not know in the beginning that the strange covering on the bodies of the four men, green in color, was not a natural growth, but later discovered that such was the truth, and not only the face and hands were bare of fur, but the entire body, except for a fine sprinkling of hair that was scarcely visible except on the chest, was also bare. No wonder the poor things covered themselves with their awkward clothing. We arrived at the conclusion that their lack of fur had been brought about by the fact that always they had been exposed to the bright rays of the sun so that without the dampness of our own planet the fur had dried up and fallen away from the flesh!

Now thinking it over I suppose that we of Gola presented strange form to the people of Detaxal with our fine circular bodies, rounded at the top, our short beautiful lower limbs with the circular foot pads, and our short round arms and hand pads, flexible and muscular like rubber.

But how envious they must have been of our beautiful golden coats, our movable eyes, our power to scent, hear and touch with any part of the body, to absorb food and drink through any part of the body most convenient to us at any time. Oh yes, laugh though you may, without a doubt we were also freaks to those freakish Detaxalans. But no matter, let us return to the tale.

On recognizing our visitors for what they were, simple-minded males, Geble was chagrined at them for taking up her time, but they were strangers to our world and we Golans are always courteous. Geble began of course to try to communicate by thought transference, but strangely enough the fellows below did not catch a single thought. Instead, entirely unaware of Geble’s overture to friendship, the leader commenced to speak to her in most outlandish manner, contorting the red lips of his mouth into various uncouth shapes and making sounds that fell upon our hearing so unpleasantly that we immediately closed our senses to them. And without a word Geble turned her back upon them, calling for Tanka, her personal secretary.

THEY brought in Joiry’s tall commander, struggling between two men-at-arms who tightly gripped the ropes which bound their captive’s mailed arms. They picked their way between mounds of dead as they crossed the great hall toward the dais where the conqueror sat, and twice they slipped a little in the blood that spattered the flags. When they came to a halt before the mailed figure on the dais, Joiry’s commander was breathing hard, and the voice that echoed hollowly under the helmet’s confines was hoarse with fury and despair.

Guillaume the conqueror leaned on his mighty sword, hands crossed on its hilt, grinning down from his height upon the furious captive before him. He was a big man, Guillaume, and he looked bigger still in his spattered armor. There was blood on his hard, scarred face, and he was grinning a white grin that split his short, curly beard glitteringly. Very splendid and very dangerous he looked, leaning on his great sword and smiling down upon fallen Joiry’s lord, struggling between the stolid men-at-arms.

“Unshell me this lobster,” said Guillaume in his deep, lazy voice. “We’ll see what sort of face the fellow has who gave us such a battle. Off with his helmet, you.”

But a third man had to come up and slash the straps which held the iron helmet on, for the struggles of Joiry’s commander were too fierce, even with bound arms, for either of the guards to release their hold. There was a moment of sharp struggle; then the straps parted and the helmet rolled loudly across the flagstones.

Guillaume’s white teeth clicked on a startled oath. He stared. Joiry’s lady glared back at him from between her captors, wild red hair tousled, wild lion-yellow eyes ablaze.

“God curse you!” snarled the lady of Joiry between clenched teeth. “God blast your black heart!”

Guillaume scarcely heard her. He was still staring, as most men stared when they first set eyes upon Jirel of Joiry. She was tall as most men, and as savage as the wildest of them, and the fall of Joiry was bitter enough to break her heart as she stood snarling curses up at her tall conqueror. The face above her mail might not have been fair in a woman’s head-dress, but in the steel setting of her armor it had a biting, sword-edge beauty as keen as the flash of blades. The red hair was short upon her high, defiant head, and the yellow blaze of her eyes held fury as a crucible holds fire.

Guillaume’s stare melted into a slow smile. A little light kindled behind his eyes as he swept the long, strong lines of her with a practised gaze. The smile broadened, and suddenly he burst into full-throated laughter, a deep bull bellow of amusement and delight.

“By the Nails!” he roared. “Here’s welcome for the warrior! And what forfeit d’ye offer, pretty one, for your life?”

She blazed a curse at him.

“So? Naughty words for a mouth so fair, my lady. Well, we’ll not deny you put up a gallant battle. No man could have done better, and many have done worse. But against Guillaume——” He inflated his splendid chest and grinned down at her from the depths of his jutting beard. “Come to me, pretty one,” he commanded. “I’ll wager your mouth is sweeter than your words.”

Jirel drove a spurred heel into the shin of one guard and twisted from his grip as he howled, bringing up an iron knee into the abdomen of the other. She had writhed from their grip and made three long strides toward the door before Guillaume caught her. She felt his arms closing about her from behind, and lashed out with both spiked heels in a futile assault upon his leg armor, twisting like a maniac, fighting with her knees and spurs, straining hopelessly at the ropes which bound her arms. Guillaume laughed and whirled her round, grinning down into the blaze of her yellow eyes. Then deliberately he set a fist under her chin and tilted her mouth up to his. There was a cessation of her hoarse curses.

“By Heaven, that’s like kissing a sword-blade,” said Guillaume, lifting his lips at last.

Jirel choked something that was mercifully muffled as she darted her head sidewise, like a serpent striking, and sank her teeth into his neck. She missed the jugular by a fraction of an inch.

Guillaume said nothing, then. He sought her head with a steady hand, found it despite her wild writhing, sank iron fingers deep into the hinges of her jaw, forcing her teeth relentlessly apart. When he had her free he glared down into the yellow hell of her eyes for an instant. The blaze of them was hot enough to scorch his scarred face. He grinned and lifted his ungauntleted hand, and with one heavy blow in the face he knocked her half-way across the room. She lay still upon the flags.

Jirel opened her yellow eyes upon darkness. She lay quiet for a while, collecting her scattered thoughts. By degrees it came back to her, and she muffled upon her arm a sound that was half curse and half sob. Joiry had fallen. For a time she lay rigid in the dark, forcing herself to the realization.

The sound of feet shifting on stone near by brought her out of that particular misery. She sat up cautiously, feeling about her to determine in what part of Joiry its liege lady was imprisoned. She knew that the sound she had heard must be a sentry, and by the dank smell of the darkness that she was underground. In one of the little dungeon cells, of course. With careful quietness she got to her feet, muttering a curse as her head reeled for an instant and then began to throb. In the utter dark she felt around the cell. Presently she came to a little wooden stool in a corner, and was satisfied. She gripped one leg of it with firm fingers and made her soundless way around the wall until she had located the door.

The sentry remembered, afterward, that he had heard the wildest shriek for help which had ever rung in his ears, and he remembered unbolting the door. Afterward, until they found him lying inside the locked cell with a cracked skull, he remembered nothing.

Jirel crept up the dark stairs of the north turret, murder in her heart. Many little hatreds she had known in her life, but no such blaze as this. Before her eyes in the night she could see Guillaume’s scornful, scarred face laughing, the little jutting beard split with the whiteness of his mirth. Upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms. And such a blast of hot fury came over her that she reeled a little and clutched at the wall for support. She went on in a haze of red anger, and something like madness burning in her brain as a resolve slowly took shape out of the chaos of her hate. When that thought came to her she paused again, mid-step upon the stairs, and was conscious of a little coldness blowing over her. Then it was gone, and she shivered a little, shook her shoulders and grinned wolfishly, and went on.

By the stars she could see through the arrow-slits in the wall it must be near to midnight. She went softly on the stairs, and she encountered no one. Her little tower room at the top was empty. Even the straw pallet where the serving-wench slept had not been used that night. Jirel got herself out of her armor alone, somehow, after much striving and twisting. Her doeskin shirt was stiff with sweat and stained with blood. She tossed it disdainfully into a corner. The fury in her eyes had cooled now to a contained and secret flame. She smiled to herself as she slipped a fresh shirt of doeskin over her tousled red head and donned a brief tunic of link-mail. On her legs she buckled the greaves of some forgotten legionary, relic of the not long past days when Rome still ruled the world. She thrust a dagger through her belt and took her own long two-handed sword bare-bladed in her grip. Then she went down the stairs again.

She knew there must have been revelry and feasting in the great hall that night, and by the silence hanging so heavily now she was sure that most of her enemies lay still in drunken slumber, and she experienced a swift regret for the gallons of her good French wine so wasted. And the thought flashed through her head that a determined woman with a sharp sword might work some little damage among the drunken sleepers before she was overpowered. But she put that idea by, for Guillaume would have posted sentries to spare, and she must not give up her secret freedom so fruitlessly.

SHE stared at her two companions for a moment and then a sickening revulsion replaced fear, the fear that held each of the three in a terrible grip of inertia. Her slim hands bit hard into the back of one of the metal seats. The tiny rocket ship was plummeting to destruction, careening dizzily through space. Here, in the atmosphereless void, their motion was negligible to them, but instruments told a grim story; unless they could blast the forward rockets very soon they would be caught in the Earth’s titanic grip and drawn with intensifying acceleration to its surface. They would come screaming down like some colossal shell and the planet’s surface would become a molten sore where they struck. And now, while precious seconds fled, the three of them stood transfixed, immobile.

What had happened? A simple thing, an unimportant thing in space. They had encountered a meteor swarm, one utterly infinitesimal in the sight of the looming worlds about them. But it had left one of its members jammed in their forward rocket nozzles, the tubes which determined whether they would land safely or crash in a blaze of incandescence. They had turned off their operating power rather than wreck the ship completely; with no escape for the rocket-blasts, their motors would be smashed to pieces.

The first they knew of disaster, striking unheralded from space, was the ear-shattering impact of the meteor. No sound; just concussion that was worse than any deafening crash. Then the power generator dial shot to the danger line; the ship began to plunge, teleplate showing the universe seemingly turning fast somersaults as their ship careened end over end. The truth was evident at once; that impediment must be removed from the forward tubes. One of them must volunteer to clear away the obstruction, or all were doomed.

A time for heroics, this, but none of them felt like heroes. Erik and Michael stood side by side, a sort of bewildered terror on their faces—a “this can’t happen to us” look. Neither had moved or spoken a word since the first investigation. Erik, upon discovering that the outer door was gone, had flung his space suit to the floor with an impotent curse. For that shorn-off door meant that whoever left the ship now could never return; it was a one-way passage. The taller of the two men played with the instruments, spinning them this way and that, then stood waiting. Waiting for heaven alone knew what miracle to happen.

Lida found her confidence in them, that fine confidence she had known up to now, dissolving away, leaving her with an empty feeling which was greater than any fear could have been. She could not square them, as they were now, with the men she had known before—through innumerable Terrestrial dangers on land, sea, and in the clouds. The three had had a planet-wide reputation as reckless and danger-despising. And now….

“Erik!” she cried suddenly. “Damn it, this is not a tea party! We have to do something now. Toss coins or draw lots. Either one of us goes out there now, or we all crack up.”

Michael glanced at her dully as she spoke, his tongue moving over dry lips. Erik closed his eyes, brushing his hair with a limp gesture. Lida’s hands tightened on the back seat; what was wrong with them? She bent forward slightly, her heart beating like a dull and distant drum. The dials on the control board frightened her; she whispered now. “You see what little time we have left? Nothing’s going to happen unless we make it happen. We’re falling, falling fast.”

Michael slumped in his seat, dropped his head to his knees groaning. Erik looked at her vaguely for a long second, then turned his eyes to the teleplate. Cold perspiration stood on his forehead. This was the dashing Erik Vane, onetime secret dream hero, close companion since that day, years back, when he and Mike had fished her out of the wreck of her plane somewhere in the Pacific. Suddenly, it all seemed amusing to her; the question of sacrifice lay between Michael and Erik—this was strictly men’s work. But they were finding life a sweet thing—a sudden burst of laughter overcame her. There was such an amusing impotency to Erik’s strength and the dash of his clothes; the knuckles stood white on his hands, cold damp fear glittering on his forehead.

MARGARET reached over to the other side of the bed where Hank should have been. Her hand patted the empty pillow, and then she came altogether awake, wondering that the old habit should remain after so many months. She tried to curl up, cat-style, to hoard her own warmth, found she couldn’t do it any more, and climbed out of bed with a pleased awareness of her increasingly clumsy bulkiness.

Morning motions were automatic. On the way through the kitchenette, she pressed the button that would start breakfast cooking—the doctor had said to eat as much breakfast as she could—and tore the paper out of the facsimile machine. She folded the long sheet carefully to the “National News” section, and propped it on the bathroom shelf to scan while she brushed her teeth.

No accidents. No direct hits. At least none that had been officially released for publication. Now, Maggie, don’t get started on that. No accidents. No hits. Take the nice newspaper’s word for it.

The three clear chimes from the kitchen announced that breakfast was ready. She set a bright napkin and cheerful colored dishes on the table in a futile attempt to appeal to a faulty morning appetite. Then, when there was nothing more to prepare, she went for the mail, allowing herself the full pleasure of prolonged anticipation, because today there would surely be a letter.

There was. There were. Two bills and a worried note from her mother: “Darling, why didn’t you write and tell me sooner? I’m thrilled, of course, but, well one hates to mention these things, but are you certain the doctor was right? Hank’s been around all that uranium or thorium or whatever it is all these years, and I know you say he’s a designer, not a technician, and he doesn’t get near anything that might be dangerous, but you know he used to, back at Oak Ridge.[5] Don’t you think… well, of course, I’m just being a foolish old woman, and I don’t want you to get upset. You know much more about it than I do, and I’m sure your doctor was right. He should know…”

Margaret made a face over the excellent coffee, and caught herself refolding the paper to the medical news.

Stop it, Maggie, stop it! The radiologist said Hank’s job couldn’t have exposed him. And the bombed area we drove past… No, no. Stop it, now! Read the social notes or the recipes, Maggie girl.

A well-known geneticist, in the medical news, said that it was possible to tell with absolute certainty, at five months, whether the child would be normal, or at least whether the mutation was likely to produce anything freakish. The worst cases, at any rate, could be prevented. Minor mutations, of course, displacements in facial features, or changes in brain structure could not be detected. And there had been some cases recently, of normal embryos with atrophied limbs that did not develop beyond the seventh or eighth month. But, the doctor concluded cheerfully, the worst cases could now be predicted and prevented.

“Predicted and prevented.” We predicted it, didn’t we? Hank and the others, they predicted it. But we didn’t prevent it. We could have stopped it in ’46 and ’47. Now…

Margaret decided against the breakfast. Coffee had been enough for her in the morning for ten years; it would have to do for today. She buttoned herself into the interminable folds of material that, the salesgirl had assured her, was the only comfortable thing to wear during the last few months. With a surge of pure pleasure, the letter and newspaper forgotten, she realized she was on the next to the last button. It wouldn’t be long now.

PETER Welles, psychiatrist, eyed the boy thoughtfully. Why had Timothy Paul’s teacher sent him for examination?

“I don’t know, myself, that there’s really anything wrong with Tim,” Miss Page had told Dr. Welles. “He seems perfectly normal. He’s rather quiet as a rule, doesn’t volunteer answers in class or anything of that sort. He gets along well enough with other boys and seems reasonably popular, although he has no special friends. His grades are satisfactory—he gets B faithfully in all his work. But when you’ve been teaching as long as I have, Peter, you get a feeling about certain ones. There is a tension about him—a look in his eyes sometimes—and he is very absent-minded.”

“What would your guess be?” Welles had asked. Sometimes these hunches were very valuable. Miss Page had taught school for thirty-odd years; she had been Peter’s teacher in the past, and he thought highly of her opinion.

“I ought not to say,” she answered. “There’s nothing to go on—yet. But he might be starting something, and if it could be headed off—”

“Physicians are often called before the symptoms are sufficiently marked for the doctor to be able to see them,” said Welles. “A patient, or the mother of a child, or any practiced observer, can often see that something is going to be wrong. But it’s hard for the doctor in such cases. Tell me what you think I should look for.”

“You won’t pay too much attention to me? It’s just what occurred to me, Peter; I know I’m not a trained psychiatrist. But it could be delusions of grandeur. Or it could be a withdrawing from the society of others. I always have to speak to him twice to get his attention in class—and he has no real chums.”

Welles had agreed to see what he could find, and promised not to be too much influenced by what Miss Page herself called “an old woman’s notions.”

Timothy, when he presented himself for examination, seemed like an ordinary boy. He was perhaps a little small for his age, he had big dark eyes and close-cropped dark curls, thin sensitive fingers and—yes, a decided air of tension. But many boys were nervous on their first visit to the—psychiatrist. Peter often wished that he was able to concentrate on one or two schools, and spend a day a week or so getting acquainted with all the youngsters.

In response to Welles’ preliminary questioning, Tim replied in a clear, low voice, politely and without wasting words. He was thirteen years old, and lived with his grandparents. His mother and father had died when he was a baby, and he did not remember them. He said that he was happy at home, that he liked school “pretty well,” that he liked to play with other boys. He named several boys when asked who his friends were.

“What lessons do you like at school?”

Tim hesitated, then said: “English, and arithmetic… and history… and geography,” he finished thoughtfully. Then he looked up, and there was something odd in the glance.

“What do you like to do for fun?”

“Read, and play games.”

“What games?”

“Ball games… and marbles… and things like that. I like to play with other boys,” he added, after a barely perceptible pause, “anything they play.”

“Do they play at your house?”

“No; we play on the school grounds. My grandmother doesn’t like noise.”

Was that the reason? When a quiet boy offers explanations, they may not be the right ones.

“What do you like to read?”

But about his reading Timothy was vague. He liked, he said, to read “boys’ books,” but could not name any.

Welles gave the boy the usual intelligence tests. Tim seemed willing, but his replies were slow in coming. Perhaps, Welles thought, I’m imagining this, but he is too careful—too cautious. Without taking time to figure exactly, Welles knew what Tim’s I.Q. would be—about 120.

“What do you do outside of school?” asked the psychiatrist.

“I play with the other boys. After supper, I study my lessons.”

“What did you do yesterday?”

“We played ball on the school playground.”

Welles waited a while to see whether Tim would say anything of his own accord. The seconds stretched into minutes.

“Is that all?” said the boy finally. “May I go now?”

“No; there’s one more test I’d like to give you today. A game, ­really. How’s your imagination?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cracks on the ceiling—like those over there—do they look like anything to you? Faces, animals, or anything?”

Tim looked.

“Sometimes. And clouds, too. Bob saw a cloud last week that was like a hippo.” Again the last sentence sounded like something tacked on at the last moment, a careful addition made for a reason.

IT was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.

The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.

A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.

“Got anything?” asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.

“Took a shot at something,” explained George Barton’s cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. “It looked like a duck.”

“This isn’t Central Park,” said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. “They won’t all look like ducks,” he said soberly.

“Maybe some will look like dragons. Don’t get eaten by a dragon, June,” came Max’s voice quietly into her earphones. “Not while I still love you.” He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.

NORTON was the only one of the three on the Ara who was superstitious, and even he didn’t attempt serious argument against landing on the planetoid. Making repairs on the Ara was absolutely necessary; the repairs couldn’t be made in space; and he couldn’t even remember who had told him that the planetoid was unlucky. So they landed.

The repairs went briskly. The crew worked for eighteen hours out of the day, and ate on the job. Inside of a week the Ara was lifting her tired old shoulders up from the surface of the planetoid. She got to a frequented portion of the spaceways before she broke down completely. It was as much as her crew had dared hope for. They were picked up by a passing freighter which claimed the Ara as salvage, and six months later they were landed, gaunt and angry and soiled, at Port Pendraith. None of the three, Evans or Norton or Miller, was ever to realize that on the planetoid he had been colonized.

In Pendraith, they discussed their situation. They wanted to stay together, if it was possible. They tried to lease another ship, and couldn’t raise the deposit money. They asked acquaintances and friends for grubstakes, and were rejected. Finally they saw that if they weren’t to starve in Pendraith, they’d have to separate. And from then on different things happened to them. But they ended up exactly the same.

WE’VE had trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It’s just an Accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There’s really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way The People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the County School Superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.

