Zora let them in, of course. How many friends do you have when you live in the Martian arctic? And they were friends, after all, despite their smell (days, weeks, in an environment suit did not improve the cheesy odor their bootliners emitted).

They seemed more like friends because they were young, just kids, like her. In fact they seemed even younger than Zora. None of them had given birth. She remembered the innocent kid she’d been before Marcus, before the contract with the Corps, before Mars. And before the hard hard work of making a place to live in the cold and tenuous atmosphere of a place where she was a pilgrim and a pioneer.

Even if they had been strangers, you don’t turn away travelers through the faded orange desert of Mars. To do so is tantamount to murder.

Yes, it taxed her family’s own systems, because of course she and Marcus had to offer to let them use the deduster and recycle their sanitary packs. Her family’s sparse larder was at their command She had to offer them warm baths and hot drinks, even before their little Sekou had taken his bath. They needed the bath much worse than Sekou did.

Smelly and needy as they were, they were society, animals of her species in a dangerous world of wide, empty skies and lonely silences.

It is said that Martians can take any substance and ferment it into beer, cheese, or a bioweapon. When she and Marcus first came to Mars, she naively believed they would bring their ethnic foods and customs with them. More than that, that they would revive ancient Kiafrikan traditions. They would drink palm wine from a calabash, they would learn to gengineer yams to grow in the artificial substrate that passed for soil on Mars, that they would tell old stories by the dim light of two moons instead of one bright one.

Somehow learning Swahili takes a back burner to scraping together a life out of sand and rock and sky.

What she had not counted on was that all the Kiafrican culture that would ever come to Mars was embedded in hers and Marcus’s two fine-tuned brains, and that even researching their mother culture wasn’t going to be easy over thirty five to a hundred million miles from home, three to thirty light minutes away from the electronic resources of Earth. And when you’re that far from home (or when your home is that far from Earth), your culture consists of the entity that you owe your life to, that controls even the air you breathe, and the few humans you meet, your neighbors several tens of kilometers away, who are kind enough to tell you how to pickle squash blossoms stuffed with onion mush, how to sex cuy, and what to do if the bacteria in your recycler go sour.

Not that there aren’t traditions. One of them is the toy exchange, and thank Mars for that. Zora managed to exchange a perfectly useless sandyfoam playhouse for a funny little “authentic” camera. Somebody had bought a carton of them, along with the silver emulsion film and chemicals they ate, and Sekou, less than three mears old, had been entranced with the flat images he could make of her, Marcus, and everything else inside the hab.

If he had been old enough to wear an environment suit, he probably would have done portraits of the rover.

Marcus couldn’t understand why anybody with enough brains to stay alive on Mars would make such a thing, but it turned out it was a way of getting rid of an unmarketably small amount of silver mined from what the manufacturer had hoped to make a fortune on.

Sekou was beside himself with excitement when the Land Ethic Nomads had turned up. Not only were they new subjects for his photography hobby, they listened to his endless questions about the world outside the hab.

Listened, not answered.

The Land Ethic Nomads had different ideas about Mars than Zora and Marcus, and sometimes Zora worried that little Sekou would absorb them and want to run away with them when he was older. Zora and Marcus Smythe believed that humanity had an imperative to go forth and know the universe. One time Zora had heard a Catholic child reciting something called a catechism: Why did God make me? To know, love and serve him.

But how do you know God? By knowing the universe. And you can only know it by exploring it.

That was why the Smythes were on Mars.

The Land Ethnic Nomads had a different idea. They believed the land, meaning the surface of planets, moons, and asteroids, was sacred. Humans could try to know, to explore, But they must not destroy. If life existed on Mars, if it had ever existed, or had the potential of existing, humankind must not impose its own order over the land.

Land was sacred. All land. Even the surfaces of stars, even the spaces between stars were sacred.

Humans, they said, did not belong on Mars.

If asked why they lived on Mars, most Land Ethic Nomads would shrug and say it was their mission to convince people to go home, back to Earth.

Tango and Desuetuda pretty much left Sekou alone. Hamret liked to play with him, and admired the camera and the toy rover. But this new nomad, Valkiri, sat for long hours reading to the boy, telling him tales.

“The earth is so b beautiful. And she was so sad when her children deserted her to go to the cold, dim sky of Mars. Can you draw a picture of the sad sad Earth? Let me help you. Here’s her eyes, all full of tears.”

Valkiri’s voice faltered. She was aware of Zora standing over her. She turned the slate over and began to draw flowers (flowers!) on the reverse.

“Marcus,” Zora whispered when everybody had retired that night, Sekou asleep on a bed of blankets at the foot of their bed, ostensibly because the nomads needed his room, but more because Zora didn’t trust their guests entirely “Marcus, they were preaching at our son.”

“Let them preach,” Marcus said shortly. “Children know what they see, not what triflers story to them.”

She curled against him, wanting the solace of his taut, warm body. She loved him better than life, angry as he sometimes made her with his silent deep thoughts. She didn’t want to outlive him. She wanted to lose herself in his body, but but she knew Sekou was old enough to notice if his parents made love. She listened a long time to the soft singing in the rooms below. Valkiri making a silky music on a polished drum, Tango’s rough bass, gruff in his Mars-dry throat, Desuetuda’s voice too soft to hear much of the time, soaring in emotion. Sweet the contrast between Tango’s damaged harshness and the sweetness of the two women and the drum. Propaganda songs.

Zora turned to him and put her hand on his chest. “Marcus, why do we have to keep them here? Couldn’t we give them some consumables and tell them to leave?”

“In the morning, Zora. Tomorrow early, I’ll invent some reason to make them leave. Tell them Sekou has an Earth virus, that should shift them out of here.”

She traced the ritual scars on his cheek. “That’s a good plan, baby. Play them for the fools they are.” Though she liked Tango and Desuetuda. It was the new one, Valkiri, she didn’t much care for.

“Is it just playing? Listen to the boy breathe. May have a virus, right enough.”

Zora fell silent. Pleading illness, her mother always said, was inviting the devil to supper. And, having lost Earth, and her family, and so much else, she sometimes wondered if Mars were enough recompense.

Sekou seemed so fragile. Nobody wants to outlive her own child.

She slept poorly and woke early.

But the solar flare subsided in the night, and while the radiation count went down, the nomads bustled around packing. Zora had a chance to talk to Desuetuda, when the two were exchanging hydroponic stimulants recipes they didn’t want to trust to electronic mail. But Desuetuda, almost an old friend, wasn’t the problem. It was Valkiri.

Marcus helped them drag their equipment back to their rover, and when he took his helmet off after returning, Zora could see he was scowling.

“Not much cooperation there,” he said. “I don’t think that new girl, that Valkiri, will last long with the tribe.”

“Where’d she come from?”

“Lunar nomads. Last of her tribe there. Rest gave up, sold themselves to a cheap labor outsourcer on Earth—you can’t live off the land on Luna.” He made a small disapproving sound in his throat. “I wish I could talk to this group’s tribe chief. The rest of the tribe’s rovers went ahead a day. Tango says they hunkered down and rode the storm out with free radical repair drugs.”

“A good way to die young.”

“But painless. Stupid. And the drugs also reduce their use of consumables by about fifteen percent. Anyway, Valkiri jumped all over me. Implied we were child endangering just to have little ones here, on the Pharm. Hoped Sekou would beg us to go back to Earth.”

When visitors leave, there is always cleaning up to do. Environmental parameters on oxygen and water consumption must be recalibrated to the normal settings. The hab must be tidied. Reports of the visit must be logged in and the balance sheets of consumables must be recalculated so that things will last until enough energy is generated by the solar panels and the nuke.

So Zora didn’t notice the anomaly until after fifteen hours.

She had just put on the top segment of her environment suit, ready to recheck the entry airlock, which she always did when there had been visitors, because once Chocko, a nomad from a different tribe, had left so much grit in the airlock that it froze open. When she looked at the detector in the airlock, she almost dropped her helmet.

The radiation warning was going off like gangbusters.

She looked around wildly for Sekou, who was playing quietly in the high pressure greenhouse. Well, not playing so much as trying out an adult role—he was clumsily transplanting a frostflower.

The sensor for this airlock showed a lot of radiation, an alarming level. Cautiously, terrified, she grabbed a handheld sensor and ran to the airlock of the greenhouse where Sekou was humming to himself and getting his hands dirty

. Thank Mars the shrilling of the alarm didn’t crescendo when she moved toward him.

But it didn’t get any softer, either. That meant there was a tremendous beacon of deadly radiation coming from some distance, else moving would make it rise or diminish.

Where, where, where?

Think. If she grabbed Sekou, as was her instinct, she’d have to know where to move him, and quickly. Most likely the cooling system of their nuke, the hab’s power source, had sprung a leak. She’d heard of such things.

But knowing that didn’t help. She closed her eyes to concentrate and, unbidden, an image came to her of a slow trickling of radioactive water seeping into the clean water supply that heated the house.

“Marcus,” she called in a shaky, low voice. Then she gave in to instinct, cycled through the airlock between her and Sekou and scooped him up into her arms.

They had no environment suit for him. He was still growing too fast. But if she couldn’t find the source of the leak, she’d have to get him out of the hab, out into the environment.

Marcus appeared beside her, a sudden angel of rescue. Deliberate and measured movements. Competent. She exhaled a breath of gratitude. as he encircled her and Sekou in his arms.

“It’s coming from all over,” he said, as if he had read her mind. “Hard to know what could cause such a failure.”

“There has to be a safe place in the hab,” she said reasonably.

“Look,” he said, and broadcast his picture of the hab’s health and life systems monitor to her wrist com.

“Sekou—”

Sekou had at first been curious at his mother’s urgency, but now he looked scared. He knew what radiation was; children had to know the dangers of their environment, and knowing the signs of radiation, though it was a rare hazard, was just as much a part of their early training as learning to heed airlock failure alarms.

“It will be fine,” said Marcus, putting his hand on the boy’s head. And to Zora: “I’m looking now at all the sensors in the hab. If there’s a safe place, I can’t find it. I left an evacuation ball in the main entry. Let’s go.”

Sekou didn’t like the evacuation ball. “Mama, please, it hurts.”

“How can the evacuation ball hurt?” She tried not to grit her teeth as she wadded the limp, slick surface around him and tried to force his legs to bend so she could seal it.

“It hurts my stomach when I have to put my knees up like that.”

“It will just have to hurt, then!” She tried to pry his left shoe off, then decided he might need shoes—wherever they ended up.

Marcus intervened. “Take a big breath, my man. Big breath. Hold it. Let it out slow. Now, pull your legs into the ball. See?”

Sekou, half enveloped by the flaccid translucent thing so like an egg, nodded through tears. His puckered little face, trying so hard to be brave, stabbed Zora’s heart. It occurred to her for the hundredth time that Marcus was just better with children than she was. Marcus winked at Sekou as he pressed the airtight closure shut.

The transparent ball, designed for animal use, had two handles so Zora and Marcus carried it between them. If only one person were there to carry, it would have been rolled, not a pleasant process for the person inside.

“Go ahead,” Marcus murmured. “I’ll do the minimum shutdown.”

“Marcus, I can do it. Sekou wants you.”

“Sekou wants both of us. Go, girl. I can do it faster and we’ll all be safer.”

The rover was ready to go, its own nuke always putting out power. She bundled Sekou inside it and fumbled to embrace him through the pliable walls of the ball, finally settling on a clumsy pat on the top of his head.

“Where to go?” Marcus asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t know. The Centime’s pharm is within range, but are they at their winter place?” Zora was shaking from the shock of being jerked out of her comfortable hab and, worst of all, seeing her little boy in fear and pain and danger. She fingertipped their code and got back cold silence, then the Gone Fishing message.

“Strike out for Borealopolis.”

“We need somebody to sponsor us there. Even if we have enough credit to buy consumables, we need somebody to vouch for us.”

“Call Hesperson.” Hesperson sold them small electronics and solar cell tech.

They did so, and explained the radioactivity problem. The image on the screen was wary. Hesperson sighed. “I wish I could tell you what to do. There’s a big decontamination mission near Equatorial City—”

“Our rover would take twenty days to get there! And we would run out of consumables first.”

“Let me get back to you on this.” And Hesperson was gone.

“The Centimes,” Zora said. This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t. It was a crazy nightmare, and soon she’d wake up. “We’ll contact the Centimes at their summer habitat and ask them to let us use their Pharm. They can send us codes to unlock it.”

Krona Centime’s face, on the monitor, looked distracted and her hair was sticking up as if she hadn’t combed it in several days. Maybe something had happened during the Centime’s trip to the southern hemisphere to derange her mind. “Yes! Yes, of course. No, wait, I ought to ask Escudo.” Without waiting for an answer, she logged off.

Marcus was staring at a life-support monitor. Some of the rover’s functions ran much better when the sun was in the sky, and it wasn’t up very much in Winter-March. Zora pressed his hand, a gesture he could barely appreciate through the thickness of their gloves.

Sekou’s voice cut through the silence like a tiny flute. “Those people have a little girl. Could I play with her?”

Zora had forgotten that Sekou had a com with him when she’d scooped him up to evacuate the hab. Now she was glad—it might come in very handy. Especially if they were to become homeless, landless people in a Martian city where they would be forced to scrape or beg for the very oxygen they breathed.

“She won’t be there,” said Marcus, and patted his head through the thick membrane. “But I’ll ask if you can play with some of her toys.” The Centimes were known as spendthrifts and were rumored a vast store of luxury items and gadgets. Zora hoped they were also generous.

Escudo Centime’s dark, strong-jawed face appeared in Zora’s monitor. “Help yourself. I sent a command to the entry airlock to let you in. It should recognize your biometrics.”

And so, in the cramped rover, confined to their environment suits with Sekou in his rescue bubble, they set off.

Centime Pharm was almost invisible, most of it underground, its sharp angles softened by sand settled out of the tenuous atmosphere.

“That’s it, thank heaven,” said Zora.

Marcus said nothing, just drove the rover toward the hab entrance. Zora could read nothing of his expression through his helmet.

Sekou’s voice broke the silence. “When can we go home? I want my Croodelly.”

The Croodelly was a piece of worn-out shirt Zora had fashioned into a stuffed animal of indeterminate species. She wished once more that they had had time to pack.

More time? They had none at all. She was totting up in her head the costs of decontaminated the hab and discarding everything damaged within. Their experiments would have to go; the radiation would start mutations and blight even the most vigorous plants and bacteria.

Marcus, reading her mind, said, “Rehabilitation may be possible.”

“If it isn’t done properly, we’d be in danger. In the end, we’d shorten our lives and our science would be suspect.”

“Or it may be impossible. We can’t know now. Here’s the airlock. Get ready.”

Zora waited for Marcus to approach Centime Pharm’s outer airlock. It was silly to be afraid of an empty hab, but she thought, irrationally, of creatures, runaways, ghosts, inside.

Marcus opened the rover hatch and slid out. He plodded a few paces from the rover, then turned and looked back, his suit dusty under the low autumn sun. He couldn’t have seen her face through her faceplate, but he stood stock still and looked at the two of them, his wife and his son, standing out in the Martian dessert. His voice came through the com. “What are you afraid of, Zora?”

“You feel it, too, don’t you? I keep thinking there are things on Mars—no, people on Mars—who don’t like us. It’s so cold out there, and that hab—it seems haunted.”

Marcus turned back to the hab and plodded on.

Zora said, “I know it’s irrational, but the darkness—we’re so far from New Jersey, aren’t we?”

Marcus spoke softly, still marching toward the dark hab entrance. “This was a decision we made. Can’t unmake it. But for your sake, if I could, I’d change.”

“No, love. We’re here. We wanted this, both of us. However it turns out, we’ll play it as it lays.”

But Sekou, she thought. Sekou is the innocent passenger.

“Mama,” he said. His voice sounded near, even though a thick plastic membrane separated him from her.

“Hush,” she said. “Papa’s trying to get us a place to stay.” Sekou couldn’t see the readouts. They had enough consumables in the rover to get back to their own hab, but what good did that do? If they went back, they’d fry.

Because she was watching the rover readouts, she didn’t notice at first that Marcus had turned and sprinted back toward the rover. Then she heard the shrill alarm relayed through his com.

He pushed through the rover door and sat down facing forward, not looking at her. “Radiation there, too.”

She stared at his helmeted face, in shock. Then she laughed, shakily. “What is this, an epidemic?”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

“Yeah. Our visitors.”

“Might could be Hesperson has something for us,” he said. He accessed the contact, and Hesperson’s assistant answered the call.

“How could this have happened?” asked the assistant “You think your nomad visitors had something to do with it?”

Zora shook her head. “It could be. There was a new woman with them, Valkiri. No last name, of course. She seemed more—fanatical than the rest.”

“New? You know some of these people from before?”

“We trade with them,” said Marcus. “Chocko, the one we know the best, he wasn’t there, but the other three, except for this Valkiri, were—” he hesitated.

“Friends,” Zora said.

Hesperson’s assistant looked glum. “So you could be carrying some nanosaboteur or even a big chunk of something radioactive—”

“No, no, the rover has no signs, except of course for the power plant—”

“There could be a problem with your suit sensors. The radioactive contaminants could be traveling with you.”

“The rover sensors—”

“The software in your suit sensors could have damaged that.” The assistant smiled a phony, nervous smile into the screen. “Why not just go back to your hab and wait. I’m sure if you contact your corp they’ll have some advice for you.”

Zora and Marcus stared at each other. The Corp that owned their contracts was the last entity in the world they wanted to contact right now. The Vivocrypt Corp had paid for four intensive years of education on Earth for each of them, equivalent to doctoral degrees, then financed their journey to Mars and bankrolled the their hab and Pharm.

This was not charity on the part of the Vivocrypt Corp. The microbiology courses they had taken were very specifically oriented to engineering certain useful substances and organisms that could survive only in extreme conditions. The Vivocrypt Corp had very specific uses for these discoveries.

And Zora and Marcus, who had married and started a family with the prospect of living off the Corp, had allowed their science to take some twists and turns that didn’t lead directly to what the Corp wanted. Because the training they had received on Earth had aroused in each of them a fierce, shared delight in science for science’s sake.

The Vivocrypt Corp would not be pleased that the expensive hab and Pharm was no longer of any use as a research and development extension of the Corp.

Zora looked down at Sekou, who was rocking back and forth in the rescue bubble hard enough to bang it against the bulkhead of the rover. His face seemed to be just two big eyes. “We can’t go back,” she whispered.

“Call the Corp.”

The computer avatar that was their usual communication link with the Corp appeared: a young woman dressed in a black suit. She was pretty and imperious. “Your hab is destroyed? Do you have the funds to cover this?” This computer avatar was apparently programmed for heavy irony. The Smythes were so deeply in debt that only a major technological breakthrough would get them in out of the cold again.

Marcus sent a private message to Zora. “Think they know there’s a problem? Their satellite imagers might have seen us carrying the bubble.”

Zora exhaled sharply. “If the corp saw something like that, they’d think we were running, maybe planning to sell out to another corp. We’d be talking to a live human corpgeek, not this avatar.”

Marcus unmuted the com and spoke to the corporation avatar. “We’re in trouble, honcha. We need shelter and atmosphere.”

The avatar smiled brightly. “We suggest you go back to the hab and see what can be salvaged. Of course the Vivocrypt Corp values you highly, but your laboratories contain priceless equipment shipped from Earth orbit.”

“We’ll be fried!” Zora hadn’t expected quite this level of cold-heartedness.

“Corp estimates your life expectancy will be shorted only by about fifteen years, on the average. That’s just a statistical average. One or both of you might sustain no more damage burden than you suffered in the trip to Mars.”

“What about our son? What about our future children?” Marcus was shouting.

The avatar’s smile broadened idiotically. These things were so badly programmed, Zora wanted to scramble the software that ran her. But the avatar was mouthing Corp policy. “No guarantees are made as to reproductive success in Corp hires, as you will find in your contracts. My memory provides me with a vid showing that you were advised of this policy when you originally sold your contracts to Vivocrypt Corp.”

Marcus voice was low and dangerous. “Let us speak to a human corpgeek.”

“Of course,” said the avatar, nodding gravely, like a cartoon character. The image froze for fifteen seconds, then she came alive with renewed joviality. “I have consulted with Bioorganism Resource Assistant Director Debs. She confirms the advice I’ve given you.”

“We want to talk to this Debs geek.”

“One moment, please.” The avatar froze again. Then, “I’m so sorry, Assistant Director Debs is finishing her daily solitaire game and will return your call tomorrow or the next sol. Thanks for calling the Vivocrypt Corporation. May Father Mars and the bright new sol bring you fresh inspiration to serve the Corp.” The image vanished.

Zora fingertipped furiously to link again to the corp, but access was rejected.

“I hate that religious stuff about Father Mars,” she said to Marcus. “Avatars don’t believe in the supernatural, or in having a ‘bright new sol.’”

“Corp doesn’t either. Using spirituality as mind control. As if they need any more control over us.”

“They hope we’ll stop thinking, just go back and work until we die of cancer or radiation burns.” She noticed that Sekou was listening to them on his com. “We gave them our time, our whole lives. They owe us at least shelter.”

Marcus’s tone turned flat and almost brutal. “Machine minds. Machine hate. Use us as if we were the machines. We run down, they dump us.”

To her horror, she realized she was starting to cry. She turned her face so Sekou would not see it.

“Mama, I have to go.”

Startled, she turned her face back to him. “Go where?”

“You know. Go potty.”

“Darling, just wait.”

Marcus seemed to be deliberately holding his helmet so she couldn’t see his expression, but her guess was that it was grim. He said, “I’m calling Hesperson again.”

The assistant answered again this time. “Mister Hesperson said he was working on your problem, trying to come up with some ideas. Meantime, he said to proceed as we discussed before.”

“We have a child with us, Mister—” Zora couldn’t remember the assistant’s name. She stopped, took a deep breath and said, “We have credit, you know. And equity in the Pharm and hab, because it’s held on a lien in our names. Our Corp purchased twenty years of our labor for each of us, and that’s gone to pay for the physical plant. We can borrow against that—”

The assistant held up a hand. “If it were only that, Dr. Smythe. But Mister Hesperson has information from Krona Centime that somehow you’ve contaminated or infected their Pharm and labs.”

“How could they know—?”

Marcus spoke up. “The Centimes must have remotely read the reading on their outermost airlock. But it was hot before we got here.”

“Still, you seem to be carrying something—”

“What crap,” Zora broke in. “This is not an contagious agent. This is a problem with the coolant in our nuclear power plant. I don’t know what the Centimes told you, but we are not ‘carrying something.’”

Marcus said, “Get Hesperson. He will talk to us. He’s no trifling fool to hide behind his bots and hires.”

Hesperson came on. “It’s beginning to look like something happened back there, something to do with those Land Ethic Nomads you entertained overnight.”

“Didn’t want to think that,” said Marcus.

Zora bit her lip. “Not all of them. That Valkiri woman.”

“She may have done something to the nuke at the Centime’s Pharm, as well, Dr. Smythe. You understand the implications of this.”

Zora squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and blinked to clear her mind. “Yes, ombudsman Hesperson. There’s a killer on the loose.”

He grimaced and nodded. “Exactly. And if seems you are not her only victims.”

Marcus said, “Then best shelter us until she’s apprehended.”

Hesperson continued smoothly. “And draw fire here? If this woman follows you into Borealopolis, several thousand lives will be at risk. The entire population of our city would be endangered.” He leaned into the viewscreen. “Let me put a proposition to you, Drs. Smythe. Bring me this woman, give her up to us, and we will allow you shelter. Perhaps I can even persuade the Borealopolis citycorp to reward you somehow.”

Marcus said, “How? How can we stop her.”

Hesperson made a cage of his fingers and looked over it at them “I assume you have the usual homesteader’s aversion to visual monitoring of your hab?”

“We left Earth to avoid that kind of violation. “Zora snapped.

Hesperson’s mouth twitched. “Then let me remind you that you are the only ones who have seen her face.”

Zora felt exhausted. The sols were short this time of year, and the sky had darkened several hours before. Sekou’s whimpers cut her like little blades, and she herself was getting hungry. “My brain is shutting down, Marcus. What can we do? Land Ethic Nomads are many of them unregistered. We don’t know Valkiri’s last name, or even if she was born in a place where she would be given one. Valkiri is probably an alias. We don’t even know the legal names of the tribe members we’ve sheltered and traded with before.”

“We’ve seen her face.”

“Yes, briefly and in bad light.” In respect for the Land Ethic Nomad’s desire to conserve resources, the lights in the hab had been dimmed. Of course, that served Valkiri’s purposes very well. “But we could download face reconstruction software and create a picture. Or—”

“Mama,” said Sekou quite reasonably, “I really have to go now. Can’s we go home now?”

“No, honey.”

“You promised we could go visit Mr. and Mrs. Centime and that little girl. Please, mama. They have a bathroom, don’t they?”

Zora turned to him. “You’ll just have to hold it! This is an emergency, Sekou.”

“Mama, I can’t!”

“Well, then you’ll have to go in your pants. We have more important problems.”

“Mama—”

She turned to Marcus. “We can’t pressurize the rover just to let him urinate. We just can’t.” The rover passenger compartment had no airlock. It took a long time to pressurize and they might have a much greater need later to pressurize, if for example they had to consume water or food. Of course they’d have to find water and food, which they hadn’t had time to pack.

Marcus squatted down in his cumbersome environment suit and looked at Sekou, bent in a cramped ball inside the bubble. “Listen, Sekou. Your daddy and mama understand. We ran into a problem and we’re trying to solve it fast. Now, take a deep breath and tell me if there’s enough air in there.”

Sekou made a great show of inflating his chest as far as was possible while bent double, then blowing out. “I think it’s okay, Daddy.”

“Good. That’s a good boy. Now close your eyes and keep trying the air in there. Breath big deep breaths, that’s right.”