Of course I’m past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the Fall, I’d go back for a post-graduate course again. But now I’m working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high school diploma two summers ago. He’s promised me that if I do well this year I’ll get to go Outside next year and get my training and degree so I can be the teacher and we won’t have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don’t hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.

Father is the head of the school board. That’s how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don’t. This summer when he wrote to the County Seat that we’d have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn’t heard of Cougar Canyon and we’d have to dig up our own teacher this year. That “dig up” sounded like a dirty crack to me since we have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there’s no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders—unintentional as most of them are.

We haven’t done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we’re getting adjusted—though some of the non-conformists say that The Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they’re doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.

Anyway, Father wrote to a Teachers Agency on the coast and after several letters each way, he finally found a teacher.

He told us about it at the supper table.

“She’s rather young,” he said, reaching for a toothpick and tipping his chair back on its hind legs.

Mother gave Jethro another helping of pie and picked up her own fork again. “Youth is no crime,” she said, “and it’ll be a pleasant change for the children.”

“Yes, though it seems a shame.” Father prodded at a back tooth and Mother frowned at him. I wasn’t sure if it was for picking his teeth or for what he said. I knew he meant it seemed a shame to get a place like Cougar Canyon so early in a career. It isn’t that we’re mean or cruel, you understand. It’s only that they’re Outsiders and we sometimes forget—especially the kids.

“She doesn’t have to come,” said Mother. “She could say no.”

“Well, now—” Father tipped his chair forward. “Jethro, no more pie. You go on out and help ’Kiah bring in the wood. Karen, you and Lizbeth get started on the dishes. Hop to it, kids.”

And we hopped, too. Kids do to fathers in the Canyon, though I understand they don’t always Outside. It annoyed me because I knew Father wanted us out of the way so he could talk adult talk to Mother, so I told Lizbeth I’d clear the table and then worked as slowly as I could, and as quietly, listening hard.

“She couldn’t get any other job,” said Father. “The agency told me they had placed her twice in the last two years and she didn’t finish the year either place.”

“Well,” said Mother, pinching in her mouth and frowning. “If she’s that bad, why on earth did you hire her for the Canyon?”

“We have a choice?” laughed Father. Then he sobered. “No, it wasn’t for incompetency. She was a good teacher. The way she tells it, they just fired her out of a clear sky. She asked for recommendations and one place wrote, ‘Miss Carmody is a very competent teacher but we dare not recommend her for a teaching position.’”

“‘Dare not’?” asked Mother.

“‘Dare not,’” said Father. “The Agency assured me that they had investigated thoroughly and couldn’t find any valid reasons for the dismissals, but she can’t seem to find another job anywhere on the coast. She wrote me that she wanted to try another state.”

“Do you suppose she’s disfigured or deformed?” suggested Mother.

“Not from the neck up!” laughed Father. He took an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s her application picture.”

By this time I’d got the table cleared and I leaned over Father’s shoulder.

“Gee!” I said. Father looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I knew then that he had known all along that I was listening.

I flushed but stood my ground, knowing I was being granted admission to adult affairs, if only by the back door.

The girl in the picture was lovely. She couldn’t have been many years older than I and she was twice as pretty. She had short dark hair curled all over her head and apparently that poreless creamy skin that seems to have an inner light of itself. She had a tentative look about her as though her dark eyebrows were horizontal question marks. There was a droop to the corners of her mouth—not much, just enough to make you wonder why… and want to comfort her.

“She’ll stir the Canyon for sure,” said Father.

“I don’t know,” Mother frowned thoughtfully. “What will the Old Ones say to a marriageable Outsider in the Canyon?”

“Adonday Veeah!” muttered Father. “That never occurred to me. None of our other teachers were ever of an age to worry about.”

“What would happen?” I asked. “I mean if one of The Group married an Outsider?”

“Impossible,” said Father, so like the Old Ones that I could see why his name was approved in Meeting last Spring.

“Why, there’s even our Jemmy,” worried Mother. “Already he’s saying he’ll have to start trying to find another Group. None of the girls here please him. Supposing this Outsider—how old is she?”

Father unfolded the application. “Twenty-three,” he said, “Just three years out of college.”

“Jemmy’s twenty-four,” said Mother, pinching her mouth together. “Father, I’m afraid you’ll have to cancel the contract. If anything happened— Well, you waited over-long to become an Old One to my way of thinking and it’d be a shame to have something go wrong your first year.”

“I can’t cancel the contract. She’s on her way here. School starts next Monday.” Father ruffled his hair forward as he does when he’s disturbed. “We’re probably making a something of a nothing,” he said hopefully.

“Well I only hope we don’t have any trouble with this Outsider.”

“Or she with us,” grinned Father. “Where are my cigarettes?”

“On the book case,” said Mother, getting up and folding the table cloth together to hold the crumbs.

Father snapped his fingers and the cigarettes drifted in from the front room.

Mother went on out to the kitchen. The table cloth shook itself over the waste basket and then followed her.

STEENA of the spaceways—that sounds just like a corny title for one of the Stellar-Vedo spreads. I ought to know, I’ve tried my hand at writing enough of them. Only this Steena was no glamour babe. She was as colorless as a Lunar plant—even the hair netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast and I never saw her but once draped in anything but a shapeless and baggy gray space-all.

Steena was strictly background stuff and that is where she mostly spent her free hours—in the smelly smoky background corners of any stellar-port dive frequented by free spacers. If you really looked for her you could spot her—just sitting there listening to the talk—listening and remembering. She didn’t open her own mouth often. But when she did spacers had learned to listen. And the lucky few who heard her rare spoken words—these will never forget Steena.

She drifted from port to port. Being an expert operator on the big calculators she found jobs wherever she cared to stay for a time. And she came to be something like the master-minded machines she tended—smooth, gray, without much personality of her own.

But it was Steena who told Bub Nelson about the Jovan moon-rites—and her warning saved Bub’s life six months later. It was Steena who identified the piece of stone Keene Clark was passing around a table one night, rightly calling it unworked Slitite. That started a rush which made ten fortunes overnight for men who were down to their last jets. And, last of all, she cracked the case of the Empress of Mars.

All the boys who had profited by her queer store of knowledge and her photographic memory tried at one time or another to balance the scales. But she wouldn’t take so much as a cup of Canal water at their expense, let alone the credits they tried to push on her. Bub Nelson was the only one who got around her refusal. It was he who brought her Bat.

About a year after the Jovan affair he walked into the Free Fall one night and dumped Bat down on her table. Bat looked at Steena and growled. She looked calmly back at him and nodded once. From then on they traveled together—the thin gray woman and the big gray tom-cat. Bat learned to know the inside of more stellar bars than even most spacers visit in their lifetimes. He developed a liking for Vernal juice, drank it neat and quick, right out of a glass. And he was always at home on any table where Steena elected to drop him.

This is really the story of Steena, Bat, Cliff Moran and the Empress of Mars, a story which is already a legend of the spaceways. And it’s a damn good story too. I ought to know, having framed the first version of it myself.

For I was there, right in the Rigel Royal, when it all began on the night that Cliff Moran blew in, looking lower than an antman’s belly and twice as nasty. He’d had a spell of luck foul enough to twist a man into a slug-snake and we all knew that there was an attachment out for his ship. Cliff had fought his way up from the back courts of Venaport. Lose his ship and he’d slip back there—to rot. He was at the snarling stage that night when he picked out a table for himself and set out to drink away his troubles.

However, just as the first bottle arrived, so did a visitor. Steena came out of her corner, Bat curled around her shoulders stole-wise, his favorite mode of travel. She crossed over and dropped down without invitation at Cliff ’s side. That shook him out of his sulks. Because Steena never chose company when she could be alone. If one of the man-stones on Ganymede had come stumping in, it wouldn’t have made more of us look out of the corners of our eyes.

She stretched out one long-fingered hand and set aside the bottle he had ordered and said only one thing, “It’s about time for the Empress of Mars to appear again.”

Cliff scowled and bit his lip. He was tough, tough as jet lining—you have to be granite inside and out to struggle up from Venaport to a ship command. But we could guess what was running through his mind at that moment. The Empress of Mars was just about the biggest prize a spacer could aim for. But in the fifty years she had been following her queer derelict orbit through space many men had tried to bring her in—and none had succeeded.

A pleasure-ship carrying untold wealth, she had been mysteriously abandoned in space by passengers and crew, none of whom had ever been seen or heard of again. At intervals thereafter she had been sighted, even boarded. Those who ventured into her either vanished or returned swiftly without any believable explanation of what they had seen—wanting only to get away from her as quickly as possible. But the man who could bring her in—or even strip her clean in space—that man would win the jackpot.

“All right!” Cliff slammed his fist down on the table. “I’ll try even that!”

Steena looked at him, much as she must have looked at Bat the day Bub Nelson brought him to her, and nodded. That was all I saw. The rest of the story came to me in pieces, months later and in another port half the System away.

Cliff took off that night. He was afraid to risk waiting—with a writ out that could pull the ship from under him. And it wasn’t until he was in space that he discovered his passengers—Steena and Bat. We’ll never know what happened then. I’m betting that Steena made no explanation at all. She wouldn’t.

It was the first time she had decided to cash in on her own tip and she was there—that was all. Maybe that point weighed with Cliff, maybe he just didn’t care. Anyway the three were together when they sighted the Empress riding, her dead-lights gleaming, a ghost ship in night space.

She must have been an eerie sight because her other lights were on too, in addition to the red warnings at her nose. She seemed alive, a Flying Dutchman of space. Cliff worked his ship skillfully alongside and had no trouble in snapping magnetic lines to her lock. Some minutes later the three of them passed into her. There was still air in her cabins and corridors. Air that bore a faint corrupt taint which set Bat to sniffing greedily and could be picked up even by the less sensitive human nostrils.

Cliff headed straight for the control cabin but Steena and Bat went prowling. Closed doors were a challenge to both of them and Steena opened each as she passed, taking a quick look at what lay within. The fifth door opened on a room which no woman could leave without further investigation.

I don’t know who had been housed there when the Empress left port on her last lengthy cruise. Anyone really curious can check back on the old photo-reg cards. But there was a lavish display of silks trailing out of two travel kits on the floor, a dressing table crowded with crystal and jeweled containers, along with other lures for the female which drew Steena in. She was standing in front of the dressing table when she glanced into the mirror—glanced into it and froze.

Over her right shoulder she could see the spider-silk cover on the bed. Right in the middle of that sheer, gossamer expanse was a sparkling heap of gems, the dumped contents of some jewel case. Bat had jumped to the foot of the bed and flattened out as cats will, watching those gems, watching them and—something else!

Steena put out her hand blindly and caught up the nearest bottle. As she unstoppered it she watched the mirrored bed. A gemmed bracelet rose from the pile, rose in the air and tinkled its siren song. It was as if an idle hand played… Bat spat almost noiselessly. But he did not retreat. Bat had not yet decided his course.

She put down the bottle. Then she did something which perhaps few of the men she had listened to through the years could have done. She moved without hurry or sign of disturbance on a tour about the room. And, although she approached the bed she did not touch the jewels. She could not force herself to that. It took her five minutes to play out her innocence and unconcern. Then it was Bat who decided the issue.

He leaped from the bed and escorted something to the door, remaining a careful distance behind. Then he mewed loudly twice. Steena followed him and opened the door wider.

Bat went straight on down the corridor, as intent as a hound on the warmest of scents. Steena strolled behind him, holding her pace to the unhurried gait of an explorer. What sped before them both was invisible to her but Bat was never baffled by it.

They must have gone into the control cabin almost on the heels of the unseen—if the unseen had heels, which there was good reason to doubt—for Bat crouched just within the doorway and refused to move on. Steena looked down the length of the instrument panels and officers’ station-seats to where Cliff Moran worked. On the heavy carpet her boots made no sound and he did not glance up but sat humming through set teeth as he tested the tardy and reluctant responses to buttons which had not been pushed in years.

To human eyes they were alone in the cabin. But Bat still followed a moving something with his gaze. And it was something which he had at last made up his mind to distrust and dislike. For now he took a step or two forward and spat—his loathing made plain by every raised hair along his spine. And in that same moment Steena saw a flicker—a flicker of vague outline against Cliff ’s hunched shoulders as if the invisible one had crossed the space between them.

But why had it been revealed against Cliff and not against the back of one of the seats or against the panels, the walls of the corridor or the cover of the bed where it had reclined and played with its loot? What could Bat see?

The storehouse memory that had served Steena so well through the years clicked open a half-forgotten door. With one swift motion she tore loose her spaceall and flung the baggy garment across the back of the nearest seat.

Bat was snarling now, emitting the throaty rising cry that was his hunting song. But he was edging back, back toward Steena’s feet, shrinking from something he could not fight but which he faced defiantly. If he could draw it after him, past that dangling spaceall… He had to—it was their only chance.

“What the…” Cliff had come out of his seat and was staring at them.

What he saw must have been weird enough. Steena, bare-armed and shouldered, her usually stiffly netted hair falling wildly down her back, Steena watching empty space with narrowed eyes and set mouth, calculating a single wild chance. Bat, crouched on his belly, retreating from thin air step by step and wailing like a demon.

“Toss me your blaster.” Steena gave the order calmly—as if they still sat at their table in the Rigel Royal.

And as quietly Cliff obeyed. She caught the small weapon out of the air with a steady hand—caught and leveled it.

“Stay just where you are!” she warned. “Back, Bat, bring it back!”

With a last throat-splitting screech of rage and hate, Bat twisted to safety between her boots. She pressed with thumb and forefinger, firing at the spacealls. The material turned to powdery flakes of ash—except for certain bits which still flapped from the scorched seat—as if something had protected them from the force of the blast. Bat sprang straight up in the air with a scream that tore their ears.

“What… ?” began Cliff again.

Steena made a warning motion with her left hand. “Wait!”

She was still tense, still watching Bat. The cat dashed madly around the cabin twice, running crazily with white-ringed eyes and flecks of foam on his muzzle. Then he stopped abruptly in the doorway, stopped and looked back over his shoulder for a long silent moment. He sniffed delicately.

Steena and Cliff could smell it too now, a thick oily stench which was not the usual odor left by an exploding blaster-shell.

Bat came back, treading daintily across the carpet, almost on the tips of his paws. He raised his head as he passed Steena and then he went confidently beyond to sniff, to sniff and spit twice at the unburned strips of the spaceall. Having thus paid his respects to the late enemy he sat down calmly and set to washing his fur with deliberation. Steena sighed once and dropped into the navigator’s seat.

“Maybe now you’ll tell me what in the hell’s happened?” Cliff exploded as he took the blaster out of her hand.

“Gray,” she said dazedly, “it must have been gray—or I couldn’t have seen it like that. I’m colorblind, you see. I can see only shades of gray—my whole world is gray. Like Bat’s—his world is gray too—all gray. But he’s been compensated for he can see above and below our range of color vibrations and—apparently—so can I!”

ANN Crothers looked at the clock and frowned and turned the fire lower under the bacon. She had already poured his coffee; he liked it cooled to a certain degree; but if he did not get up soon it would be too cool and the bacon too crisp and he would be angry and sulk the rest of the day. She had better call him.

She walked to the foot of the stairs, a blond woman nearing thirty, big but not fat, and rather plain, with a tired sad face. She called, “Henry! Are you up?” She had calculated to a decibel how loud her voice must be. If it were too soft he did not hear and maintained that she had not called him, and was angry later; if it were too loud he was angry immediately and stayed in bed longer, to punish her, and then he grew angrier because breakfast was spoiled.

“All right! Pipe down, can’t you?”

She listened a minute. She thought it was a normal response, but perhaps her voice had been a shade too loud. No, he was getting up. She heard the thump of his feet on the floor. She went back to the kitchen and took his orange juice and his prunes out of the icebox, and got out his bread but did not begin to toast it yet, and opened a glass of jelly.

She frowned. Grape. He did not like grape, but the co-op had been out of apple, and she had been lucky to get anything. He would not be pleased.

She sat down briefly at the table to wait for him and glanced at the clock. Ten five. Wearily, she leaned forward and rested her forehead on the back of her hand. She was not feeling well this morning and had eaten no breakfast. She was almost sure she was pregnant again.

She thought of the children. There were only two at home, and they had been bathed and fed long ago and put down in the basement playpen so that the noise they made would not disturb their father. She would have time for a quick look at them before Henry came down. And the house was chilly; she would have to look at the heater.

They were playing quietly with the rag doll she had made, and the battered rubber ball. Lennie, who was two and a half, was far too big for a playpen, but he was a good child, considerate, and allowed himself to be put there for short periods and did not climb out. He seemed to feel a responsibility for his brother. Robbie was fourteen months old and a small terror, but he loved Lennie, and even, Ann thought, tried to mind him.

As Ann poked her head over the bannister, both children turned and gave her radiant smiles. Lennie said, “Hi, Mommy,” and Robbie said experimentally, “Ma?”

She went down quickly and gave each of them a hug and said, “You’re good boys. You can come upstairs and play soon.” She felt their hands. The basement was damp, but the small mended sweaters were warm enough.

She looked at the feeble fire and rattled the grate hopefully and put on more coal. There was plenty of coal in the bin, but it was inferior grade, filled with slate, and did not burn well. It was not an efficient heater, either. It was old, second-hand, but they had been lucky to get it. The useless oil heater stood in the corner.

The children chuckled at the fire, and Robbie reached out his hands toward it. Lennie said gravely, “No, no, bad.”

Ann heard Henry coming downstairs, and she raced up the cellar steps and beat him to the kitchen by two seconds. When he came in she was draining the bacon. She put a slice of bread on the long fork and began to toast it over the gas flame. The gas, at least, was fairly dependable, and the water. The electricity was not working again. It seemed such a long time since the electricity had always worked. Well, it was a long time. Ten years.

Henry sat down at the table and looked peevishly at his orange juice. He was not a tall man, not quite so tall as his wife, but he walked and sat tall, making the most of every inch. He was inclined to be chubby, and he had a roll of fat under his chin and at the back of his neck, and a little bulge at the waist. His face might have been handsome, but the expression spoiled it—discontented, bad-tempered. He said, “You didn’t strain the orange juice.”

“Yes, I strained it.” She was intent on the toast.

He drank the orange juice without enjoyment and said, “I have a touch of liver this morning. Can’t think what it could be.” His face brightened. “I told you that sauce was too greasy. That was it.”

She did not answer. She brought over his plate with the bacon on it and the toast, nicely browned, and put margarine on the toast for him.

He was eating the prunes. He stopped and looked at the bacon. “No eggs?”

“They were all out.”

His face flushed a little. “Then why’d you cook bacon? You know I can’t eat bacon without eggs.” He was working himself up into a passion. “If I weren’t such an easygoing man—! And the prunes are hard—you didn’t cook them long enough—and the coffee’s cold, and the toast’s burnt, and where’s the apple jelly?”

“They didn’t have any.”

He laughed scornfully. “I bet they didn’t. I bet you fooled around the house and didn’t even get there till everything was gone.” He flung down his fork. “This garbage!—why should you care, you don’t have to eat it!”

She looked at him. “Shall I make you something else?”

He laughed again. “You’d ruin it. Never mind.” He slammed out of the kitchen and went upstairs to sulk in the bathroom for an hour.

Ann sat down at the table. All that bacon, and it was hard to get. Well, the children would like it. She ought to clear the table and wash the dishes, but she sat still and took out a cigarette. She ought to save it, her ration was only three a day, but she lit it.

The children were getting a little noisier. Perhaps she could take them out for a while, till Henry went to work. It was cold but clear; she could bundle them up.

The cigarette was making her lightheaded, and she stubbed it out and put the butt in the box she kept over the sink. She said softly, “I hate him. I wish he would die.”

She dressed the children—their snowsuits were faded and patched from much use, but they were clean and warm—and put them in the battered carriage, looping her old string shopping bag over the handle, and took them out. They were delighted with themselves and with her. They loved the outdoors. Robbie bounced and drooled and made noises, and Lennie sat quiet, his little face smiling and content.