“But if I—?”

“If you have an accident, we can clean it up soon as we get where we’re going. Okay? Are you a big guy?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Oh yes. Big, brave guy. Breathe again, let’s see you puff out those cheeks.”

Sekou breathed in and out again, eyes closed.

Zora felt again the pang of being not very good with kids. When a girl leaves her family at fifteen and the earth itself at nineteen, as Zora had, maybe she doesn’t pick up the knack of being good with kids. “He’ll pee himself if he falls asleep,” she sent on a private channel to Marcus.

Marcus said, “Yeah, and what harm is there in that, considering the ice we’re on?”

That crumbled Zora’s sense of reality, and she began laughing, in a kind of relief at having let go some of the pettier fears of their situation. Then something occurred to her. “We could use the photograph that Sekou took.”

Marcus turned his eyes to her. “Use—”

“To find her. If we have an image, we don’t need to try to recognize her face. We can upload it to Marsnet and let their biometrics identify her.”

“Girl, I thought I married you for your pretty face, but I’ll love you forever for your brain. Wait, though. What if she’s not registered?”

“She won’t be, probably. But Earth shares biometric data with Marsnet.”

“Still won’t tell us where she is on Mars. I like the idea—”

“Even Land Ethic Nomads can’t stay out in the sky forever. Send out biometrics, including the photo itself, and tell Pharmholders to check when travelers seek shelter.”

“Yes, yes, Daddy, Mama, we can go home then?” Sekou was not asleep, it seemed.

“Yes, little habling, yes, but close your eyes and go to sleep like Daddy said.”

“Okay. But I have to go so bad!”

Marcus patted the top of the bubble with his gloved hand. “Remember what I said, now. Close your eyes. Mama and Daddy have to talk some.”

Zora said, “There’s one problem. I have no idea where that photo plate is.”

“Ask Sekou.”

Sekou heard his name and was instantly awake, sensing some how that he could be part of the solution to the family crisis. “Mommy! Mommy! It’s in my bedroom. I tried to show you when you read my story to me, only you made me go to sleep.”

Zora felt a shudder of fear and hope. She knew Marcus would volunteer to go back into the hab and retrieve the camera and the photo plate. She knew it was dangerous, but she made an instant calculation: life without Marcus would be hell, and life on Mars without Marcus would be worse than hell.

Marcus had already turned the rover around. She bit her lip. She was going to insist on being the one to go into that hot hab. But she wouldn’t make her bid until the last possible minute. She’d surprise him, force him into letting her do it before he could think. The entire ride was silent. Maybe Marcus was making the same calculations.

As they neared the hab, Sekou’s tired little voice piped up. “Can we go back in now?”

“No! Stop asking! Mommy and Daddy are just trying to protect you,” Zora snapped.

Marcus said, “Sekou, my big smart man, you remember about the radiation sensors? You know what bad rays do?”

“Yeah, Dad. I just hoped maybe they went away.”

“Not yet, son. We may have to move to a new hab.”

“Can I take my toys there?”

“You’ll get new ones.”

“But you’ll get my camera?”

“Yes, but I’ll tell you straight up, we have to keep it.”

Zora had been wondering why Sekou no longer clamored for a bathroom, but a glance at his overalls revealed a dark stain on the front. Sekou, noticing her glance, said. “It kind of smells bad, and it’s all cold and wet.”

Zora murmured, “Sorry, baby.” And then, trying to think what Marcus would say, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Marcus stopped the rover about thirty meters from the hab entrance. He untoggled the rover door and began to open it.

“Marcus,” she said.

“Don’t, Zora. You can’t do this.”

She had thought very carefully about it. “You’re stronger, I know. But that’s exactly why I should go in and find the camera. If something happened to me while I was in there, you would be better able to care for and defend Sekou than I would be.”

“Zora, suppose you’re pregnant.”

“I’m not. I’m having a period. It just started.” This was not strictly true, but Zora felt like her period was about to start, and anyway, she used a colored-light cycle regulator had never failed her, both in conceiving Sekou and in preventing subsequent conceptions.

“Zora,” he said tiredly, “you playing me?”

She felt a flush of outrage. “You want me to take off my environment suit and show you the blood on my underpants?” Even though actually, come to think of it, she was playing him.

What could she do? If Marcus died, if he got sick and died, her life on Mars without a mate was too horrible to envision—she’d be meteor sploosh, she’d be forced to sell herself, she’d be dead. Mother and child, she and Sekou, would be like naked bacteria in the harsh UV sky of Mars. But it was even worse than that. Without Marcus, she wouldn’t want to go on living. Not even for Sekou. It would be better to venture everything, live or die now, than die slowly as the widow of Dr. Marcus Smythe.

“Let me do it, Marcus.” She heard the pleading in her voice, and the sharp knife of desperation under her groveling.

“Zora—”

“Oh, never mind! You always want to charge ahead, the big bull rover, like some stupid big male animal from Earth.”

Even through the helmet she could see him wince.

She realized just then that they hadn’t turned their coms to private channel, and that Sekou was listening intently.

Marcus said, “How you doing, big guy?”

“Okay,” said Sekou very softly. Then, louder, “It’s wet and icky and smelly in here. How long before we go home?”

Zora closed her eyes and thanked whatever gods controlled their fate that Sekou was in a bubble, because she was very close to hitting him. “We aren’t going—”

Marcus swiftly and seamlessly interrupted her. “Sekou, here’s a trick for getting over the bad parts. Make up good thoughts. Like, if you wanted to invent a toy, what would it be?”

“A camera to take smells and tastes,” said Sekou promptly.

“Those pictures you took, those were good,” Marcus continued. “Maybe help us get a new home. Your Daddy’s going to get the camera.”

“Can I take more pictures then?”

Zora focussed on the back of Marcus’s suit. “When did you tear your suit?” she asked.

Marcus wheeled around and looked at her. “Playing me, girl? My indicators say the suit’s fine.”

“It’s not torn through,” she said reasonably. “But it has a weak spot. That’s bad, baby.”

“Slap some tape on it.”

She rummaged the storage compartment and got out the tape. “I can’t handle this in my gloves,” she said.

He was quiet. “Have to pressurize the rover cabin then, to mend it. That what you want? Mend it.”

She tried not to smile. The nearly invisible spot she had seen on his suit was not likely to cause problems. “You can’t go out into the hab in a weakened suit.”

Marcus stared at her. “What kind of jive is that, Zora?”

“No, Marcus, no! Sekou, tell Daddy he’s got a little tear in his suit.”

Sekou tried to crane his neck, but of course he couldn’t see anything.

“Girl, I know you’re playing me. I know this.”

She threw the tape at his feet. “Be a fool, then. Get us all killed.”

“You’re counting that I can’t take the chance.” He stooped slowly and picked up the tape.

Zora continued, as if she had just thought of it. “You can pressurize the cabin and fix your suit. But it’ll take awhile to pressurize. A half hour at least. I’ll go get the camera with the photo while you the atmosphere builds up.”

“When you come back, we’ll lose all that good atmosphere again.”

She looked at him blandly. “It can’t be helped. You can take the opportunity to get Sekou out and cleaned up. We have no clean clothes for him, but ten minutes over the heater will at least dry his britches.”

Marcus stared back unsmiling. “You’re a jive fool, girl. You get serious radiation sick, I’ll kill you.”

“You saying don’t go?”

He stared longer. Then, “Go.”

Zora didn’t look back at the rover as she loped awkwardly in her environment suit to the front airlock of the hab. Once inside, she felt a sense of unreality, her family home having turned alien. Odd to fumble to open the door to Sekou’s tiny room, not to feel the softness of his blanket through her thick glove. Everything was changed, charmed, deadly.

Her com still connected her to her child and her husband back in the rover. “Sekou,” she asked, matter of fact. “Tell Mama where the camera is.”

Sleepy, Sekou’s voice came back, “Under the bed.”

Environment suits aren’t built for crawling on hands and knees. Under the bed Sekou had stowed all sorts of things, pitiful toys made of household scraps and discards. A whole fleet of rovers made of low quality Mars ceramics with wobbly wheels that only a child would consider round. A doll she had made of scraps of cloth, and upon which he had put a helmet made of a discarded jar.

And way back toward the wall, where her clumsy fat-fingered glove could scarcely reach, the camera.

“The picture is still in the camera, Sekou?”

“Yes, Mama.”

She felt a flash of fury for not having paid more attention to her own child’s plaything. “How do you get the pictures out?”

“You have to develop them.”

“Say what?”

Marcus broke in. “It’s a chemical process. The film emulsion is sensitive to light, you apply chemicals to fix it. You unload the film into the chemical bath in the dark.”

Sekou had done this by himself? Mars god almighty, her boy was going to be something fine as a grown man. “Why can’t we just give the camera to Hesperson? And why can’t we do the developing in the rover?”

“It needs water, if I understand correctly. And I’m not sure Hesperson has the chemicals.”

Sekou’s voice broke in, excited. “They’re already all mixed up. Look behind the sanitizer. And Mama, it has to be way dark or you’ll spoil them. Take them in the bathroom.”

Marcus added, “It’s nineteenth century technology, Zora. Just do as the boy says.”

“Nineteenth century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not how to work a nineteenth century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.

“Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.

Thirty minutes later, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient band width? And how could anybody be recognizable?”

“I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”

She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.

Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough REMs to light up Valles Marineris.”

Marcus was back in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.

“My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.

“Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”

Sekou didn’t even ask to see the picture. “Those guys that stayed in my room,” he said, “they did something bad, didn’t they?” Through the haze of the bubble’s surface, she could see betrayal written on his pinched face.

“I’m sorry, Sekou. I think it was just the new girl, the one with the frizzy blonde hair. But we can’t trust them any more.”

She had stopped trusting her conviction that she wasn’t pregnant, too. She’d have to find a machine and test herself the minute they were safely inside the city.

Hesperson greeted them inside the city’s outer airlock. His assistant took the image “We’ll run a biometric search on this, right away.”

“And you’ll take us in,” Marcus asked. “We need consumables. Can’t live like Land Ethic Nomads, running from hab to hab, on charity.”

Hesperson smiled warily, “The city management of Boreaolopolis can offer you a nice cubicle, plus free air, water, food, and utilities for up to a year.

“Marcus,” Zora said, “We’ll have to contact Vivocrypt corp about renegotiating our contracts.”

Marcus looked grim. “They’ll want another ten mears of work, no lie.”

Hesperson took them to a cramped, body-smelling holding area where they could unsuit while he arranged for temporary quarters. Zora wanted some hot tea, but she had to find out something first. She slipped away and found a cheap medical test machine in a dark corridor. It looked battered and she wondered if the lancet that nicked her skin was even sterile. Bu in two minutes, it told her what she wanted to know—or didn’t want to know. She was pregnant.

She stood in the corridor in the dimness for endless minutes. How long had she been in the radioactive hab? Her suit com would have the information, but she didn’t want to know, really.

What difference would it make now?

She willed herself to walk back to the holding area.

Should she tell Marcus she had lied? Or should she quietly go and abort the fetus? She had lied about the rip in his suit, he had forgiven her that lie. But could she compound the lie, saying she was sure she wasn’t pregnant, a further betrayal?

Her mind was a welter of horror and confused thinking.

“—and you can run routine quality tests on our water treatment until we find you work more suited to your backgrounds,” the assistant was saying. “Any questions?”

Sekou looked up at her and whispered “Can I ask how long before we can go back, Mama?”

And all the stars help her, she had all she could do not to slap him.

Hesperson hustled back in, smiling. “Then there’s a break in the search for Valkiri. The image your little boy recorded with matches the face of a Land Ethic radical who had jumped contract from Equatorial City two years ago. Her name was Estelle Query. She was a nuclear engineer in charge of developing ways to maximize heat production in large urban nukes.”

“Figures,” said Marcus.

“What a smart little boy you have here,” said Hesperson. “Somebody will pay big franks for his contract someday.”

Zora was already feeling horrible guilt over nearly losing her temper with Sekou. This just made her want to cry.

“Would you like a nice clean pair of pants?” the assistant asked Sekou. He nodded eagerly and cast an only slightly worried look at Zora and Marcus as she led him out to get cleaned up. Zora buried her face in her hands.

Marcus pulled her hands away and searched her face, perplexed. “Girl, we’re vindicated. They can’t say it was our fault any more. This Valkiri-Estelle bee has as much as admitted she did it.”

“But we can’t go home, Marcus. And Sekou deserves better than a cubicle two meters square with only minimal utilities.”

“Would be good if we could sue her, or her former corp. But there’s no hope there.” He pulled her to him and stroked her shoulders. “Girl, there’s something worse wrong than that. Call it my hoodoo sense, but you’re grieving a bigger grief than our happy ex-home.”

She sobbed for several minutes into his shirt, then pulled away and said, “I lied, Marcus. I am pregnant, and I’ve stupidly murdered our baby. It can’t live after the dose of radiation I took. It might spontaneously abort, but we can’t take the chance. A damaged infant on Mars—the corp will take it away and kill it.”

He grabbed her shoulders and looked hard in her face. Then he shook his head sadly and hugged her close. “Zora, girl, don’t blame yourself. I should have known. Truth be told, I did know there was no rip in my suit. I just thought you wanted to be the big woman. I thought I’d let you have your pride, be the heroine. But you were storying—I knew that.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. She sobbed some more, then said, “You’re so damned intuitive. Did you know I was pregnant, too?”

His embrace loosened, and she saw his sadness. “Truth be told, I think I did. Something in your eyes. Your skin glowed like it did before, when you were big with Sekou. But I told myself, you’re tripping, Marcus man. Didn’t want to think it, straight up.” His voice sank to almost inaudible. “Didn’t want to think you’d lie to me about that.”

After awhile, she said, “And can you forgive me?”

He let go of her and leaned against the cold marscrete wall “Forgive you, forgive myself for not being the man and telling you right out not to play me.”

She could scarcely make her voice loud enough to hear. “Where do we go from here?”

He shrugged. “The medical for the abortion is cheap. Medbots are clean and fast. And as far as surviving here, what we’ve got in our brains is enough to sell to some corp.”

“Sekou,” she said. “They’ll put him in a group school her. But he needs to go back to the on-line school. More than that, he needs a real home.”

“Sekou needs to hear the truth, which is that he’s a smart kid, and strong, despite his minor ills, and he’ll sell high to some corp that likes his brain as much as Vivocrypt liked yours and mine. Now I’m going to find that sorry assistant and ask what we have to do to get a meal around here.” Marcus pushed the door further open. “Whoa. Look who’s here, in all new clothes.”

“Mama, you think I’m smart, too?”

It was Sekou, wearing a jumpuit that had probably been blue when it was new. At least it was clean. The assistant had apparently brought him back and left.

Marcus rubbed the top of Sekou’s head, then continued down the corridor.

Zora bent over and hugged Sekou. She ran over in her mind what they had been saying. How long had the child been standing there listening? She turned from Marcus and hoisted him up into her arms—a heavy bundle though he was a skinny kid. “Mama thinks you’re way too smart for your britches. Where did that jumpsuit come from?”

“I dunno.” He opened his hand, revealing a bright twist of paper, “They gave me a candy. Can I eat it?”

“No! Bad for you!” She resisted the idea that candy might become part of the Smythe family diet now that they were going to live in Borealopolis. It would be hard to adjust to prepared foods from the refectory after having lived primarily for years on cuy and chicken and stuff from their own greenhouses.

He looked at the candy fondly, then put it in Zora’s outstretched hand. “Mama, what does ‘big’ mean?”

“What? It means not small. What are you talking about?”

“I thought it meant like when some lady is going to have a baby.”

Oh no. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I thought maybe you might have a baby in there.” He patted her tummy shyly.

“No.” Her stomach twisted. “No baby.”

Sekou dug in the pocket of the jumpsuit and brought out a tiny action figure, a boy in an environment suit. “But Daddy said—”

“You shouldn’t be listening when Daddy and Mama are talking privately.” But would there be any privacy once they had settled in to Borealopolis? Even the best paid city hires lived in quarters not much bigger than the passenger compartment of their rover. Speaking of which, they would probably have to sell the rover. What use do city people have for such a thing?

“Sorry.” His voice was very soft.

She had some credit, and she noticed the holding area had a tea dispenser. “Would you like some mint tea? I think they can put sweetener in it.”

She figured she had lied to Marcus, it would be a bad thing to lie to Sekou, young though he was.

When they had gotten their tea, which did indeed come with sweetener, she sat opposite Sekou on the little bench and then, in a rush of affection, moved over and grabbed him in a hug.

“Mama was going to have a baby, but something bad happened. You know about radiation, about the accident.”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking. I wanted to ask you something.”

She had been poised with a careful explanation, but Sekou’s question threw her. “About what?”

“About my camera.”

“The camera.” She was momentarily at a loss, and then, before he opened his mouth, all in a rush, she guessed what he was about to say.

“Mama, the camera works because light turns the chemical into something different, so it looks black after you develop it.”

She dropped her hands and stared at him.

“Mama, radiation comes in different kinds. Light is one kind. But the radiation from our nuke, that would turn the chemical all black too.”

She began to giggle.

“Mama, the picture took. So there wasn’t any radiation.”

Zora’s giggles shook her body until, if the fetus was developed enough to be aware, it would have gotten the giggles too. She fingertipped on her com and called Marcus.

How had Valkiri done it? How had she ruined every sensor and monitor in the whole hab and pharm?

They never found Valkiri, of course. But when they went back to the Pharm—cautiously, of course, because who trusts the reasoning of a child?—they found Valkiri—they couldn’t believe the other two had abetted her—had dusted the surfaces of every sensor, including the one in Marcus’s environment suit, but not her own, with Thorium 230 powder It had been imported from earth for some early experiments in plant metabolism. It was diabolic.

It cost a lot of credit to have everything checked out. Several other habs that had been contaminated made vague threats about suing the Smythes for not notifying them, as if they could have known any earlier what happened. But the fact that Sekou (Sekou!) had solved the mystery and pushed back the specter of death made the other Pharmholders back down.

Ultimately, Zora and Marcus didn’t trust the work of the decon crew. They had to do their own investigation. Nothing else would convince them it was okay. The sensors had to be replaced, and that wasn’t cheap. But they had a home. They had a place for Sekou to play, and grow.

Sekou didn’t get his camera back from the municipality of Borealopolis, but Marcus traded a packet of new freeze-resistant seeds for an antique chemistry set, and that seemed to satisfy the boy.

Why had Valkiri been willing to make her victims homeless but not actually murder them? Zora never figured it out. Marcus said it was because she was afraid that if she had really breached the nuke, their home corp would have charged her with murder. Or maybe she was afraid she herself would be in danger if she sabotaged the nuke.

Or maybe she had some ethics, said Marcus. He always said things like that. Seeing both sides. Zora found it exasperating. Ultimately, though, it made him lovable.

The baby, a girl, was pretty and small, always quite small, for her age, but with big eyes favoring Zora’s and a sly smile favoring Marcus’s. Zora treasures a digital image of the two children, boy and girl, taken soon after the birth.

But Marcus prefers the quite deft drawing Sekou did of the family, though of course, as the artist, he put himself in the picture wielding a camera that by that time rusted in a crime lab in Borealopolis.

“The trouble with adventure,” said Robeson feelingly, “is that it isn’t what it’s made out to be.”

“Is anything?” Smyth, he insisted on being different, stared wistfully at the globular fruits suspended in the branches of the tree beneath which they rested.

“No,” admitted Robeson. “And there you have the whole trouble with civilization. Adventure is a snare, a delusion, a tarnished bauble, a lying promise of freedom. Strangled in the economic rat-race of his own world, a man sells up, buys a ticket to some distant place, and ventures on the sea of space in search of the road to adventure.” He was raising his metaphors but didn’t let it worry him. “And then what happens? He finds himself worse off than before, caught in a vicious trap baited by his own necessity. Adventure! I’m sick of it!”

“I’m hungry,” said Smyth.

“So am I,” said Robeson. Together, they stared at the succulent fruits hanging just above their heads.

They didn’t eat them, of course; they knew better. It wasn’t morals that stopped them from reaching up and helping themselves. They had long since discarded such troublesome concepts as to the sanctity of other people’s property. They didn’t eat the fruits for the simple reason that, if they did, they would die in a most unpleasant and distressing manner.

“The Tortures of Tantalus had nothing on this place.” With difficulty Robeson looked away from the fruits. “I can think of few things worse than for a starving man to be stranded on Mirab IV.”

“Or Sirus II.”

“Or Vega VIII.”

“Or on Lochis, Mephisto, Wendis or Thrombo.” Smyth rolled the words as if uttering a curse. “Or, in fact, on most planets of this triple-blasted universe.”

Robeson nodded, too despondent to do anything else. The universe was huge, filled with planets and swarming with the Hy-Drive ships of a score of races. Most of the planets had the right gravitation, the right atmosphere and the right temperature for Terrestrial life. But for every thousand planets on which men could live without protection only one had the essential ingredient for colonization. Only one in a thousand could grow edible food.

It was the minerals which did it, that, and the subtle variations in the radiation received from the sun. Earth-like plants grew in profusion, but the apples were poisoned with selenium, the lettuces loaded with arsenic, the corn contained copper or some other mineral in the right proportions for the adapted plant but the wrong proportions for human metabolism.

On such worlds men grew their own food in shielded hydroponic installations or starved.

The factor in charge of the food plant on Mirab IV was a dour, sandy-haired man who was firm in the belief that hard work was the destiny of the human race. Especially such members of it as Robeson and Smyth. He glared at the two men: Robeson, once plump and well rounded, looking a little like a partly deflated balloon; Smyth, always a small man, resembling a wizened gnome.

“So you’re hungry, are you?”

McKief felt a sense of his own power. He crushed it. “Well?”

“You’re supposed to provide food for any Terrestrial requiring it,” said Robeson, the self-elected spokesman. “We require it.”

“I’m supposed to sell food to any Terrestrial requiring it,” corrected McKief. “This isn’t a charity station.” He looked hopeful. “Can you pay?”

“No.” Robeson was firm. “We spent all our money in that hash-house you run. Now they won’t feed us any more.”

“Spent all your money, have you?” McKief rocked gently back on his heels. “Waiting for a ship, I suppose, to carry you to some other world.” He shook his head. “Well, well.”

“It isn’t well,” snapped Robeson. “We’re starving.”

“Then you’ll be wanting a job.” McKief couldn’t ever appear genial, but he was doing his best. Labor, on such backwoods planets as Mirab IV was scarce, and even such a pair of misfits as these two would be valuable. He pretended to consider, stroking his lantern jaw. “Let me see, now. Maybe I could use a couple of tank cleaners. Five-year contract at a credit a day plus keep.” He pulled a couple of printed forms from his pocket. “Just sign and thumbprint these and you can start at once.”

“No.” Robeson had no intention of signing away the next five years of his life. “We’re a couple of distressed spacemen,” he claimed. “You’ve got to feed us.”

“Got your papers?” McKief didn’t wait for an answer. “I know you haven’t. You were kicked off the last Terrestrial ship to land here. You’re a pair of drifters, no-good space tramps dodging your responsibilities and shaming the entire human race before the aliens with your shiftlessness. You won’t get any free help from me.” He altered his tactics. “Just sign and everything will be all right. There’s chicken for supper, with fresh green peas and mashed potatoes, with apple pie to follow. And coffee, real coffee, with real sugar and cream. For breakfast, there’s…”

“No,” said Robeson hastily. Smyth, he could tell, was weakening.

“Have it your way,” snapped McKief. “A meal will cost you a credit. Basic menu: a plate of yeast and a hunk of soy-flour bread. Take it or leave it.”

“We can’t take it,” said Robeson. “We haven’t any money. But we aren’t going to sign any contract, either. Under the Regs we’re allowed to work off the cost of our food.”

“So you’re a space lawyer, are you?” McKief looked disgusted. “I might have known it. All right, as you’re so smart, you can report to the tank super. You’ll get a meal for a fair day’s work. Now get moving, the sight of you makes me ashamed of my race.”

Smyth didn’t move. “Please,” he said weakly. “Couldn’t we eat first?”

“You work, and then you eat.” McKief was firm. “Of course, if you’d like to change your mind and sign the contract…”

Robeson led his partner away before he could yield to temptation.

“That McKief,” said Robeson thoughtfully, “is a louse.” He prodded at the unsavory chunk of yeast swimming in a watery pool of its own natural juices, which lay on a tin plate before him. “A first-class louse,” he amended. “The king of them all.”

“Don’t you want that?” Smyth swallowed his last crumb of soy-flour bread and reached towards his partner’s neglected meal.

“Of course I don’t want it.” Robeson snatched away his plate. “But I need it. I owe it to myself to look after my health.” He chewed distastefully on the unappetizing mass. “You know, I’ve the conviction that if I were to collapse while at my arduous duties I’d recover to find a roast chicken before me—and my thumbprint on that contract.” He took another bite. “And then we’d never get away from this place.”

Smyth shuddered at the prospect. For ten days, now, the two had worked like robots cleaning the great hydroponic tanks of dying and odorous vegetable matter. The tank super, a contract man himself, had no time or patience to spare for any who refused to share his misery. So he piled on the work and made them sweat out the food he grudgingly gave them at the end of the day.

“You know,” said Smyth wistfully, “we could afford at least one decent meal.”

“We daren’t,” said Robeson. “Once we taste good food again we’ll be lost. We need every cent of that money to beg, buy or bribe a passage on the first ship leaving here for a Class X world. Class X,” he repeated wonderingly. “Food growing everywhere. Orchards, truck gardens, chicken coops, the works and every last bit of it fit to eat.” He sighed and scraped up the last of his yeast. “Besides, if McKief guesses that we’ve got money he’ll make us buy food until we’re broke. Then he’ll have us where he wants us.”