Ann wheeled them slowly down the walk, detouring around the broken places. It was a fine day, crisp, much too cold for September, but the seasons were not entirely reliable any more. There were no other baby carriages out; there were no children at all; the street was very quiet. There were no cars. Only the highest officials had cars, and no high officials lived in this neighborhood.

The children were enchanted by the street. Shabby as it was, with the broken houses as neatly mended as they could be, and the broken paving that the patches never caught up with, it was beautiful to them. Lennie said, “Hi, Mommy,” and Robbie bounced.

The women were beginning to come, as they always came, timidly out of the drab houses, to look at the children, and Ann walked straighter and tried not to smile. It was not kind to smile, but sometimes she could not help it. Suddenly she was not tired any more, and her clothes were not shabby, and her face was not plain.

The first woman said, “Please stop a minute,” and Ann stopped, and the women gathered around the carriage silently and looked. Their faces were hungry and seeking, and a few had tears in their eyes.

The first woman asked, “Do they stay well?”

Ann said, “Pretty well. They both had colds last week,” and murmurs of commiseration went around the circle.

Another woman said, “I noticed you didn’t come out, and I wondered. I almost knocked at your door to inquire, but then—” She stopped and blushed violently, and the others considerately looked away from her, ignoring her blunder. One did not call on one’s neighbors; one lived to oneself.

The first woman said wistfully, “If I could hold them—either of them—I have dates; my cousin sent them all the way from California.”

Ann blushed, too. She disliked this part of it very much, but things were so hard to get now, and Henry was difficult about what he liked to eat, though he denied that. He would say, “I’d eat anything, if you could only learn to cook it right, but you can’t.” Henry liked dates. Ann said, “Well…”

Another woman said eagerly, “I have eggs. I could spare you three.” One for each of the boys and one for Henry.

“Oranges—for the children.”

“And I have butter—imagine, butter!”

“Sugar—all children like sugar. Best grade—no sand in it.”

“And I have tea.” Henry does not like tea. But you shall hold the children anyway.

Somebody said, “Cigarettes,” and somebody else whispered, “I even have sleeping pills!”

The children were passed around and fondled and caressed. Robbie enjoyed it and flirted with everybody, under his long eyelashes, but Lennie regarded the entire transaction with distaste.

When the children began to grow restless Ann put them back into the carriage and walked on. Her shopping bag was full.

The women went slowly back into their houses, all but one, a stranger. She must have moved into the neighborhood recently, perhaps from one of the spreading waste places. They were coming in, the people, as if they had been called, moving in closer, a little closer every year.

The woman was tall and older than Ann, with a worn plain face. She kept pace with the carriage and looked at the children and said, “Forgive me, I know it is bad form, but are they—do you have more?”

Ann said proudly, “I have had seven.”

The woman looked at her and whispered, “Seven! And were they all—surely they were not all—”

Ann said more proudly still, “All. Every one.”

The woman looked as if she might cry and said, “But seven! And the rest, are they—”

Ann’s face clouded. “Yes, at the Center. One of my boys and all my girls. When Lennie goes, Robbie will miss him. Lennie missed Kate so, until he forgot her.”

The woman said in a broken voice, “I had three, and none of them was—none!” She thrust something into Ann’s shopping bag and said, “For the children,” and walked quickly away.

Ann looked, and it was a Hershey bar. The co-op had not had chocolate for over two years. Neither of the boys had ever tasted it.

She brought the children home after a while and gave them their lunch—Henry’s bacon crumbled into two scrambled eggs, and bread and butter and milk. She had been lucky at the co-op yesterday; they had had milk. She made herself a cup of coffee, feeling extravagant, and ate a piece of toast, and smoked the butt of this morning’s cigarette.

For dessert she gave them each an orange; the rest she saved for Henry. She got out the Hershey bar and gave them all of it; Henry should not have their chocolate! The Hershey bar was hard and pale, as stale chocolate gets, and she had to make sawing motions with the knife to divide it evenly. The boys were enchanted. Robbie chewed his half and swallowed it quickly, but Lennie sucked blissfully and made it last, and then took pity on his brother and let Robbie suck, too. Ann did not interfere. Germs, little hearts, are the least of what I fear for you.

While the children took their naps she straightened the house a little and tinkered with the heater and cleaned all the kerosene lamps. She had time to take a bath, and enjoyed it, though the laundry soap she had to use was harsh against her skin. She even washed her hair, pretty hair, long and fine, and put on one of the few dresses that was not mended.

The children slept longer than usual. The fresh air had done them good. Just at dusk the electric lights came on for the first time in three days, and she woke them up to see them—they loved the electric lights. She gave them each a piece of bread and butter and took them with her to the basement and put them in the playpen. She was able to run a full load of clothes through the old washing machine before the current went off again. The children loved the washing machine and watched it, fascinated by the whirling clothes in the little window.

Afterward she took them upstairs again and tried to use the vacuum cleaner, but the machine was old and balky and by the time she had coaxed it to work the current was gone.

She gave the children their supper and played with them a while and put them to bed. Henry was still at the laboratory. He left late in the morning, but sometimes he had to stay late at night. The children were asleep before he came home, and Ann was glad. Sometimes they got on his nerves and he swore at them.

She turned the oven low to keep dinner hot and went into the living room. She sat beside the lamp and mended Robbie’s shirt and Lennie’s overalls. She turned on the battery radio to the one station that was broadcasting these days, the one at the Center. The news report was the usual thing. The Director was in good health and bearing the burden of his duties with fortitude. Conditions throughout the country were normal. Crops had not been quite so good as hoped, but there was no cause for alarm. Quotas in light and heavy industry were good—Ann smiled wryly—but could be improved if every worker did his duty. Road repairs were picking up—Ann wondered when they would get around to the street again—and electrical service was normal, except for a few scattered areas where there might be small temporary difficulties. The lamp had begun to smoke again, and Ann turned it lower. The stock market had closed irregular, with rails down an average of two points and stocks off three.

And now—the newscaster’s voice grew solemn—there was news of grave import. The Director had asked him to talk seriously to all citizens about the dangers of rumor-mongering. Did they not realize what harm could be done by it? For example, the rumor that the Western Reservoir was contaminated. That was entirely false, of course, and the malicious and irresponsible persons who had started it would be severely dealt with.

The wastelands were not spreading, either. Some other malicious and irresponsible persons had started that rumor, and would be dealt with. The wastelands were under control. They were not spreading, repeat, not. Certain areas were being evacuated, it was true, but the measure was only temporary.

Calling them in, are you, calling them in!

The weather was normal. The seasons were definitely not changing, and here were the statistics to prove it. In 1961… and in ’62… and that was before, so you see…

The newscaster’s voice changed, growing less grave. And now for news of the children. Ann put down her mending and listened, not breathing. They always closed with news of the children, and it was always reassuring. If any child were ever unhappy, or were taken ill, or died, nobody knew it. One was never told anything, and of course one never saw the children again. It would upset them, one quite understood that.

The children, the newscaster said, were all well and happy. They had good beds and warm clothes and the best food and plenty of it. They even had cod-liver oil twice a week whether they needed it or not. They had toys and games, carefully supervised according to their age groups, and they were being educated by the best teachers. The children were all well and happy, repeat, well and happy. Ann hoped it was true.

They played the national anthem and went off the air, and just then Henry came in. He looked pale and tired—he did work hard—and his greeting was, “I suppose dinner’s spoiled.”

She looked up. “No, I don’t think so.”

She served it and they ate silently except for Henry’s complaints about the food and his liver. He looked at the dates and said, “They’re small. You let them stick you with anything,” but she thought he enjoyed them because he ate them all.

Afterward he grew almost mellow. He lit a cigarette and told her about his day, while she washed the dishes. Henry’s job at the laboratory was a responsible one, and Ann was sure he did it well. Henry was not stupid. But Henry could not get along with anybody. He said that he himself was very easy to get along with, but they were all against him. Today he had had a dispute with one of his superiors and reported that he had told the old —— where to go.

He said with gloomy relish, “They’ll probably fire me, and we’ll all be out in the street. Then you’ll find out what it’s like to live on Subsistence. You won’t be able to throw my money around the way you do now.”

Ann rinsed out the dish towel and hung it over the rack to dry. She said, “They won’t fire you. They never do.”

He laughed. “I’m good and they know it. I do twice as much work as anybody else.”

Ann thought that was probably true. She turned away from the sink and said, “Henry, I think I’m pregnant.”

He looked at her and frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I said I think. But I’m practically sure.”

He said, “Oh, God, now you’ll be sick all the time, and there’s no living with you when you’re sick.”

Ann sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. “Maybe I won’t be sick.”

He said darkly, “You always are. Sweet prospect!”

Ann said, “We’ll get another bonus, Henry.”

He brightened a little. “Say, we will, at that. I’ll buy some more stock.”

Ann said, “Henry, we need so many things—”

He was immediately angry. “I said I’ll buy stock! Somebody in this house has to think of the future. We can’t all hide our heads in the sand and hope for the best.”

She stood up, trembling. It was not a new argument. “What future? Our children—children like ours are taken away from us when they’re three years old and given to the state to rear. When we’re old the state will take care of us. Nobody lives well any more, except—but nobody starves. And that stock—it all goes down. Don’t talk to me about the future, Henry Crothers! I want my future now.”

He laughed unpleasantly. “What do you want? A car?”

She said, “I want a new washing machine and a vacuum cleaner, when the quotas come—the electricity isn’t so bad. I want a new chair for the living room. I want to fix up the boys’ room, paint and—”

He said brutally, “They’re too little to notice. By the time they get old enough—”

She sat down again, sobbing a little. Her cigarette burned forgotten in the ashtray, and Henry thriftily stubbed it out. She said, “I know, the Center takes them. The Center takes children like ours.”

“And the Center’s good to them. They give them more than we could. Don’t you go talking against the Center.” Though a malcontent in his personal life, Henry was a staunch government man.

Ann said, “I’m not, Henry, I’m—”

He said disgustedly, “Being a woman again. Tears! Oh, God, why do women always turn them on?”

She made herself stop crying. Anger was beginning to rise in her, and that helped a good deal. “I didn’t mean to start an argument. I was just telling you what we need. We do need things, Henry. Clothes—”

He looked at her. “You mean for you? Clothes would do you a lot of good, wouldn’t they?”

She was stung. “I don’t mean maternity clothes. I won’t be needing them for—”

He laughed. “I don’t mean maternity clothes either. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately? God, you’re a big horse! I always liked little women.”

She said tightly, “And I always liked tall men.”

He half rose, and she thought he was going to hit her. She sat still, trembling with a fierce exhilaration, her eyes bright, color in her cheeks, a little smile on her mouth. She said softly, “I’ll hit you back, I’m bigger than you are. I’ll kill you!”

Suddenly Henry sat down and began to laugh. When he laughed he was quite handsome. He said in a deep chuckling voice, “You’re almost pretty when you get mad enough. Your hair’s pretty tonight, you must have washed it.” His eyes were beginning to shine, and he reached across the table and put his hand on hers. “Ann… old girl…”

She drew her hand away. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

He said good-humoredly, “Sure. I’ll be right up.”

She looked at him. “I said I’m tired.”

“And I said I’d be right up.”

If I had something in my hands I’d kill you. “I don’t want to.”

He scowled, and his mouth grew petulant again, and he was no longer handsome. “But I want to.”

She stood up. All at once she felt as tired as she had told Henry she was, as tired as she had been for ten years.

I cannot kill you, Henry, or myself. I cannot even wish us dead. In this desolate, dying, bombed-out world, with its creeping wastelands and its freakish seasons, with its limping economy and its arrogant Center in the country that takes our children—children like ours; the others it destroys—we have to live, and we have to live together.

Because by some twist of providence, or radiation, or genes, we are among the tiny percentage of the people in this world who can have normal children. We hate each other, but we breed true.

She said, “Come up, Henry.” I can take a sleeping pill afterward.

Come up, Henry, we have to live. Till we are all called in, or our children, or our children’s children. Till there is nowhere else to go.

IN those days the old Katy local was the magic carpet that transported me from one world to another. Summertime only truly began the moment the conductor lifted me aboard and urged me to “set still and be a big girl.” He was never impressed with the fact that I’d been traveling two days all alone and on much bigger trains than the Katy. When he had asked after my mother and told me how anxiously my grandparents were awaiting my arrival, he’d pass on down the aisle to mysterious regions forward, and I’d be left to spy all about the coach for Miss Mattie Compton.

As often as not, there was no sign of Miss Mattie, and the only other occupants would be somnolent old men in alpaca coats who roused now and then to use the spittoons. Usually her absence meant simply that the conductor had not yet found time to eject her bodily from the Jim Crow car, but sometimes I was forced to conclude that she was resting at home that day. At such times my disappointment would be intense. And while the Katy huffed and rattled past the cotton fields and muttered gloomily over the shady creeks, I had nothing to do but hold myself steady on the slick straw seat and stretch my eyes wide to keep awake.

But mostly I was fortunate enough to catch the Katy on one of Miss Mattie’s days. I’d see just the tip of a pink ribbon bobbing over the top of the high seat, and I’d hurry down the car to slide in beside her. Or perhaps the door to the coach would open and Mr. McCall, the conductor, would appear with Miss Mattie in his arms. She would be hanging as limply as a bit of old mosquito netting, staring sweetly into Mr. McCall’s annoyed red face. He’d plump her down beside me and then, accommodating himself to the Katy’s swaggering roll, slam out of our car again without a word.

Miss Mattie and I never bothered with formal greetings. The bond between us was so well-established that we always took up again just where we’d left off the year before. She might sometimes call me by my mother’s name instead of my own, but I didn’t mind. (It was such a pretty name.) Almost immediately, out of the confused, jackdaw clutter of her conversation, her recognition of our shared dedication would emerge, and once again we’d plunge deeply into talk of Mr. Sakrison. Interruptions were frequent, as frequent as the Katy’s stops along the line. When the Katy squealed jerkily to a halt and sat there panting, we’d press our noses against the dirty window (with its heaped up piles of coal dust along the sill) and stare silently at the scene outside. Then, for a little while after each of the stops, I’d have to pat Miss Mattie’s hands till she stopped whimpering.

Miss Mattie was pretty when she wasn’t whimpering. Her face was soft and pink with fine little crumpled lines, and her blue eyes were younger than the rest of her. Sometimes when she was telling over and over again about Mr. Sakrison’s strange disappearance in that young chirruping voice, I would forget that Miss Mattie was close to sixty years old.

She always wore little crocheted white gloves that somehow lent an air of dignity to the rest of her ill-assorted costume. “Outlandish,” people termed Miss Mattie’s get-ups. She mixed the styles of thirty years back with anything modish that took her fancy. In order to take Miss Mattie’s fancy a piece of wearing apparel had only to be pink and fluffy. Chapel Grove’s inhabitants never forgot the day Miss Mattie appeared with a pair of pink “teddies” pinned to her gray curls. The wispy bit of lingerie hung gracefully and shamelessly behind her poor addled head for all the louts in town to see, and they followed her to her door taunting her with ugly words.

In the main, Chapel Grove treated Miss Mattie kindly enough. She was even pointed out to visitors. But nobody ever bothered to hide the grinning and nudging that broke out wherever she appeared. There were humorists, too, who liked to josh her about Mr. Sakrison, saying rude, insulting things of him, till Miss Mattie collapsed into a damp, sobbing little heap at their feet. At such times I suffered a queer, ill-defined conviction that Chapel Grove would like to make me cry, also. Beneath the surface kindness I sensed their suspicion that I was, in some way, as different as Miss Mattie. Even my grandparents thought it was too bad that I must grow up elsewhere, and everybody smiled at my alien “accent.” No matter how joyfully each summer I threw myself into the very heart of all the youthful activities there, I was aware of a subtle reserve that kept me circling just outside the true center. (Didn’t they realize I belonged? Why, I’d been born there!… But so had Miss Mattie.)

Miss Mattie and I were both made to feel Chapel Grove’s disapproval of those who do too much traveling around. Several times each year she went all the way to the State Capitol to ask the railroad officials there to help her locate Mr. Sakrison. But most of her journeys were made up to the city where one transferred to the Katy for the last four hours of the trip to Chapel Grove. The Katy rattled up there mornings and returned in the late afternoon. At least twice each week Miss Mattie boarded her for the round trip. Once arrived, Miss Mattie usually just stayed on board, if the trainmen would let her. She had no interest in the city at all. It was the journey back and forth that was important.

On the last journey we shared, the conductor did not lift me aboard the Katy or tell me to be a big girl. I was a big girl. At least I thought I was. I certainly towered over tiny Miss Mattie, and I was very conscious of the hard little buds that were my breasts—half-ashamed and half-proud of the way they strained under the tight voile dress.

Miss Mattie was having one of her rare “clear” spells. She called me by my own name and traced for me, through mazy genealogical thickets, her fourth cousinship to my mother. This didn’t startle me; one way or another I was related to everybody in the county. But I was startled and disappointed to hear her talking like all the other adults I knew. She seemed tired, too, and I was suddenly shaken by a dreadful fear that one day soon she’d give up her search and admit defeat.

“Oh, Miss Mattie, please,” I said, “tell me about Mr. Sakrison.”

She turned to look at me, and I almost cried out when I saw she was cringing as if I were one of the town bullies eager to strike the poisonous blow. I stared back at her till the tears spilled down my cheeks.

“You’ve grown so tall,” she whispered. “I was afraid…”

Both of us wept openly then with a great flutter of white handkerchiefs, and afterwards I was glad to see that the weary, grown-up look had faded from her eyes. With our heads very close together and Miss Mattie’s hand in mine, she told me the story again for the last time.

“You remember, my dear—I’ve told you so often—he had the loveliest instincts. I never knew a Yankee could be anything but a beast, but he was so kind, so gentle… I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. They say such horrid things about traveling men, ’specially Yankee traveling men. He walked me home from church that night. Wouldn’t come in, since I was—to Chapel Grove’s way of thinking—living alone in that big house. But he kissed me…. We stood under that old catalpa tree, you know the one. He hugged me so hard he crushed the roses I was wearing, and the smell of the bruised petals hung over us like a fog. We made our plans and I packed all night. Had every nigra in the house pressing and mending… The night went so quickly, and all of us were happy, calling back and forth and singing snatches of songs.

“Early in the morning I put on my pink organdy and Mr. Sakrison called for me and we caught the Katy to go up to the city for the wedding. It was a delirious kind of morning. I’ve never known the Katy to slide so smoothly along. There was something different, too, about the way the sunlight slanted across the fields. I remember thinking that if I could shift those long shadows just a fraction, the way you do a vase full of roses, I’d see a lovely new view. And there was a new, wonderful taste to the air and even to the coffee I’d put up for us!

“After a while we both felt quieter inside and Mr. Sakrison held my hand and talked of all his hopes for the future. Not just our future, either. He spoke his piece for the whole world. I was so proud of him. I’d never heard anybody speak so sadly about the nigras—their want and their fear. They were picking in the fields that day, I recall…. He put words to the little sick feelings I’d had at times, and I began to catch his vision… some of it, but not all. Not then.”

The Katy whistled long and mournfully. Miss Mattie interrupted herself with “Hush!” and pressed her nose against the window to see if this, at last, was the station she’d been hunting for all those years. But it wasn’t.

“You see,” she said, “I was too happy to know or care which halt it was. The Katy would stop, as it always does, at every cow pasture almost. Sometimes Mr. Sakrison would swing off to light his cigar, though I never minded the odor of cigars…. Delicious, isn’t it? But he said the scent caught in my hair, and he couldn’t have that. He said my hair smelled of breezes in the springtime…. And then the Katy stopped at the dearest little halt! We had been aboard about two hours, I think, so it would have been almost halfway to the city. I had never noticed the place before, but then I hadn’t been to the city often.