“Chicken,” said Smyth dreamily. “Green peas, mashed potatoes.” He licked his lips.

“Five years of sweating for the sake of your stomach,” reminded Robeson.

“At a credit a day,” pointed out Smyth.

“Man?” said Robeson sternly, “is not made for bread alone. There are other things. Could you go five years without a drink? You couldn’t, and as soon as you taste it you’ll want more and more. You’ll even start smoking again. You’ll wind up a slave to expensive vices and spend your money as fast as you get it.” He picked at his teeth. “At the end of the contract time you’ll be flat broke and have to sign up for another five years.”

“But I’ll eat,” said Smyth. “The way things are I’m no better off.”

“We’ve got money,” reminded Robeson. “I’ve got fifty-three credits and you’ve got forty-nine. While we hang onto that we’ve got economic independence. With any sort of luck at all it will pay our passage to a Class X world. Then you can eat until you burst.”

“So you keep telling me.” Smyth was hungry and irritable. “But when?”

The tank super came roaring in just then, and saved Robeson from what could have been an argument.

“Overtime,” he ordered. “A ship’s due in tomorrow and McKief wants the supplies all ready for loading. You can start humping right away.” He stormed out again, yelling to others. Robeson stared at Smyth.

You heard that? A Terrestrial ship’s due in tomorrow. Brother, this is it!”

Smyth rubbed his stomach in anticipation.

The plan was simple, masterly, logical, and contained a touch of elementary genius. The only thing wrong with it was that it didn’t work. Robeson stared sourly at McKief, then climbed, with what dignity he could muster, from the bag of flour. The white powder didn’t improve his appearance.

“I suppose,” he said bitterly, “you think you’re smart.”

“Smart enough not to let these good people load up a couple of stowaways,” snapped the factor. He stood back as Robeson dusted himself down. Smyth, looking more harassed than ever, stared wistfully at the soaring bulk of the Terrestrial Hy-Drive ship. A grinning quartermaster supervised the loading of supplies while a couple of Rigelians looked on. The Rigelians had arrived at the same time as the Terrestrials and their ship was unloading supplies for the Rigelian station.

“I suspected what was going on when I checked the sacks.” McKief believed in rubbing it in. “You knew that the quartermaster wouldn’t argue about two bags extra on the manifest.” He glowered at the unhappy pair. “Do I have to remind you of the penalties for stowing away?”

“Shut up,” said Robeson. He knew the penalties, but he also knew that a little money to the right person would have closed the right eyes. Hy-Drive ships were fast and it would have been simple to remain under cover for the few days necessary to reach another world. He walked up to an officer. “Where are you bound, sir?”

“Klargush then on to Perlon.”

“Perlon’s Class X, isn’t it?”

Robeson looked hopeful. “Could you use a couple of good men? I can cook and Smyth makes a good steward.”

“No.” The officer didn’t like would-be stowaways and didn’t bother to hide the fact.

“How much would passage cost then? For the two of us?”

“Two hundred and fifty each, basic rations provided.”

“We can raise a hundred. How about taking it, signing us on as crew and forgetting to book the passage?” Robeson winked. “We won’t complain.”

“Not a chance.” The officer glanced at McKief. “Sorry, fully-paid passage only on this ship.” He walked away to confer with the factor. Robeson glared after him.

“If there’s one thing I hate more than another,” he said feelingly, “it’s an honest man. Look at him! Turning down the chance of an easy hundred just for the sake of a principle.”

“He’s scared of McKief,” said Smyth. “Maybe we’d better sign that contract now? That officer’s telling McKief we’ve got money. If we volunteer to sign maybe he’ll let us keep it.”

“Not McKief,” said Robeson positively. “The man’s a sadist; he’ll make us spend it first. Anyway, it’s a matter of personal pride. I refuse to be beaten by a louse like McKief.”

Smyth didn’t say anything; he was too busy listening to the rumblings from his empty stomach.

“I don’t like it,” said Smyth. “I don’t like it at all.”

“So you don’t like it.” Robcson was impatient. “Now tell me what else we can do?”

It was two days later and Robeson’s prediction had proved correct. McKief had gently shaken his head when they had reported for work, pointing out that they weren’t really distressed, as they had money, and regretting that he couldn’t accommodate them under the Regs. On the other hand, if they were to sign the; five-year contract, they could live like kings. Robeson had dragged his partner away when the factor had casually started talking about the menu.

“I’ve fixed everything,” he said. “The Rigelians will sell passage to one man for one hundred credits. We’ve got that. Naturally, as it’s an alien ship, I’ll have to provide my own food. That’s where you come in.”

“I don’t like it,” repeated Smyth. “Why can’t I have the passage?”

Robeson sighed as he stared at his partner. At times Smyth appeared really dumb. The commissary problems were such that no one ship could provide food for any and all races who might want passage; So food was provided only for the members of the race operating the ship. Others were given a cubicle and water, and left to provide their own food. It was a system that worked perfectly. It would work now if Smyth would reasonable.

“I’m the biggest,” pointed out Robeson. “Also I’ve put in the most cash. But I don’t see what you’ve got to worry about. The trip is scheduled to last three days and we can last that long. All I have to do is carry you into the ship and claim that you’re my provisions. Simple.”

“Maybe.” Smyth still wasn’t happy. “But why me?”

“Could you carry me?” Robeson snorted and shook out a sack he had found at the hydroponic station. “Come on now, no more arguing. With any sort of luck at all we’ll be on our way within the hour.”

The Rigelian on duty at the airlock stared curiously at Robeson as he came puffing up the ramp, a sack slung over his shoulder.

“Paid passenger to Perlon,” he gasped, extending his ticket. The Rigelian examined it, found it in order and uttered the customary warning.

“Passage only sold liable to alteration on route.” His translator clicked and hummed. “You have provided yourself with supplies?”

“I have.” Robeson opened the sack. “You want to see?”

The Rigelian leaned forward, two of his eyes extending themselves as he peered into the sack. Smyth, his skin blackened with charcoal, his hair clipped and his hands bound, glared up at the alien. Robeson swallowed, hoping that the deception would work.

It did. The eating habits of other races were varied and strange. The Rigelians themselves ate mineral salts, the Vegans a mass of quivering, opalescent jelly. The guard saw nothing strange in a live, animal-form being used as food. The disguise was sufficient to make Smyth, to a Rigelian, utterly different from a normal Terrestrial. Also he fell into the essential weight-restriction that no food supply could be greater than the body-weight of the passenger.

“You may enter,” hummed the translator. “Take-off within the hour.”

Safe inside the cubicle, Robeson released his partner and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. Talking was out; a man doesn’t hold discussions with his food, but both gave a sigh of relief as the ship lifted and the familiar twisting sensation told of the operation of the Hy-Drive.

“Three days,” whispered Robeson. “Then we eat.”

“Just enough time to work up a really sharp appetite,” agreed Smyth, also in a whisper. He fell silent as the door slid open. A Rigelian entered the room.

“We regret to inform you,” clicked the translator, “of a change in schedule. We have been re-routed to Lundis, a journey of twenty days. I trust that your food supply will be sufficient.”

Nobody would ordinarily have thought of Mr. Grebb and Professor Muntz in the same breath, so to speak, yet their careers impinged upon each other remarkably. Mr. Grebb was a large, coarse person, with large coarse manners and large coarse pores on an oversized nose. He drove a beer truck for the Ajax Brewing Company, and his one dominant desire was to get something on Joe Hallix, who as head of the delivery service for Ajax, was his immediate boss.

Professor Muntz, on the other hand, was the passionately shy and mouselike author of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, who vanished precipitately when he found himself famous. In that abstruse work he referred worriedly to experimental evidence of parallel time-tracks, and other physicists converged upon him with hopeful gleams in their eyes, and he fled.

Professor Muntz couldn’t talk to people. But they wanted to know about his experiments. They couldn’t make any. They didn’t know how to start, and to them the whole thing had been abstract theory. But he had made experiments and they wanted to ask about them, so he ran away in an agony of shyness.

That was that. No one human being could seem less likely to be affected by Professor Muntz’ life-work than Mr. Grebb, and no life-work could seem more certainly immune to Mr. Grebb than Professor Muntz’. But life is full of paradoxes, and the theory of multiple time-tracks is even fuller. Therefore…

Mr. Grebb waked when his alarm clock rang stridently beside his ear. His eyes still closed, he numbly reached out a large, hairy ham of a hand and threw the alarm clock fiercely, across the room. But it was a very tough alarm clock. It continued to ring in a far corner, battered and bruised, its glass long gone, and dented so that it had a rakish and completely disreputable appearance. But it rang defiantly. It rang stridently. It rang naggingly. Its tone seemed to have something of the quality of a Bronx cheer.

Its tumult penetrated to the sleep drugged recesses of what Mr. Grebb considered his brain. It reminded him of the hour. Of the bright and merry sunshine. It was a clarion call to duty and the service of the Ajax Brewing Company. And in that context it was a reminder of the existence of Joe Hallix, and it was a raspberry.

Mr. Grebb opened one vaguely bloodshot eye. Rage appeared in it. The other eye opened. Fury developed. He swore heavily at the name and thought of Joe Hallix, who would have him docked if he were late. The alarm clock-rang on, jeering.

Mr. Grebb got out of bed, rumbling bitterly, and put on his clothes. He slept in his underwear, so he had merely to pull on his pants, slide into a brightly-checked flannel shirt, and pull on his shoes. He went down to breakfast, glowering.

His landlady discreetly served him coffee without even a good-morning. She presented a huge stack of pancakes and vast quantities of sausage. He ate, largely and coarsely. He finished up the pancakes with thick molasses, wiping up his plate. He drank more coffee. A certain gloomy peace descended upon him.

“Mr. Grebb—” said his landlady hopefully.

He scowled, then remembered that his board was paid. He relaxed and fumbled out a cigarette which looked very small in his hairy fingers. “Yeah?”

“I wondered if I could ask your advice,” his landlady went on. “I don’t know anything about machinery, Mr. Grebb, and I thought you’d know all about it, being you drive a truck.”

Mr. Grebb was pleased at the tribute.

“The lodger who had your room, Mr. Grebb,” said the landlady, “was a very nice little man. But one day he dodged a truck and jumped in front of a bus, and they took him to the hospital and he died there. And the police came and took his things to pay the hospital bill and to try to find his family. I don’t know if they did. And I was so flustered about him getting killed like that that I forget about him owing me a week’s board, and I didn’t think about the box until I went down in the cellar yesterday and noticed it.”

Mr. Grebb’s hand caressed his stomach. He loosened his belt a trifle.

“Yeah?” he said encouragingly.

“He had a box he asked to have put down in the cellar, and I forgot to tell the police about it. But he did owe me a week’s board. So yesterday when I noticed the box I peeked in between the slats, and it’s a sort of machine. So I thought I’d get you to look at it. If it’s valuable I’ll tell the police and they can sell it and maybe pay me what he owed me.”

“Huh!” said Mr. Grebb. “Them cops! Grafters, all of ’em! You keep the thing. Use it. What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know what it’s for,” said the landlady. “Would you look at it, Mr. Grebb?”

“Sure!” said Mr. Grebb amiably. “If it’s valuable I guess I know a place to sell it.”

As a matter of fact, he did not. But he figured that somewhere among his acquaintances he could find somebody who would know how to sell almost anything with no questions asked, and he estimated that this landlady would take his word for what he sold it for. Which should mean a quick buck or two. The thought was cheering.

“I got a coupla minutes,” he said generously. “I’ll look now.”

He followed his landlady down the rickety cellar stairs. He saw the crate. He did not bother to read the express tag on it, or he would have seen that it was addressed to Professor Aldous Muntz at this street and number. He wouldn’t have thought of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks at that, though. He knew nothing of abstruse speculations on the nature of space and time and reality. But the landlady turned on a drop-light and he poked at the paper wrapping inside the crate.

There were many wires. There were two or three radio tubes. There were transformer coils, and there was a row of dials marked, Milliamperes, Kilovolts, and so on.

He pulled away the crating boards. He saw that it was not a factory-made contrivance. It was not enclosed in a mass-production case. All the works were in plain view, though some were swathed in protective coverings. To Mr. Grebb it looked vaguely like a home-made radio. He was disappointed.

The doorbell rang upstairs. The landlady said: “I’d better answer the bell. You just look it over, Mr. Grebb.”

She went up. Mr. Grebb shook his head sadly. It was not something that could be sold at a standard hot-goods price, with a profit for himself. But he saw an extension cord with a bayonet plug at the end. He pulled it out and plugged it into the outlet of the dangling cellar light.

Nothing happened. There was a row of switches. He poked one or two, experimentally. Still nothing happened. He did not hear music or even an enthusiastic voice telling of the marvelous new product, Reeko, a refined deodorant and double your money back if your best friends can smell you. The machine remained inert and useless. He did not notice that a tiny dial went over to “20” on the milliampere scale and to “19.6” on the kilovolt dial.

He turned and lumbered upstairs, disgusted. Not a chance for a sudden buck. Which was just his kind of luck, he thought. Like having Joe Hallix for a boss.

“I ain’t got time to look it over good,” he told his landlady. “I’ll see about it later.”

He put on his hat and windbreaker and went out the front door. He saw the morning paper on the porch. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket. It belonged to his landlady, but she had not seen him take it. It would be convenient to read on the bus. He had to run to get to the corner on time. He thought of Hallix who would raise the devil if he were late to work. He breathed heavily in his indignation at the existence of people like Joe Hallix who would get him fired if he had half a chance. Presently he got out the newspaper.

He read, quite unsuspicious. The newspaper, had he known it, was unique. It was quite the most remarkable newspaper on the whole world. It was the direct result of a milliammeter reading of twenty and a kilovolt reading of nineteen-point-six on the device down in the cellar of his landlady’s home.

This newspaper said that “Undertaker Joe” had beaten “Goatface Jim” at the wrestling matches last night. It said that the Rangers had won, 6-3, in last night’s night game. It said that Carribee had romped home first in the fourth race, paying seven for two. Mr. Grebb was pained. He stuffed the paper in the crack of the seat beside him. He fell into bitter meditation on the undesirable characteristics of Joe Hallix.

In time, he got off the bus, the bus-conductor gathered up the paper with other trash and heaved it into the trash box at the end of the line, and it was lost forever. Which was regrettable, because all other copies of the morning paper said that Goatface Jim had won over Undertaker Joe, that the Pilots beat the Rangers 5-3, and that Mooncalf won in the fourth race, paying three for two. The foreign news was different, too, the political news was subtly unlike, and the financial news was peculiar. But Mr. Grebb did not notice.

That day he drove his truck, and got into three arguments with customers, two with Joe Hallix, and almost had a fight with a friend who insisted that Goatface Jim had won the wrestling match. Mr. Grebb was furious when his friend’s newspaper checked. It was apparently the same edition of the same paper he’d read, but it didn’t say the same things. He considered that it had betrayed him.

Actually, the paper was the result of Professor Muntz’ apparatus for experiment in multiple time-tracks. But Mr. Grebb had never heard of Professor Muntz except as a lodger who’d dodged a truck and jumped in front of a bus. He certainly had never heard of multiple time-tracks and surely could not have imagined experiments in that field.

But very many eminent scientists would have given much to read that newspaper, and the contrivance in the cellar could have been sold to any of half a dozen research institutions for tens of thousands of dollars. But Mr. Grebb didn’t even guess at such a thing, and he went to bed that night in a very gloomy mood.

Next morning the alarm clock jerked him awake and he went downstairs filled with bitterness at the fate which made him get up and gave him Joe Hallix as a boss. His landlady dared not address him even after he was fed.

He stamped dourly out the front door. There was the morning paper. He stooped to pick it up. As he bent over, there was the thump of a rolled-up paper landing. Then there were two papers on the porch. Mr. Grebb jumped, and turned scowling to glare at the paper-boy who apparently had almost hit him. But there was no paper-boy in sight. The paper seemed to have materialized out of empty air. Mr. Grebb growled anathemas at fool boys who hid, and went to his bus.

Today’s paper did not deceive him. Today, his oracular comments on sporting events went unchallenged. But he had a furious argument with Joe Hallix. The delivery boss was riding him. Mr. Grebb fumed and muttered all day. When he got home, his landlady said uneasily:

“Mr. Grebb, did you see the paper?”

He growled inarticulately.

“There’s a piece in it about Mr. Muntz,” said the landlady. “You know, the lodger who had your room and was hit by a bus? They call him Professor Muntz and say he lives here! But the policemen told me that he died in the hospital. I don’t know what to think!”

Mr. Grebb remembered vaguely a newspaper which had told him lies. Yesterday’s paper. It had appeared out of thin air and it did not tell the truth. Today, the paper that appeared from nowhere had been left behind. But he had no theory. He merely growled:

“Don’t believe them newspapers. They print a lot of hooey!”

From his experience of the day before, the remark was justified. But he did not think of the machine in the cellar. Which was a pity, because Mr. Grebb and his landlady too would have been clasped to the bosom of anybody who understood The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks and found out about that machine or the newspapers either.

The theory of multiple time-tracks is, in effect, that since there are a great number of really possible futures, that there are a great number of possibly real presents. If a dozen futures are equally possible, they are equally real, and there is no reason to assume that all of them but one cease to have any validity merely because we experience that one as the present.

The theory says that there is no evidence that the present moment of our experience is the only present moment that exists. That reality may be multiple, and that if you toss a coin for a decision, resolving that if it comes heads you will propose to Mabel and to Helen if it comes tails, there exist two futures in which each event can happen, and possibly after the tossing there exist two present moments in which each event does.

And thus it followed that if Professor Muntz jumped out of the way of a truck, immediately before him there was one future in which he was hit by a bus, and another in which he was not. So that a person who understood Professor Muntz’ work, and knew about the machine down in the cellar, would immediately have concluded that the newspaper came from a time-track in which Professor Muntz’ attempt to dodge the truck had been wholly successful.

But Mr. Grebb did not even speculate about such things. Instead, at supper he described at length and bitterly just what part of a horse’s anatomy most resembled Joe Hallix. He explained in great detail just how Joe Hallix had gotten all the delivery slips mixed up so that he, Mr. Grebb, had almost been charged with the loss of four kegs of beer. And afterward he went out to a tavern and had half a dozen beers and grew more embittered as he thought upon his wrongs.

Next morning was cloudy when he went out the front door. There was one paper on the porch. There was a large wet space in the small front yard, and part of the porch was soaking wet. Mr. Grebb picked up the paper, dourly wondering who the devil had been using a hose when it looked like rain anyhow. Then there was a plopping sound, and a second paper appeared out of nowhere and smacked close by Mr. Grebb. He looked indignantly for the boy. He was invisible. There was no boy. The newspaper had come from nowhere.

Mr. Grebb picked it up, too, and went belligerently out to the street to find the paper boy and tell him to stop playing tricks. Mr. Grebb’s brain was not analytical. When something happened which he did not understand, he assumed aggrievedly that somebody was acting smart. He rumbled wrathfully at his failure to find anybody, and went heavily off to the bus.

On the bus he unfolded one newspaper. He glanced at the headlines and was bored. He shoved it down beside him and seethed over the remembrance of the four kegs of beer he had been accused of mislaying the previous day.

Presently he unfolded the second paper, forgetting the first. The headlines were not the same. He blinked, remembered, and retrieved the first paper. The mastheads were identical. The date was identical. A minor story was identical. But where the headlines differed, they contradicted each other. One said that the local front-page criminal trial had ended in acquittal for the lady who murdered her husband with a boy-scout axe. The other said that she had been convicted and would appeal.

It did not occur to Mr. Grebb that the jurymen might have been tossing coins, and that the two papers were the results, respectively, of a coin coming heads and the same coin coming tails. He regarded the two papers with enormous indignation. He checked the inner pages. Again they differed and contradicted each other. Some few items were the same, and the advertisements seemed to match, but the two copies of the same newspaper for the same date treated the same events as if they had happened on different worlds.

Which they had. In different time-tracks, at any rate. One newspaper outlined the events in a world in which metaphorically all coins tossed heads, and the other world in which tails invariably turned up. The scores of the ball games were different. The racing results—for the same races—were different.

Mr. Grebb furiously tore both papers to shreds and rumbled to himself of the perfidy of newspapers in general and this sheet in particular.

But he had no time to meditate upon it that day. The matter of the four kegs of beer came up again. Mr. Grebb was requested to explain. Purple with fury, he bellowed. Joe Hallix was not the questioner, today. Somebody from the bookkeeping department of the Ajax Brewing Company asked involved and insulting questions.

Mr. Grebb roared defiance. He ran his truck his way! Them delivery slips were crazy, anyhow. Customers weren’t complaining, were they? They got what they ordered and what was put on his truck, didn’t they? If Joe Hallix got things all messed up, it wasn’t his fault! He took the beer where he was told to take it! Them four kegs…

He steamed to himself as he drove out of the brewery with a fresh load. He’d pinned that bookkeeper guy’s ears back, all right! Thought he was smart, huh? Said he was going to check back on earlier deliveries. The devil with him! Let him check all he wanted!

But Mr. Grebb was privately worried. As he swore to himself, he drove his truck with greater insolence and abandon even than usual. And he fretted. Because the system of delivery slips was complicated. He had never fathomed all its intricacies. He had devised, instead, a system of magnificent simplicity for his own guidance, which magnificently ignored the piddling details of paperwork. He delivered the beer. But he was belligerently uneasy.

When he returned to his boarding-house he was loudly and fulsomely enraged. The bookkeeper guy had been at him again. Not only the four kegs from yesterday were now in question. Two from the day before and one from the day before that and three from another day earlier still.

The bookkeeper talked with asperity. Threateningly. He hadn’t any proof yet, he said, but it looked very queer. There was a lot of beer missing. Mr. Grebb, said the bookkeeper, had messed up his delivery slips so thoroughly that it was not possible yet to guess how much beer had gone astray. Maybe only sixty or seventy kegs, but it might have been going on for months.

Mr. Grebb went to his favorite tavern that night and literally bellowed his opinion of Joe Hallix to the world. Joe Hallix had done this to him! Joe Hallix had mixed up his delivery slips just to get him in trouble. Joe Hallix was a man of minute character indeed, to hear Mr. Grebb tell it.

Meanwhile, down in the cellar of his landlady’s house, a device of coils and wires and radio tubes reposed inert and forgotten. But a needle on one tiny dial pointed to twenty milliamperes, and another dial registered nineteen-point-six kilovolts.

And in a certain area in a certain direction from that device there were strictly local rain-showers in a space no more than twenty feet across. Sometimes the rain fell there when it wasn’t raining anywhere else. It was exactly as if that small twenty-foot circle were somewhere connected with another weather process—or a time-track—so that it received rain quite independently of the ground about it.

Naturally, nobody noticed it. It was night and everything was rain-wet to begin with, and nobody would have understood, anyhow.

A couple of hundred miles away, however, there were people who would have understood it, if they’d known. There had been much learned discussion of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, and as Mr. Grebb bellowed his fury in a tavern around the corner from his boarding house, an eminent mathematician was making an address to a scientific society.

“Professor Muntz has disappeared,” he announced regretfully, “and his disappearance is clearly the result of his excessive shyness. However, the references to experimental evidence in his work have borne fruit. He speaks of interdimensional stresses leading to a tendency of disparate time-streams to coalesce. Then he observes that experimental evidence throws some of his equations into question. A careful study of his equations has disclosed a trivial error in assumption which, when corrected, modifies his equations into accord with the experimental results he mentions.

“There can be no doubt that he has achieved experimental proof of the reality of time-streams, of whole systems of reality, which are parallel to but separate from the reality we know. And what does that mean? It means that if we miss a train in this reality, somewhere there is a cosmos in which we catch it. A thief who has been undetected in the universe we know, has somewhere made some slip which has led to his discovery.”

The learned scientist went on and on with his speech, two hundred miles from where Mr. Grebb bellowed to his tavern companions of the iniquity of Joe Hallix.

Next morning, Mr. Grebb was bleary-eyed and morose. He almost lacked appetite. He ate only twelve pancakes and almost forced himself to mop up the plate. He was uneasy. If sixty or seventy kegs of beer were missing, due to his fine scorn of bookkeeping details, he was in a bad fix. If that bookkeeper guy hunted back for six months or so and found even more missing—well, that would make it right serious. Mr. Grebb was ready to weep with vexation and terror of jail.

But he went out of the front door. Keeping gallantly to established custom even in this time of stress, he stooped for the newspaper his landlady paid for and sadly complained she never received. As he bent over, there was a loud slapping noise. A rolled-up newspaper hit him a resounding whack in the seat of the pants.

He roared, grabbed it, and plunged for the street to avenge the indignity. But there was no paper-boy anywhere about. The paper had materialized in mid-air above a twenty-foot circle which yesterday had received rain independently of neighboring territory.

Mr. Grebb was formidable as he marched at last toward his bus. He was large and coarse and infuriated. He rode on the bus, scowling. A fat woman stood beside his seat. She glared at him because he did not offer his place to a fat lady. He unfolded a newspaper to intercept the glare. A minor headline caught his eye:

Underneath was a news-item. More than four hundred kegs of beer had cleverly been diverted from the regular channels of trade during the past six months. Unscrupulous customers had bought them at cut rates from a dishonest employee.

Irregularities had been suspected, and on the previous day a bookkeeper, checking up, had quite accidentally looked in a drawer containing office-supplies in the delivery director’s desk. He found there, casually hidden, forged delivery slips used to cover past diversions, and other delivery slips made ready for use in future thefts. Confronted with the evidence, Joe Hallix had confessed to a six-months’ career in the racket and had been placed under arrest.

Mr. Grebb stared blankly. The item was infinitely plausible, but it simply was not true. That had not happened yesterday. When he left the brewery the bookkeeper was still frankly suspicious of him.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Grebb’s mouth dropped open. His mental processes were never clear, so he did not reason. But the newspaper story was exactly what he would like to believe, and therefore he was convinced instantly that this was exactly what Joe Hallix had been doing.