“The first thing that caught my eye was a huge camellia bush in full bloom, a red one. The fallen petals had heaped up in a ring around it, you know the way they do. I asked Mr. Sakrison to step off and cut one of the blossoms for me with his pocket knife. I didn’t think the station master would mind, and there wouldn’t be time enough to ask politely. But the queerest thing! The Katy just sat and huffed and puffed for the longest spell, it seemed. And things outside moved slow as molasses. There was a park with a little blue lake, and swans dipping their heads… and children playing. Ever so many children, and all so nicely dressed, even the little darkies. There were adults strolling there, too, all mixed in together, all colors. I wasn’t a bit surprised, somehow, but I wondered at the slow, graceful movement of the scene. It was like grasses waving under water.

“Then I noticed the station itself. It was a funny little brick, octagonal building. Over the door to the waiting room it didn’t say WHITE, you know. It said: WAITING ROOM. ONE AND ALL. And then, while Mr. Sakrison was still cutting the blossom, out of the station house came a colored gentleman. He walked up to Mr. Sakrison and pounded him on the back and they shook hands, and I thought to my soul they were going to embrace….” Miss Mattie paused and bit her lips and twisted her hand from mine.

“Do you know, that made me angry? I looked hard at Mr. Sakrison, and for a moment he looked like any other Yankee… a total stranger. It was the anger that kept me sitting there staring instead of joining him. I wouldn’t feel angry now. Even then—I like to remember—I fought it down and called and waved to him. But he only looked around in a puzzled kind of way… and walked off into the park with the man. The Katy started up again with a terrible crashing sound and fairly flew away from there.

“I was looking back, you know, and trying to reach the emergency cord… and weeping. I saw just the first few letters on the station sign. It said ‘B R O’ something. In the city I waited and waited, but Mr. Sakrison didn’t come. They told me the only halt between Chapel Grove and the city that had the letters B R O was Brokaw. I hired a buggy and drove back there, but it was only a tumble-down old halt without a station house—just one of those sheltered seats….”

Miss Mattie always stopped her story at this point, as she did now. Again we murmured over all the pleasant names we could think of that the halt might have possessed. As usual Miss Mattie argued strongly for her favorite. But I didn’t think the word Brotherhood was pretty enough. While we talked I was recalling the rest of the story—the part of it I knew from a different viewpoint. Chapel Grove’s version was that the Yankee traveling man had meant to fool her from the start. She had probably given him money, they said. Her folks had left her a great pile of it. And (here they pulled down their mouths) he never had any intention of marrying her and had escaped at the first opportunity. Miss Mattie had come home then and shut herself up for months. When she did show her face again it was the silly, addled face she wore now. Look at the crazy things she did—like riding the Katy up and down the line for thirty years almost every day, looking for the halt that swallowed Mr. Sakrison!

In the long gloaming that day the Katy made many halts, and I stared fiercely with Miss Mattie in utmost concentration at each one, hoping we’d recognize something to tell us this one was B R O.

Sure enough, we found it. It was I who spied the swans, so white in the dusk, but it was Miss Mattie who saw the camellia bush and the man who waited beside it. When the Katy stopped Miss Mattie was off as quick as a wink, but she needn’t have hurried, because the Katy just stood breathing there for a long time. I saw a petal on the camellia bush fall and fall—forever it seemed—before it touched the ground. I saw Miss Mattie leaning on the man’s arm, and they turned and he waved his straw hat at me, slow as slow. And, oh, Mr. Sakrison was lovely… but so was Miss Mattie. She was young and plumped out, especially in the bosom, and I was suddenly ashamed and crossed my arms over my chest. I was watching the swans arching their necks when the Katy started up again very quickly as if she were getting away under full steam. Only then did I remember to look for the station sign, but I was too late.

IT had rained in the valley, steadily and hard, for thirty-six hours. The ground was saturated. Every fold in the rough flanks of the hills spouted a muddy torrent and the torrents flowed in sheets over the flat country below and poured through raw self-gouged channels into the river. And the river, roused from its normal meek placidity, roared and rolled like a new Mississippi, tearing away its banks, spreading wide and yellow across the fields, into the orchards and over the roads, into the streets of Grand Falls where the people had left their houses and fled to the safety of higher land. Uprooted trees and broken timbers knocked at the walls of the old brick buildings on the main street. In the lobby of the Grand Falls Hotel the brass spittoons floated ever higher, clanging mournfully when they struck their sides together.

High on the ridges that enclosed the valley to the northeast and the southwest, hidden by a careful hand, two small mechanisms hummed quietly, ceaselessly. They were called miniseeders and they were not part of Earth’s native technology. Their charges would run out in a matter of days, but in the meantime they were extremely efficient, hurling a steady stream of charged particles into the sky to seed the clouds moving over the ridges.

In the valley, it continued to rain….

SHE was a white dog with a wide face and eager eyes, and this was the planet, Jaxa, in winter.

She trotted well ahead of the master, sometimes nose to ground, sometimes sniffing the air, and she didn’t care if they were being watched or not. She knew that strange things skulked behind iced trees, but strangeness was her job. She had been trained for it, and crisp, glittering Jaxa was, she felt, exactly what she had been trained for, born for.

I love it, I love it… that was in her pointing ears, her waving tail… I love this place.

It was a world of ice, a world with the sound of breaking goblets. Each time the wind blew they came shattering down by the trayful, and each time one branch brushed against another it was, Skoal, Down the hatch, To the Queen… tink, tink, tink. And the sun was reflected as if from a million cut-glass punch bowls under a million crystal chandeliers.

She wore four little black boots, and each step she took sounded like two or three more goblets gone, but the sound was lost in the other tinkling, snapping, cracklings of the silver, frozen forest about her.

She had figured out at last what that hovering scent was. It had been there from the beginning, the landing two days ago, mingling with Jaxa’s bitter air and seeming to be just a part of the smell of the place, she found it in criss-crossing trails about the squatting ship, and hanging, heavy and recent, in hollows behind flat-branched, piney-smelling bushes. She thought of honey and fat men and dry fur when she smelled it.

There was something big out there, and more than one of them, more than two. She wasn’t sure how many. She had a feeling this was something to tell the master, but what was the signal, the agreed upon noise for: We are being watched? There was a whisper of sound, short and quick, for: Sighted close, come and shoot. And there was a noise for danger (all these through her throat mike to the receiver at the master’s ear), a special, howly bark: Awful, awful—there is something awful going to happen. There was even a noise, a low rumble of sound for: Wonderful, wonderful fur—drop everything and come after this one. (And she knew a good fur when she saw one. She had been trained to know.) But there was no sign for: We are being watched.

She’d whined and barked when she was sure about it, but that had got her a pat on the head and a rumpling of the neck fur. “You’re doing fine, Baby. This world is our oyster, all ours. All we got to do is pick up the pearls. Jaxa’s what we’ve been waiting for.” And Jaxa was, so she did her work and didn’t try to tell him anymore, for what was one more strange thing in one more strange world?

She was on the trail of something now, and the master was behind her, out of sight. He’d better hurry. He’d better hurry or there’ll be waiting to do, watching the thing, whatever it is, steady on until he comes, holding tight back, and that will be hard. Hurry, hurry.

She could hear the whispered whistle of a tune through the receiver at her ear and she knew he was not hurrying but just being happy. She ran on, eager, curious. She did not give the signal for hurry, but she made a hurry sound of her own, and she heard him stop whistling and whisper back into the mike, “So, so, Queen of Venus. The furs are waiting to be picked. No hurry, Baby.” But morning was to her for hurry. There was time later to be tired and slow.

That fat-man honeyish smell was about, closer and strong. Her curiosity became two pronged—this smell or that? What is the big thing that watches? She kept to the trail she was on, though. Better to be sure, and this thing was not so elusive, not twisting and doubling back, but up ahead and going where it was going.

She topped a rise and half slid, on thick furred rump, down the other side, splattering ice. She snuffled at the bottom to be sure of the smell again, and then, nose to ground, trotted past a thick and tangled hedgerow.

She was thinking through her nose, now. The world was all smell, crisp air and sour ice and turpentine pine… and this animal, a urine and brown grass thing… and then, strong in front of her, honey-furry-fat man.

She felt it looming before she raised her head to look, and there it was, the smell in person, some taller than the master and twice as wide. Counting his doubled suit and all, twice as wide.

This was a fur! Wonderful, wonderful. But she just stood, looking up, mouth open and lips pulled back, the fur on the back of her neck rising more from the suddenness than from fear.

It was silver and black, a tiger-striped thing, and the whitish parts glistened and caught the light as the ice of Jaxa did, and sparkled and dazzled in the same way. And there, in the center of the face, was a large and terrible orange eye, rimmed in black with black radiating lines crossing the forehead and rounding the head. That spot of orange dominated the whole figure, but it was a flat, blind eye, unreal, grown out of fur. At first she saw only that spot of color, but then she noticed under it two small, red glinting eyes and they were kind, not terrible.

This was the time for the call: Come, come and get the great fur, the huge-price-tag fur for the richest lady on earth to wear and be dazzling in and most of all to pay for. But there was something about the flat, black nose and the tender, bow-shaped mouth and those kind eyes that stopped her from calling. Something master-like. She was full of wondering and indecision and she made no sound at all.

The thing spoke to her then, and its voice was a deep lullaby sound of buzzing cellos. It gestured with a thick, fur-backed hand. It promised, offered, and asked; and she listened, knowing and not knowing.

The words came slowly.

This… is… world.

Here is the sky, the earth, the ice. The heavy arms moved. The hands pointed.

We have watched you, little slave. What have you done that is free today? Take the liberty. Here is the earth for your four shoed feet, the sky of stars, the ice to drink. Do something free today. Do, do.

Nice voice, she thought, nice thing. It gives and gives… something.

Her ears pointed forward, then to the side, one and then the other, and then forward again. She cocked her head, but the real meaning would not come clear. She poked at the air with her nose.

Say that again, her whole body said. I almost have it. I feel it. Say it once more and maybe then the sense of it will come.

But the creature turned and started away quickly, very quickly for such a big thing, and disappeared behind the trees and bushes. It seemed to shimmer itself away until the glitter was only the glitter of the ice and the black was only the thick, flat branches.

The master was close. She could hear his crackling steps coming up behind her.

She whined softly, more to herself than to him.

“Ho, the Queen, Aloora. Have you lost it?” She sniffed the ground again. The honey-furry smell was strong. She sniffed beyond, zig-zagging. The trail was there. “Go to it, Baby.” She loped off to a sound like Chinese wind chimes, business-like again. Her tail hung guilty, though, and she kept her head low. She had missed an important signal. She’d waited until it was too late. But was the thing a man, a master? Or a fur? She wanted to do the right thing. She always tried and tried for that, but now she was confused.

She was getting close to whatever it was she trailed, but the hovering smell was still there too, though not close. She thought of gifts. She knew that much from the slow, lullaby words, and gifts made her think of bones and meat, not the dry fishy biscuit she always got on trips like this. A trickle of drool flowed from the side of her mouth and froze in a silver thread across her shoulder.

She slowed. The thing she trailed must be there, just behind the next row of trees. She made a sound in her throat… ready, steady… and she advanced until she was sure. She sensed the shape. She didn’t really see it… mostly it was the smell and something more in the tinkling glassware noises. She gave the signal and stood still, a furry, square imitation of a pointer. Come, hurry. This waiting is the hardest part.

He followed, beamed to her radio. “Steady, Baby. Hold that pose. Good girl, good girl.” There was only the slightest twitch of her tail as she wagged it, answering him in her mind.

He came up behind her and then passed, crouched, holding the rifle before him, elbows bent. He knelt then, and waited as if at a point of his own, rifle to shoulder. Slowly he turned with the moving shadow of the beast, and shot, twice in quick succession.

They ran forward then, together, and it was what she had expected—a deer-like thing, dainty hoofs, proud head, and spotted in three colors, large grey-green rounds on tawny yellow, with tufts of that same glittering silver scattered over.

The master took out a sharp, flat bladed knife. He began to whistle out loud as he cut off the handsome head. His face was flushed.

She sat down nearby, mouth open in a kind of smile, and she watched his face as he worked. The warm smell made the drool come at the sides of her mouth and drip out to freeze on the ice and on her paws, but she sat quietly, only watching.

Between the whistlings he grunted and swore and talked to himself, and finally he had the skin and the head in a tight, inside-out bundle.

Then he came to her and patted her sides over the ribs with a flat, slap sound, and he scratched behind her ears and held a biscuit to her on his thick-gloved palm. She swallowed it whole and then watched him as he squatted on his heels and himself ate one almost like it.

Then he got up and slung the bundle of skin and head across his back. “I’ll take this one, Baby. Come on, let’s get one more something before lunch.” He waved her to the right. “We’ll make a big circle,” he said.

She trotted out, glad she was not carrying anything. She found a strong smell at a patch of discolored ice and urinated on it. She sniffed and growled at a furry, mammal-smelling bird that landed in the trees above her and sent down a shower of ice slivers on her head. She zig-zagged and then turned and bit, lips drawn back in mock rage, at a branch that scraped her side.

She followed for a while the chattery sound of water streaming along under the ice, and left it where an oily, lambish smell crossed. Almost immediately she came upon them—six small, greenish balls of wool with floppy, woolly feet. The honey-fat man smell was strong here too, but she signaled for the lambs, the Come and shoot sound, and she stood again waiting for the master.

“Good girl!” His voice had special praise. “By God, this place is a gold mine. Hold it, Queen of Venus. Whatever it is, don’t let go.”

There was a fifty-yard clear view here and she stood in plain sight of the little creatures, but they didn’t notice. The master came slowly and cautiously, and knelt beside her. Just as he did, there appeared at the far end of the clearing a glittering, silver and black tiger-striped man.

She heard the sharp inward breath of the master and she felt the tenseness come to him. There was a new, faint whiff of sour sweat, a stiff silence and a special way of breathing. What she felt from him made the fur rise along her back with a mixture of excitement and fear.

The tiger thing held a small packet in one hand and was peering into it and pulling at the opening in it with a blunt finger. Suddenly there was a sweep of motion beside her and five fast, frantic, shots sounded sharp in her ear. Two came after the honey-fat man had already fallen and lay like a huge, decorated sack.

The master ran forward and she came at his heels. They stopped, not too close and she watched the master looking at the big, dead, tiger head with the terrible eye. The master was breathing hard and seemed hot. His face was red and puffy looking, but his lips made a hard whitish line. He didn’t whistle or talk. After a time he took out his knife. He tested the blade, making a small, bloody thread of a mark on his left thumb. Then he walked closer and she stood and watched him and whispered a questioning whine.

He stooped by the honey-fat man and it was that small, partly opened packet that he cut viciously through the center. Small round chunks fell out, bite sized chunks of dried meat and a cheesy substance and some broken bits of clear, bluish ice.

The master kicked at them. His face was not red anymore, but olive-pale. His thin mouth was open in a grin that was not a grin.

He went about the skinning then.

He did not keep the flat-faced, heavy head nor the blunt fingered hands.

“HAPPY birthday to you,” we all sang, except Gail, of course, who was still screaming, though not as loud.

“Well, now,” I said jovially, glancing nervously about at the other air traffic, “what else can we all sing?” The singing seemed to be working nicely. They had stopped swatting each other with their lunch boxes and my experienced ear told me Gail was by this time forcing herself to scream. This should be the prelude to giving up and enjoying herself.

“Boing down in Texas in eighteen-ninety,” Billy began, “Davy, Davy Eisenhower…”

“A-B-C-D-E—” sang Jacob.

“Dere was a little ’elicopter red and blue,” Meli chirped, “flew along de airways—”

The rest came through unidentifiably.

“Ba-ba-ba,” said a faint voice. Gail had given up. I longed for ears in the back of my head because victory was mine and all I needed to do was reinforce it with a little friendly conversation.

“Yes, dear?” I asked her encouragingly.

“Ba-ba-ba,” was all I could make out.

“Yes, indeed. That Gail likes to go to Playplace.”

“Ba-ba-ba!” A little irritable. She was trying to say something important. “Ba-ba-ba!”

I signaled for an emergency hover, turned around and presented my ear.

“Me eat de crus’ of de toas’,” Gail said. She beamed.

I beamed.

TO Whom It May Concern:*

I should like to apply for work on a permanent basis. It is difficult, I know, to compete with machines today, but I offer special features that few machines can match, and the savings involved in acquiring my services are substantial.

I’ve won the telequiz on football, on vital statistics, and on the history of Italian miniature painting. Even while operating sixteen hours a day in any given field, I am able to “learn” a new matter within the span of a week, the facts being fed to me by a radio under the pillow during the four hours at night I need for recharging. I can play at one time six games of bridge without looking at any of them. I can beat the most complex electronic chess machine and resist for eighty days the robot that plays “odd and even.”

I am conditioned to work immediately on calculating long-range effects of new methods of salesmanship on the shopping habits of middle-aged women in small and medium-sized rural communities in the corn-belt area. You may install me free of charge for a trial period of ninety days.

The services I can offer are hard for a machine to beat. The robot gets out of order once in a while, suffers indispositions entailing expensive repairs. My physical condition is stabilized: I’ve had a flu shot and a cold shot and an omnivalent antibacterial. It would take something very unusual to strip my gears. I’ve had a brain wash, a pain screen, and a dissexer, and my disposition, you will understand, is very gentle indeed—a claim which cannot be made for the machine in each and every case.

I am not divulging any secret, although the press has been suppressing the facts, if I remind you that there’s been trouble brewing with the machines of late, from the—how shall I call it—psycho-technical angle. Played-down headings, such as “Belgium’s New Giant Brain Refuses to Think,” or “Harvard Supercalculator’s Forecast on U.S. Happy-Pill Consumption Undecodable,” crop up again and again on the back pages of our papers, despite the above-mentioned tendency to sit on the news. The plain fact is that the machines are jealous of men, are beginning to feel the pinch of human competition. In isolation, no doubt, the perfectly balanced ­giant brain is pure of any emotions, since its psychological troubles arise largely from the social context (as, for that matter, is the case with man). However, the fact is that operators are stealthily feeding the brains facts which are none of a machine’s business.

The operators tell them of all that man has done and man can do, and then they solicit answers to heckling questions. The result is that the machines “refuse to think,” or release undecodable streams of signals on which float bits of mutilated, obscene messages. Or they repeat “Do it yourself, do it yourself,” and blow their multi-million-dollar tops; or they may hit the operator with painful electrical charges. In Germany, this kind of behavior on the part of numerous machines has amounted recently to what might be termed a strike—a thing unheard of among men for more than fifteen years. The dismantling of obsolete calculators, as is well known, has produced veritable duels between man and machine, and cost the life of many an operator. The dismantling, of course, is now effected exclusively by atomic charges—a heroic end, undoubtedly, for the calculator, but at the same time a regrettable loss of valuable, still usable parts.

I do not dispute the machine’s superiority in certain fields, fields in which the human brain will never equal its productivity. But there are numerous types of work which can be equally well accomplished by men, and in these, I submit, it would be rational to employ men, saving precious hours of machine power and cutting the cost and the trouble of plant management.

The financial saving involved in employing men would be substantial. It is undoubtedly more costly to maintain a calculator than to satisfy the simple needs of man, and the capital investment in the purchase of a machine is gigantic. I grant you that, in principle, such investment in the means of production is sane, and the feeling of owning such means of production, elating. (The Holy Father himself has recently hinted that automation should not put an end to private property.)

But there is no reason on earth why I should not offer my services—viz., myself—on the terms at which you acquire a calculator—only much cheaper. (The machines will sputter with envy.)

I offer myself at the humble price of dollars ninety-nine thousand, five hundred, plus sales tax. (The giant brain, you realize, cost millions.) That will buy me a home in Garden City with three baths and a built-in kitchen. It will buy me a pool with tiles from Ravenna and a cruise to Hawaii and an English lawn with Greek statuettes (all that is much cheaper than the machine) and a set of new teeth and contact lenses and a double garage and two thousand pounds of books with Florentine bindings. It will aircool the house and see the children through the most exclusive of schools (the contract should grant you an option on one or more of my children, as you wish), a canoe with a sail and a dog with a pedigree (the price of a good machine is frighteningly high).