He became filled with a bellicose triumph. The newspaper slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the bus, to be trampled on and soiled and so ultimately to go unglanced-at into a trash box. But Mr. Grebb steamed. So that was what Joe Hallix was doing! And he was blaming the missing beer on an innocent truck-driver of utter integrity—on Mr. Grebb himself!

He stalked into the warehouse with magnificent dignity, to find himself confronted by Joe Hallix, by the bookkeeper, and by two other men of ominous aspect.

“Look here, Grebb!” said the bookkeeper sternly. “I worked all night on this thing! There’s four hundred kegs of beer missing in the past six months! Every record is straight but yours? Your delivery slips are a mess! What’ve you been putting over?”

Mr. Grebb breathed heavily.

“Me,” said Mr. Grebb dramatically, “I been thinkin’! Thinkin’ about why my records always get jammed up an’ why Joe Hallix always keeps pickin’ on me an’ ripenin’ me up for a fall guy for him! Any of the other drivers will tell you I’m a right guy, an’ any one of ’em will tell you he’s a crook!”

The bookkeeper interrupted impatiently, but Mr. Grebb bellowed him down.

“Look in his desk!” he roared in righteous wrath. “Look where he keeps his blank forms! You’ll find the whole works right there! Right in this here drawer!”

He thumped with a hairy ham of a hand, breathing in snorts of indignation.

Joe Hallix tried to laugh scornfully. But it wasn’t good. That Mr. Grebb, of all humans, should have hit so instantly and with such uncanny accuracy upon the hiding-place of papers he had to have handy for the working of his racket, and which nobody in the world should ever have thought of looking for, was simply beyond belief. It was too sudden and too startling and too starkly impossible.

Joe Hallix tried to laugh it off, but sweat poured out on his forehead. When the bookkeeper, after one look at his graying face, stooped to pull out the drawer, Joe Hallix got panicky. And the two ominous gentlemen turned their attention to him.

Mr. Grebb returned to his boarding house in a mood of triumphant indignation. He was as near to perfect happiness as he would ever get. Joe Hallix was unmasked and headed for jail, and he, Mr. Grebb, was proven innocent as a babe unborn. Moreover, that half-keg of beer he had managed to get away with, two months before, would never be charged against him.

He was magnificent in his sensations of vindicated purity. He told his landlady about it at supper. But he did not mention the newspaper. He did not understand that, and therefore he ignored it. She listened admiringly.

“I always knew you were smart, Mr. Grebb,” she said with conviction. “That’s why I asked you about that machine down in the basement. Did you ever get time to look at it again, Mr. Grebb?”

“It’s no good,” said Mr. Grebb largely. “It’s just some stuff put together crazy. It don’t work.”

“Too bad,” said the landlady. “And I’ve let it clutter up my cellar all this time.”

“I’ll get it out for you,” said Mr. Grebb, generously. “Give it a couple kicks to get it in two pieces so I can handle it easy, an’ I’ll pile it out on the sidewalk for the garbage man to haul away.”

Which, out of the kindness of his heart, he did. It is still a mystery in high scientific circles just what Professor Muntz did with himself, and what sort of experimental apparatus he had to back his work in The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks. Some eminent scientists still hope he will turn up eventually, in spite of his passionate shyness. It is not likely, because he jumped out of the way of a truck and landed in front of a bus. In this time-track, at any rate. Perhaps in another, different conditions prevail. But life and the theory of multiple time-tracks are full of paradoxes.

In this time-track the paradox was that nobody would ordinarily think of Mr. Grebb and Professor Muntz in the same breath, so to speak, yet their careers most curiously impinged upon each other. Mr. Grebb was driving the truck that Professor Muntz dodged when he jumped in front of the bus, and Mr. Grebb moved into the lodging Professor Muntz vacated, and Mr. Grebb kicked to pieces the device which was the Professor’s life-work, and set the fragments out on the sidewalk for the garbage-man.

But Professor Muntz had his effect on Mr. Grebb, too. It was his device that brought those newspapers from another time-track and enabled Mr. Grebb to unmask the fine villainy of Joe Hallix. It is due to Professor Muntz’ life-work in fact—it is its fine fruit—that Mr. Grebb still drives a truck for the Ajax Brewing Company.

She had to find out about Tiny—everything about Tiny.

They were bound to call him Tiny. The name was good for a laugh when he was a pup, and many times afterward.

He was a Great Dane, unfashionable with his long tail, smooth and glossy in the brown coat which fit so snugly over his heavily muscled shoulders and chest. His eyes were big and brown and his feet were big and black; he had a voice like thunder and a heart ten times his own great size.

He was born in the Virgin Islands, on St. Croix, which is a land of palm trees and sugar, of soft winds and luxuriant undergrowth whispering with the stealthy passage of pheasant and mongoose. There were rats in the ruins of the ancient estate houses that stood among the foothills—ruins with slave-built walls forty inches thick and great arches of weathered stone. There was pasture land where the field mice ran, and brooks asparkle with gaudy blue minnows.

But—where in St. Croix had he learned to be so strange?

When Tiny was a puppy, all feet and ears, he learned many things. Most of these things were kinds of respect. He learned to respect that swift, vengeful piece of utter engineering called a scorpion, when one of them whipped its barbed tail into his inquiring nose. He learned to respect the heavy deadness of the air about him that preceded a hurricane, for he knew that it meant hurry and hammering and utmost obedience from every creature on the estate. He learned to respect the justice of sharing, for he was pulled from the teat and from the trough when he crowded the others of his litter. He was the largest.

These things, all of them, he learned as respects. He was never struck, and although he learned caution he never learned fear. The pain he suffered from the scorpion—it happened only once—the strong but gentle hands which curbed his greed, the frightful violence of the hurricane that followed the tense preparations—all these things and many more taught him the justice of respect. He half understood a basic ethic: namely, that he would never be asked to do something, or to refrain from doing something, unless there was a good reason for it. His obedience, then, was a thing implicit, for it was half reasoned; and since it was not based on fear, but on justice, it could not interfere with his resourcefulness.

All of which, along with his blood, explained why he was such a splendid animal. It did not explain how he learned to read. It did not explain why Alec was compelled to sell him—not only to sell him but to search out Alistair Forsythe and sell him to her.

She had to find out. The whole thing was crazy. She hadn’t wanted a dog. If she had wanted a dog, it wouldn’t have been a Great Dane. And if it had been a Great Dane, it wouldn’t have been Tiny, for he was a Crucian dog and had to be shipped all the way to Scarsdale, New York, by air.

The series of letters she sent to Alec were as full of wondering persuasion as his had been when he sold her the dog. It was through these letters that she learned about the scorpion and the hurricane, about Tiny’s puppyhood and the way Alec brought up his dogs. If she learned something about Alec as well, that was understandable. Alec and Alistair Forsythe had never met, but through Tiny they shared a greater secret than many people who have grown up together.

“As for why I wrote you, of all people,” Alec wrote in answer to her direct question, “I can’t say I chose you at all. It was Tiny. One of the cruise-boat people mentioned your name at my place, over cocktails one afternoon. It was, as I remember, a Dr. Schwellenbach. Nice old fellow. As soon as your name was mentioned, Tiny’s head came up as if I had called him. He got up from his station by the door and lolloped over to the doctor with his ears up and his nose quivering. I thought for a minute that the old fellow was offering him food, but no—he must have wanted to hear Schwellenbach say your name again, So I asked about you. A day or so later I was telling a couple of friends about it, and when I mentioned the name again, Tiny came snuffling over and shoved his nose into my hand. He was shivering. That got me. I wrote to a friend in New York who got your name and address in the phone book. You know the rest. I just wanted to tell you about it at first, but something made me suggest a sale. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to have something like this going on and not have you meet Tiny. When you wrote that you couldn’t get away from New York, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do but send Tiny to you. And now—I don’t know if I’m too happy about it. Judging from those pages and pages of questions you keep sending me, I get the idea that you are more than a little troubled by this crazy business.”

She answered: “Please don’t think I’m troubled about this! I’m not. I’m interested, and curious, and more than a little excited; but there is nothing about the situation that frightens me. I can’t stress that enough. There’s something around Tiny—sometimes I have the feeling it’s something outside Tiny—that is infinitely comforting. I feel protected, in a strange way, and it’s a different and greater thing than the protection I could expect from a large and intelligent dog. It’s strange, and it’s mysterious enough; but it isn’t at all frightening.

“I have some more questions. Can you remember exactly what it was that Dr. Schwellenbach said the first time he mentioned my name and Tiny acted strangely? Was there ever any time that you can remember when Tiny was under some influence other than your own—something which might have given him these strange traits? What about his diet as a puppy? How many times did he get…” and so on.

And Alec answered, in part: “It was so long ago now that I can’t remember exactly; but it seems to me Dr. Schwellenbach was talking about his work. As you know, he’s a professor of metallurgy. He mentioned Professor Nowland as the greatest alloy specialist of his time—said Nowland could alloy anything with anything. Then he went on about Nowland’s assistant. Said the assistant was very highly qualified, having been one of these Science Search products and something of a prodigy; in spite of which she was completely feminine and as beautiful a redhead as had ever exchanged heaven for earth. Then he said her name was Alistair Forsythe. (I hope you’re not blushing, Miss Forsythe; you asked for this!) And then it was that Tiny ran over to the doctor in that extraordinary way.

“The only time I can think of when Tiny was off the estate and possibly under some influence was the day old Debbil disappeared for a whole day with the pup when he was about three months old. Debbil is one of the characters who hang around here. He’s a Crucian about sixty years old, a piratical-looking old gent with one eye and elephantiasis. He shuffles around the grounds running odd errands for anyone who will give him tobacco or a shot of white rum. Well, one morning I sent him over the hill to see if there was a leak in the water line that runs from the reservoir. It would only take a couple of hours, so I told him to take Tiny for a run.

“They were gone for the whole day. I was shorthanded and busy as a squirrel in a nuthouse and didn’t have a chance to send anyone after him. But he drifted in toward evening. I bawled him out thoroughly. It was no use asking him where he had been; he’s only about quarter-witted anyway. He just claimed he couldn’t remember, which is pretty usual for him. But for the next three days I was busy with Tiny. He wouldn’t eat, and he hardly slept at all. He just kept staring out over the cane fields at the hill. He didn’t seem to want to go there at all. I went out to have a look. There’s nothing out that way but the reservoir and the old ruins of the governor’s palace, which have been rotting out there in the sun for the last century and a half. Nothing left now but an overgrown mound and a couple of arches, but it’s supposed to be haunted. I forgot about it after that because Tiny got back to normal. As a matter of fact, he seemed to be better than ever, although, from then on, he would sometimes freeze and watch the hill as if he were listening to something. I haven’t attached much importance to it until now. I still don’t. Maybe he got chased by some mongoose’s mother. Maybe he chewed up some ganjaweed—marijuana to you. But I doubt that it has anything to do with the way he acts now, any more than that business of the compasses that pointed west might have something to do with it. Did you hear about that, by the way? Craziest thing I ever heard of. It was right after I shipped Tiny off to you last fall, as I remember. Every ship and boat and plane from here to Sandy Hook reported that its compass began to indicate due west instead of a magnetic north! Fortunately the effect only lasted a couple of hours so there were no serious difficulties. One cruise steamer ran aground, and there were a couple of Miami fishing-boat mishaps. I only bring it up to remind both of us that Tiny’s behavior may be odd, but not exclusively so in a world where such things as the crazy compasses occur.”

`And in her next, she wrote: “You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you? Be careful of that Fortean attitude, my tropical friend. It tends to accept the idea of the unexplainable to an extent where explaining, or even investigating, begins to look useless. As far as that crazy compass episode is concerned, I remember it well indeed. My boss, Dr. Nowland—yes, it’s true, he can alloy anything with anything!—has been up to his ears in that fantastic happenstance. So have most of his colleagues in half a dozen sciences. They’re able to explain it quite satisfactorily, too. It was simply the presence of some quasi-magnetic phenomenon that created a resultant field at right angles to the Earth’s own magnetic influences. That solution sent the pure theorists home happy. Of course, the practical ones—Nowland and his associates in metallurgy, for example—have only to figure out what caused the field. Science is a wonderful thing.

“By the way, you will notice my change of address. I have wanted for a long time to have a little house of my own, and I was lucky enough to get this one from a friend. It’s up the Hudson from New York, quite countrified, but convenient enough to the city to be practical. I’m bringing Mother here from upstate. She’ll love it. And besides—as if you didn’t know the most important reason when you saw it!—it gives Tiny a place to run. He’s no city dog… I’d tell you that he found the house for me, too, if I didn’t think that, these days, I’m crediting him with even more than his remarkable powers. Gregg and Marie Weems, the couple who had the cottage before, began to be haunted. So they said, anyway. Some indescribably horrible monster that both of them caught glimpses of, inside the house and out of it. Marie finally got the screaming meemies about it and insisted on Gregg’s selling the place; housing shortage or no. They came straight to me. Why? Because they—Marie, anyway; she’s a mystic little thing—had the idea that someone with a large dog would be safe in that house. The odd part of that was that neither of them knew I had recently acquired a Great Dane. As soon as they saw Tiny they threw themselves on my neck and begged me to take the place. Marie couldn’t explain the feeling she had; what she and Gregg came to my place for was to ask me to buy a big dog and take the house. Why me? Well, she just felt I would like it, that was all. It seemed the right kind of place for me. And my having the dog clinched it. Anyway, you can put that down in your notebook of unexplainables.”

So it went for the better part of a year. The letters were long and frequent, and, as sometimes happens, Alec and Alistair grew very close indeed. Almost by accident, they found themselves writing letters that did not mention Tiny at all, although there were others that concerned nothing else. And, of course, Tiny was not always in the role of canis superior. He was a dog—all dog—and acted accordingly. His strangeness only came out at particular intervals. At first it had been at times when Alistair was most susceptible to being astonished by it—in other words, when it was least expected. Later, he would perform his odd feat when she was ready for him to do it, and under exactly the right circumstances. Later still, he became the superdog only when she asked him to…

The cottage was on a hillside, such a very steep hillside that the view over the river overlooked the railroad, and the trains were a secret rumble and never a sight at all. There was a wild and clean air about the place—a perpetual tingle of expectancy, as though someone coming into New York for the very first time on one of the trains had thrown his joyous anticipation high in the air and the cottage had caught it and breathed it and kept it forever.

Up the hairpin driveway to the house, one spring afternoon, toiled a miniature automobile in its lowest gear. Its little motor grunted and moaned as it took the last steep grade, a miniature Old Faithful appearing around its radiator cap. At the foot of the brownstone porch steps it stopped, and a miniature lady slid out from under the wheel. But for the facts that she was wearing an aviation mechanic’s coveralls, and that her very first remark—an earthy epithet directed at the steaming radiator—was neither ladylike nor miniature, she might have been a model for the more precious variety of Mother’s Day greeting card.

Fuming, she reached into the car and pressed the horn button. The quavering ululation that resulted had its desired effect. It was answered instantly by the mighty howl of a Great Dane at the peak of aural agony. The door of the house crashed open and a girl rushed out on the porch, to stand with her russet hair ablaze in the sunlight, her lips parted, and her long eyes squinting against the light reflected from the river. “What—Mother! Mother, darling—is that you? Already? Tiny!” she rapped as the dog bolted out of the open door and down the steps. “Come back here!”

The dog stopped. Mrs. Forsythe scooped a crescent wrench from the ledge behind the driver’s seat and brandished it. “Let him come, Alistair,” she said grimly. “In the name of sense, girl, what are you doing with a monster like that? I thought you said you had a dog, not a Shetland pony with fangs. If he messes with me, I’ll separate him from a couple of those twelve-pound feet and bring him down to my weight. Where do you keep his saddle? I thought there was a meat shortage in this part of the country. Whatever possessed you to take up your abode with that carnivorous dromedary, anyway? And what’s the idea of buying a barn like this, thirty miles from nowhere and perched on a precipice to boot, with a stepladder for a driveway and an altitude fit to boil water at eighty degrees Centigrade? It must take you forever to make breakfast. Twenty-minute eggs, and then they’re raw. I’m hungry. If that Danish basilisk hasn’t eaten everything in sight, I’d like to nibble on about eight sandwiches. Salami on whole wheat. Your flowers are gorgeous, child. So are you. You always were, of course. Pity you have brains. If you had no brains, you’d get married. A lovely view, honey, lovely. I like it here. Glad you bought it. Come here, you,” she said to Tiny.

He approached this small specimen of volubility with his head a little low and his tail down. She extended a hand and held it still to let him sniff it before she thumped him on the withers. He waved his unfashionable tail in acceptance and then went to join the laughing Alistair, who was coming down the steps.

“Mother, you’re marvelous. And you haven’t changed a bit.” She bent and kissed her. “What on earth made that awful noise?”

“Noise? Oh—the horn.” Mrs. Forsythe busily went about lifting the hood of the car. “I have a friend in the shoelace business. Wanted to stimulate trade for him. Fixed this up to make people jump out of their shoes. When they jump they break the laces. Leave their shoes in the street. Thousands of people walking about in their stocking feet. More people ought to, anyway. Good for the arches.” She pointed. There were four big air-driven horns mounted on and around the little motor. Over the mouth of each was a shutter, so arranged that it revolved about an axle set at right angles to the horn, so that the bell was opened and closed by four small DC motors. “That’s what gives it the warble. As for the beat-note, the four of them are tuned a sixteenth-tone apart. Pretty?”

“Pretty,” Alistair conceded with sincerity. “No—please don’t demonstrate it again, Mother! You almost wrenched poor Tiny’s ears off the first time.”

“Oh—did I?” Contritely, she went to the dog. “I didn’t mean to, honey-poodle, really I didn’t.” The honey-poodle looked up at her with somber brown eyes and thumped his tail on the ground. “I like him,” said Mrs. Forsythe decisively. She put out a fearless hand and pulled affectionately at the loose flesh of Tiny’s upper lip. “Will you look at those tusks! Great day in the morning, dog, reel in some of that tongue or you’ll turn yourself inside out. Why aren’t you married yet, chicken?”

“Why aren’t you?” Alistair countered.

Mrs. Forsythe stretched. “I’ve been married,” she said, and Alistair knew now her casualness was forced. “A married season with the likes of Dan Forsythe sticks with you.” Her voice softened. “Your daddy was all kinds of good people, baby.” She shook herself. “Let’s eat. I want to hear about Tiny. Your driblets and drablets of information about that dog are as tantalizing as Chapter Eleven of a movie serial. Who’s this Alec creature in St. Croix? Some kind of native—cannibal, or something? He sounds nice. I wonder if you know how nice you think he is? Good heavens, the girl’s blushing! I only know what I read in your letters, darling, and I never knew you to quote anyone by the paragraph before but that old scoundrel Nowland, and that was all about ductility and permeability and melting points. Metallurgy! A girl like you mucking about with molybs and durals instead of heartbeats and hope chests!”

“Mother, sweetheart, hasn’t it occurred to you at all that I don’t want to get married? Not yet, anyway.”

“Of course it has! That doesn’t alter the fact that a woman is only forty per cent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty per cent a woman until she has children. As for you and your precious career I seem to remember something about a certain Marie Sklodowska who didn’t mind marrying a fellow called Curie, science or no science.”

“Darling,” said Alistair a little tiredly as they mounted the steps and went into the cool house, “once and for all, get this straight. The career, as such, doesn’t matter at all. The work does. I like it. I don’t see the sense in being married purely for the sake of being married.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, child, neither do I!” said Mrs. Forsythe quickly. Then, casting a critical eye over her daughter, she sighed, “But it’s such a waste!”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother shook her head. “If you don’t get it, it’s because there’s something wrong with your sense of values; in which case, there’s no point in arguing. I love your furniture. Now, for pity’s sake feed me and tell me about this canine Carnera of yours.”

Moving deftly about the kitchen while her mother perched like a bright-eyed bird on a utility ladder, Alistair told the story of her letters from Alec and Tiny’s arrival.

“At first he was just a dog. A very wonderful dog, of course, and extremely well trained. We got along beautifully. There was nothing remarkable about him but his history, as far as I could see, and certainly no indication of…of anything. I mean, he might have responded to my name the way he did because the syllabic content pleased him.”

“It should,” said her mother complacently. “Dan and I spent weeks at a sound laboratory graphing a suitable name for you. Alistair Forsythe. Has a beat, you know. Keep that in mind when you change it.”

“Mother!”

“All right, dear. Go on with the story.”

“For all I knew, the whole thing was a crazy coincidence. Tiny didn’t respond particularly to the sound of my name after he got here. He seemed to take a perfectly normal, doggy pleasure in sticking around, that was all.

“Then, one evening after he had been with me about a month, I found out he could read.”

“Read!” Mrs. Forsythe toppled, clutched the edge of the sink, and righted herself.

“Well, practically that. I used to study a lot in the evenings, and Tiny used to stretch out in front of the fire with his nose between his paws and watch me. I was tickled by that. I even got the habit of talking to him while I studied. I mean, about the work. He always seemed to be paying very close attention, which, of course, was silly. And maybe it was my imagination, but the times he’d get up and nuzzle me always seemed to be the times when my mind was wandering or when I would quit working and go on to something else.

“This particular evening I was working on the permeability mathematics of certain of the rare-earth group. I put down my pencil and reached for my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and found nothing but a big hole in the bookcase. The book wasn’t on the desk, either. So I swung around to Tiny and said, just for something to say, ‘Tiny, what have you done with my handbook?’

“He went whuff! in the most startled tone of voice, leaped to his feet, and went over to his bed. He turned up the mattress with his paw and scooped out the book. He picked it up in his jaws—I wonder what he would have done if he were a Scotty? That’s a chunky piece of literature!—and brought it to me.

“I just didn’t know what to do. I took the book and riffled it. It was pretty well shoved around. Apparently he had been trying to leaf through it with those big splay feet of his. I put the book down and took him by the muzzle. I called him nine kinds of a rascal and asked him what he was looking for.” She paused, building a sandwich.

“Well?”

“Oh,” said Alistair, as if coming back from a far distance. “He didn’t say.”

There was a thoughtful silence. Finally, Mrs. Forsythe looked up with her odd birdlike glance and said, “You’re kidding. That dog isn’t shaggy enough.”

“You don’t believe me.” It wasn’t a question.

The older woman got up to put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Honey-lamb, your daddy used to say that the only things worth believing were things you learned from people you trusted. Of course I believe you. Thing is—do you believe you?”

“I’m not—sick, Mum, if that’s what you mean. Let me tell you the rest of it.”

“You mean there’s more?”

“Plenty more.” She put the stack of sandwiches on the sideboard where her mother could reach it. Mrs. Forsythe fell to with a will. “Tiny has been goading me to do research. A particular kind of research.”

“Hut hine uffefa?”

“Mother! I didn’t give you those sandwiches only to feed you. The idea was to soundproof you a bit, too, while I talked.”

“Hohay!” said her mother cheerfully.

“Well, Tiny won’t let me work on any other project but the one he’s interested in. Mum, I can’t talk if you’re going to gape like that! No… I can’t say he won’t let me do any work. But there’s a certain line of endeavor that he approves. If I do anything else, he snuffles around, joggles my elbow, grunts, whimpers, and generally carries on until I lose my temper and tell him to go away. Then he’ll walk over to the fireplace and flop down and sulk. Never takes his eyes off me. So, of course, I get all softhearted and repentant and apologize to him and get on with what he wants done.”

Mrs. Forsythe swallowed, coughed, gulped some milk, and exploded, “Wait a minute! You’re away too fast for me! What is it that he wants done? How do you know he wants it? Can he read, or can’t he? Make some sense, child!”

Alistair laughed richly. “Poor Mum! I don’t blame you, darling. No, I don’t think he can really read. He shows no interest at all in books or pictures. The episode with the handbook seemed to be an experiment that didn’t bring any results. But—he knows the difference between my books, even books that are bound alike, even when I shift them around in the bookcase. Tiny!”

The Great Dane scrambled to his feet from the corner of the kitchen, his paws skidding on the waxed linoleum. “Get me Hoag’s Basic Radio, old feller, will you?”

Tiny turned and padded out. They heard him going up the stairs. “I was afraid he wouldn’t do it while you were here,” she said. “He generally warns me not to say anything about his powers. He growls. He did that when Dr. Nowland dropped out for lunch one Saturday. I started to talk about Tiny and just couldn’t. He acted disgracefully. First he growled and then he barked. It was the first time I’ve ever known him to bark in the house. Poor Dr. Nowland! He was scared half out of his wits!”

Tiny thudded down the stairs and entered the kitchen. “Give it to Mum,” said Alistair. Tiny walked sedately over to the stool and stood before the astonished Mrs. Forsythe. She took the volume from his jaws.

“Basic Radio,” she breathed.

“I asked him for that because I have a whole row of technical books up there, all from the same publisher, all the same color and about the same size,” said Alistair calmly.

“But…but…how does he do it?”

Alistair shrugged. “I don’t know! He doesn’t read the titles. That I’m sure of. He can’t read anything. I’ve tried to get him to do it a dozen different ways. I’ve lettered instructions on pieces of paper and shown them to him…you know… ‘Go to the door’ and ‘Give me a kiss’ and so on. Re just looks at them and wags his tail. But if I read them first—”

“You mean, read them aloud?”

“No. Oh…he’ll do anything I ask him to, sure. But I don’t have to say it. Just read it, and he turns and does it. That’s the way he makes me study what he wants studied.”

“Are you telling me that that behemoth can read your mind?”

“What do you think? Here—I’ll show you. Give me the book.”

Tiny’s ears went up. “There’s something in here about the electrical flux in supercooled copper that I don’t quite remember. Let’s see if Tiny’s interested.”