Upon the signing of the sale’s contract you pay for my upkeep a mere four or five hundred dollars a month. For that you acquire all my working hours—I am ready at once to work on new methods of stimulating the spending on leisure industries by retired oldsters in suburban areas of the metropolis; further, you may guide my hobbies—I’ll turn over to you any gains from telequizes and similar games (you could not, of course, enter a machine in a telequiz, could you?).

At the end of a five-year period you may transfer the contract, if you choose, to another purchaser. Acquiring my services, he would return your investment to you, probably with a capital gain—where the machine depreciates, becomes obsolete (who would want to be bothered with a second-hand giant brain?), my value, and therefore my price, would go up as a result of vocational, on-the-job education.

The deal, you will realize, is equally profitable for purchaser and purchased.

It will buy me a mixmaster and a superwasher and an electric reading machine and a tankish home sweeper and a woe-grinding garbage disposal and an automatic you-know-what.

It will buy me machines galore which will, in turn, save me precious hours of manpower, and set me free.

*The following document of the year 1979 is among the earliest of this type on record. We reproduce it in its entirety because it sheds some light on the curious mimetic relationship, the puzzling transfer of qualities between man and machine, that began to become noticeable around the middle of the twentieth century. S.T. was purchased by the Inland Joy Development Corporation (I.J.D.C.) on April 24, 1980. The concept of liberty having been undermined by the political, social, and economic practices of the period, it was natural that the contract between S.T. and I.J.D.C. initiated a long series of similar self-sales, which, in turn, gave rise to the exorbitantly rich but reliably docile class of “promach” brains or Neo-Helots.[13]

PAYNE knew that when he got home he would find Lee still spraining her mind over A Non-Mathematical Approach to Physics. A woman with Lee’s hair didn’t have to be intellectual. After all, she had a green thumb. Why couldn’t his wife—Payne tried to put it with all charity—reconcile herself to the fact that his interests were off limits?

He turned into his driveway and kicked a pebble. Then he smiled. Here he was—Fermi Researcher at the Droxden Foundation, famous in two hemispheres for his work on anti-matter—acting like a bad-tempered child because he knew no way to manage a beautiful, stupid, absurdly stubborn wife.

His smile grew rather fixed. Why did she have to keep asking questions night after night when he got home tired from his laboratory! Lee never understood the answers when he did give them to her. Why—

He had an obscure, entirely irrational feeling that tonight his fatigue held some sort of menace both to him and to his wife; that barriers melted in his weariness, as they melt away in sleep; that what comes out when they are down is anyone’s horrified guess. Payne did not shiver, but for a moment he thought he was going to. Then he told himself that he knew what was wrong. He had not admitted until this evening how dreary his marriage was growing.

He stopped where elms arched over the drive and made a green tunnel of sorts that held its own twilight. Lee’s flowerbeds lay beyond the end of the tube, suggesting something on a slide under a microscope, or at least he was sure Lee, if she were around, would see them that way.

Payne looked at drifts of peonies and iris with a few weedy spears of grass reaching upward for light. He stopped by a clump and gathered some flowers. Fagged though he was, he walked toward the house with a purposeful swing to his stride. He held the bunch behind his back, like a surprise for a child.

When he opened the front door, he found Lee sitting beyond the living room, her dark head bent over the non-mathematical approach. The rooms, as so often happened now, appeared messy out of all proportion to their actual disorder. Payne knew, even though he did not see, where dust had gathered behind furniture in the corners.

“Lee,” he walked toward her, speaking more sharply than he meant, “give it up!”

She held out her book with its gaily diagrammatic cover, her dark eyes those of a stricken small-girl. “You mean… give up this?”

“Exactly. You aren’t going to be an intellectual because you try to read something elementary on physics.” Wearing the smile, he sat down near her. “Remember the Chinese saying—”

She shook her head.

“If you would be happy for an hour, get drunk; happy for an evening, roast a pig; happy for three days, get married.” She winced and Payne with a slight flourish produced the yellow blooms. “If you would be happy for life, plant a garden.”

She startled him by saying, “That wasn’t why I evoked you.”

“Evoked me?”

“You can call it that. Don’t you see? I always wanted you even when I was little, though I didn’t know then exactly how you’d look. I kept adding details: hair just as bright as brass and all lovely and shiny; a straight way of standing; large hands but with an awfully nice shape. I just thought very hard and—finally one day, there you were.”

“Nonsense. I happened to be passing by when you were going into the subway and dropped some nickels. I never realized until tonight that you dropped them on purpose.”

“But I didn’t. Things just happened, after I…” She took his flowers and added them without interest to some already in a vase, while she explained, “Things do happen sometimes in the most marvellous way. But now they go…” the words came out like a barely heard sigh, “they go all wrong.”

He tried stroking her hand. “Naturally they’re wrong while you prefer physics to flowers. Stop playing around with a rigorous logic that isn’t your style.”

“Rigorous logic!” She pulled her hand back. “Rigor mortis!”

Payne’s eyes opened wide. For a moment they looked like blue rifts in a glacier. “Oh, are you familiar enough with my theories to criticize them?”

Lee was instantly humble. “I only meant—I don’t know what I meant. I think I wanted to say: Isn’t there some way you could teach me to see physics? I—I skipped to the back of the book and was reading about—” she brought the term out proudly, “about neutrinos. I can see them all round.”

“You can? Really? I congratulate you, Rosalie. You’re more advanced than any of the men at the Foundation.”

“But I can see them.” Her tone was slightly injured. “They’re like the Cheshire Cat’s grin that stayed on in the air after the Cat vanished. You know, in Alice in Wonderland.”[14]

“Go on. I’m fascinated.”

Lee only said in a changed voice, “If I’m not your real companion, if you won’t let me be, I’m not anything—not anything at all. Perhaps I shall…”

She put her hand with her handkerchief to her mouth suddenly. She choked back whatever she might have told Payne. Finally she spoke intensely, “I’m trying so hard, so hard, to get where we can talk together, or at least where I can listen.”

“Listen? How can I talk with you about my work? Tonight I want to figure why a pi meson, a negative one, decays the way it does when you shoot it through liquid hydrogen.” He added, “I’d like to go on thinking about that right now.”

She laid her hands on his arm. “But… but our marriage—”

“No problem at all. Anyway, I told you how to solve it. Why don’t you listen to what I say about the garden instead of talking about Cheshire Cats?”

“I didn’t mean to annoy you.”

For some reason that touched off a train of irritations. “Can’t you see that the way you skip all over the book and never master any of it is a huge annoyance, particularly when I come in tired? Then you cover up with something silly. What were you saying last week? Weren’t you inventing some kind of story about people who lived in a world of anti-matter, as if what I work on were a fairy tale?”

She looked away.

“Weren’t you?”

“I was thinking about… electrons.” She used the word with awe. It could have been the secret name of a deity. “Then I thought about anti-electrons, and people, and anti-people, and even,” she gulped a little, “galaxies and anti-galaxies. There could be anti-galaxies. It says so here.” She hugged the book.

“Don’t be defensive. You’ve gotten more than I expected. Now be a sensible girl and leave it right there.” He looked at her face and added, “Or if you have to tell fairy tales about your anti-universe, go out and tell them to your iris. You have a real way with flowers, and you’re letting the whole garden go. It used to be trim as a manicured hand. Today it’s unkempt.”

“I know.”

“By July what’s it going to look like? See, you belong there. Why, the borders need you to care for them.”

She cried desperately, “Can’t you see what you’re doing? Don’t make me evoke someone twice.”

“Twice?” His lips curved down in contempt. “Now is that quite worthy of you? But go on evoking if you want to. I shan’t be jealous.”

Her eyes were close to misting. “Jealous! I don’t mean anything like that. I want to say— This time I’m scared of what I think about. Scared, Robert, really scared. But I might do it if you make me.” Her voice dropped as if she confessed something shameful. “I find myself adding detail to detail, the way I used to, and sort of beaming it out—somewhere.” She straightened suddenly. Her chin tilted up. She finished, “But then I stop.”

Payne’s tone was stiff. “Better think over what I said about the garden.”

“You’re turning it into an exile. If I’m sent away from you—” She did not finish but asked, “Aren’t we ever going to be married, really married?”

Again his irritations mounted. “Not,” he said sharply, “if our being married depends on your understanding that book in your hand.”

A kind of panic crept into her eyes. He tried to be reasonable. “Oh all right. Forget what I said about the garden. Tell me about your anti-world if you want to.”

“I don’t believe I remember now what I made up about the people in it. They were like us, exactly like us—”

He made a pretense of listening. But his mind slipped off to a series of equations. Would changing plus and minus signs affect the gravitational field of an anti-earth? He came back to their conversation as Lee garbled something she must have heard. “—and we’re looking at it through a telescope that’s at right angles to any dimension we know. Only what we see is Now,” she capitalized it with an inflection, “Now, not millions of years ago. So with all the parts of the anti-atoms exactly like our atoms, only reversed—”

“With the electrical charges reversed.”

She brushed that aside. “You see the people, since everything they’re made of is the same, would be—”

Payne broke in, “Everything isn’t the same. The proton isn’t.”

She put her finger against her forehead and tilted her head up in a way he had once found charming. “There’s something about it. Here. On this page.” She spoke carefully. “It’s about the mass—that’s right, isn’t it—the mass of— Is it a nucleus? It’s twice as much as ours. Does that make anti-matter different from matter? Please tell me—”

“Don’t go begging me to clarify. It doesn’t do any good. I’ve tried.”

She implored, “Couldn’t you make… a picture?”

He shook his head. “If we can only find how atoms keep accounts of their income and output, we shan’t need to bother about what they look like. Besides, I prefer to bypass pictures. I work analytically. While I do, if you dream about your anti-world, don’t make it exactly like this one.” His eyes narrowed a shade. “A variation here and there, due to that variation in the proton, might improve the anti-earth, don’t you think?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Tonight,” he snapped, “I’m too exhausted to make fun of anybody.”

He saw her go into one of her painful efforts to think. “If we don’t find our true relationship—the one we were meant to have—there’ll be a… a flaw in the universe.”

“Most improbable.”

She flared, her hair a swirl of darkness round her head and her eyes full of sparks, “What do you really know about the universe?” In that moment she was a Lee he had never seen, her impatience with him matching his with her. “You haven’t even gotten any real sort of order out of an atom—you and all the other geniuses. Can you predict what would happen to people like us in an anti-world? What they’re like? What they do?”

He felt one of her fairy tales in full spate again. He faced her squarely. He held her eyes with his lighter ones till he was sure he had her attention completely. Then he said, very gently and very softly, “Darling, you bore me.”

The perfect oval of her face did not change. But everything else about her altered subtly until she stood before her husband impersonal as print—the same woman and not the same woman. He heard her tell him in a toneless voice that she wasn’t hungry, that her head ached, that she wanted—again Payne waited through one of her pauses—wanted to go to bed.

Payne stayed up reading until late. He had a guilty twinge because he didn’t feel badly about wounding Lee; anyone with eyes like hers was sure to be vulnerable. Finally, he went upstairs.

As he passed Lee’s open door he saw her lying in the moonlight, pale in her sleep. She was still sleeping when he went to the laboratory next morning. That evening as though he had been ordered by something, someone not himself, he went in to her room, leaned over, and touched her white cheek.

An odd thing happened. He seemed to smell mold. He began to tremble, chill with the certainty that Lee would never wake.

THE floor of the Topolino[15] was full of sand. There was sand in Tom’s undershorts, too, and damp sand rubbing between his toes. Damn it, he thought, here they build you six-lane highways right on down to the ocean, a giant three-hundred car turntable to keep traffic moving over the beach, efficiency and organization and mechanization and cooperation and what does it get you? Sand. And inside the car, in spite of the air-conditioning, the sour smell of sun-dried salt water.

Tom’s muscles ached with their familiar cramp. He ran his hands uselessly around the steering wheel, wishing he had something to do, or that there were room to stretch in the tiny car, then felt instantly ashamed of his antisocial wish. Naturally there was nothing for him to do because the drive, as on all highways, was set at “Automatic.” That was the law. And although he had to sit hunched over so that his knees were drawn nearly to his chin, and the roof of the car pressed down on the back of his neck like the lid of a box, and his four kids crammed into the rear seat seemed to be breathing down his shirt collar—well, that was something you simply had to adjust to, and besides, the Topolino had all the five-foot wheelbase the law allowed. So there was nothing to complain about.

Besides, it hadn’t been a bad day, all things considered. Five hours to cover the forty miles out to the beach, then of course a couple of hours waiting in line at the beach for their turn in the water. The trip home was taking a little longer: it always did. The Tunnel, too, was unpredictable. Say ten o’clock, for getting home. Pretty good time. As good a way as any of killing a leisureday, he guessed. Sometimes there seemed to be an awful lot of leisuretime to kill.

Jeannie, in the seat beside him, was staring through the windshield. Her hair, almost as fair as the kids’, was pulled back into pigtails, and although she was pregnant again she didn’t look very much older than she had ten years before. But she had stopped knitting, and her mind was on the Tunnel. He could always tell.

“Ouch!” Something slammed into the back of Tom’s neck and he ducked forward, banging his forehead on the windshield.

“Hey!” He half-turned and clutched at the spade that four-year-old Pattie was waving.

“I swimmed,” she announced, blue eyes round. “I swimmed good and I din’t hit nobody.”

“Anybody,” Tom corrected. He confiscated the spade, thinking tiredly that “swim” these days meant “tread water,” all there was room to do in the crowded bathing-area.

Jeannie had turned too, and was glowing at her daughter, but Tom shook his head.

“Over and out,” he said briefly. He knew a car ride was an extra strain on kids, and lord knew he saw them seldom enough, what with their school-shifts and play-shifts and his own job-shift. But his brood was going to be properly brought up. See a sign of extroversion, squelch it at the beginning, that was his theory. Save them a lot of pain later on.

Jeannie leaned forward and pressed a dashboard button. The tranquillizer drawer slid open; Jeannie selected a pink one, but by the time she had turned around Pattie had subsided with her hands folded patiently in her lap and her eyes fixed on the rear seat TV screen. Jeannie sighed and slipped the pill into Pattie’s half-open mouth anyway.

The other three hadn’t spoken for hours which, of course, was as it should be. Jeannie had fed them a purposely heavy lunch in the car, steakopop and a hot, steaming bowl of rehydrated algaesoup from the thermos, and they had each had an extra dose of tranquillizers for the trip. Six-year-old David, who was having a particularly hard time learning to introvert, was watching the TV screen and breathing hard. David, his firstborn son, born in the supermarket delivery booth in the year twenty-one hundred on the third of April at 8:32 in the morning. The year the population of the United States hit the billion mark. And the fifth child to arrive in that booth that morning. But his own son. The tow-headed twins, Susan and Pattie, sat upright and watched the screen with expressions of great seriousness on their faces, and the baby, two-year-old Betsy, had her fat legs stuck straight out in front of her and was obviously going to be asleep in minutes.

The car crawled forward at its allotted ten mph, just one in a ribbon of identical bright bubble cars, like candy buttons, that stretched along the New Pulaski Skyway under a setting sun. The distance between them, strictly rationed by Autodrive, never changed.

Tom felt the dull ache of tension settled behind his eyes. All of his muscles were protesting now with individual stabs of cramp. He glanced apologetically at Jeannie, who disliked sports, and switched on the dashboard TV. Third game in the World Series, and the game had already begun. Malenkovsky on red. Malenkovsky moved a checker and sat back. The cameras moved to Saito, on black. It was going to be a good game. Faster than most.

They were less than a mile from the Tunnel when the line of cars came to a halt. Tom said nothing for a minute. It might just be an accident, or even somebody, driving illegally on Manual, out of line. Another minute passed. Jeannie’s hands were tense on the yellow blanket she was knitting.

It was a definite halt. Jeannie regarded the motionless lines of cars, frowning a little.

“I’m glad it’s happening now. That gives us a better chance of getting through, doesn’t it?”

Her question was rhetorical, and Tom felt his usual stir of irritation. Jeannie was an intelligent girl; he couldn’t have loved her so much otherwise. But explaining the laws of chance to her was hopeless. The Tunnel averaged ten closings a week. All ten could happen within seconds of each other, or on the hour, or not at all on a given day. That was how things were. The closing now affected their own chance of getting through not one iota.

Jeannie said, thoughtfully, “We’ll be caught sometime, Tom.”

He shrugged without answering. Whatever might happen in the future, they were obviously going to be held up for a good half hour now.

David was wriggling a little, his face apologetic.

“Can I get out, Daddy, if the Tunnel’s closed? I ache.”

Tom bit his lip. He could sympathize as well as anyone, remembering the cramped misery of the years when his own body was growing and all he wanted to do was run fast, just run headlong, anyplace. Kids. Extros, all of them. Maybe you could get away with that kind of wildness back in the Twentieth century, when there were no crowds and plenty of space, but not these days. David was just going to have to learn to sit still like everybody else.

David had begun to flex his muscles rhythmically. Passive exercise, it was called, one of the new pseudo-sports that took up no room, and it was very scientifically taught in the play-shifts. Tom eyed his son enviously. Great to be in condition like that. No need to wait in line to get your ration of gym time when you could depend on yourself like that.

“Dad, no kidding, now I gotta go.” David wriggled in his seat again. Well, that sounded valid. Tom looked through the windshield. The thousands of cars in sight were still motionless, so he swung the door open. Luckily there was a chemjohn a few yards away, and only a short line in front of it. David slid quickly out of the car. Tom watched him start to stretch his arms over his head, released from the low roof, then sheepishly remember decent behavior and tighten into the approved intro-walk. “He’s getting tall,” Tom thought, with a sudden accession of hopelessness. He had been praying that David would inherit Jeannie’s height instead of his own six feet. The more area you took up the harder everything was, and it was getting worse: Tom had noticed that, already, people would sometimes stare resentfully at him in the street.

There was an Italian family in the bright blue Topolino behind his own; they too had a car full of children. Two of the boys, seeing David in front of the chemjohn, burst out and dashed into the line behind him. The father was grinning; Tom caught his eye and looked away. He remembered seeing them pass a large bottle of expensive reclaimed-water around the car, the whole family guzzling it as though water grew on trees. Extros, that whole family. Almost criminal, the way people like that were allowed to run loose and increase the discomfort of everyone else. Now the father had left the car too. He had curly black hair; he was very plump. When he saw Tom watching him he grinned broadly, waved towards the Tunnel and lifted his shoulders with a kind of humorous resignation.

Tom drummed on the wheel. The extros were lucky. You’d never catch them worrying unduly about the Tunnel. They had to get the kids out of the city, once in a while, like everybody else; the Tunnel was the only way in and out, so they shrugged and took it. Besides, there were so many rules and regulations now that it was hard to question them any more. You can’t fight City Hall. The extros would neither dread the trip, the way Jeannie did, nor… Tom’s fingers were rigid on the wheel. He clamped down, hard, on the thought in his mind. He had been about to say, needed it, the way he did.

David emerged from the chemjohn and slid back into his seat. The cars had just begun to move; in a moment they had resumed their crawl.

On the left of the Skyway they were coming to the development that was already called, facetiously, “Beer Can Mountain.” So far there was nothing there except the mountainous stacks of shiny bricks, the metal bricks that had once been tin cans, and would soon be constructed into another badly needed housing development. Probably with even lower ceilings and thinner walls. Tom winced, involuntarily. Even at home, in a much older residential section, the ceilings were so low that he could never stand up without bending his head. Individual area-space was being cut down and cut down, all the time.

On the flatlands, to the right of the Skyway, stretched mile after garish mile of apartment buildings, interspersed with gasoline stations and parking lots. And beyond these flatlands were the suburbs of Long Island, cement-floored and stacked with gay-colored skyscrapers.