She sat on the kitchen table and began to leaf through the hook. Tiny came and sat in front of her, his tongue lolling out, his big brown eyes fixed on her face. There was silence as she turned pages, read a little, turned some more. And suddenly Tiny whimpered urgently.

“See what I mean, Mum? All right, Tiny. I’ll read it over.”

Silence again, while Alistair’s long green eyes traveled over the page. All at once Tiny stood up and nuzzled her leg.

“Hm-m-m? The reference? Want me to go back?”

Tiny sat again, expectantly. “There’s a reference here to a passage in the first section on basic electric theory that he wants,” she explained. She looked up. “Mother! You read it to him!” She jumped off the table, handed the book over. “Here. Section 45. Tiny! Go listen to Mum. Go on!” and she shoved him toward Mrs. Forsythe, who said in an awed voice, “When I was a little girl, I used to read bedtime stories to my dolls. I thought I’d quit that kind of thing altogether, and now I’m reading technical literature to this…this canine catastrophe here. Shall I read aloud?”

“No—don’t. See if he gets it.”

But Mrs. Forsythe didn’t get the chance. Before she had read two lines Tiny was frantic. He ran to Mrs. Forsythe and back to Alistair. He reared up like a frightened horse, rolled his eyes, and panted. He whimpered. He growled a little.

“For pity’s sakes, what’s wrong?”

“I guess he can’t get it from you,” said Alistair. “I’ve had the idea before that he’s tuned to me in more ways than one and this clinches it. All right then. Give me back the—”

But before she could ask him, Tiny had bounded to Mrs. Forsythe, taken the book gently out of her hands, and carried it to his mistress. Alistair smiled at her paling mother, took the book, and read until Tiny suddenly seemed to lose interest. He went back to his station by the kitchen cabinet and lay down, yawning.

“That’s that,” said Alistair, closing the book. “In other words, class dismissed. Well, Mum?”

Mrs. Forsythe opened her mouth, closed it again, and shook her head. Alistair loosed a peal of laughter.

“Oh, Mum, Mum,” she gurgled through her laughter. “History has been made. Mum, darling, you’re speechless!”

“I am not,” said Mrs. Forsythe gruffly. “I…I think well, what do you know! You’re right! I am!”

When they had their breath back—yes, Mrs. Forsythe joined in, for Alistair’s statement was indeed true—Alistair picked up the book and said, “Now look, Mum, it’s almost time for my session with Tiny. Oh, yes; it’s a regular thing and he certainly is leading me into some fascinating byways.”

“Like what?”

“Like the old impossible problem of casting tungsten, for example. You know, there is a way to do it.”

“You don’t say! What do you cast it in—a play?”

Alistair wrinkled her straight nose. “Did you ever hear of pressure ice? Water compressed until it forms a solid at what is usually its boiling point?”

“I remember some such.”

“Well, all you need is enough pressure, and a chamber that can take that kind of pressure, and a couple of details like a high-intensity field of umpteen megacycles phased with…I forget the figures; anyhow, that’s the way to go about it.”

“‘If we had some eggs we could have some ham and eggs if we had some ham,’” quoted Mrs. Forsythe. “And besides, I seem to remember something about that pressure ice melting pretty much right now, like so,” and she snapped her fingers. “How do you know your molded tungsten—that’s what it would be, not cast at all—wouldn’t change state the same way?”

“That’s what I’m working on now,” said Alistair calmly. “Come along, Tiny. Mum, you can find your way around all right, can’t you? If you need anything, just sing out. This isn’t a séance, you know.”

“Isn’t it, though?” muttered Mrs. Forsythe as her lithe daughter and the dog bounded up the stairs. She shook her head, went into the kitchen, drew a bucket of water, and carried it down to her car, which had cooled to a simmer. She was dashing careful handfuls of it onto the radiator, before beginning to pour, when her quick ear caught the scrunching of boots on the steep drive.

She looked up to see a young man trudging wearily in the midmorning heat. He wore an old sharkskin suit and carried his coat. In spite of his wilted appearance, his step was firm and his golden hair was crisp in the sunlight. He swung up to Mrs. Forsythe and gave her a grin, all deep blue eyes and good teeth. “Forsythe’s?” he asked in a resonant baritone.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Forsythe, finding that she had to turn her head from side to side to see both of his shoulders. And yet she and he could swap belts. “You must feel like the Blue Kangaroo here,” she added, slapping her miniature mount on its broiling flank. “Boiled dry.”

“You cahl de cyah de Blue Kangaroo?” he repeated, draping his coat over the door and mopping his forehead with what seemed, to Mrs. Forsythe’s discerning eye, a pure linen handkerchief.

“I do,” she replied, forcing herself not to comment on the young man’s slight but strange accent. “It’s strictly a dry-clutch job and acts like a castellated one. Let the pedal out, she races. Let it out three thirty-seconds of an inch more, and you’re gone from there. Always stopping to walk back and pick up your head. Snaps right off, you know. Carry a bottle of collodion and a couple of splints to put your head back on. Starve to death without a head to eat With. What brings you here?”

In answer he held out a yellow envelope, looking solemnly at her head and neck, then at the car, his face quiet, his eyes crinkling with a huge enjoyment.

Mrs. Forsythe glanced at the envelope. “Oh. Telegram. She’s inside. I’ll give it to her. Come on in and have a drink. It’s hotter than the hinges of Hail Columbia, Happy Land. Don’t go wiping your feet like that! By jeepers, that’s enough to give you an inferiority complex! Invite a man in, invite the dust on his feet, too. It’s good, honest dirt and we don’t run to white broadlooms here. Are you afraid of dogs?”

The young man laughed. “Dahgs talk to me, ma’am.”

She glanced at him sharply, opened her mouth to tell him he might just be taken at his word around here, then thought better of it. “Sit down,” she ordered. She bustled up a foaming glass of beer and set it beside him. “I’ll get her down to sign for the wire,” she said. The man half lowered the glass into which he had been jowls-deep, began to speak, found he was alone in the room, laughed suddenly and richly, wiped off the mustache of suds, and dove down for a new one.

Mrs. Forsythe grinned and shook her head as she heard the laughter, and went straight to Alistair’s study. “Alistair!”

“Stop pushing me about the ductility of tungsten, Tiny! You know better than that. Figures are figures, and facts are facts. I think I see what you’re trying to lead me to. All I can say is that if such a thing is possible, I never heard of any equipment that could handle it. Stick around a few years and I’ll hire you a nuclear power plant. Until then, I’m afraid that—”

“Alistair!”

“—there just isn’t…hm-m-m? Yes, Mother?”

“Telegram.”

“Oh. Who from?”

“I don’t know, being only one fortieth of one per cent as psychic as that doghouse Dunninger you have there. In other words, I didn’t open it.”

“Oh, Mum, you’re silly! Of course you could have—oh, well, let’s have it.”

“I haven’t got it. It’s downstairs with Discobolus Junior, who brought it. No one,” she said ecstatically, “has a right to be so tanned with hair that color.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Go on down and sign for the telegram and see for yourself. You will find the maiden’s dream with his golden head in a bucket of suds, all hot and sweaty from his noble efforts in attaining this peak without spikes or alpenstock, with nothing but his pure heart and Western Union to guide him.”

“This maiden’s dream happens to be tungsten treatment,” said Alistair with some irritation. She looked longingly at her work sheet, put down her pencil, and rose. “Stay here, Tiny. I’ll be right back as soon as I have successfully resisted my conniving mother’s latest scheme to drag my red hairing across some young buck’s path to matrimony.” She paused at the door. “Aren’t you staying up here, Mum?”

“Get that hair away from your face,” said her mother grimly. “I am not. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. And don’t pun in front of that young man. It’s practically the only thing in the world I consider vulgar.”

Alistair led the way down the stairs and through the corridor to the kitchen, with her mother crowding her heels, once fluffing out her daughter’s blazing hair, once taking a swift tuck in the back of the girl’s halter. They spilled through the door almost together. Alistair stopped and frankly stared.

For the young man had risen and, still with the traces of beer foam on his modeled lips, stood with his jaws stupidly open, his head a little back, his eyes partly closed as if against a bright light. And it seemed as if everyone in the room forgot to breathe for a moment.

“Well!” Mrs. Forsythe exploded after a moment. “Honey, you’ve made a conquest. Hey—you? Chin up! Chest out!”

“I beg your humble pardon,” muttered the young man; and the phrase seemed more a colloquialism than an affectation.

Alistair, visibly pulling herself together, said, “Mother! Please!” and drifted forward to pick up the telegram that lay on the kitchen table. Her mother knew her well enough to realize that her hands and her eyes were steady only by a powerful effort. Whether the effort was in control of annoyance, embarrassment, or out-and-out biochemistry was a matter for later thought. At the moment she was enjoying it tremendously.

“Please wait,” said Alistair coolly. “There may be an answer to this.” The young man simply bobbed his head. He was still a little walleyed with the impact of seeing Alistair, as many a young man had been before. But there were the beginnings of his astonishing smile around his lips as he watched her rip the envelope open.

“Mother! Listen!

“How old is this tropical savage?” asked Mrs. Forsythe.

“He’s not a savage and I don’t know how old he is and I can’t see what that has to do with it. I think he’s about my age or a little older.” She looked up, and her eyes were shining.

“Deadly rival,” said Mrs. Forsythe to the messenger consolingly. “Rotten timing here, somewhere.”

“I—” said the young man.

“Mother, we’ve got to fix something to eat. Do you suppose he’ll be able to stay over? Where’s my green dress with the… oh, you wouldn’t know. It’s new.”

“Then the letters weren’t all about the dog,” said Mrs. Forsythe, with a Cheshire grin.

“Mum, you’re impossible! This is… is important. Alec is… is…”

Her mother nodded. “Important. That’s all I was pointing out.”

The young man said, “I—”

Alistair turned to him. “I do hope you don’t think we’re totally mad. I’m sorry you had such a climb.” She went to the sideboard and took a quarter out of a sugar bowl. He took it gravely.

“Thank you, ma’am. If you don’t mm’, I’ll keep this piece of silver for the rest o’ my everlahstin’.”

“You’re wel—What?”

The young man seemed to get even taller. “I greatly appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Forsythe. I have you at a disadvantage, ma’am, and one I shall correct.” He put a crooked forefinger between his lips and blew out an incredible blast of sound.

“Tiny!” he roared. “Here to me, dahg, an’ mek me known!”

There was a roar from upstairs, and Tiny came tumbling down, scrabbling wildly as he took the turn at the foot of the stairs and hurtled over the slick flooring to crash joyfully into the young man.

“Ah, you beast,” crooned the man, cuffing the dog happily. His accent thickened. “You thrive yourself here wid de lady-dem, you gray-yut styoupid harse. You glad me, mon, you glad me.” He grinned at the two astonished women. “Forgive me,” he said as he pummeled Tiny, pulled his ears, shoved him away, and caught him by the jaws. “For true, I couldn’t get in the first word with Mrs. Forsythe, and after I couldn’t help meself. Alec my name is, and the telegram I took from the true messenger, finding him sighing and sweating at the sight of the hill there.”

Alistair covered her face with her hands and said, “Oooh.” Mrs. Forsythe whooped with laughter. She found her voice and demanded, “Young man, what is your last name?”

“Sundersen, ma’am.”

“Mother! Why did you ask him that?”

“For reasons of euphony,” said Mrs. Forsythe with a twinkle. “Alexander Sundersen. Very good. Alistair—”

“Stop! Mum, don’t you dare—”

“I was going to say, Alistair, if you and our guest will excuse me, I’ll have to get back to my knitting.” She went to the door.

Alistair threw an appalled look at Alec and cried, “Mother! What are you knitting?”

“My brows, darling. See you later.” Mrs. Forsythe chuckled and went out.

It took almost a week for Alec to get caught up with the latest developments in Tiny, for he got the story in the most meticulous detail. There never seemed to be enough time to get in an explanation or an anecdote, so swiftly did the time fly when he and Alistair were together. Some of these days he went into the city with Alistair in the morning and spent the day buying tools and equipment for his estate. New York was a wonder city to him—he had been there only once before—and Alistair found herself getting quite possessive about the place, showing it off like the contents of a jewel box. And then Alec stayed at the house a couple of days. He endeared himself forever to Mrs. Forsythe by removing, cleaning, and refacing the clutch on the Blue Kangaroo, simplifying the controls on the gas refrigerator so it could be defrosted without a major operation, and putting a building jack under the corner of the porch that threatened to sag.

And the sessions with Tiny were resumed and intensified. At first, he seemed a little uneasy when Alec joined one of them, but within half an hour he relaxed. Thereafter, more and more he would interrupt Alistair to turn to Alec. Although he apparently could not understand Alec’s thoughts at all, he seemed to comprehend perfectly when Alec spoke to Alistair. And within a few days she learned to accept these interruptions, for they speeded up the research they were doing. Alec was almost totally ignorant of the advanced theory with which Alistair worked, but his mind was clear, quick, and very direct. He was no theorist, and that was good. He was one of those rare grease-monkey geniuses, with a grasp that amounted to intuition concerning the laws of cause and effect. Tiny’s reaction to this seemed to be approved. At any rate, the occasions when Alistair lost the track of what Tiny was after happened less and less frequently. Alec instinctively knew just how far to go back, and then how to spot the turning at which they had gone astray. And bit by bit, they began to identify what it was that Tiny was after. As to why—and how—he was after it, Alec’s experience with old Debbil seemed a clue. It certainly was sufficient to keep Alec plugging away at a possible solution to the strange animal’s stranger need.

“It was down at the sugar mill,” he told Alistair, after he had become fully acquainted with the incredible dog’s action and they were trying to determine the why and the how. “He called me over to the chute where cane is loaded into the conveyors.

“‘Bahss,’ he told me ‘dat t’ing dere, it not safe, sah.’ And he pointed through the guard over the bull gears that drove the conveyor. ‘Great big everlahstin’ teeth it has, Miss Alistair, a full ten inches long, and it whirlin’ to the drive pinion. It’s old, but strong for good. Debbil, what he saw was a bit o’ play on the pinion shaf’.’

“‘Now, you’re an old fool,’ I told him.

“‘No, Bahss,’ he says. ‘Look now, sah, de t’ing wit’ de teet’—dem, it not safe, sah. I mek you see,’ and before I could move meself or let a thought trickle, he opens the guard up and thrus’ his han’ inside! Bull gear, it run right up his arm and nip it off, neat as ever, at the shoulder. I humbly beg your pardon, Miss Alistair.”

“G-go on,” said Alistair, through her handkerchief.

“Well, sir, old Debbil was an idiot for true, and he only died the way he lived, rest him. He was old and he was all eaten out with malaria and elephantiasis and the like, that not even Dr. Thetford could save him. But a strange thing happened. As he lay dyin’, with the entire village gathered roun’ the door whisperin’ plans for the wake, he sent to tell me come quickly. Down I run, and for the smile on his face I glad him when I cross the doorstep.”

As Alec spoke, he was back in the Spanish-wall hut, with the air close under the palm-thatch roof and the glare of the pressure lantern set on the tiny window ledge to give the old man light to die by. Alec’s accent deepened. “‘How you feel, mon?’ I ahsk him. ‘Bahss, I’m a dead man now, but I got a light in mah hey-yud.’

“‘Tell me, then, Debbil.’

“‘Bahss, de folk-dem say, ol’ Debbil, him cyahn’t remembah de taste of a mango as he t’row away de skin. Him cyahn’t remembah his own house do he stay away t’ree day.’

“‘Loose talk, Debbil.’

“‘True talk, Bahss. Foh de Lahd give me a leaky pot fo’ hol’ ma brains. But Bahss, I do recall one t’ing now, bright an’ clear, and you must know. Bahss, de day I go up the wahtah line, I see a great jumbee in de stones of de Gov’nor Palace dere.’”

“What’s a jumbee?” asked Mrs. Forsythe.

“A ghost, ma’am. The Crucians carry a crawlin’ heap of superstitions. Tiny! What eats you, mon?”

Tiny growled again. Alec and Alistair exchanged a look. “He doesn’t want you to go on.”

“Listen carefully. I want him to get this. I am his friend. I want to help you help him. I realize that he wants as few people as possible to find out about this thing. I will say nothing to anybody unless and until I have his permission.

“Well, Tiny?”

The dog stood restlessly, swinging his great head from Alistair to Alec. Finally he made a sound like an audible shrug, then turned to Mrs. Forsythe.

“Mother’s part of me,” said Alistair firmly. “That’s the way it’s got to be. No alternative.” She leaned forward. “You can’t talk to us. You can only indicate what you want said and done. I think Alec’s story will help us to understand what you want and help you to get it more quickly. Understand?”

Tiny gazed at her for a long moment, said “Whuff!” and lay down with his nose between his paws and his eyes fixed on Alec.

“I think that’s the green light,” said Mrs. Forsythe, “and I might add that most of it was due to my daughter’s conviction that you’re a wonderful fellow.”

“Mother!”

“Well, pare me down and call me Spud! They’re both blushing!” said Mrs. Forsythe blatantly.

“Go on, Alec,” choked Alistair.

“Thank you. Old Debbil told me a fine tale of the things he had seen at the ruins. A great beast, mind you, with no shape at all, and a face ugly to drive you mad. And about the beast was what he called a ‘feelin’ good.’ He said it was a miracle, but he feared nothing. ‘Wet it was, Bahss, like a slug, an’ de eye it have is whirlin’ an’ shakin’, an’ I standin’ dar feelin’ like a bride at de altar step an’ no fear in me.’ Well, I thought the old man’s mind was wandering, for I knew he was touched. But the story he told was that clear, and never a simple second did he stop to think. Out it all came like a true thing.

“He said that Tiny walked to the beast and that it curved over him like an ocean wave. It closed over the dog, and Debbil was rooted there the livelong day, still without fear, and feelin’ no smallest desire to move. He had no surprise at all, even at the thing he saw restin’ in the thicket among the old stones.

“He said it was a submarine, a mighty one as great as the estate house and with no break nor mar in its surface but for the glass part let in where the mouth is on a shark.

“And then when the sun began to dip, the beast gave a shudderin’ heave and rolled back, and out walked Tiny. He stepped up to Debbil and stood. Then the beast begun to quiver and shake, and Debbil said the air aroun’ him heavied with the work the monster was doing, tryin’ to talk. A cloud formed in his brain, and a voice swept over him. ‘Not a livin’ word, Bahss, nor a sound at all. But it said to forget. It said to leave dis place and forget, sah.’ And the last thing old Debbil saw as he turned away was the beast slumping down, seeming all but dead from the work it had done to speak at all. ‘An’ de cloud leave in mah hey-yud, Bahss, f’om dat time onward. I’m a dead man now, Bahss, but de cloud gone and Debbil know de story.’” Alec leaned back and looked at his hands. “That was all. This must have happened about fifteen months pahst, just before Tiny began to show his strange stripe.” He drew a deep breath and looked up. “Maybe I’m gullible. But I knew the old man too well. He never in this life could invent such a tale. I troubled myself to go up to the Governor’s Palace after the buryin’. I might have been mistaken, but something big had lain in the deepest thicket, for it was crushed into a great hollow place near a hundred foot long. Well, there you are. For what it’s worth, you have the story of a superstitious an’ illiterate old man, at the point of death by violence and many years sick to boot.”

There was a long silence, and at last Alistair threw her lucent hair back and said, “It isn’t Tiny at all. It’s a…a thing outside Tiny.” She looked at the dog, her eyes wide. “And I don’t even mind.”

“Neither did Debbil, when he saw it,” said Alec gravely.

Mrs. Forsythe snapped, “What are we sitting gawking at

each other for? Don’t answer; I’ll tell you. All of us can

think up a story to fit the facts, and we’re all too self-conscious to come out with it. Any story that fit those facts would really be a killer.”

“Well said.” Alec grinned. “Would you like to tell us your idea?”

“Silly boy,” muttered Alistair.

“Don’t be impertinent, child. Of course I’d like to tell you, Alec. I think that the good Lord, in His infinite wisdom, has decided that it was about time for Alistair to come to her senses, and, knowing that it would take a quasi-scientific miracle to do it, dreamed up this—”

“Some day,” said Alistair icily, “I’m going to pry you loose from your verbosity and your sense of humor in one fell swoop.”

Mrs. Forsythe grinned. “There is a time for jocularity, kidlet, and this is it. I hate solemn people solemnly sitting around being awed by things. What do you make of all this, Alec?”

Alec pulled his ear and said, “I vote we leave it up to Tiny. It’s his show. Let’s get on with the work and just keep in mind what we already know.”

And to their astonishment, Tiny stumped over to Alec and licked his hand.

The blowoff came six weeks after Alec’s arrival. (Oh, yes! He stayed six weeks, and longer! It took some fiendish cogitation for him to think of enough legitimate estate business that had to be done in New York to keep him that long; but after that he was so much one of the family that he needed no excuse.) He had devised a code system for Tiny, so that Tiny could add something to their conversation. His point: “Here he sits, ma’am, like a fly on the wall, seeing everything and hearing everything and saying not a word. Picture it for yourself, and you in such a position, full entranced as you are with the talk you hear.” And for Mrs. Forsythe particularly, the mental picture was altogether too vivid! It was so well presented that Tiny’s research went by the board for four days while they devised the code. They had to give up the idea of a glove with a pencil pocket in it, with which Tiny might write a little, or any similar device. 1 was simply not deft enough for such meticulous work; and besides, he showed absolutely no signs of understanding any written or printed symbolism. Unless, of course, Alistair thought about it.

Alec’s plan was simple. He cut some wooden forms—a disk, a square, a triangle to begin with. The disk signified “yes” or any other affirmation, depending on the context. The square was “no” or any negation; and the triangle indicated a question or a change in subject. The amount of information Tiny was able to impart by moving from one to another of these forms was astonishing. Once a subject for discussion was established, Tiny would take a stand between the disk and the square, so that all he had to do was to swing his head to one side or the other to indicate a “yes” or a “no.” No longer were there those exasperating sessions in which the track of his research was lost while they back-trailed to discover where they had gone astray. The conversations ran like this:

“Tiny, I have a question. Hope you won’t think it too personal. May I ask it?” That was Alec, always infinitely polite to dogs. He had always recognized their innate dignity.

Yes, the answer would come, as Tiny swung his head over the disk.

“Are we right in assuming that you, the dog, are not communicating with us: that you are the medium?”

Tiny went to the triangle. “You want to change the subject?”

Tiny hesitated, then went to the square. No.

Alistair said, “He obviously wants something from us before he will discuss the question. Right, Tiny?”

Yes.

Mrs. Forsythe said, “He’s had his dinner, and he doesn’t smoke. I think he wants us to assure him that we’ll keep his secret.”

Yes.

“Good. Alec, you’re wonderful,” said Alistair. “Mother, stop beaming! I only meant—”

“Leave it at that, child! Any qualification will spoil it for the man!”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Alec gravely, with that deep twinkle of amusement around his eyes. Then he turned back to Tiny. “Well, what about it, sah? Are you a superdog?”

No.

“Who…no, he can’t answer that. Let’s go back a bit. Was old Debbil’s story true?”

Yes.

“Ah.” They exchanged glances. “Where is this—monster? Still in St. Croix?”

No.

“Here?”

Yes.

“You mean here, in this room or in the house?”

No.

“Nearby, though?”

Yes.

“How can we find out just where, without mentioning the countryside item by item?” asked Alistair.

“I know,” said Mrs. Forsythe. “Alec, according to Debbil, that ‘submarine’ thing was pretty big, wasn’t it?”

“That it was, ma’am.”

“Good. Tiny, does he…it…have the ship here, too?”

Yes.

Mrs. Forsythe spread her hands. “That’s it, then. There’s only one place around here where you could hide such an object.” She nodded her head at the west wall of the house.

“The river!” cried Alistair. “That right, Tiny?”

Yes. And Tiny went immediately to the triangle.

“Wait!” said Alec. “Tiny, beggin’ your pardon, but there’s one more question. Shortly after you took passage to New York, there was a business with compasses, where they all pointed to the west. Was that the ship?”

Yes.

“In the water?”

No.

“Why,” said Alistair, “this is pure science fiction! Alec, do you ever get science fiction in the tropics?”

“Ah, Miss Alistair, not often enough, for true. But well I know it. The spaceships are Old Mother Goose to me. But there’s a difference here. For in all the stories I’ve read, when a beast comes here from space, it’s to kill and conquer; and yet—and I don’t know why—I know that this one wants nothing of the sort. More, he’s out to do us good.”

“I feel the same way,” said Mrs. Forsythe thoughtfully. “It’s sort of a protective cloud which seems to surround us. Does that make sense to you, Alistair?”

“I know it from ’way back,” said Alistair with conviction. She looked at the dog thoughtfully. “I wonder why he…it…won’t show itself. And why it can communicate only through me. And why me?”

“I’d say, Miss Alistair, that you were chosen because of your metallurgy. As to why we never see the beast—Well, it knows best. Its reason must be a good one.”

Day after day, and bit by bit, they got and gave information. Many things remained mysteries; but, strangely, there seemed no real need to question Tiny too closely. The atmosphere of confidence, of good will that surrounded them made questions seem not only unnecessary but downright rude.

And day by day, and little by little, a drawing began to take shape under Alec’s skilled hands. It was a casting, with a simple enough external contour, but inside it contained a series of baffles and a chamber. It was designed, apparently, to support and house a carballoy shaft. There were no openings into the central chamber except those taken by the shaft. The shaft turned; something within the chamber apparently drove it. There was plenty of discussion about it.

“Why the baffles?” moaned Alistair, palming all the neatness out of her flaming hair. “Why carballoy? And in the name of Nemo, why tungsten?”

Alec stared at the drawing for a long moment, then suddenly clapped a hand to his head. “Tiny! Is there radiation inside that housing? I mean, hard stuff?”

Yes.