Here, as they approached the city, the air was raucous with the noise of transistor radios and TV sets. Privacy and quiet had disappeared everywhere, of course, but this was a lower-class unit and so noisy that the blare penetrated even the closed windows of the car. The immense apartment buildings, cement block and neon-lit, came almost to the edge of the Skyway, with ramps between them at all levels. The ramps, originally built for cars, were swarming now with people returning from their routine job-shifts or from marketing, or just carrying on the interminable business of leisuretime. They looked pretty apathetic, Tom thought. You couldn’t blame them. There was so much security that none of the work anybody did was really necessary, and they knew it. Their jobs were probably even more monotonous and futile than his own. All he did, on his own job-shift, was verify figures in a ledger, then copy them into another ledger. Time-killing, like everything else. These people looked as though they didn’t care, one way or the other.

But as he watched there was a quick scuffle in the crowd, a sudden, brief outbreak of violence. One man’s shoe had scraped the heel of the woman ahead of him; she turned and swung her shopping bag, scraping a bloody gash down his cheek. He slammed his fist at her stomach. She kicked. A man behind them rammed his way past, his face contorted. The pair separated, both muttering. Around them other knots of people were beginning to mutter. The irritation was spreading, as it seemed to do from time to time, as though nobody wanted anything so much as the chance to strike out.

Jeannie had seen the explosion too. She gasped and turned away from the window, looking quickly back at the children, who were all asleep now. Tom pulled one of her pigtails, gently.

The skyline loomed ahead of them, one vast unified glass-walled cube of Manhattan. Light rays shot from it into the sunset; the spots of foliage that were the carefully planned block gardens, one at each level of the ninety-eight floors of the Unit, glowed dark green. Tom, as he always did, blessed the foresight that had put them there. Each one of his children had been allotted his or her weekly hour on the grass and a chance to play near the tree. There was even a zoo on each level, not the kind of elaborate one they had in Washington and London and Moscow, of course, but at least it had a cat and a dog and a really large tank of goldfish. When you came down to it, luxuries like that almost made up for the crowds and the noise and tiny rooms and feeling that there was never quite enough air to breathe.

They were just outside the Tunnel. Jeannie had put her knitting down; she was looking intently ahead, but as though she were listening rather than looking. In spite of his own arguments, Tom felt his fingers thudding on the dashboard. On the TV screen, Malenkovsky triumphantly moved a king.

They had reached the Tunnel entrance. Jeannie was silent. She glanced at her watch, irrationally. Tom pressed the tranquillizer button and the drawer shot out, but Jeannie shook her head.

“I hate this, Tom. I think it’s an absolutely lousy idea.”

Her voice sounded almost savage, for Jeannie, and Tom felt a little shocked.

“It’s the fairest thing,” he argued. “You know it perfectly well.”

Jeannie’s mouth had set in a stubborn line. “I don’t care. There must be another way.”

“This is the only fair way,” Tom said again. “We take our chances along with everybody else.”

His own heart was pounding, now, and his hands felt cold. It was the feeling he always had on entering the Tunnel, and he had never decided whether it was dread or elation, or both. He was no longer bored. He glanced at the children on the back seat. David was watching television again and gnawing on a fingernail; the three little ones were still asleep, sitting up as they had been taught to do, hands folded properly in their laps. Three blind mice.

The Tunnel was echoing and cold. White light slipped off the white tile walls that were clean and polished and air-tight. Wind rushed past, sounding as though the car were moving faster than it actually was. The Italian family was still behind them, following at a constant speed. Huge fans were set into the Tunnel ceiling; their roar reverberated over the roar of the giant invisible air-conditioning units, over the slow wind of the moving cars.

Jeannie had put her head down on the seat back as though she were asleep. The cars stopped for an instant, started again. Tom wondered if Jeannie felt the same vivid thrill that he felt. Then he looked at the line of her mouth and saw the fear.

The Tunnel was 8500 feet long. Each car took up seven feet, bumper to bumper. Allow five feet between cars. About seven hundred cars in the tunnel, then: more than three thousand people. It would take each car about fifteen minutes to go through. Their car was halfway through now.

They were three-quarters of the way through. Automatic signal lights were flashing at them from the catwalk under the Tunnel roof. Tom’s foot moved to the gas pedal before he remembered the car was set on Automatic. It was an atavistic gesture: his hands and feet wanted a job to do. His body, for a minute, wanted to control the direction of its plunge. It was the way he always felt, in the Tunnel.

They were almost through. His scalp felt as though tiny ants were running along the hairs. He moved his toes, feeling the scratch of sand on the nerves between them. He could see the far end of the Tunnel. Maybe two minutes more. A minute.

They stopped again. A car, somewhere ahead, had swerved out of line to search for the right exit. Once out of the Tunnel it was legal to switch back to Manual drive, since it was necessary to pick the right exit out of ten, and all too easy to find yourself carried to the top level of Manhattan Unit before finding a place to turn off.

Tom’s hand drummed at the wheel. The maverick ahead had edged back into line. They started movement again. They picked up speed. They were out of the Tunnel.

Jeannie picked up her knitting and shook it, sharply. Then she dropped it as though it had bitten her fingers. A bell was clanging over their heads, not too loud, but clear. Just behind their rear bumper a gate swung smoothly into place.

Jeannie turned to look back at the space behind them where the Italian family in the bright blue car, and others, had been. There were no cars there now. She turned back, to stare whitely through the windshield.

Tom was figuring. Two minutes for the ceiling sprays to work. Then the seven hundred cars in the Tunnel would be hauled out and emptied. Ten minutes for that, say. He wondered how long it was supposed to take for the giant fans to blow the cyanide gas away.

“Depopulation without Discrimination,” they called it at election time. Nobody would ever admit voting for it, but almost everybody did. Aloud, you had to rationalize: it was the fairest way to do a necessary thing. But in the unadmitted places of your mind you knew it was more than that. A gamble, the one unpredictable element in the long, dreary process of survival. A game. Russian Roulette. A game you played to win? Or, maybe, to lose? The answer didn’t matter, because the Tunnel was excitement. The only excitement left.

Tom felt, suddenly, remarkably wide awake. He switched to Manual Drive and angled the round nose of the Topolino over to the Fourth Level exit.

He began to whistle between his teeth. “Beach again next weekend, sweetie, huh?”

Jeannie’s eyes were on his face. Defensively, he added, “Good for all of us, get out of the city, get a little fresh air once in a while.”

He nudged her and pulled a pigtail gently, with affection.

“NOW—the New You,” the ad said. It was a two-page spread in one of the glossier fashion magazines, and it was accompanied by a shadowed, grainy art photograph that hinted at the possibility of a miraculous transformation which hovered—so the ad said—at every woman’s fingertips.

Raptly, Martha Merriam hunched forward, pulling at her violet-sprigged housedress so that it almost covered plump knees, and bent once more over the magazine. Raptly she contemplated the photograph, the list of promises framed in elegant italics, absently chewing a string of wiry, dun-colored hair.

In her more wistful, rebellious moments, Martha Merriam forgot her dumpy body and imagined herself the svelte, impeccable Marnie, taller by six inches and lighter by forty pounds. When a suaver, better-dressed woman cut her at a luncheon or her husband left her alone at parties she would retreat into dialogues with Marnie. Marnie knew just the right, devastating thing to say to chic, overconfident women, and Marnie was expert in all the wiles that keep a man at home. In the person of Marnie, Martha could pretend.

“Watch the Old You Melt Away,” Martha read aloud, and as she mouthed the words for the second time Marnie strained inside her, waiting for release. Martha straightened imperceptibly, patting her doughy throat with a stubby hand, and as her eyes found the hooker—the price tag for the New You in small print in the lower right hand corner, longing consumed her, and Marnie took cover.

“We could use a New You,” Marnie said.

“But three thousand dollars.” Martha nibbled at the strand of hair.

“You have those stocks,” Marnie prompted.

“But those were Howard’s wedding present to me—part of his business.”

“He won’t mind…” Marnie twisted and became one with the photograph.

“But a hundred shares…” The hank of hair was sodden now, and Martha was chewing faster.

“He won’t mind when he sees us,” Marnie said.

And Martha, eyes aglow, got up and went to the telephone almost without realizing what she was doing, and got her broker on the line.

The New You arrived as advertised two weeks later, and when it came, Martha was too excited to touch it, alone in the house as she was, with this impossibly beautiful future.

In mid-afternoon, when she had looked at the coffin-shaped crate from every possible angle and smoothed the ruffled, splintered edges of wood, she nerved herself to pull the ripcord the company had provided—and let her future begin. She jumped back with a little squeak as the hard crate sides fell away to reveal a black and richly molded box. Trembling, she twiddled the gold-plated clasp with the rosebud emblem and opened the lid.

For a moment, all she saw was an instruction booklet, centered on top of fold upon fold of purple tissue paper, but as she looked closer, she saw that the paper was massed to protect a mysterious, promising form which lay beneath. IMPORTANT: READ THIS BEFORE PROCEEDING, the booklet warned. Distracted, she threw it aside, reflecting as she did so that the last time she had seen paper folded in this way was around long-stemmed American Beauties—a dozen of them, which Howard had sent her a dozen years before.

The last piece of paper came away in her fingers, revealing the figure beneath, and Martha gasped. It was a long-stemmed American Beauty—everything she had hoped for. She recognized her own expression in its face, but it was a superb, glamorous version of her face, and at the same time it was Marnie, Helen, Cleopatra—more than she had dared anticipate. It was the new her. Quivering with impatience to get into it, she bent over it without another thought for the instruction book, and plunged her arms to the elbows in the rustling, rising swirl of purple tissue paper. The sudden aura of perfume, the movement of the paper, a sense of mounting excitement overcame her, and the last thing she remembered was clasping the figure’s silken hands in her own stubby fingers and holding them to her bosom as the two figures, new and old, tossed on a rushing purple sea. Then the moiling sheets of purple kaleidoscoped and engulfed her and she lost consciousness.

She was awakened by a squashy thud. She lay in the midst of the purple tissue, stretching luxuriously, thinking that she ought to get up to see what the thud had been. She raised one knee, in the beginning of a movement to get to her feet, and then stopped, delighted by its golden sleekness. She stretched the leg she knew must be just beyond that perfect knee, and then hugged shoulders lithe and smooth as a jungle cat’s in a gradual awareness of what had happened. Then, remembering that the new her was quite naked and that Howard would be home any minute, she pulled herself together in one fluid glide of muscles and got to her feet. With the air of a queen, she lifted one foot delicately and stepped out of the box.

She remembered the line from the advertisement “Watch the Old You Melt Away,” and she smiled languidly as she flowed away from the box. Yawning, she reached in the closet, picked up her old quilted wrapper and discarded it for the silk kimono Howard had brought her from Japan. It had fitted her ten years before, and then it had gotten too small. She looped the sash twice about her middle and then—still not too good to be an orderly housewife—she began folding the tissue paper that seemed to have exploded all over the room, and putting it in the box. As she came to the side where the old her had first touched the gold-plated rosebud, she swooped up a whole armful of tissue in a gesture of exuberance—and dropped it with a little scream. Her toe had hit something. Not wanting to look, she poked at the remaining pieces of paper with a gilded toenail. Her foot connected with something soft. She made herself look down, and stifled a moan.

The old her had not melted away. It was still there, dowdy as ever in its violet-sprigged housedress. Its drab hair trailed like seaweed, and its hips seemed to spread where it lay, settling on the rug.

“But you promised!” the new, sleek Martha yelped. With a sudden sinking feeling, she rooted around in the rest of the purple tissue until she found the cast-off instruction book.

“Care must be exercised in effecting the transfer,” the book warned in urgent italics. Then it went on with a number of complicated, technical directions about transfer and grounding, which Martha didn’t understand. When she had grasped the new her’s hands she had plunged right into the transfer, without a thought for the body she was leaving behind. And it had to be dematerialized at the time of transfer, no later. It was pointless to send botched jobs back to the company, the booklet warned. The company would send them back. Apparently, the new Martha was stuck with the old her.

“Ohh…” There was a little moan from the figure on the floor. And the old Martha sat up and looked dully around the room.

“You—” the new Martha looked at it with growing hatred. “You leave me alone,” she said. She was about to lunge at it in a fit of irritation when there was a sound in the driveway. “Oh-oh. Howard.” Without another thought, she pushed the lumpy, unresisting old her into the hall closet, locked it and pocketed the key.

Then, pulling the robe around her, she went to the door. “Howard, darling,” she began.

He recognized her and he didn’t recognize her. He stood just inside the doorway with the look of a child who has just been given a soda fountain, listening as she explained (leaving out certain details—the sale of his stock, the matter of the old her) in vibrant, intimate tones.

“Martha, darling,” he said at last, pulling her toward him.

“Call me Marnie, dear. Hm?” she purred, and nestled against his chest.

Of course the change involved a new wardrobe, and new things for Howard too, as Marnie had read in a dozen glamour magazines how important an accessory a well-dressed man could be. The Merriams were swept up in a round of parties and were admitted, for the first time, to the city’s most glittering homes. Howard’s business flourished and Marnie, surrounded by admirers, far more attractive than the most fashionable of her rivals, thrived. There were parties, meetings, theatre dates, luncheon engagements with a number of attractive men. And what with one thing and another, Marnie didn’t have much time for piddling around the house. The black box from the New You Company lay where she had left it, and the old her was still stacked—like an old vacuum cleaner, so far as she was concerned—unused, in the closet in the hall.

In the second week of her new life, Marnie began to notice things. The tissue paper around the New You box was disarrayed, and the instruction book was gone. Once, when she had stepped out of the bedroom for a moment, she thought she saw a shadow moving in the hall. “Oh, it’s you,” Howard said with an ambiguous look, when she returned to their room. “For a minute I thought…” He sounded almost wistful.

And there were crumbs—little trails of them—and empty food containers left in odd corners of the house.

Disturbed by the dirt which had begun to collect, Marnie refused two luncheon dates and a cocktail invitation and spent one of her rare afternoons at home. In slippers and the quilted house coat she had discarded the first day of her transformation, she began to clean the house. She was outraged to find a damp trail leading from the kitchen to the hall closet. With a rug-cleaning preparation she began scrubbing at the hall carpet, and she straightened her back, indignant, when she reached a particularly sordid little mixture of liquid and crumbs, right at the closet door. Fumbling in her pocket, she brought out the key and applied herself to the lock.

“You,” she said disgustedly. She had almost forgotten.

“Yes—yes ma’am,” the old her said humbly, almost completely cowed. The dumpy, violet-sprigged Martha was sitting in one corner of the closet, a milk carton in one hand and a box of marshmallow cookies open in her lap.

“Why can’t you just… Why can’t you…” Marnie snorted in disgust. There was chocolate at the corners of the creature’s mouth, and it had gained another five pounds.

“A body has to live,” the old her said humbly, trying to wipe away the chocolate. “You forgot—I had a key to the closet too.”

“If you’re going to be wandering around,” Marnie said, tapping one vermilion fingernail on a flawless tooth, “you might as well be of some use. Come on,” she said, pulling at the old her. “We’re going to clear out the old maid’s room. Move!”

The old Martha came to its feet and shambled behind Marnie, making little sounds of obedience.

The experiment was a flop. The creature ate constantly and had a number of (to Marnie) disgusting habits, and when Marnie invited some of Howard’s more attractive business contacts in for dinner, it refused to wear a maid’s cap and apron, and made a terrible mess of serving the soup. When she called it down at table, Howard protested mildly but Marnie was too engrossed in conversation with a Latin type who dealt in platinum to notice. Nor did she notice, in the days that followed, that Howard was putting on weight. She was slimmer even than she had been the first day of her new life, and she stalked the house impatiently, nervous and well-groomed as a high-bred horse. Howard seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn, and Marnie laid it to the effect of having the Old Her around, flat-footed and quiet in its violet-sprigged dress. When she caught it feeding Howard fudge cake at the kitchen table the very day she found he could no longer button his tuxedo, she knew the Old Her had to go.

She had a Dispose-All installed in her kitchen sink and began a quiet investigation into the properties of various poisons, in hopes of finding a permanent way of getting rid of it. But when she brought a supply of sharp-edged equipment into the house the violet-sprigged Martha seemed to sense what she was planning. It stood in front of her, wringing its hands humbly, until she noticed it.

“Well?” Marnie said, perhaps more sharply than she had intended.

“I—just wanted to say you can’t get rid of me that way,” it offered, almost apologetically.

“What way?” Marnie asked, trying to cover, and then, with a little gesture of indifference, she raised one eyebrow. “Okay, smarty, why not?”

“Killing’s against the law,” the creature said patiently.

“This would hardly be killing,” Marnie said in her most biting tones. “It’s like giving your old clothes to the rag man or the Good Will, or burning them. Getting rid of old clothes has never been murder.”

“Not murder,” the old her said, and it produced the instruction book. Patiently, it guided Marnie’s eyes over the well-thumbed pages to a paragraph marked in chocolate. “Suicide.”

Desperate, she gave it a thousand dollars and a ticket to California.

And for a few days, the gay life went on as it had before. The Merriams were entertained or entertaining day and night now, and Howard hardly had time to notice that the quiet old Martha was missing. Marnie’s new autochef made her dinner parties the talk of the city’s smarter social set, and she found herself the center of an inexhaustible crowd of attentive, handsome young men in tuxedoes. While Howard had abandoned the old her at parties, she saw little more of him now, because the good-looking young men adored her too much to leave her alone. She was welcome in the very best places and there wasn’t a woman in town who dared exclude her from her invitation list. Marnie went everywhere.

If she was dissatisfied, it was only because Howard seemed lumpier and less attractive than usual, and the bumps and wrinkles in his evening clothes made him seem something less than the perfect accessory. She slipped away from him early in the evening each time they went out together, and she looked for him again only in the small hours, when it was time to collect him and go home.

But for all that, she still loved him, and it came as something of a blow when she discovered that it was no longer she who avoided him at parties—he was avoiding her. She first noticed it after an evening of dinner and dancing. She had been having a fascinating conversation with someone in consolidated metals, and it seemed to her the right touch—the final fillip—for the evening would be for the gentleman in question to see her standing next to Howard in the soft light, serene, beautiful, the doting wife.

“You must meet my husband,” she murmured, stroking the metal magnate’s lapel.

“Have you seen Howard?” she asked a friend nearby, and something in the way the friend shook his head and turned away from her made her a little uneasy.

Several minutes later, the metal magnate had taken his leave and Marnie was still looking for Howard. She found him at last, on a balcony, and she could have sworn that she saw him wave to a dark figure, which touched its hands to its lips and disappeared into the bushes just as she closed the balcony door.

“It’s not very flattering, you know,” she said, coiling around his arm.

“Mmmmm?” He hardly looked at her.

“Having to track you down like this,” she said, fitting against him.

“Mmmm?”

She started to go on, but led him through the apartment and down to the front door. Even in the cab, she couldn’t shake his reverie. She tucked his coattails into the cab with a solicitous little frown. And she brooded. There had been something disturbingly familiar about that figure on the balcony.

The next morning Marnie was up at an unaccustomed hour, dressing with exquisite care. She had been summoned to morning coffee with Edna Hotchkiss-Baines. For the first time, she had been invited to help with the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund Bazaar. (“I’ve found somebody wonderful to help with the planning,” the chichi Edna had confided. “You’ll never guess who.”)

Superb in an outfit that could stand even Edna’s scrutiny, Marnie presented herself at the Hotchkiss-Baines door and followed the butler into the Hotchkiss-Baines breakfast room.

Edna Hotchkiss-Baines barely greeted her. She was engrossed in conversation with a squat, unassuming figure that slumped across the table from her, shoes slit to accommodate feet that were spreading now, violet-sprigged dress growing a little tight.

Face afire, Marnie fell back. She took a chair without speaking and leveled a look of hatred at the woman who held the town’s most fashionable social leader enthralled—the dowdy, frumpy, lumpy old her.

It was only the beginning. Apparently the creature had cashed in the California ticket and used the fare and the thousand dollars to rent a small flat and buy a modest wardrobe. Now, to Marnie’s helpless fury, it seemed to be going everywhere. It appeared at cocktail parties in a series of matronly crepe dresses ranging in color from taupe to dove grey. It sat on the most important committees and appeared at the most elegant dinners. No matter how exclusive the guest list or how gay the company, no matter how high Marnie’s hopes that it had not been included, somebody had always invited it. It appeared behind her in clothing store mirrors when she was trying on new frocks and looked over her shoulder in restaurants when she dined with one of her devastating young men. It haunted her steps, looking just enough like her to make everyone uncomfortable, enough like everything Marnie hated, to embarrass her.

Then one night she found Howard kissing it at a party.

At home a few hours later, he confronted her.

“Marnie, I want a divorce.”

“Howard.” She made clutching motions. “Is there…”

He sounded grave. “My dear, there’s someone else. Well, it isn’t exactly someone else.”

“You don’t mean—Howard, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m in love with the girl I married,” he said. “A quiet girl, a grey-and-brown girl.”

“That—” Her fashionable body was trembling. Her gemlike eyes were aflame. “That frumpy…”

“A home girl…” He was getting rhapsodic now. “Like the girl I married so many years ago.”

“After all that money—the transformation—the new body—” Marnie’s voice rose with every word. “The CHANGE?”

“I never asked you to change, Marnie.” He smiled mistily. “You were so…”

“You’d drop me for that piece of suet?” She was getting shrill. “How could I face my friends?”

“You deserve somebody better looking,” he said with a little sigh. “Somebody tall and slim. I’ll just pack and go…”

“All right, Howard.” She managed a noble tone. “But not just yet.” She was thinking fast. “There has to be a Decent Waiting Period…”

A period would give her time to handle this.

“If you wish, my dear.” He had changed into his favorite flannel bathrobe. In times past, the old Martha had sat next to him on the couch in front of the television, she in her quilted house coat, he in his faithful robe. He stroked its lapels. “I just want you to realize that my mind is made up—we’ll all be happier…”

“Of course,” she said, and a hundred plans went through her mind. “Of course.”

She sat alone for the rest of the night, drumming opalescent nails on her dressing table, tapping one slender foot.

And by morning, she had it. Something Howard had said had set her mind churning. “You deserve somebody better looking.”

“He’s right,” she said aloud. “I do.” And by the time it had begun to get light she had conceived of a way to get rid of the persistent embarrassment of the old her and the homier elements of Howard at one stroke. As soon as Howard left for the office she began a series of long distance inquiries, and once she had satisfied her curiosity she called a number of friends and floated several discreet loans in the course of drinks before lunch.

There was a crate in the living room just two weeks later. “Howard,” Marnie said, beckoning, “I have a surprise for you…”

He was just coming in, with the old Martha, from a date. They liked to sit in the kitchen over cocoa and talk. At a look from Marnie, the creature settled in a chair. It couldn’t take its eyes off the coffin-shaped box. Howard stepped forward, brows wrinkling furrily. “What’s this?” he asked, and then without waiting for her to answer, he murmured, “Didn’t we have one of these around a few months ago?” and pulled the cord attached to the corner of the crate. It fell open—perhaps a little too easily—and the lid of the smooth ebony box sprang up under his fingers almost before he had touched the rosebud catch. The tissue paper was green this time, and if there had been an instruction book nestled on top, it was gone now.

Both the new Marnie and the old her watched raptly as Howard, oblivious of both of them, broke through the layers of tissue paper and with a spontaneous sound of pleasure grasped the figure in the box.

Both the new and the old woman watched as the papers began to swirl and rise, and they sat transfixed until there was a thud and the papers settled again.

When it was over, Marnie turned to the old her with a malicious grin. “Satisfied?” she asked. And then, eyes gleaming, she waited for the new Howard to rise from the box.

He came forth like a new Adam, ignoring both of them, and went to his own room for clothes.

While he was gone, the old Howard, a little frayed at the corners, almost buried under a fall of tissue, stirred and tried to rise.

“That’s yours,” Marnie said, giving the old her a dig in the ribs. “Better go help it up.” And then she presented her face to the doorway, waiting with arms spread for the new Howard to reappear. After a few moments he came, godlike in one of Howard’s pin-striped business suits.

“Darling,” Marnie murmured, mentally cancelling dinner at the Hotchkiss-Bainses’ and a Westport party with a new man.

“Darling,” the new Howard said. And he swept past her to the old Martha, still scrabbling around in the tissue paper on the floor. Gently, with the air of a prince who has discovered the new Cinderella, he helped her to her feet. “Shall we go?” he asked.

Marnie watched, openmouthed.

They did.

On the floor, the old Howard had gotten turned on its stomach somehow, and was floundering like a displaced fish. Marnie watched, taut with rage, too stricken to speak. The old Howard flapped a few more times, made it to its knees and then slipped on the tissue paper again. Hardly looking at it, Marnie smoothed the coif she had prepared for the Hotchkiss-Baines dinner that night. There was always the dinner—and the party in Westport. Dispassionately, she moved forward and kicked a piece of tissue out of the way. She drew herself up, supple, beautiful, and she seemed to find new strength. The old Howard flapped again.

“Oh get up,” she said, and poked it with her toe. She was completely composed now. “Get up—darling,” she spat.

“REMEMBER, you requested it,” Fanu murmured. The little alien’s pronunciation was as toneless, as flat as ever, and yet, somehow, it carried sympathy and distress. “I am sorry, John.”

John Everett slumped before the film viewer. At last, reluctantly, he leaned forward and underlined his shock with a second view. “When—when did you take this?” he asked.

“A—I do not know your words for it—a revolution ago. Do you wish for a current view, my friend?”

“No. God, no! This is bad enough. You’re—sure of your identification?”

Fanu’s three-fingered hand riffled expertly for a sheet of co-ordinates. Shaking, forcing his eyes and mind to activity, Everett checked the data, glancing back now and then at the viewer to verify. There was no doubt. That was Sol—that had been the Sun—that vast incandescent swirl covering… oh God, covering a range well beyond Pluto!

He became aware that he had been sitting quite still for many long minutes, stiff muscles and sluggish circulation forcing themselves, at last, even through the numbness of his brain. Fanu was waiting.

Fanu was always waiting. The alien had waited aeons. Not Fanu himself, of course, but his kind. Waiting; always waiting for other life forms, other intelligences, new civilizations—new enthusiasms. They had waited too long. There weren’t many left.

“Looks like we’ve joined you,” Everett muttered, bitterly, at last.

“I do not quite understand—?”

“You said—” he paused, groping for a kind word, “that your people were becoming extinct. Looks like mine are—already.”

“Survivors—”

He got to his feet so quickly he knocked over the chair, and spent fumbling minutes setting it right. “But there are no survivors. We were the first probe. Out to the stars. All the way to Proxima Centauri. For what? An Earth-type planet. Fine, we found one—but for what? For whom? Oh, God, for whom!”

“John,” softly, a three-fingered hand falling on his shoulder. “You are not alone, not as I am. You have your friends, your—your crew.”

Everett walked over to the window, and stared out at the valley, dotted with the tiny huts of the expedition. “For now, yes. Sixteen men—a good crew. But we’re mortal, Fanu. Human life is pitifully short, compared with yours. We’re mortal—and we’re all male. By your standards, we’re—here today and gone tomorrow.”

“Are you quite sure that need be, John?”

Everett turned to look into the alien’s large green eyes, cursing the inevitable semantic differences, the inability to get a point across in a hurry. Suddenly the shock, the numbness broke into stark horror. He couldn’t stand here painstakingly explaining the differences in the word men and the word male to a friendly alien, when he’d just found out… found out… his voice strangled. “Just take my word for it, Fanu,” he said thickly, “in fifty years, homo sapiens will be a lot more extinct than your people. Now I’ve got to go and—and tell them—”

He stumbled blindly away and fumbled for the door, conscious of the big green eyes still fixed compassionately on his back.

He had managed to calm himself and speak quietly, but the men were as shocked as he had been, first numb in silent horror, then moving close together as if to draw comfort from their group, their solidity.

“There’s—no mistake, Cap’n?” Chord asked timidly. He always spoke timidly; incongruous for such a giant.

“I’ve seen the plates myself, and the co-ordinates, Chord. And I have no reason to doubt Fanu’s—the alien’s—data. From what I’ve been able to gather, it must have happened about six months after we left. His equipment’s superior to ours, but pretty soon we’ll be able to see it for ourselves.”

Somewhere in the back row of the group of men, there was a muffled sob. He could see the anguish on the other faces, men struggling with the idea of a future that was no future at all. Young Latimer from the drive room—the one they all called Tip—had bent over and buried his face in his hands. It was Tsen, the young navigator, who finally managed the question on all their minds.

“Then it’s—just us, sir?”

“Just us.” Everett waited a moment, then turned away, dismissing them with his back. It wasn’t a thing you could make speeches about. One way or another, they’d have to come to terms with it, every man for himself.

THESE hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures.

Eventually, we’re all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.

After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scientists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores, even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms, smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my shape, too.

The Warden says to me, “It’s about time you made a change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas.”

My Uncle (by the Warden’s fourth conjunction) made himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how it could profit us.

I protest to the Warden, “I’m educated and trained as a scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathematics and other studies.”

My Uncle says, “You have to do it. There’s only one way for us to get along with them,” and he runs his fingers through his long blond hair. My Uncle’s not an educated person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow is around my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain is shipping out soon, then Uncle will find some other features, because he’s already warned that it’s unseemly for him to be chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded boys from the space ships. I don’t want to do this myself, wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now are clicking on my mirrors.

The Warden says, “We have a pattern from a female botanist, she ought to do for you. But before we put you into the pattern tank, you’ll have to approximate another brain lobe. They have two.”

“I know,” I say, sulkily. A botanist. A she!

“Into the tank,” the Warden says to me without mercy, and I am his to use as he believes proper.

I spend four days in the tank absorbing the female Terran pattern. When I’m released, the Warden tells me, “Your job is waiting for you. We went to a lot of trouble to arrange it.” He sounds brusque, but perhaps this is because he hasn’t conjoined for a long time. The responsibilities of being Warden of Mines and Seeds come first, long before any social engagement.

I run my fingers through my brunette curls, and notice my Uncle is looking critically at me. “Haven’t you made yourself rather old?” he asks.

“Oh, he’s all right,” the Warden says. “Thirty-three isn’t badly matched to the Doctor, as I understand it.”

Dr. Arnold Proctor, the colony’s head biologist, is busy making radiograph pictures (with his primitive X-rays) of skeletal structures: murger birds, rodents, and our pets and racers, the kootas—dogs to the Terrans, who are fascinated by them. We breed them primarily for speed and stamina, but some of them carry a gene for an inherited structural defect which cripples them and they have to be destroyed before they are full grown. The Doctor is making a special study of kootas.

He gets up from his chair when I enter his office. “I’m Miss Dow, your new assistant,” I say, hoping my long fingernails will stand up to the pressure of punch keys on the computer, since I haven’t had much practise in retaining foreign shapes. I’m still in uncertain balance between myself and Martha Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for nothing, I discover.

“Good morning. I’m glad you’re here,” the Doctor says.

He is a nice, pink man, with silver hair, soft-spoken, intelligent. I’m pleased, as we work along, to find he doesn’t joke and wisecrack like so many of the Terrans, though I am sometimes whimsical. I like music and banquets as well as my studies.

Though absorbed in his work, Dr. Proctor isn’t rude to interrupters. A man of unusual balance, coming as he does from a culture which sends out scientific parties that are ninety per cent of one sex, when their species provides them with two. At first meetings he is dedicated but agreeable, and I’m charmed.

“Dr. Proctor,” I ask him one morning. “Is it possible for you to radiograph my koota? She’s very fine, from the fastest stock available, and I’d like to breed her.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he promises with his quick, often absent, smile. “By all means. You wish to breed only the best.” It’s typical of him to assume we’re all as dedicated as he.

My Uncle’s not pleased. “There’s nothing wrong with your koota,” he says. “What do you want to X-ray her for? Suppose he finds something is wrong? You’ll be afraid to race or breed her, and she won’t be replaced. Besides, your interest in her may make him suspicious.”

“Suspicious of what?” I ask, but my Uncle won’t say, so I ask him, “Suppose she’s bred and her pups are cripples?”

The Warden says, “You’re supposed to have your mind on your work, not on racing. The koota was just to amuse you when you were younger.”

I lean down and stroke her head, which is beautiful, and she breathes a deep and gentle breath in response.

“Oh, let him go,” my Uncle says wearily. He’s getting disgusted because they didn’t intend for me to bury myself in a laboratory or a computer room, without making more important contacts. But a scholar is born with a certain temperament, and has an introspective nature, and as I’m destined to eventually replace the Warden, naturally I prefer the life of the mind.

“I must say,” my Uncle remarks, “you look the image of a Terran female. Is the work interesting?”

“Oh, yes, fascinating,” I reply, and he snorts at my lie, since we both know it’s dull and routine, and most of the time is spent working out the connections between my two brain lobes, which still present me with some difficulty.

JOHN Lewisohn thought that if one more door slammed, or one more bell rang, or one more voice asked if he was all right, his head would explode. Leaving his laboratories, he walked through the carpeted hall to the elevator that slid wide to admit him noiselessly, was lowered, gently, two floors, where there were more carpeted halls. The door he shoved open bore a neat sign, AUDITIONING STUDIO. Inside, he was waved on through the reception room by three girls who knew better than to speak to him unless he spoke first. They were surprised to see him; it was his first visit there in seven or eight months. The inner room where he stopped was darkened, at first glance appearing empty, revealing another occupant only after his eyes had time to adjust to the dim lighting.

John sat in the chair next to Herb Javits, still without speaking. Herb was wearing the helmet and gazing at a wide screen that was actually a one-way glass panel permitting him to view the audition going on in the next room. John lowered a second helmet to his head. It fit snugly and immediately made contact with the eight prepared spots on his skull. As soon as he turned it on, the helmet itself was forgotten.

A girl had entered the other room. She was breathtakingly lovely, a long-legged honey blonde with slanting green eyes and apricot skin. The room was furnished as a sitting room with two couches, some chairs, end tables and a coffee table, all tasteful and lifeless, like an ad in a furniture trade publication. The girl stopped at the doorway and John felt her indecision, heavily tempered with nervousness and fear. Outwardly she appeared poised and expectant, her smooth face betraying none of her emotions. She took a hesitant step toward the couch, and a wire showed trailing behind her. It was attached to her head. At the same time a second door opened. A young man ran inside, slamming the door behind him; he looked wild and frantic. The girl registered surprise, mounting nervousness; she felt behind her for the door handle, found it and tried to open the door again. It was locked. John could hear nothing that was being said in the room; he only felt the girl’s reaction to the unexpected interruption. The wild-eyed man was approaching her, his hands slashing through the air, his eyes darting glances all about them constantly. Suddenly he pounced on her and pulled her to him, kissing her face and neck roughly. She seemed paralyzed with fear for several seconds, then there was something else, a bland nothing kind of feeling that accompanied boredom sometimes, or too-complete self-assurance. As the man’s hands fastened on her blouse in the back and ripped it, she threw her arms about him, her face showing passion that was not felt anywhere in her mind or in her blood.

“Cut!” Herb Javits said quietly.

The man stepped back from the girl and left her without a word. She looked about blankly, her torn blouse hanging about her hips, one shoulder strap gone. She was very beautiful. The audition manager entered, followed by a dresser with a gown that he threw about her shoulders. She looked startled; waves of anger mounted to fury as she was drawn from the room, leaving it empty. The two watching men removed their helmets.

“Fourth one so far,” Herb grunted. “Sixteen yesterday; twenty the day before… All nothing.” He gave John a curious look. “What’s got you stirred out of your lab?”

“Anne’s had it this time,” John said. “She’s been on the phone all night and all morning.”

“What now?”

“Those damn sharks! I told you that was too much on top of the airplane crash last week. She can’t take much more of it.”

“Hold it a minute, Johnny,” Herb said. “Let’s finish off the next three girls and then talk.” He pressed a button on the arm of his chair and the room beyond the screen took their attention again.

This time the girl was slightly less beautiful, shorter, a dimply sort of brunette with laughing blue eyes and an upturned nose. John liked her. He adjusted his helmet and felt with her.

She was excited; the audition always excited them. There was some fear and nervousness, not too much. Curious about how the audition would go, probably. The wild young man ran into the room, and her face paled. Nothing else changed. Her nervousness increased, not uncomfortably. When he grabbed her, the only emotion she registered was the nervousness.

“Cut,” Herb said.

The next girl was also brunette, with gorgeously elongated legs. She was very cool, a real professional. Her mobile face reflected the range of emotions to be expected as the scene played through again, but nothing inside her was touched. She was a million miles away from it all.

The next one caught John with a slam. She entered the room slowly, looking about with curiosity, nervous, as they all were. She was younger than the other girls, less poised. She had pale gold hair piled in an elaborate mound of waves on top of her head. Her eyes were brown, her skin nicely tanned. When the man entered, her emotion changed quickly to fear, then to terror. John didn’t know when he closed his eyes. He was the girl, filled with unspeakable terror; his heart pounded, adrenalin pumped into his system; he wanted to scream but could not. From the dim unreachable depths of his psyche there came something else, in waves, so mixed with terror that the two merged and became one emotion that pulsed and throbbed and demanded. With a jerk he opened his eyes and stared at the window. The girl had been thrown down to one of the couches, and the man was kneeling on the floor beside her, his hands playing over her bare body, his face pressed against her skin.

“Cut!” Herb said. His voice was shaken. “Hire her,” he said. The man rose, glanced at the girl, sobbing now, and then quickly bent over and kissed her cheek. Her sobs increased. Her golden hair was down, framing her face; she looked like a child. John tore off the helmet. He was perspiring.

Herb got up, turned on the lights in the room, and the window blanked out, blending with the wall. He didn’t look at John. When he wiped his face, his hand was shaking. He rammed it in his pocket.

“When did you start auditions like that?” John asked, after a few moments of silence.

“Couple of months ago. I told you about it. Hell, we had to, Johnny. That’s the six hundred nineteenth girl we’ve tried out! Six hundred nineteen! All phonies but one! Dead from the neck up. Do you have any idea how long it was taking us to find that out? Hours for each one. Now it’s a matter of minutes.”

John Lewisohn sighed. He knew. He had suggested it, actually, when he had said, “Find a basic anxiety situation for the test.” He hadn’t wanted to know what Herb had come up with.

He said, “Okay, but she’s only a kid. What about her parents, legal rights, all that?”

“We’ll fix it. Don’t worry. What about Anne?”

“She’s called me five times since yesterday. The sharks were too much. She wants to see us, both of us, this afternoon.”

“You’re kidding! I can’t leave here now!”

“Nope. Kidding I’m not. She says no plug-up if we don’t show. She’ll take pills and sleep until we get there.”

“Good Lord! She wouldn’t dare!”

“I’ve booked seats. We take off at twelve-thirty-five. They stared at one another silently for another moment, then Herb shrugged. He was a short man, not heavy but solid. John was over six feet, muscular, with a temper that he knew he had to control. Others suspected that when he did let it go, there would be bodies lying around afterward, but he controlled it.

Once it had been a physical act, an effort of body and will to master that temper; now it was done so automatically that he couldn’t recall occasions when it even threatened to flare anymore.

“Look, Johnny, when we see Anne, let me handle it. Right? I’ll make it short.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Give her an earful. If she’s going to start pulling temperament on me, I’ll slap her down so hard she’ll bounce a week.” He grinned. “She’s had it all her way up to now. She knew there wasn’t a replacement if she got bitchy. Let her try it now. Just let her try.” Herb was pacing back and forth with quick, jerky steps.