“There you are, then,” said Alec. “Tungsten to shield the radiation. A casting for uniformity. The baffles to make a meander out of the shaft openings—see, the shaft has plates turned on it to fit between the baffles.”

“And nowhere for anything to go in, nowhere for anything to come out—except the shaft, of course and besides, you can’t cast tungsten that way! Maybe Tiny’s monster can, but we can’t. Maybe with the right flux and with enough power—but that’s silly. Tungsten won’t cast.”

“And we cahn’t build a spaceship. There must be a way!”

“Not with today’s facilities, and not with tungsten,” said Alistair. “Tiny’s ordering it from us the way we would order a wedding cake at the corner bakery.”

“What made you say ‘wedding cake’?”

“You, too, Alec? Don’t I get enough of that from Mother?” But she smiled all the same. “But about the casting—it seems to me that our mysterious friend is in the position of a radio fiend who understands every part of his set, how it’s made, how and why it works. Then a tube blows, and he finds he can’t buy one. He has to make one if he gets one at all. Apparently old Debbil’s beast is in that kind of spot. What about it, Tiny? Is your friend short a part which he understands but has never built before?”

Yes.

“And he needs it to get away from Earth?”

Yes.

Alec asked, “What’s the trouble? Can’t get escape velocity?”

Tiny hesitated, then went to the triangle. “Either he doesn’t want to talk about it or the question doesn’t quite fit the situation,” said Alistair. “It doesn’t matter. Our main problem is the casting. It just can’t be done. Not by anyone

on this planet, as far as I know; and I think I know. It has to be tungsten, Tiny?”

Yes.

“Tungsten, for what?” asked Alec. “Radiation shield?”

Yes.

He turned to Alistair. “Isn’t there something just as good?”

She mused, staring at his drawing. “Yes, several things,” she said thoughtfully. Tiny watched her, motionless. He seemed to slump as she shrugged dispiritedly and said, “But not anything with walls as thin as that. A yard or so of lead might do it, and have something like the mechanical strength he seems to want, but it would obviously be too big. Beryllium—” At the word, Tiny went and stood right on top of the square—a most emphatic no.

“How about an alloy?” Alec asked.

“Well, Tiny?”

Tiny went to the triangle. Alistair nodded. “You don’t know. I can’t think of one. I’ll take it up with Dr. Nowland. Maybe—”

The following day Alec stayed home and spent the day arguing cheerfully with Mrs. Forsythe and building a grape arbor. It was a radiant Alistair who came home that evening. “Got it! Got it!” she caroled as she danced in. “Alec! Tiny—come on!”

They flew upstairs to the study. Without removing the green “beanie” with the orange feather that so nearly matched her hair, Alistair hauled out four reference books and began talking animatedly. “Auric molybdenum, Tiny! What about that? Gold and molyb III should do it! Listen!” And she launched forth into a spatter of absorption data, Greek-letter formulas, and strength-of-materials comparisons that quite made Alec’s head swim. He sat watching her without listening. Increasingly, this was his greatest pleasure.

When Alistair was quite through, Tiny walked away from her and lay down, gazing off into space.

“Well, strike me!” said Alec. “Look yonder, Miss Alistair. The very first time I ever saw him thinking something over.”

“Sh-h! Don’t disturb him, then. If that is the answer, and if he never thought of it before, it will take some figuring out. There’s no knowing what fantastic kind of science he’s comparing it with.”

“I see the point. Like…well, suppose we crashed a plane in the Brazilian jungle and needed a new hydraulic cylinder on the landing gear. Now, then, one of the natives shows us ironwood, and it’s up to us to figure out if we can make it serve.”

“That’s about it,” breathed Alistair. “I—” She was interrupted by Tiny, who suddenly leaped up and ran to her, kissing her hands, committing the forbidding enormity of putting his paws on her shoulders, running back to the wooden forms and nudging the disk, the yes symbol. His tail was going like a metronome without its pendulum. Mrs. Forsythe came in in the midst of all this rowdiness and demanded:

“What goes on? Who made a dervish out of Tiny? What have you been feeding him? Don’t tell me. Let me…you don’t mean you’ve solved his problem for him? What are you going to do—buy him a pogo stick?”

“Oh, Mum! We’ve got it! An alloy of molybdenum and gold! I can get it alloyed and cast in no time!”

“Good, honey—good. You going to cast the whole thing?” She pointed to the drawing.

“Why, yes.”

“Humph!”

“Mother! Why, if I may ask, do you ‘humph’ in that tone of voice?”

“You may ask. Chicken, who’s going to pay for it?”

“Why, that will…I—oh. Oh!” she said, aghast, and ran to the drawing. Alec came and looked over her shoulder. She figured in the corner of the drawing, oh-ed once again, and sat down weakly.

“How much?” asked Alec.

“I’ll get an estimate in the morning,” she said faintly. “I know plenty of people. I can get it at cost—maybe.” She looked at Tiny despairingly. He came and laid his head against her knee, and she pulled at his ears. “I won’t let you down, darling,” she whispered.

She got the estimate the next day. It was a little over thirteen thousand dollars.

Alistair and Alec stared blankly at each other and then at the dog.

“Maybe you can tell us where we can raise that much money?” said Alistair, as if she expected Tiny to whip out a wallet.

Tiny whimpered, licked Alistair’s hand, looked at Alec, and then lay down.

“Now what?” mused Alec.

“Now we go and fix something to eat,” said Mrs. Forsythe, moving toward the door. The others were about to follow, when Tiny leaped to his feet and ran in front of them. He stood in the doorway and whimpered. When they came closer, he barked.

“Sh-h! What is it, Tiny? Want us to stay here a while?”

“Say! Who’s the boss around here?” Mrs. Forsythe wanted to know.

“He is,” said Alec, and he knew he was speaking for all of them. They sat down, Mrs. Forsythe on the studio couch, Alistair at her desk, Alec at the drawing table. But Tiny seemed not to approve of the arrangement. He became vastly excited, running to Alec, nudging him hard, dashing to Alistair, taking her wrist very gently in his jaws and pulling gently toward Alec.

“What is it, fellow?”

“Seems like matchmaking to me,” remarked Mrs. Forsythe.

“Nonsense, Mum!” said Alistair, coloring. “He wants Alec and me to change places, that’s all.”

Alec said, “Oh!” and went to sit beside Mrs. Forsythe. Alistair sat at the drawing table. Tiny put a paw up on it, poked at the large tablet of paper. Alistair looked at him curiously, then tore off the top sheet. Tiny nudged a pencil with his nose.

Then they waited. Somehow, no one wanted to speak. Perhaps no one could, but there seemed to be no reason to try. And gradually a tension built up in the room. Tiny stood stiff and rapt in the center of the room. His eyes glazed, and when he finally keeled over limply, no one went to him.

Alistair picked up the pencil slowly. Watching her hand, Alec was reminded of the movement of the pointer on a ouija board. The pencil traveled steadily, in small surges, to the very top of the paper and hung there. Alistair’s face was quite blank.

After that no one could say what happened, exactly. It was as if their eyes had done what their voices had done. They could see, but they did not care to. And Alistair’s pencil began to move. Something, somewhere, was directing her mind—not her hand. Faster and faster her pencil flew, and it wrote what was later to be known as the Forsythe Formulas.

There was no sign then, of course, of the furor that they would cause, of the millions of words of conjecture that were written when it was discovered that the girl who wrote them could not possibly have had the mathematical background to have written them. They were understood by no one at first, and by very few people ever. Alistair certainly did not know what they meant.

An editorial in a popular magazine came startlingly close to the true nature of the formulas when it said: “The Forsythe Formulas, which describe what the Sunday supplements call the ‘Something-for-Nothing Clutch,’ and the drawing that accompanies them, signify little to the layman. As far as can be determined, the formulas are the description and working principles of a device. It appears to be a power plant of sorts, and if it is ever understood, atomic power will go the way of gas lights.

“A sphere of energy is enclosed in a shell made of neutron-absorbing material. This sphere has inner and outer ‘layers.’ A shaft passes through the sphere. Apparently a magnetic field must be rotated about the outer casing of the device. The sphere of energy aligns itself with this field. The inner sphere rotates with the outer one and has the ability to turn the shaft. Unless the mathematics used are disproved—and no one seems to have come anywhere near doing that, unorthodox as they are—the aligning effect between the rotating field and the two concentric spheres, as well as the shaft, is quite independent of any load. In other words, if the original magnetic field rotates at 3,000 r.p.m., the shaft will rotate at 3000 r.p.m., even if there is only a sixteenth horsepower turning the field while there is a 10,000 braking stress on the shaft.

“Ridiculous? Perhaps. And perhaps it is no more so than the apparent impossibility of 15 watts of energy pouring into the antenna of a radio station, and nothing coming down. The key to the whole problem is in the nature of those self-contained spheres of force inside the shell. Their power is apparently inherent, and consists of an ability to align, just as the useful property of steam is its faculty to expand. If, as is suggested by Reinhardt in his ‘Usage of the Symbol B in the Forsythe Formulas,’ these spheres are nothing but stable concentrations of pure binding energy, we have here a source of power beyond the wildest dreams of mankind. And whether or not we succeed in building such devices, it cannot be denied that whatever their mysterious source, the Forsythe Formulas are an epochal gift to several sciences, including, if you like, the art of philosophy.”

After it was over, and the formulas written, the terrible tension lifted. The three humans sat in their happy coma, and the dog lay senseless on the rug. Mrs. Forsythe was the first to move, standing up abruptly. “Well!” she said.

It seemed to break a spell. Everything was quite normal. No hangovers, no sense of strangeness, no fear. They stood looking wonderingly at the mass of minute figures.

“I don’t know,” murmured Alistair, and the phrase covered a world of meaning. Then, “Alec—that casting. We’ve got to get it done. We’ve just got to, no matter what it costs us!”

“I’d like to,” said Alec. “Why do we have to?”

She waved toward the drawing table. “We’ve been given that.”

“You don’t say!” said Mrs. Forsythe. “And what is that?”

Alistair put her hand to her head, and a strange, unfocused look came into her eyes. That look was the only part of the whole affair that ever really bothered Alec. It was a place she had gone to, a little bit; and he knew that no matter whatever happened, he would never be able to go there with her.

She said, “He’s been…talking to me, you know. You do know that, don’t you? I’m not guessing, Alec—Mum.”

“I believe you, chicken,” her mother said softly. “What are you trying to say?”

“I got it in concepts. It isn’t a thing you can repeat, really. But the idea is that he couldn’t give us any thing. His ship is completely functional, and there isn’t anything he can exchange for what he wants us to do. But he has given us something of great value—” Her voice trailed off; she seemed to listen to something for a moment. “Of value in several ways. A new science, a new approach to attack the science. New tools, new mathematics.”

“But what is it? What can it do? And how is it going to help us pay for the casting?” asked Mrs. Forsythe.

“It can’t, immediately,” said Alistair decisively. “It’s too big. We don’t even know what it is. Why are you arguing? Can’t you understand that he can’t give us any gadgetry? That we haven’t his techniques, materials, and tools, and so we couldn’t make any actual machine he suggested? He’s done the only thing he can; he’s given us a new science, and tools to take it apart.”

“That I know,” said Alec gravely. “Well, indeed. I felt that. And I…trust him. Do you, ma’am?”

“Yes, of course. I think he’s—people. I think he has a sense of humor and a sense of justice,” said Mrs. Forsythe firmly. “Let’s get our heads together. We ought to be able to scrape it up some way. And why shouldn’t we? Haven’t we three got something to talk about for the rest of our lives?”

And their heads went together.

This is the letter that arrived two months later in St. Croix.

Honey-lamb,

Hold on to your seat. It’s all over.

The casting arrived. I missed you more than ever, but when you have to go—and you know I’m glad you went! Anyway, I did as you indicated, through Tiny, before you left. The men who rented me the boat and ran it for me thought I was crazy, and said so. Do you know that once we were out on the river with the casting, and Tiny started whuffing and whimpering to tell me we were on the right spot, and I told the men to tip the casting over the side, they had the colossal nerve to insist on opening the crate? Got quite nasty about it. Didn’t want to be a party to any dirty work. It was against my principles, but I let them, just to expedite matters. They were certain there was a body in the box! When they saw what it was, I was going to bend my umbrelly over their silly heads, but they looked so funny! I couldn’t do a thing but roar with laughter. That was when the man said I was crazy.

Anyhow, over the side it went, into the river. Made a lovely splash. And about a minute later I got the loveliest feeling—I wish I could describe it to you. I was sort of overwhelmed by a feeling of utter satisfaction, and gratitude, and…oh, I don’t know. I just felt good, all over. I looked at Tiny, and he was trembling. I think he felt it, too. I’d call it a thank you, on a grand psychic scale. I think you can rest assured that Tiny’s monster got what it wanted.

But that wasn’t the end of it. I paid off the boatmen and started up the bank. Something made me stop, and wait, and then go back to the water’s edge.

It was early evening, and very still. I was under some sort of compulsion—not an unpleasant thing, but an unbreakable one. I sat down on the river wall and watched the water. There was no one around—the boat had left—except one of those snazzy Sunlounge cruisers anchored a few yards out. I remember how still it was, because there was a little girl playing on the deck of the yacht, and I could hear her footsteps as she ran about.

Suddenly I noticed something in the water. I suppose I should have been frightened, but somehow I wasn’t at all. Whatever the thing was, it was big and gray and slimy and quite shapeless. And somehow, it seemed to be the source of this aura of well-being and protectiveness that I felt. It was staring at me. I knew it was before I saw that it had an eye—a big one, with something whirling inside of it…I don’t know. I wish I could write. I wish I had the power to tell you what it was like. I know that it was, by human standards, infinitely revolting. If this was Tiny’s monster, I could understand its being sensitive to the revulsion it might cause. And wrongly, for I felt to the core that the creature was good.

It winked at me. I don’t mean blinked. It winked. And then everything happened at once.

The creature was gone, and in seconds there was a disturbance in the water by the yacht. Something gray and wet reached up out of the river, and I saw it was going for that little girl. Only a tyke—about three, she was. Red hair just like yours. And it thumped that child in the small of the back just enough to knock her over—into the river.

And can you believe it? I just sat there watching and said never a word! It didn’t seem right to me that that baby could be struggling in the water. But it didn’t seem wrong, either!

Well, before I could get my wits together, Tiny was off the wall like a hairy bullet and streaking through the water. I have often wondered why his feet are so big; I never will again. The hound is built like the lower half of a paddle wheel! In two shakes he had the baby by the scruff of the neck and was bringing her back to me. No one had seen that child get pushed, Alistair! No one but me. But there was a man on the yacht who must have seen her fall. He was all over the deck, roaring orders and getting in the way of things, and by the time he had his wherry in the water, Tiny had reached me with the little girl. She wasn’t frightened, either—she thought it was a grand joke! Wonderful youngster.

So the man came ashore, all gratitude and tears, and wanted to goldplate Tiny or something. Then he saw me. “That your dog?” I said it was my daughter’s. She was in St. Croix on her honeymoon. Before I could stop him, he had a checkbook out and was scratching away at it. He said he knew my kind. Said he knew I’d never accept a thing for myself, but wouldn’t refuse something for my daughter. I enclose the check. Why he picked a sum like thirteen thousand, I’ll never know. Anyhow, I know it’ll be a help to you. Since the money really comes from Tiny’s monster, I suppose I can confess that getting Alec to put up the money—even though he would have to clean out his savings and mortgage his estate—would be a good idea if he were one of the family, because then he’d have you to help him make it all back again—that was all my idea. Sometimes, though, watching you, I wonder if I really had to work so all-fired hard to get you nice people married to each other.

Well, I imagine that closes the business of Tiny’s monster. There are a lot of things we’ll probably never know. I can guess some things, though. It could communicate with a dog but not with a human, unless it half killed itself trying. Apparently a dog is telepathic with humans to a degree, though it probably doesn’t understand a lot of what it gets. I don’t speak French, but I could probably transcribe French phonetically well enough so a Frenchman could read it. Tiny was transcribing that way. The monster could “send” through him and control him completely. It no doubt indoctrinated the dog—if I can use the term—the day old Debbil took him up the waterline. And when the monster caught, through Tiny, the mental picture of you when Or. Schwellenbach mentioned you, it went to work through the dog to get you working on its problem. Mental pictures—that’s probably what the monster used. That’s how Tiny could tell one book from another without being able to read. You visualize everything you think about. What do you think? I think that mine’s as good a guess as any.

You might be amused to learn that last night all the compasses in this neighborhood pointed west for a couple of hours! ’Bye, now, chillun. Keep on being happy.

Love and love, and a kiss for Alec,

Mum.

P.S. Is St. Croix really a nice place to honeymoon? Jack—he’s the fellow who signed the check—is getting very sentimental. He’s very like your father. A widower, and—Oh, I don’t know. Says fate, or something, brought us together. Said he hadn’t planned to take a trip upriver with the baby, but something drove him to it. He can’t imagine why he anchored just there. Seemed a good idea at the time. Maybe it was fate. He is very sweet. I wish I could forget that wink I saw in the water.

They had almost finished with the loading. Outside stood the Optus, his arms folded, his face sunk in gloom. Captain Franco walked leisurely down the gangplank, grinning.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re getting paid for all this.”

The Optus said nothing. He turned away, collecting his robes. The Captain put his boot on the hem of the robe.

“Just a minute. Don’t go off. I’m not finished.”

“Oh?” The Optus turned with dignity. “I am going back to the village.” He looked toward the animals and birds being driven up the gangplank into the spaceship. “I must organize new hunts.”

Franco lit a cigarette. “Why not? You people can go out into the veldt and track it all down again. But when we run out halfway between Mars and Earth—”

The Optus went off, wordless. Franco joined the first mate at the bottom of the gangplank.

“How’s it coming?” he said. He looked at his watch. “We got a good bargain here.”

The mate glanced at him sourly. “How do you explain that?”

“What’s the matter with you? We need it more than they do.”

“I’ll see you later, Captain.” The mate threaded his way up the plank, between the long-legged Martian go-birds, into the ship. Franco watched him disappear. He was just starting up after him, up the plank toward the port, when he saw it.

“My God!” He stood staring, his hands on his hips. Peterson was walking along the path, his face red, leading it by a string.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said, tugging at the string. Franco walked toward him.

“What is it?”

The wub stood sagging, its great body settling slowly. It was sitting down, its eyes half shut. A few flies buzzed about its flank, and it switched its tail.

It sat. There was silence.

“It’s a wub,” Peterson said. “I got it from a native for fifty cents. He said it was a very unusual animal. Very respected.”

“This?” Franco poked the great sloping side of the wub. “It’s a pig! A huge dirty pig!”

“Yes sir, it’s a pig. The natives call it a wub.”

“A huge pig. It must weigh four hundred pounds.” Franco grabbed a tuft of the rough hair. The wub gasped. Its eyes opened, small and moist. Then its great mouth twitched.

A tear rolled down the wub’s cheek and splashed on the floor.

“Maybe it’s good to eat,” Peterson said nervously.

“We’ll soon find out,” Franco said.

The wub survived the take-off, sound asleep in the hold of the ship. When they were out in space and everything was running smoothly, Captain Franco bade his men fetch the wub upstairs so that he might perceive what manner of beast it was.

The wub grunted and wheezed, squeezing up the passageway.

“Come on,” Jones grated, pulling at the rope. The wub twisted, rubbing its skin off on the smooth chrome walls. It burst into the ante-room, tumbling down in a heap. The men leaped up.

“Good Lord,” French said. “What is it?”

“Peterson says it’s a wub,” Jones said. “It belongs to him.” He kicked at the wub. The wub stood up unsteadily, panting.

“What’s the matter with it?” French came over. “Is it going to be sick?”

They watched. The wub rolled its eyes mournfully. It gazed around at the men.

“I think it’s thirsty,” Peterson said. He went to get some water. French shook his head.

“No wonder we had so much trouble taking off. I had to reset all my ballast calculations.”

Peterson came back with the water. The wub began to lap gratefully, splashing the men.

Captain Franco appeared at the door.

“Let’s have a look at it.” He advanced, squinting critically. “You got this for fifty cents?”

“Yes, sir,” Peterson said. “It eats almost anything. I fed it on grain and it liked that. And then potatoes, and mash, and scraps from the table, and milk. It seems to enjoy eating. After it eats it lies down and goes to sleep.”

“I see,” Captain Franco said. “Now, as to its taste. That’s the real question. I doubt if there’s much point in fattening it up any more. It seems fat enough to me already. Where’s the cook? I want him here. I want to find out—”

The wub stopped lapping and looked up at the Captain.

“Really, Captain,” the wub said. “I suggest we talk of other matters.”

The room was silent.

“What was that?” Franco said. “Just now.”

“The wub, sir,” Peterson said. “It spoke.”

They all looked at the wub.

“What did it say? What did it say?”

“It suggested we talk about other things.”

Franco walked toward the wub. He went all around it, examining it from every side. Then he came back over and stood with the men.

“I wonder if there’s a native inside it,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should open it up and have a look.”

“Oh, goodness!” the wub cried. “Is that all you people can think of, killing and cutting?”

Franco clenched his fists. “Come out of there! Whoever you are, come out!”

Nothing stirred. The men stood together, their faces blank, staring at the wub. The wub swished its tail. It belched suddenly.

“I beg your pardon,” the wub said.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in there,” Jones said in a low voice. They all looked at each other.

The cook came in.

“You wanted me, Captain?” he said. “What’s this thing?”

“This is a wub,” Franco said. “It’s to be eaten. Will you measure it and figure out—”

“I think we should have a talk,” the wub said. “I’d like to discuss this with you, Captain, if I might. I can see that you and I do not agree on some basic issues.”

The Captain took a long time to answer. The wub waited good-naturedly, licking the water from its jowls.

“Come into my office,” the Captain said at last. He turned and walked out of the room. The wub rose and padded after him. The men watched it go out. They heard it climbing the stairs.

“I wonder what the outcome will be,” the cook said. “Well, I’ll be in the kitchen. Let me know as soon as you hear.”

“Sure,” Jones said. “Sure.”

The wub eased itself down in the corner with a sigh. “You must forgive me,” it said. “I’m afraid I’m addicted to various forms of relaxation. When one is as large as I—”

The Captain nodded impatiently. He sat down at his desk and folded his hands.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get started. You’re a wub? Is that correct?”

The wub shrugged. “I suppose so. That’s what they call us, the natives, I mean. We have our own term.”

“And you speak English? You’ve been in contact with Earthmen before?”

“No.”

“Then how do you do it?”

“Speak English? Am I speaking English? I’m not conscious of speaking anything in particular. I examined your mind—”

“My mind?”

“I studied the contents, especially the semantic warehouse, as I refer to it—”

“I see,” the Captain said. “Telepathy. Of course.”

“We are a very old race,” the wub said. “Very old and very ponderous. It is difficult for us to move around. You can appreciate that anything so slow and heavy would be at the mercy of more agile forms of life. There was no use in our relying on physical defenses. How could we win? Too heavy to run, too soft to fight, too good-natured to hunt for game—”

“How do you live?”

“Plants. Vegetables. We can eat almost anything. We’re very catholic. Tolerant, eclectic, catholic. We live and let live. That’s how we’ve gotten along.”

The wub eyed the Captain.

“And that’s why I so violently objected to this business about having me boiled. I could see the image in your mind—most of me in the frozen food locker, some of me in the kettle, a bit for your pet cat—”

“So you read minds?” the Captain said. “How interesting. Anything else? I mean, what else can you do along those lines?”

“A few odds and ends,” the wub said absently, staring around the room. “A nice apartment you have here, Captain. You keep it quite neat. I respect life-forms that are tidy. Some Martian birds are quite tidy. They throw things out of their nests and sweep them—”

“Indeed.” The Captain nodded. “But to get back to the problem—”

“Quite so. You spoke of dining on me. The taste, I am told, is good. A little fatty, but tender. But how can any lasting contact be established between your people and mine if you resort to such barbaric attitudes? Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts—”

The Captain stood up. “Philosophy. It might interest you to know that we will be hard put to find something to eat for the next month. An unfortunate spoilage—”

“I know.” The wub nodded. “But wouldn’t it be more in accord with your principles of democracy if we all drew straws, or something along that line? After all, democracy is to protect the minority from just such infringements. Now, if each of us casts one vote—”

The Captain walked to the door.

“Nuts to you,” he said. He opened the door. He opened his mouth.

He stood frozen, his mouth wide, his eyes staring, his fingers still on the knob.

The wub watched him. Presently it padded out of the room, edging past the Captain. It went down the hall, deep in meditation.

The room was quiet.

“So you see,” the wub said, “we have a common myth. Your mind contains many familiar myth symbols. Ishtar, Odysseus—”

Peterson sat silently, staring at the floor. He shifted in his chair.

“Go on,” he said. “Please go on.”

“I find in your Odysseus a figure common to the mythology of most self-conscious races. As I interpret it, Odysseus wanders as an individual, aware of himself as such. This is the idea of separation, of separation from family and country. The process of individuation.”

“But Odysseus returns to his home.” Peterson looked out the port window, at the stars, endless stars, burning intently in the empty universe. “Finally he goes home.”

“As must all creatures. The moment of separation is a temporary period, a brief journey of the soul. It begins, it ends. The wanderer returns to land and race….”

The door opened. The wub stopped, turning its great head.

Captain Franco came into the room, the men behind him. They hesitated at the door.

“Are you all right?” French said.

“Do you mean me?” Peterson said, surprised. “Why me?”

Franco lowered his gun. “Come over here,” he said to Peterson. “Get up and come here.”

There was silence.

“Go ahead,” the wub said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Peterson stood up. “What for?”

“It’s an order.”

Peterson walked to the door. French caught his arm.

“What’s going on?” Peterson wrenched loose. “What’s the matter with you?”