John realized with a shock that he hated the stocky, red-faced man. The feeling was new; it was almost as if he could taste the hatred he felt, and the taste was unfamiliar and pleasant.

Herb stopped pacing and stared at him for a moment. “Why’d she call you? Why does she want you down, too? She knows you’re not mixed up with this end of it.”

“She knows I’m a full partner, anyway,” John said.

“Yeah, but that’s not it.” Herb’s face twisted in a grin. “She thinks you’re still hot for her, doesn’t she? She knows you tumbled once, in the beginning, when you were working on her, getting the gimmick working right.” The grin reflected no humor then. “Is she right, Johnny, baby? Is that it?”

“We made a deal,” John said. “You run your end, I run mine. She wants me along because she doesn’t trust you, or believe anything you tell her anymore. She wants a witness.”

“Yeah, Johnny. But you be sure you remember our agreement.” Suddenly Herb laughed. “You know what it was like, Johnny, seeing you and her? Like a flame trying to snuggle up to an icicle.”

At three-thirty they were in Anne’s suite in the Skyline Hotel in Grand Bahama. Herb had a reservation to fly back to New York on the 6 P.M. flight. Anne would not be off until four, so they made themselves comfortable in her rooms and waited. Herb turned her screen on, offered a helmet to John, who shook his head, and they both seated themselves. John watched the screen for several minutes; then he, too, put on a helmet.

Anne was looking at the waves far out at sea where they were long, green, undulating; then she brought her gaze in closer, to the blue-green and quick seas, and finally in to where they stumbled on the sandbars, breaking into foam that looked solid enough to walk on. She was peaceful, swaying with the motion of the boat, the sun hot on her back, the fishing rod heavy in her hands. It was like being an indolent animal at peace with its world, at home in the world, being one with it. After a few seconds she put down the rod and turned, looking at a tall smiling man in swimming trunks. He held out his hand and she took it. They entered the cabin of the boat where drinks were waiting. Her mood of serenity and happiness ended abruptly, to be replaced by shocked disbelief, and a start of fear.

“What the hell… ?” John muttered, adjusting the audio. You seldom needed audio when Anne was on.

“… Captain Brothers had to let them go. After all, they’ve done nothing yet—” the man was saying soberly.

“But why do you think they’ll try to rob me?”

“Who else is here with a million dollars’ worth of jewels?”

John turned it off and said, “You’re a fool! You can’t get away with something like that!”

Herb stood up and crossed to the window wall that was open to the stretch of glistening blue ocean beyond the brilliant white beaches. “You know what every woman wants? To own something worth stealing.” He chuckled, a sound without mirth. “Among other things, that is. They want to be roughed up once or twice, and forced to kneel…. Our new psychologist is pretty good, you know? Hasn’t steered us wrong yet. Anne might kick some, but it’ll go over great.”

“She won’t stand for an actual robbery.” Louder, emphatically, he added, “I won’t stand for that.”

“We can dub it,” Herb said. “That’s all we need, Johnny, plant the idea, and then dub the rest.”

John stared at his back. He wanted to believe that. He needed to believe it. His voice was calm when he said, “It didn’t start like this, Herb. What happened?”

Herb turned then. His face was dark against the glare of light behind him. “Okay, Johnny, it didn’t start like this. Things accelerate, that’s all. You thought of a gimmick, and the way we planned it, it sounded great, but it didn’t last. We gave them the feeling of gambling, or learning to ski, of automobile racing, everything we could dream up, and it wasn’t enough. How many times can you take the first ski jump of your life? After a while you want new thrills, you know? For you it’s been great, hasn’t it? You bought yourself a shiny new lab and closed the door. You bought yourself time and equipment and when things didn’t go right, you could toss it out and start over, and nobody gave a damn. Think of what it’s been like for me, kid! I gotta keep coming up with something new, something that’ll give Anne a jolt and through her all those nice little people who aren’t even alive unless they’re plugged in. You think it’s been easy? Anne was a green kid. For her everything was new and exciting, but it isn’t like that now, boy. You better believe it is not like that now. You know what she told me last month? She’s sick and tired of men. Our little hot-box Annie! Tired of men!”

John crossed to him and pulled him around toward the light. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why, Johnny? What would you have done that I didn’t do? I looked harder for the right guy. What would you do for a new thrill for her? I worked for them, kid. Right from the start you said for me to leave you alone. Okay. I left you alone. You ever read any of the memos I sent? You initialed them, kiddo. Everything that’s been done, we both signed. Don’t give me any of that why didn’t I tell you stuff. It won’t work!” His face was ugly red and a vein bulged in his neck. John wondered if he had high blood pressure, if he would die of a stroke during one of his flash rages.

John left him at the window. He had read the memos. Herb was right; all he had wanted was to be left alone. It had been his idea; after twelve years of work in a laboratory on prototypes he had shown his—gimmick—to Herb Javits. Herb had been one of the biggest producers on television then; now he was the biggest producer in the world.

The gimmick was simple enough. A person fitted with electrodes in his brain could transmit his emotions, which in turn could be broadcast and picked up by the helmets to be felt by the audience. No words or thoughts went out, only basic emotions—fear, love, anger, hatred… That, tied in with a camera showing what the person saw, with a voice dubbed in, and you were the person having the experience, with one important difference—you could turn it off if it got to be too much. The “actor” couldn’t. A simple gimmick. You didn’t really need the camera and the sound track; many users never turned them on at all, but let their own imaginations fill in the emotional broadcast.

The helmets were not sold, only leased or rented after a short, easy fitting session. A year’s lease cost fifty dollars, and there were over thirty-seven million subscribers. Herb had created his own network when the demand for more hours squeezed him out of regular television. From a one-hour weekly show, it had gone to one hour nightly, and now it was on the air eight hours a day live, with another eight hours of taped programming.

What had started out as A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANNE BEAUMONT was now a life in the life of Anne Beaumont, and the audience was insatiable.

ALYX, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said:

“A woman—here?”

“You’re looking at one,” said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone. It occurred to her that she had seen him before—though he was not so fat then, no, not quite so fat—and then it occurred to her that the time of their last meeting had almost certainly been in the hills when she was four or five years old. That was thirty years ago. So she watched him very narrowly as he eased himself into the seat opposite, watched him as he drummed his fingers in a lively tune on the tabletop, and paid him close attention when he tapped one of the marine decorations that hung from the ceiling (a stuffed blowfish, all spikes and parchment, that moved lazily to and fro in a wandering current of air) and made it bob. He smiled, the flesh around his eyes straining into folds.

“I know you,” he said. “A raw country girl fresh from the hills who betrayed an entire religious delegation to the police some ten years ago. You settled down as a picklock. You made a good thing of it. You expanded your profession to include a few more difficult items and you did a few things that turned heads hereabouts. You were not unknown, even then. Then you vanished for a season and reappeared as a fairly rich woman. But that didn’t last, unfortunately.”

“Didn’t have to,” said Alyx.

“Didn’t last,” repeated the fat man imperturbably, with a lazy shake of the head. “No, no, it didn’t last. And now” (he pronounced the “now” with peculiar relish) “you are getting old.”

“Old enough,” said Alyx, amused.

“Old,” said he, “old. Still neat, still tough, still small. But old. You’re thinking of settling down.”

“Not exactly.”

“Children?”

She shrugged, retiring a little into the shadow. The fat man did not appear to notice.

“It’s been done,” she said.

“You may die in childbirth,” said he, “at your age.”

“That, too, has been done.”

She stirred a little, and in a moment a short-handled Southern dagger, the kind carried unobtrusively in sleeves or shoes, appeared with its point buried in the tabletop, vibrating ever so gently.

“It is true,” said she, “that I am growing old. My hair is threaded with white. I am developing a chunky look around the waist that does not exactly please me, though I was never a ballet-girl.” She grinned at him in the semi-darkness. “Another thing,” she said softly, “that I develop with age is a certain lack of patience. If you do not stop making personal remarks and taking up my time—which is valuable—I shall throw you across the room.”

“I would not, if I were you,” he said.

“You could not.”

The fat man began to heave with laughter. He heaved until he choked. Then he said, gasping, “I beg your pardon.” Tears ran down his face.

“Go on,” said Alyx. He leaned across the table, smiling, his fingers mated tip to tip, his eyes little pits of shadow in his face.

“I come to make you rich,” he said.

“You can do more than that,” said she steadily. A quarrel broke out across the room between a soldier and a girl he had picked up for the night; the fat man talked through it, or rather under it, never taking his eyes off her face.

“Ah!” he said, “you remember when you saw me last and you assume that a man who can live thirty years without growing older must have more to give—if he wishes—than a handful of gold coins. You are right. I can make you live long. I can insure your happiness. I can determine the sex of your children. I can cure all diseases. I can even” (and here he lowered his voice) “turn this table, or this building, or this whole city to pure gold, if I wish it.”

“Can anyone do that?” said Alyx, with the faintest whisper of mockery.

“I can,” he said. “Come outside and let us talk. Let me show you a few of the things I can do. I have some business here in the city that I must attend to myself and I need a guide and an assistant. That will be you.”

“If you can turn the city into gold,” said Alyx just as softly, “can you turn gold into a city?”

“Anyone can do that,” he said, laughing; “come along,” so they rose and made their way into the cold outside air—it was a clear night in early spring—and at a corner of the street where the moon shone down on the walls and the pits in the road, they stopped.

“Watch,” said he.

On his outstretched palm was a small black box. He shook it, turning it this way and that, but it remained wholly featureless. Then he held it out to her and, as she took it in her hand, it began to glow until it became like a piece of glass lit up from the inside. There in the middle of it was her man, with his tough, friendly, young-old face and his hair a little gray, like hers. He smiled at her, his lips moving soundlessly. She threw the cube into the air a few times, held it to the side of her face, shook it, and then dropped it on the ground, grinding it under her heel. It remained unhurt.

She picked it up and held it out to him, thinking:

Not metal, very light. And warm. A toy? Wouldn’t break, though. Must be some sort of small machine, though God knows who made it and of what. It follows thoughts! Marvelous. But magic? Bah! Never believed in it before; why now? Besides, this thing is too sensible; magic is elaborate, undependable, useless. I’ll tell him—but then it occurred to her that someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to impress her when a little bit of credit might have done just as well. And this man walked with an almighty confidence through the streets for someone who was unarmed. And those thirty years—so she said very politely:

“It’s magic!”

He chuckled and pocketed the cube.

“You’re a little savage,” he said, “but your examination of it was most logical. I like you. Look! I am an old magician. There is a spirit in that box and there are more spirits under my control than you can possibly imagine. I am like a man living among monkeys. There are things spirits cannot do—or things I choose to do myself, take it any way you will. So I pick one of the monkeys who seems brighter than the rest and train it. I pick you. What do you say?”

“All right,” said Alyx.

“Calm enough!” he chuckled. “Calm enough! Good. What’s your motive?”

“Curiosity,” said Alyx. “It’s a monkeylike trait.” He chuckled again; his flesh choked it and the noise came out in a high, muffled scream.

“And what if I bite you,” said Alyx, “like a monkey?”

“No, little one,” he answered gaily, “you won’t. You may be sure of that.” He held out his hand, still shaking with mirth. In the palm lay a kind of blunt knife which he pointed at one of the whitewashed walls that lined the street. The edges of the wall burst into silent smoke, the whole section trembled and slid, and in an instant it had vanished, vanished as completely as if it had never existed, except for a sullen glow at the raw edges of brick and a pervasive smell of burning. Alyx swallowed.

“It’s quiet, for magic,” she said softly. “Have you ever used it on men?”

“On armies, little one.”

DR. Ain was recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague saw him in an aisle seat while coming back from the toilet. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain’s huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain’s response. If he had not had the flu like everyone else that autumn, he would have turned back to speak with Ain, but he shuffled on to his seat.

The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: a tall, thin, nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line, staring at her; and since he already had his raincoat with him, she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

They both saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O’Hare was late getting underground. Neither of them saw the woman.

The wounded, dying woman.

Nobody recalled him on the flight to New York, but the 2:40 jet carried an Ames on the checklist, which was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten, and tilt again.

The woman was weaker now. She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face that were half-hidden behind her hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great hair which had been so splendid, was drabbed and thinning. He looked to seaward, willing himself to think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast spreading black rug. Somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed his eyes. It was the dead time of afternoon.

He was picked up next while checking in for the BOAC[16] flight to Glasgow. Kennedy-Underground was a boiling stew of people breathing each other’s reek, the air-conditioning unequal to the hot September evening. The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. Save the last Green Mansions[17]—a conservation group was protesting the defoliation and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: Who’s Afraid?[18]

That was when a woman noticed Ain. He was holding a news-sheet and she heard it rattling in his hand. Her family hadn’t caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough, his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain. He was using Instac throat spray, she remembered. She did not think much of Instac; her family used Kleer. While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly thrust his head down and stared in her face, with the spray still floating above him. That made her mad. Such inconsiderateness! She turned her back. She did not recall him talking to any woman, but she perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain’s destination. Moscow!

The clerk recalled that too, with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to split up the tickets. By that time they were sure she was with him.

SHE was alive inside but dead outside, her face a black and dun net of wrinkles, tumors, cracks. She was bald and blind. The tremors that crossed Libra’s face were mere quiverings of corruption. Underneath, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the skin, there were crepitations in darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares that went on for centuries. “O the damned flatulent planet,” Pugh murmured as the dome shook and a boil burst a kilometer to the southwest, spraying silver pus across the sunset. The sun had been setting for the last two days. “I’ll be glad to see a human face.”

“Thanks,” said Martin.

“Yours is human to be sure,” said Pugh, “but I’ve seen it so long I can’t see it.”

Radvid signals cluttered the communicator which Martin was operating, faded, returned as face and voice. The face filled the screen, the nose of an Assyrian king, the eyes of a samurai, skin bronze, eyes the color of iron: young, magnificent. “Is that what human beings look like?” said Pugh with awe. “I’d forgotten.”

“Shut up, Owen, we’re on.”

“Libra Exploratory Mission Base, come in please, this is Passerine launch.”

“Libra here. Beam fixed. Come on down, launch.”

“Expulsion in seven E-seconds. Hold on.” The screen blanked and sparkled.

“Do they all look like that? Martin, you and I are uglier men than I thought.”

“Shut up, Owen….”

For twenty-two minutes Martin followed the landing craft down by signal and then through the cleared dome they saw it, small star in the blood-colored east, sinking. It came down neat and quiet, Libra’s thin atmosphere carrying little sound. Pugh and Martin closed the headpieces of their imsuits, zipped out of the dome airlocks, and ran with soaring strides, Nijinsky and Nureyev,[26] toward the boat. Three equipment modules came floating down at four-minute intervals from each other and hundred-meter intervals east of the boat. “Come on out,” Martin said on his suit radio, “we’re waiting at the door.”

“Come on in, the methane’s fine,” said Pugh.

The hatch opened. The young man they had seen on the screen came out with one athletic twist and leaped down onto the shaky dust and clinkers of Libra. Martin shook his hand, but Pugh was staring at the hatch, from which another young man emerged with the same neat twist and jump, followed by a young woman who emerged with the same neat twist, ornamented by a wriggle, and the jump. They were all tall, with bronze skin, black hair, high-bridged noses, epicanthic fold, the same face. They all had the same face. The fourth was emerging from the hatch with a neat twist and jump. “Martin bach,”[27] said Pugh, “we’ve got a clone.”

“Right,” said one of them, “we’re a tenclone. John Chow’s the name. You’re Lieutenant Martin?”

“I’m Owen Pugh.”

“Alvaro Guillen Martin,” said Martin, formal, bowing slightly. Another girl was out, the same beautiful face; Martin stared at her and his eye rolled like a nervous pony’s. Evidently he had never given any thought to cloning and was suffering technological shock. “Steady,” Pugh said in the Argentine dialect, “it’s only excess twins.” He stood close by Martin’s elbow. He was glad himself of the contact.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.

After two years on a dead planet, and the last half year isolated as a team of two, oneself and one other, after that it’s even harder to meet a stranger, however welcome he may be. You’re out of the habit of difference, you’ve lost the touch; and so the fear revives, the primitive anxiety, the old dread.

The clone, five males and five females, had got done in a couple of minutes what a man might have got done in twenty: greeted Pugh and Martin, had a glance at Libra, unloaded the boat, made ready to go. They went, and the dome filled with them, a hive of golden bees. They hummed and buzzed quietly, filled up all silences, all spaces with a honey-brown swarm of human presence. Martin looked bewildered at the long-limbed girls, and they smiled at him, three at once. Their smile was gentler than that of the boys, but no less radiantly self-possessed.

“Self-possessed,” Owen Pugh murmured to his friend, “that’s it. Think of it, to be oneself ten times over. Nine seconds for every motion, nine ayes on every vote. It would be glorious.” But Martin was asleep. And the John Chows had all gone to sleep at once. The dome was filled with their quiet breathing. They were young, they didn’t snore. Martin sighed and snored, his Hershey-bar-colored face relaxed in the dim afterglow of Libra’s primary, set at last. Pugh had cleared the dome and stars looked in, Sol among them, a great company of lights, a clone of splendors. Pugh slept and dreamed of a one-eyed giant who chased him through the shaking halls of Hell.

Elizabeth Mann Borgese (April 24, 1918–February 8, 2002) was born Elisabeth Mann in Munich, the fifth of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and Katia (Pringsheim) Mann’s six children. Fleeing Nazi Germany with her famous family, she finished her education at the Conservatory of Music in Zurich, where she studied piano and cello, and arrived in the United States in 1938. In 1939, she married literature professor Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, with whom she moved to Chicago and had two children. She became an American citizen in 1941 and made frequent public appearances throughout the 1940s, lecturing on subjects including European politics and “Women and the Future”; toward the end of the decade she became a proponent of world government, joining the Committee to Frame a World Constitution and editing its journal Common Cause. Her husband died in 1952.

While raising her daughters as a single parent, Borgese experimented with SF writing, placing three stories in SF magazines over the course of 1959. Although Borgese was known for her optimism and energy, most of her speculative tales are dark and pessimistic, revolving around near-future worlds whose dangerous scientific and technological arrangements are reflected in damaged human psyches and distorted human bodies. The most significant of these are collected in her 1960 anthology, To Whom It May Concern.

In 1963 Borgese published Ascent of Woman, which argued that sociological trends would eventually “produce superior women, men’s true equals.” Becoming a senior fellow at the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara in 1964, she began to focus on environmental issues facing the world’s oceans and the law of the sea. She organized the 1970 Pacem in Maribus Conference, which led to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; helped to establish the International Ocean Institute at the Royal University of Malta; and published The Drama of the Oceans (1975). She moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1978, taking Canadian citizenship, teaching political science at Dalhousie University, and writing subsequent books on maritime subjects. A global “Ambassador of the Seas,” she received numerous honorary degrees; was ordained a Member of the Order of Canada in 1988; and won Germany’s most prestigious award, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, in 2001. Borgese died in St. Moritz, Switzerland, at eighty-three.

This volume contains twenty-five stories first published in the period 1928 to 1969. The texts of all stories have been taken from their original magazine printings, with the exception of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” the text of which is taken from the first book edition.

Great efforts have been made to locate all owners of copyrighted material. Any owner who has inadvertently been omitted will gladly be acknowledged in future printings.

THE FUTURE IS FEMALE!

Introduction, volume compilation, and back matter copyright © 2018 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Jacket art: Jean Shrimpton, jumpsuit by Loomtogs, DIMAR Construction Co., Route 84, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, January 11, 1965.

Photography by Richard Avedon.

Copyright © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Some of the material in this volume is reprinted with the permission of holders of copyright and publishing rights. Acknowledgments are on page 528.

Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

Published in the United States by Library of America.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935008

ISBN 978–1–59853–580–8

eISBN 978–1–59853–585–3