Captain Franco moved toward the wub. The wub looked up from where it lay in the corner, pressed against the wall.

“It is interesting,” the wub said, “that you are obsessed with the idea of eating me. I wonder why.”

“Get up,” Franco said.

“If you wish.” The wub rose, grunting. “Be patient. It is difficult for me.” It stood, gasping, its tongue lolling foolishly.

“Shoot it now,” French said.

“For God’s sake!” Peterson exclaimed. Jones turned to him quickly, his eyes gray with fear.

“You didn’t see him—like a statue, standing there, his mouth open. If we hadn’t come down, he’d still be there.”

“Who? The Captain?” Peterson stared around. “But he’s all right now.”

They looked at the wub, standing in the middle of the room, its great chest rising and falling.

“Come on,” Franco said. “Out of the way.”

The men pulled aside toward the door.

“You are quite afraid, aren’t you?” the wub said. “Have I done anything to you? I am against the idea of hurting. All I have done is try to protect myself. Can you expect me to rush eagerly to my death? I am a sensible being like yourselves. I was curious to see your ship, learn about you. I suggested to the native—”

The gun jerked.

“See,” Franco said. “I thought so.”

The wub settled down, panting. It put its paw out, pulling its tail around it.

“It is very warm,” the wub said. “I understand that we are close to the jets. Atomic power. You have done many wonderful things with it—technically. Apparently, your scientific hierarchy is not equipped to solve moral, ethical—”

Franco turned to the men, crowding behind him, wide-eyed, silent.

“I’ll do it. You can watch.”

French nodded. “Try to hit the brain. It’s no good for eating. Don’t hit the chest. If the rib cage shatters, we’ll have to pick bones out.”

“Listen,” Peterson said, licking his lips. “Has it done anything? What harm has it done? I’m asking you. And anyhow, it’s still mine. You have no right to shoot it. It doesn’t belong to you.”

Franco raised his gun.

“I’m going out,” Jones said, his face white and sick. “I don’t want to see it.”

“Me, too,” French said. The men straggled out, murmuring. Peterson lingered at the door.

“It was talking to me about myths,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

He went outside.

Franco walked toward the wub. The wub looked up slowly. It swallowed.

“A very foolish thing,” it said. “I am sorry that you want to do it. There was a parable that your Saviour related—”

It stopped, staring at the gun.

“Can you look me in the eye and do it?” the wub said. “Can you do that?”

The Captain gazed down. “I can look you in the eye,” he said. “Back on the farm we had hogs, dirty razor-back hogs. I can do it.”

Staring down at the wub, into the gleaming, moist eyes, he pressed the trigger.

The taste was excellent.

They sat glumly around the table, some of them hardly eating at all. The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Captain Franco.

“More?” he said, looking around. “More? And some wine, perhaps.”

“Not me,” French said. “I think I’ll go back to the chart room.”

“Me, too.” Jones stood up, pushing his chair back. “I’ll see you later.”

The Captain watched them go. Some of the others excused themselves.

“What do you suppose the matter is?” the Captain said. He turned to Peterson. Peterson sat staring down at his plate, at the potatoes, the green peas, and at the thick slab of tender, warm meat.

He opened his mouth. No sound came.

The Captain put his hand on Peterson’s shoulder.

“It is only organic matter, now,” he said. “The life essence is gone.” He ate, spooning up the gravy with some bread. “I, myself, love to eat. It is one of the greatest things that a living creature can enjoy. Eating, resting, meditation, discussing things.”

Peterson nodded. Two more men got up and went out. The Captain drank some water and sighed.

“Well,” he said. “I must say that this was a very enjoyable meal. All the reports I had heard were quite true—the taste of wub. Very fine. But I was prevented from enjoying this pleasure in times past.”

He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. Peterson stared dejectedly at the table.

The Captain watched him intently. He leaned over.

“Come, come,” he said. “Cheer up! Let’s discuss things.”

He smiled.

“As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths—”

Peterson jerked up, staring.

“To go on,” the Captain said. “Odysseus, as I understand him—”

The man from the News asked, “What do you think of the aliens, Mr. Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?”

“Very human,” said the thin young man.

Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady, faint drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where They would arrive. On the concrete runways the puddles were pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.

Back at a respectful distance from the place where the huge spaceship would land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted, sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space.

“Do you know anything about their home planet?” asked the man from the Herald.

The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of questions but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions at once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.

“No, nothing directly.”

“Any ideas or deductions?” the Herald persisted.

“Their world must be Earthlike to them,” the weary-looking young man answered uncertainly. “The environment evolves the animal. But only in relative terms, of course.” He looked at them with a quick glance and then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to his forehead with sweat. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Earthlike,” muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed nothing more in the reply.

The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed, and received a quick glance in exchange.

The Herald asked Nathen, “You think they are dangerous, then?”

It was the kind of question, assuming much, that usually broke reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to know.

The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. “No, I wouldn’t say so.”

“You think they are friendly, then?” said the Herald, equally positive on the opposite tack.

A fleeting smile touched Nathen’s lips. “Those I know are.”

There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, “What led up to your contacting them?”

Nathen answered, after a hesitation, “Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn’t they?”

The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public.

Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. “My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns.”

The officer cleared his throat but said nothing. The reporters smiled, noting that down.

Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it.

Nathen continued, “In my spare time I started directing the pickup at stars. There’s radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn’t seem natural.”

He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to him while he listened, an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.

“I decided it wasn’t natural. I tried decoding it.”

Hurriedly, he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. “You see, there’s an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I’d heard that kind of screech before.”

“You mean they broadcast at us in code?” asked the News.

“It’s not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it down. They’re not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on a tight beam to save power.” He looked for comprehension. “You know, like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You can’t expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a few seconds at a time. So they’d naturally compress each message into a short half-second- or one-second-length package and send it a few hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during the instant the beam swings across the target.”

He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation was for the newspapers. “When a stray beam swings through our section of space, there’s a sharp peak in noise level from that direction. The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing tremendously, so we wouldn’t pick up more than a bip as it passes.”

“How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?” the Times asked. “Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?” It was a private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.

The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face for a moment. “Maybe we’re intercepting everybody’s telephone calls, and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model.”

“It would take something like that,” the Times agreed. They smiled at each other.

The News asked, “How did you happen to pick up television instead of voices?”

“Not by accident,” Nathen explained patiently. “I’d recognized a scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in any language.”

Near the interviewers, a senator paced back and forth, muttering his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide, streaming windows into the gray, sleeting rain.

Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms, and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the senator to make his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up before them, and a small hand. mike sat ready on the table before the panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of equipment with “Radio Lab, U. S. Property” stenciled on it.

“I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began working on them,” Nathen added. “It took a couple of months to find the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands and assign them the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen.”

The shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners to some kind of sane picture.

“Trial and error,” said Nathen, “but it came out all right. The wide band spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning.”

He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.

“We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set working and started recording and playing everything that came in, we found we’d tapped something like a lending-library line. It was all fiction, plays.”

Between the pauses in Nathen’s voice, the Times found himself unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching rocket jets.

The Post asked, “How did you contact the spaceship?”

“I scanned and recorded a film copy of The Rite of Spring, the Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn’t get there for a good number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please the library to get a new record in.

“Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings, we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear and loud. We’d intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore, you see. They liked the film and wanted more… ”

He smiled at them in sudden thought. “You can see them for yourself. It’s all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the automatic translator.”

The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin young man turned to him quickly. “No security reason why they should not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them.” He said to the reporters reassuringly, “It’s right down the hall. You will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches.”

The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a closed door.

They opened it and fumbled, into a darkened room crowded with empty folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed behind them, bringing total darkness.

There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around him, but the Times man remained standing, aware of an enormous surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the wrong country.

The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.

He was looking at aliens.

The impression was of two humans, disguised, humans moving oddly, half dancing, half crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other, and put them on.

Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid, and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he watched them.

They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said and grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away from him.

Mellerdrammer.

The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying to interrupt.

Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted to be persuaded. The Times groped for a chair and sat down.

Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters. The scenes changed: a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others talking and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it unclear what was happening or how they felt.

They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.

He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked.

With an effort, he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short, silky crew cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in tapering, light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.

There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.

Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering beside him. He turned from counting their fingers and looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones, watching and listening with hawk-like concentration. Beside him was a tall streamlined box.

From the screen came the sound of the alien language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word into a small hand microphone, and flipped the switch back with nervous rapidity.

He reminded the Times man of the earphoned interpreters at the U.N. The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists taking notes.

The Times remembered the senator pacing in the observatory room, rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated mechanically and understood by the aliens.

On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen the large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room in a spaceship.

The Times tried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol of whole Solar Systems.

Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a too quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious, turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid, dragging grace of the others, as if they were under water or on a slow-motion film. The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel, moving closer to it, talking casually—background music coming and rising in thin chords of tension.

There was a close-up of the alien’s face watching the switch, and the Times noted that his ears were symmetrical half circles, almost perfect, with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one answered—a brief word in a preoccupied, deep voice. His back was still turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darted out, closed over the switch—

There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.

The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes that were the bane of color television—to a color negative of itself, a green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second; then the color-band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to normal.

Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank, like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog.

The music faded.

In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.

The earphoned man beside the Times shifted his earphones back from his ears and spoke briskly. “I can’t get any more. Either of you want a replay?”

There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, “I guess we’ve squeezed that one dry. Let’s run the tape where Nathen and that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving the old radio count—one-two-three-testing.”

There was some fumbling in the semidark and then the screen came to life again.

It showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a clipped chord of some familiar symphony. “Crazy about Stravinsky and Mozart,” remarked the ear-phoned linguist to the Times, resettling his earphones. “Can’t stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?” He turned his attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on.

The Post, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the Times and said, “Funny how much they look like people.” He was writing, making notes to telephone his report. “What color hair did that character have?”

“I didn’t notice.” He wondered if he should remind the reporter that Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.

From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This race averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write that?

No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the modulation as it came in, or some sort of heterodyning up and down by trial and error? Probably.

It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep voices.

As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen came back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear.

“What I don’t get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV shows instead of just contacting them,” the News complained. “They’re good shows, but what’s the point?”

“Maybe so we’d get to learn their language, too,” said the Herald.

On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and opened his mouth in the comical 0 shape which the Times was beginning to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate, awkward gestures and carefully mouthed words.

The Times got up quietly, went out into the bright white stone corridor, and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his stereo glasses and putting them away.

No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit—mere reflex, from the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department—than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret.

The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the senator had found a chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned concentration. The Times recognized a few he knew personally, eminent names in science, workers in field theory.

A stray phrase reached him: “—reference to the universal constants as ratio—” It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information.

They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.

The hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in one hand. He did not look up as the Times approached, but it was the indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy.

The Times sat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the diminishing rain spray against the streaming windows.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his head.

“You tell me.”

“Hunch,” said the Times man. “Sheer hunch. Everything sailing along too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted.”

Nathen relaxed slightly. “I’m still listening.”

“Something about the way they move… ”

Nathen shifted to glance at him.

“That’s bothered me, too.”

“Are you sure they’re adjusted to the right speed?”

Nathen clenched his hands out in front of him and looked at them consideringly. “I don’t know. When I turn the tape faster, they’re all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don’t stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can’t hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming.” He gave the Times a considering sideways glance. “Didn’t catch the name.”

Country-bred guy, thought the Times. “Jacob Luke, Times,” he said, extending his hand.

Nathen gave the hand a quick, hard grip, identifying the name. “Sunday Science Section editor. I read it. Surprised to meet you here.”

“Likewise.” The Times smiled. “Look, have you gone into this rationally, with formulas?” He found a pencil in his pocket. “Obviously, there’s something wrong with our judgment of their weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio. Maybe it’s something simple, like low gravity aboard ship, with magnetic shoes. Maybe they are floating slightly.”

“Why worry?” Nathen cut in “I don’t see any reason to try to figure it out now.” He laughed and shoved back his black hair nervously. “We’ll see them in twenty minutes.”

“Will we?” asked the Times slowly.

There was a silence while the senator turned a page of his magazine with a slight crackling of paper and the scientists argued at the other end of the room. Nathen pushed at his lank black hair again, as if it were trying to fall forward in front of his eyes and keep him from seeing.

“Sure.” The young man laughed suddenly, talked rapidly. “Sure we’ll see them. Why shouldn’t we, with all the government ready with welcome speeches, the whole Army turned out and hiding over the hill, reporters all around, newsreel cameras—everything set up to broadcast the landing to the world. The President himself shaking hands with me and waiting in Washington—”

He came to the truth without pausing for breath.

He said, “Hell, no, they won’t get here. There’s some mistake somewhere. Something’s wrong. I should have told the brass hats yesterday when I started adding it up. Don’t know why I didn’t say anything. Scared, I guess. Too much top rank around here. Lost my nerve.”

He clutched the Times man’s sleeve. “Look. I don’t know what—”

A green light flashed on the sending-receiving set. Nathen didn’t look at it, but he stopped talking.

The loud-speaker on the set broke into a voice speaking in the aliens’ language. The senator started and looked nervously at it, straightening his tie. The voice stopped.

Nathen turned and looked at the loud-speaker. His worry seemed to be gone.

“What is it?” the Times asked anxiously.

“He says they’ve slowed enough to enter the atmosphere now. They’ll be here in five to ten minutes, I guess. That’s Bud. He’s all excited. He says holy smoke, what a murky-looking planet we live on.” Nathen smiled. “Kidding.”

The Times was puzzled. “What does he mean, murky? It can’t be raining over much territory on Earth.” Outside, the rain was slowing and bright-blue patches of sky were shining through breaks in the cloud blanket, glittering blue light from the drops that ran down the windows. He tried to think of an explanation. “Maybe they’re trying to land on Venus.” The thought was ridiculous, he knew. The spaceship was following Nathen’s sending beam. It couldn’t miss Earth. “Bud” had to be kidding.

The green light glowed on the set again, and they stopped speaking, waiting for the message to be recorded, slowed, and replayed. The cathode screen came to life suddenly with a picture of the young man sitting at his sending set, his back turned, watching a screen at one side that showed a glimpse of a huge dark plain approaching. As the ship plunged down toward it, the illusion of solidity melted into a boiling turbulence of black clouds. They expanded in an inky swirl, looked huge for an instant, and then blackness swallowed the screen. The young alien swung around to face the camera, speaking a few words as he moved, made the 0 of a smile again, then flipped the switch and the screen went gray.

Nathen’s voice was suddenly toneless and strained. “He said something like break out the drinks, here they come.”

“The atmosphere doesn’t look like that,” the Times said at random, knowing he was saying something too obvious even to think about. “Not Earth’s atmosphere.”

Some people drifted up. “What did they say?”

“Entering the atmosphere, ought to be landing in five or ten minutes,” Nathen told them.

A ripple of heightened excitement ran through the room. Cameramen began adjusting the lens angles again, turning on the mike and checking it, turning on the floodlights. The scientists rose and stood near the window, still talking. The reporters trooped in from the hall and went to the windows to watch for the great event. The three linguists came in, trundling a large wheeled box that was the mechanical translator, supervising while it was hitched into the sound-broadcasting system.

“Landing where?” the Times asked Nathen brutally. “Why don’t you do something?”

“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” Nathen said quietly, not moving.

It was not sarcasm. Jacob Luke of the Times looked sideways at the strained whiteness of his face and moderated his tone. “Can’t you contact them?”

“Not while they’re landing.”

“What now?” The Times took out a pack of cigarettes, remembered the rule against smoking, and put it back. “We just wait.” Nathen leaned his elbow on one knee and his chin in his hand.

They waited.

All the people in the room were waiting. There was no more conversation. A bald man of the scientist group was automatically buffing his fingernails over and over and inspecting them without seeing them; another absently polished his glasses, held them up to the light, put them on, and then a moment later took them off and began polishing again. The television crew concentrated on their jobs, moving quietly and efficiently, with perfectionist care, minutely arranging things that did not need to be arranged, checking things that had already been checked.

This was to be one of the great moments of human history, and they were all trying to forget that fact and remain impassive and wrapped up in the problems of their jobs, as good specialists should.

After an interminable age the Times consulted his watch. Three minutes had passed. He tried holding his breath a moment, listening for a distant approaching thunder of jets. There was no sound.

The sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the field like a great spotlight on an empty stage.

Abruptly, the green light shone on the set again, indicating that a squawk message had been received. The recorder recorded it, slowed it, and fed it back to the speaker. It clicked and the sound was very loud in the still, tense room.

The screen remained gray, but Bud’s voice spoke a few words in the alien language. He stopped, the speaker clicked, and the light went out. When it was plain that nothing more would occur and no announcement was to be made of what was said, the people in the room turned back to the windows and talk picked up again.

Somebody told a joke and laughed alone.

One of the linguists remained turned toward the loudspeaker, then looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his expression puzzled. He had understood.

“It’s dark,” the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated, low-voiced, to the man from the Times. “Your atmosphere is thick. That’s precisely what Bud said.”

Another three minutes. The Times caught himself about to light a cigarette and swore silently, blowing the match out and putting the cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts.

The green light came on in the transceiver.

Message in.

Instinctively, he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the Times knew.

“We’ve landed.” Nathen whispered the words.

The wind blew across the open spaces of white concrete and damp soil that was the empty airfield, swaying the wet, shiny grass. The people in the room looked out, listening for the roar of jets, looking for the silver bulk of a spaceship in the sky.

Nathen moved, seating himself at the transmitter, switching it on to warm up, checking and balancing dials. Jacob Luke of the Times moved softly to stand behind his right shoulder, hoping he could be useful. Nathen made a half motion of his head, as if to glance back at him, unhooked two of the earphone sets hanging on the side of the tall streamlined box that was the automatic translator, plugged them in, and handed one back over his shoulder to the Times man.

The voice began to come from the speaker again.

Hastily, Jacob Luke fitted the earphones over his ears. He fancied he could hear Bud’s voice tremble. For a moment it was just Bud’s voice speaking the alien language, and then, very distant and clear in his earphones, he heard the recorded voice of the linguist say an English word, then a mechanical click and another clear word in the voice of one of the other translators, then another as the alien’s voice flowed from the loud-speaker, the cool single words barely audible, overlapping and blending like translating thought, skipping unfamiliar words yet quite astonishingly clear.

“Radar shows no buildings or civilization near. The atmosphere around us registers as thick as glue. Tremendous gas pressure, low gravity, no light at all. You didn’t describe it like this. Where are you, Joe? This isn’t some kind of trick, is it?” Bud hesitated, was prompted by a deeper official voice, and jerked out the words.

“If it is a trick, we are ready to repel attack.”

The linguist stood listening. He whitened slowly and beckoned the other linguists over to him and whispered to them.

Joseph Nathen looked at them with unwarranted bitter hostility while he picked up the hand mike, plugging it into the translator. “Joe calling,” he said quietly into it in clear, slow English. “No trick. We don’t know where you are. I am trying to get a direction fix from your signal. Describe your surroundings to us if at all possible.”

Nearby, the floodlights blazed steadily on the television platform, ready for the official welcome of the aliens to Earth. The television channels of the world had been alerted to set aside their scheduled programs for an unscheduled great event. in the long room the people waited, listening for the swelling sound of rocket jets.

This time, after the light came on, there was a long delay. The speaker sputtered and sputtered again, building to a steady scratching through which they could barely hear a dim voice. It came through in a few tinny words and then wavered back to inaudibility. The machine translated in their earphones.

“Tried… seemed… repair…” Suddenly it came in clearly. “Can’t tell if the auxiliary blew, too. Will try it. We might pick you up clearly on the next try. I have the volume down. Where is the landing port? Repeat. Where is the landing port? Where are you?”

Nathen put down the hand mike and carefully set a dial on the recording box and flipped a switch, speaking over his shoulder. “This sets it to repeat what I said the last time. It keeps repeating.” Then he sat with unnatural stillness, his head still half turned, as if he had suddenly caught a glimpse of answer and was trying with no success whatever to grasp it.

The green warning light cut in, the recording clicked, and the playback of Bud’s face and voice appeared on the screen.

“We heard a few words, Joe, and then the receiver blew again. We’re adjusting a viewing screen to pick up the long waves that go through the murk and convert them to visible light. We’ll be able to see out soon. The engineer says that something is wrong with the stern jets, and the captain has had me broadcast a help call to our nearest space base.” He made the mouth 0 of a grin. “The message won’t reach it for some years. I trust you, Joe, but get us out of here, will you?— They’re buzzing that the screen is finally ready. Hold everything.”

The screen went gray and the green light went off.

The Times considered the lag required for the help call, the speaking and recording of the message just received, the time needed to reconvert a viewing screen.

“They work fast.” He shifted uneasily and added at random, “Something wrong with the time factor. All wrong. They work too fast.”

The green light came on again immediately. Nathen half turned to him, sliding his words hastily into the gap of time as the message was recorded and slowed. “They’re close enough for our transmission power to blow their receiver.”

If it was on Earth, why the darkness around the ship? “Maybe they see in the high ultraviolet—the atmosphere is opaque to that band,” the Times suggested hastily as the speaker began to talk in the young extra-Terrestrial’s voice.

That voice was shaking now. “Stand by for the description.”

They tensed, waiting. The Times brought a map of the state before his mind’s eye.

“A half circle of cliffs around the horizon. A wide muddy lake swarming with swimming things. Huge, strange white foliage all around the ship and incredibly huge, pulpy monsters attacking and eating each other on all sides. We almost landed in the lake, right on the soft edge. The mud can’t hold the ship’s weight, and we’re sinking. The engineer says we might be able to blast free, but the tubes are mud-clogged and might blow up the ship. When can you reach us?”

The Times thought vaguely of the Carboniferous era. Nathen obviously had seen something he had not.

“Where are they?” the Times asked him quietly.

Nathen pointed to the antenna position indicators. The Times let his eyes follow the converging imaginary lines of focus out the window to the sunlit airfield, the empty airfield, the drying concrete and green waving grass where the lines met.

Where the lines met. The spaceship was there!

The fear of something unknown gripped him suddenly.

The spaceship was broadcasting again, “Where are you? Answer if possible! We are sinking! Where are you?”

He saw that Nathen knew. “What is it?” the Times asked hoarsely. “Are they in another dimension or the past or on another world or what?”

Nathen was smiling bitterly, and Jacob Luke remembered that the young man had a friend in that spaceship. “My guess is that they evolved on a high-gravity planet with a thin atmosphere, near a blue-white star. Sure, they see in the ultraviolet range. Our sun is abnormally small and dim and yellow. Our atmosphere is so thick it screens out ultraviolet.” He laughed harshly. “A good joke on us, the weird place we evolved in, the thing it did to us!”

“Where are you?” called the alien spaceship. “Hurry, please! We’re sinking!”

The decoder slowed his tumbled, frightened words and looked up into the Times’ face for understanding. “We’ll rescue them,” he said quietly. “You were right about the time factor, right about them moving at a different speed. I misunderstood. This business about squawk coding, speeding for better transmission to counteract beam waver—I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“They don’t speed up their broadcasts.”

“They don’t—?”

Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, the Times began to see again the play he had just seen—but the actors were moving at blurring speed, the words jerking out in a fluting, dizzying stream, thoughts and decisions passing with unfollowable rapidity, rippling faces in a twisting blur of expressions, doors slamming wildly, shatteringly, as the actors leaped in and out of the rooms.

No—faster, faster—he wasn’t visualizing it as rapidly as it was, an hour of talk and action in one almost instantaneous “squawk,” a narrow peak of “noise” interfering with a single word in an Earth broadcast! Faster—faster—it was impossible. Matter could not stand such stress—inertia—momentum—abrupt weight.

It was insane. “Why?” he asked. “How?”

Nathen laughed again harshly, reaching for the mike. “Get them out? There isn’t a lake or river within hundreds of miles from here!”

A shiver of unreality went down the Times’ spine. Automatically and inanely, he found himself delving in his pockets for a cigarette while he tried to grasp what had happened. “Where are they, then? Why can’t we see their spaceship?”

Nathen switched the microphone on in a gesture that showed the bitterness of his disappointment.

“We’ll need a magnifying glass for that.”

Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day’s happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, “Hell, we did that a hundred years ago!”

Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that 2185 A.D. rarity—privacy—were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou’s father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife—and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age—somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 when anti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since.

“Meanwhile,” the commentator was saying, “Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still threatened by stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers have refused to give up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been wedged for two days in a…”

“I wish he’d get something more cheerful,” Emerald whispered to Lou.

“Silence!” cried Gramps. “Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV’s on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar—”his voice suddenly softened and sweetened—”when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder.”

He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

“Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard,” continued the commentator, “President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world’s ills can be traced to the fact that Man’s knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.”

“Hell!” snorted Gramps. “We said that a hundred years ago!”

“In Chicago tonight,” the commentator went on, “a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five-millionth child to be born in the hospital.” The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.

“Hell!” whispered Lou to Emerald. “We said that a hundred years ago.”

“I heard that!” shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. “You, there, boy—”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, sir,” said Lou, aged 103.

“Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!” Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply.

Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps’ room, the only private room in the Ford apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room and the wide windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment.

On Gramps’ bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and himself.

“Boy!” called Gramps.

“Coming, sir.” Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will.

“Pen!” said Gramps.

He was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple.

“Not that leaky thing,” he said, brushing Lou’s pen aside. “Ah, there’s a nice one. Good boy, Willy.” He accepted Willy’s pen. That was the tip they had all been waiting for. Willy, then—Lou’s father—was the new favorite.

Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was 142, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

Gramps missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note on a cathedral organ.

“I, Harold D. Ford, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.” He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis—repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might have forgotten why he’d brought out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control and, after erasing for a full minute, began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he had heard them so often.

“I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land,” Gramps said and wrote. “But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by—” He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.

Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.

Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence—”my great-grandson, Louis J. Ford.”

“Grandson, sir,” said Lou.

“Don’t quibble. You’re in deep enough now, young man,” said Gramps, but he made the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou’s name was scratched out and Willy’s substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom.

“So!” said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will and substituted a new one, including the time of day. “Well—time to watch the McGarvey Family.” The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was 60, or for a total of 112 years. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next,” he said.

Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was.

He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

“Em?” he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

“Morty!” gasped Lou.

Lou’s great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand—Gramps’ enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had apparently been half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling with tap water.

A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.

Shocked, Lou didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t let Gramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone—but, if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.

Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps’ bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf.

The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment, through the keyhole and under the door.

The bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping of chair-legs on the floor. “Thus ends,” said the television announcer, “the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys.” Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Just a sec,” Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor.

The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.

Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak.

“Well, boy,” said Gramps at last, “looks like you’ve got a little tidying up to do.”

And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked himself in his bedroom.

The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.

Tears streamed over her cheeks. “Oh, you poor lamb—please don’t look so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about Gramps.”

“No,” said Lou, finding his voice, “really you didn’t. Honest, Em, I was just—”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me, hon. I’m on your side, no matter what.” She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, “It wouldn’t have been murder, hon. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he’d be able to go any time God decided He wanted him.”

“What’s going to happen next, Em?” said Lou hollowly. “What’s he going to do?”

Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep.

At six o’clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son’s generation.

Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps’ breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.

“Well,” said Emerald, “I’m not going to get all panicky until I’m sure there’s something to be panicky about.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what it was I busted,” Lou said hopefully.

“Probably thinks it was your watch crystal,” offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.

“Don’t get sarcastic with your father,” said Em, “and don’t talk with your mouth full, either.”

“I’d like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something,” complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. “It’s time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know.”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” said Lou weakly. He shrugged. “Let’s have the tray, Em.”

“We’ll both go.”

Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.

Em knocked. “Gramps,” she called brightly, “break-fast is rea-dy.”

There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.

The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.

A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.

But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World’s Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:

“’Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night’s bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.’”

“Gosh,” said Willy brokenly, “he didn’t even get to see how the 5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out.”

“Or the Solar Series,” Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.

“Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back,” added Morty.

“There’s more,” said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: “’I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.’”

“No!” cried Willy. “Not another one!”

“’I do stipulate,’” read Lou, “’that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.’”

“Issue?” said Emerald.

Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. “It means we all own the whole damn shootin’ match.”

Each eye turned instantly to the bed.

“Share and share alike?” asked Morty.

“Actually,” said Willy, who was the oldest one present, “it’s just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and—”

“I like that!” exclaimed Em. “Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who’s still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—”

“How about letting somebody who’s never had any privacy get a little crack at it?” Eddie demanded hotly. “Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about—”

“Yeah?” challenged Morty. “Sure, you’ve all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick.”

“Silence!” shouted Willy imperiously. “The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think.”

A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head.

In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units.

For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.

The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest.

Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

“Em,” called Lou through the partition, “you got a washbasin all your own, too?”

“Sure. Washbasin, bed, light—the works. And we thought Gramps’ room was something. How long has this been going on?” She held out her hand. “For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven’t got the shakes—look at me!”

“Cross your fingers,” said Lou. “The lawyer’s going to try to get us a year.”

“Gee!” Em said dreamily. “I wonder what kind of wires you’d have to pull to get put away in solitary?”

“All right, pipe down,” said the turnkey, “or I’ll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain’t never getting back in!”

The prisoners instantly fell silent.

The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. “And now, friends,” he said, “I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things.

“After years of research, medical science has now developed Super-anti-gerasone! In weeks—yes, weeks—you can look, feel and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn’t you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don’t have to. Safe, tested Super-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day.

“Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to ‘Super,’ Box 500,000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I’ll repeat it. ‘Super,’ Box 500,000…”

Underlining the announcer’s words was the scratching of Gramps’ pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutes earlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, a genius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he’d dreamed of doing for years.

“Schen-ec-ta-dy,” murmured Gramps. “Got it!” His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter.

Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.

We had no indication of the odd business that was going to happen. The boys at the Weather Bureau still think they had all the fun. They think that being out in it wasn’t as good as sitting in the station watching it all come about. Only there are some things they’ll never understand about the weather, some things I think Ed and I alone will know. We were in the middle of it all.

We were riding out of Rock Springs at sunrise on a three-day leave, but the Chief Meteorologist had asked us to take the night shift until then. It was just as well, for the Bureau was on the edge of the desert and we had our duffel and horses tethered outside. The meteor fall of two days before came as a marvelous excuse to go out into the badlands of the Great Divide Basin. I’ve always liked to ride out in the glorious, wide, empty Wyoming land, and any excuse to spend three days out there was good.

Free also from the routine and monotony of the Weather Bureau as well. Of course, I like the work, but still the open air and the open spaces must be bred in the blood of all of us born and raised out there in the West. I know it’s tame and civilized today, but even so, to jog along with a haphazard sort of prospector’s aim was really fine.

Aim was, of course, to try to locate fragments of the big meteor that had landed out there two nights before. Lots of people had seen it, myself for one, because I happened to be out on the roof taking readings. There had been a brilliant streak of blue-white across the northern sky and a sharp flash way off, like an explosion. I understand that folks in Superior claim to have felt a jolt, as if something big had smashed up out there in the trackless dust and dunes between Mud Lake, Morrow Creek, and the town. That’s quite a lot of empty territory, and Ed and I had about as much chance of finding the meteor as the well-known needle in the haystack. But it was a swell excuse.

“Cold front coming down from Saskatchewan,” the Chief said as he came in and looked over our charts. We were getting ready to leave. “Unusual for this time of year.”

I nodded, unworried. We had the mountains between us and any cold wave from that direction. We wouldn’t freeze at night even if the cold got down as far as Casper, which would be highly unlikely. The Chief was bending low over the map, tracing out the various lows and highs. He frowned a bit when he came to a new little low I had traced in from the first reports of that day.

“An unreported low turning up just off Washington state. That’s really odd. Since when are storms originating so close?”

“Coming east, too, and growing, according to Seattle’s wire,” said Ed. The Chief sat down and stared at the map.

“I don’t like it, it’s all out of whack,” he said. Then he stood up and held out his hand to me.

“Well, good-by, boys, and have a good time. If you find that meteor, bring me back a chunk, too.”

“Sure will,” I said, and we shook hands and yelled at the other boys and went out.

The first rays of the sun were just coming up as we left. Outwards we jogged, the town and civilization fell behind rapidly, and we went on into the golden glow of the Sweetwater basin.

We made good time that day, though we didn’t hurry. We kept up a nice, steady trot, resting now and then. We didn’t talk much, for we were too busy just breathing in the clean open air and enjoying the sensation of freedom. An occasional desert toad or the flash of a disturbed snake were the only signs of life we saw, and the multiform shapes of the cactus and sage our only garden. It was enough.

Toward evening, at the Bureau, the Chief first noted the slight growth of the southern warm front. A report from Utah set him buzzing. The cold front had now reached the borders of Wyoming and was still moving on. The baby storm that was born where it had no right to be born was still growing and now occupied a large area over Oregon and Idaho. The Chief was heard to remark that the conjunction of things seemed to place southwest Wyoming as a possible center of lots of wild weather. He started worrying a bit about us, too.

We didn’t worry. We didn’t have any real indications, but our weathermen’s senses acted aright. We felt a sort of odd expectancy in the air as we camped. Nothing definite—a sort of extra stillness in the air, as if forces were pressing from all sides, forces that were still far away and still vague.

We spoke a bit around the fire about the storm that the Chief had noted when we left. Ed thought it would fizzle out. I think I had a feeling then that it wasn’t just a short-lived freak. I think I had an idea we might see something of it.

Next morning there was just the faintest trace of extra chill in the air. I’m used to Wyoming mornings and I know just how cold it ought to be at sunrise and how hot. This morning it was just the slightest bit colder.

“That Canadian cold front must have reached the other side of the mountains,” I said, waving toward the great rampart of the Rockies to the East. “We’re probably feeling the only tendril of it to get over.”

“That’s sort of odd,” Ed said. “There shouldn’t be any

getting over at all. It must be a very powerful front.”

I nodded and wondered what the boys in the Bureau were getting on it. Probably snowfall in the northern part of the state. If I had known what the Chief knew that morning, I might have started back in a hurry. But neither of us did, and I guess we saw something that no one else has, as a result.

For, at the Bureau, the Chief knew that morning that we were in for some extraordinary weather. He predicted for the Rock Springs paper the wildest storm ever. You see, the southern warm front had definitely gotten a salient through by that time. It was already giving Salt Lake City one of the hottest days on record, and what was more, the warm wave was coming our way steadily.

The next thing was that storm from the west. It was growing smaller and tighter again and had passed over Idaho Falls two hours earlier, raging and squalling. It was heading in our direction like an arrow from a bow.

And finally the cold front had done the impossible. It was beginning to sweep over the heights and to swoop down into the Divide Basin, heading straight for the warm front coming north.

And there were Ed and I with a premonition and nothing more. We were riding along right into the conflux of the whole mess, and we were looking for meteors. We were looking for what we expected to be some big craters or pockmarks in the ground and a bunch of pitted iron rocks scattered around a vicinity of several miles.

Toward ten that morning we came over a slight rise and dipped down into a bowl-shaped region. I stopped and stared around. Ed wheeled and came back.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Notice anything funny in the air?” I asked and gave a deep sniff.

Ed drew in some sharp breaths and stared around. “Sort of odd,” he finally admitted. “Nothing I. can place, but it’s sort of odd.”

“Yes,” I answered. “Odd is the word. I can’t place anything wrong, but it seems to smell differently than the air did a few moments ago.” I stared around and wrinkled my brow.

“I think I know now,” I finally said. “The temperature’s changed somewhat. It’s warmer.”

Ed frowned. “Colder, I’d say.”

I became puzzled. I waved my hands through the air a bit. “I think you’re right; I must be wrong. Now it feels a bit colder.”

Ed walked his horse a bit. I stared after him.

“Y’know,” I finally said, “I think I’ve got it. It’s colder, but it smells like warm air. I don’t know if you can quite understand what I’m driving at. It smells as if the temperature should be steaming, yet actually it’s sort of chilly. It doesn’t smell natural.”

Ed nodded. He was puzzled, and so was I. There was something wrong here. Something that got on our nerves.

Far ahead I saw something sparkle. I stared as we rode and then mentioned it to Ed. He looked, too.

There was something, no, several things far off at the edge of the bowl near the next rise, that glistened. They looked like bits of glass.

“The meteor, maybe?” queried Ed. I shrugged. We rode on steadily in that direction.

“Say, something smells funny here,” Ed remarked, stopping again.

I came up next to him. He was right. The sense of strangeness in the air had increased, the nearer we got to the glistening things. It was still the same—warm-cold. There was something else again. Something like vegetation in the air. Like something growing, only there still wasn’t any more growth than the usual cactus and sage. It smelled differently from any other growing things, and yet it smelled like vegetation.

It was unearthly, that air. I can’t describe it any other way. It was unearthly. Plant smells that couldn’t come from any plant or forest I ever encountered, a cold warmness unlike anything that meteorology records.

Yet it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t frightening. It was just peculiar. It was mystifying.

We could see the sparkling things now. They were like bubbles of glass. Big, iridescent, glassy balls lying like some giant child’s marbles on the desert.

We knew then that, if they were the meteors, they were like none that had ever been recorded before. We knew we had made a find that would go on record, and yet we weren’t elated. We were ill at ease. It was the funny weather that did it.

I noticed then for the first time that there were black clouds beginning to show far in the west. It was the first wave of the storm.

We rode nearer the strange bubbles. We could see them clearly now. They seemed cracked a bit, as if they had broken. One had a gaping hole in its side. It must have been hollow, just a glassy shell.

Ed and I stopped short at the same time. Or rather our horses did. We were willing, too, but our mounts got the idea just as quickly. It was the smell.

There was a new odor in the air. A sudden one. It had just that instant wafted across our nostrils. It was at first repelling. That’s why we stopped. But sniffing it a bit took a little of the repulsion away. It wasn’t so very awful.

In fact, it wasn’t actually bad. It was hard to describe. Not exactly like anything I’ve ever smelled before. Vaguely it was acrid, and vaguely it was dry. Mostly I would say that it smelled like a curious mixture of burning rubber and zinc ointment.

It grew stronger as we sat there, and then it began to die away a bit as a slight breeze moved it on. We both got the impression at the same time that it had come from the broken glass bubble.

We rode on cautiously.

“Maybe the meteors landed in an alkali pool and there’s been some chemical reaction going on,” I opined to Ed.

“Could be,” he said, and we rode nearer.

The black clouds were piling up now in the west, and a faint breeze began to stir. Ed and I dismounted to look into the odd meteors.

“Looks like we better get under cover till it blows over,” he remarked.

“We’ve got a few minutes, I think,” I replied. “Besides, by the rise right here is just about the best cover around.”

Back at the Weather Station, the temperature was rising steadily and the Chief was getting everything battened down. The storm was coming next, and, meeting the thin edge of the warm-front wedge which was now passing Rock Springs, would create havoc. Then the cold wave might get that far because it was over the Divide. In a few minutes all hell would break loose. The Chief wondered where we were.

We were looking into the hole in the nearest bubble. The things—they must have been the meteors we were looking for—were about twelve feet in diameter and pretty nearly perfect spheres. They were thick-shelled and smooth and very glassy and iridescent and like mother-of-pearl on the inside. They were quite hollow, and we couldn’t figure out what they were made of and what they could be. Nothing I had read or learned could explain the things. That they were meteoric in origin I was sure because there was the evidence of the scattered ground and broken rocks about to show the impact. Yet they must have been terrifically strong or something, because, save for the few cracks and the hole in one, they were intact.

Inside, they stank of that rubber-zinc smell. It was powerful. Very powerful.

The stink had obviously come from the bubbles—there was no pool around.

It suddenly occurred to me that we had breathed air of some other world. For if these things were meteoric and the smell had come from the inside, then it was no air of Earth that smelled like burning rubber and zinc ointment. It was the air of somewhere, I don’t know where, somewhere out among the endless reaches of the stars. Somewhere out there, out beyond the sun.

Another thought occurred to me.

“Do you think these things could have carried some creatures?” I asked. Ed stared at me a while, bit his lip, looked slowly around. He shrugged his shoulders without saying anything.

“The oddness of the air,” I went on, “maybe it was like the air of some other world. Maybe they were trying to make our own air more breathable to them?”

Ed didn’t answer that one, either. It didn’t require any. And he didn’t ask me who I meant by “they.”

“And what makes the stink?” Ed finally commented. This time I shrugged.

Around us the smell waxed and waned. As if breezes were playing with a stream of noxious vapor. And yet, I suddenly realized, no breezes were blowing. The air was quite still. But still the smell grew stronger at one moment and weaker at another.

It was as if some creature were moving silently about, leaving no trace of itself save its scent.

“Look!” said Ed suddenly. He pointed to the west. I looked and stared at the sky. The whole west was a mass of seething dark clouds. But it was a curiously arrested mass. There was a sharply defined edge to the area—an edge of blue against which the black clouds piled in vain, and we could see lightning crackle and flash in the storm. Yet no wind reached us, and no thunder, and the sky was serene and blue overhead.

It looked as if the storm had come up against a solid obstacle beyond which it could go no farther. But there was no such obstacle visible.

As a meteorologist I knew that meant there must be a powerful opposing bank of air shielding us. We could not see it, for air is invisible, but it must be there, straining against the cloud blank.

I noticed now that a pressure was growing in my ears. Something was concentrating around this area. We were in for it if the forces of the air ever broke through. Suddenly, the stink welled up powerfully. More so than it had before. It seemed to pass by us and through us and around us. Then, again, it was gone. It almost vanished from everything. We could detect but the faintest traces of it after that passage.

Ed and I rode out to an outcropping of rock. We dismounted. We got well under the rock and we waited. It wouldn’t be long before the protecting air bank gave way.

To the south, now, storm clouds materialized, and then finally to the east and north. As I learned later, the cold wave had eddied around us and met the equatorial front at last, and now we were huddled with some inexplicable globes from unknown space and a bunch of strange stinks and atmosphere, ringed around by. a seething, raging sea of storm. And yet above, the sky was still blue and clear.

We were in the midst of a dead center, in the midst of an inexplicable high pressure area, most of whose air did not originate on Earth, and the powers of the Earth’s atmosphere were hurling themselves against us from every direction.

I saw that the area of clear was slowly but surely contracting. A lancing, freezing breeze suddenly enveloped us. A breath rough from the north. But it seemed to become curiously blunted and broken up by countless thrusts of the oddly reeking air. I realized, as the jet of cold air reached my lungs, how different the atmosphere was in this pocket from that we are accustomed to breathe. It was truly alien.

And yet always this strange air seemed to resist the advances of the normal. Another slight breeze, this one wet and warm, came in from the south, and again a whirl of the rubbery-odored wind dispersed it.

Then there came an intolerable moment. A moment of terrific compression and rise, and the black storm clouds tore through in wild streaks overhead and spiderwebbed the sky rapidly into total darkness. The area of peace became narrow, restricted, enclosed by walls of lightning-shot storm.

I got an odd impression then. That we were embattled. That the forces of nature were determined to annihilate and utterly rip apart our little region of invading alien air, that the meteor gases were determined to resist to the last, determined to keep their curious stinks intact!

The lightning flashed and flashed. Endless giant bolts, yet always outside our region. And we heard them only when a lance of cold or hot storm pierced through to us. The alien air clearly would not transmit the sounds; it was standing rigid against the interrupting vibrations!

Ed and I have conferred since then. We both agree that we had the same impressions. That a genuine life-and-death fight was going on. That that pocket of other-worldly air seemed to be consciously fighting to keep itself from being absorbed by the storm, from being diffused to total destruction so that no atom of the unearthly gases could exist save as incredibly rare elements in the total atmosphere of the Earth. It seemed to be trying to maintain its entirety, its identity.

It was in that last period that Ed and I saw the inexplicable things. We saw the things that don’t make sense. For we saw part of the clear area suddenly contract as if some of the defending force had been withdrawn, and we saw suddenly one of the glass globes, one of the least cracked, whirl up from the ground and rush into the storm, rush straight up!

It was moving through the clear air without any visible propulsion. We thought then that perhaps a jet of the storm had pierced through to carry it up, as a ball will ride on a jet of water. But no, for the globe hurled itself into the storm, contrary to the direction of the winds, against the forces of the storm.

The globe was trying to break through the ceiling of black to the clear air above. But the constant lightning that flickered around it kept it in our sight. Again and again it darted against the mass of clouds and was hurled wildly and furiously about. For a moment we thought it would force its way out of our sight, and then there was a sudden flash and a sharp snap that even we heard, and a few fragments of glassy stuff came falling down.

I realized suddenly that the storm had actually abated its fury while this strange thing was going on. As if the very elements themselves watched the outcome of the ball’s flight. And now the storm raged in again with renewed vigor, as if triumphant.

The area was definitely being forced back. Soon not more than twenty yards separated us from the front, and we could hear the dull, endless rumbling of the thunder. The stink was back again and all around us. Tiny trickles of cold, wet air broke through now and then but were still being lost in the smell.

Then came the last moment. A sort of terrible crescendo in the storm, and the stink finally broke for good. I saw it, and what I saw is inexplicable save for a very fantastic hypothesis which I believe only because I must.

And after that revealing moment the last shreds of the stellar air raveled away. For only a brief instant more the storm raged, an instant in which for the first and last time Ed and I got soaked and hurled around by the wind and rain, and the horses almost broke their tethers. Then it was over.

The dark clouds lifted rapidly. In a few minutes they had incredibly thinned out, there was slight rain, and by the time ten more minutes had passed, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and things were almost dry. On the northern horizon faint shreds of cloud lingered, but that was all.

Of the meteor globes only a few shards and splinters remained.

I’ve talked the matter over, as I said, and there is no really acceptable answer to the whole curious business. We know that we don’t really know very much about things. As a meteorologist I can tell you that. Why, we’ve been discussing the weather from cave-man days, and yet it was not more than twenty years ago that the theory of weather fronts was formulated which first allowed really decent predictions. And the theory of fronts, which is what we modern weather people use, has lots of imperfections in it. For instance, we still don’t know anything about the why of things. Why does a storm form at all? We know how it grows, sure, but why did it start, and how?

We don’t know. We don’t know very much at all. We breathe this air, and it was only in the last century that we first began to find out how many different elements and gases made it up, and we don’t know for sure yet.

I think it’s possible that living things may exist that are made of gas only. We’re protoplasm, you know, but do you know that we’re not solid matter—we’re liquid? Protoplasm is liquid. Flesh is liquid arranged in suspension in cells of dead substances. And most of us is water, and water is the origin of all life. And water is composed of two common gases, hydrogen and oxygen. And those gases are found everywhere in the universe, astronomers say.

So I say that if the elements of our life can be boiled down to gases, then why can’t gases combine as gases and still have the elements of life? Water is always present in the atmosphere as vapor; then why not a life as a sort of water-vapor variant?

I think it makes sense. I think it might smell odd if we accidentally inhaled such a vapor life. Because we could inhale it as we do water vapor. It might smell, say, for example, like burning rubber and zinc ointment.

Because in that last moment when the storm was at its height and the area of unearthly air was compressed to its smallest, I noticed that at one point a definite outline could be seen against the black clouds and. the blue-white glare of the lightning. A section of the smelly air had been sort of trapped and pinned off from the main section. And it had a definite shape under that terrible storm pressure.

I can’t say what it was like, because it wasn’t exactly like anything save maybe a great amoeba being pushed down against the ground. There were lots of arms and stubby, wiggly things sticking out, and the main mass was squashy and thick. And it flowed along the ground sort of like a snail. It seemed to be writhing and trying to slither away and spread out.

It couldn’t, because the storm was hammering at it. And I definitely saw a big black mass, round like a fist, hammer at one section of the thing’s base as it tried to spread out.

Then the storm smashed down hard on the odd outline, and it squashed out flat and was gone.

I imagine there were others, and I think that when they aren’t being compressed they could have spread out naturally about a hundred yards along the ground and upwards. And I think we have things like that, only of earthly origin, right in the atmosphere now. And I don’t think that our breathing and walking and living right through them means a thing to them at all. But they objected to the invaders from space. They smelled differently, they were different, they must have come from a different sort of planet, a planet cooler than ours, with deserts and vegetation different from our own. And they would have tried to remake our atmosphere into one of their own. And our native air dwellers stopped them.

That’s what I think.

“You are deeply troubled by this, Robert.”

Cade unconsciously flinched. He had never learned to feel completely comfortable with Professor Gavin’s thought-speech. “Yes, I am. The treatment that Doctor Mayes has developed could disrupt society and further damage this institution.”

The ancient orangutan wrinkled his massive brow. Professor Gavin paced across the office using a pair of specially made crutches. The movement caused shards of pain to escape the Professor’s mental shields. “I think I’m quite familiar with the dangers of experimental treatments, Robert.”

Cade reflexively boosted his own shielding. “Sir, that is why I am confused as to your stand on this issue.”

The Professor snorted derisively. He spoke aloud for the first time since entering the room. “Apologies, Robert. The doctors insist upon these exerizes each day.” The resistance training helps keep me mobile. I fear orangutan took another pass of the office. “My discipline is lax this day. I should have waited until later to speak to you.”

Cade couldn’t help but feel a bit of shame in Professor Gavin’s presence. He had been one of the first telepaths allowed to directly communicate with him after the experiment that altered his genetic and skeletal structure. The broadcast waves of pain and anguish had driven three scientists to kill themselves. Cade had managed to calm the simian and teach him to use his abilities to monitor and control his abilities and pain. It had been a traumatic experience for the both of them. There was no point in shielding this.

The orangutan smiled, flipping up his enormous lips. It had taken several years for Cade to fully understand the nuances of simian facial expressions. The Professor knew a secret. “Mr. Cade, do you think I am unable to look past personal regrets to see something that could be good for the entire system?”

“To be honest, Professor Gavin, I’m confused as to why you aren’t as worried as I am. Do you see something that I don’t?”

Professor Gavin grunted approvingly and tapped the wooden floor with one of his crutches. “I am certain of the outcome because I am aware that you are the opposing council and that you rarely lose such encounters. You won my freedom.”

Cade waved away the compliment. “That was different. From your pain waves, it was obvious to anyone listening that you were sentient. I was merely first to hear them. And now, you are revered through out the system for your work in teleportation.” Cade shook his head, frustrated. “The experiment will take education out of our hands. This entire institution will be obsolete.”

Professor Gavin grunted softly. He poked Cade with one of his canes. “If you wish to defeat the rather tempting amendment, you will have to think of a better argument. I’m certain that a man with such disciplined mind will come up with a solution. Good day.”

The simian professor disappeared with a loud pop. Cade pondered the advice. Professor Gavin rarely made personal visits to his office or anywhere else. His altered bone structure made any travel, except via teleportation, difficult and painful. Translocating your body took an enormous amount of energy and control. It was the mental equivalent of running a marathon with lead weights tied around the ankles. Professor Gavin would not have taken such a journey unannounced unless he had something important to say.

It was not easy for Cade to acknowledge a superior intellect, but he knew that the simian saw things that he did not. Professor Gavin had seen a solution to the problem, but was forbidden ethically from sharing this solution as one of the judges. He ran his body through the standard breathing and mediation techniques until he received a meek thought-call.

“Professor Cade?”

It was Stephanie Williams, one of his ethics students. Cade checked the time and was quite disturbed to discover that he was ten minutes late for his ethics class. If he hurried, class was fifteen minutes away near the athletics field. Arriving late dripping with perspiration was hardly the way to maintain awe amongst the next generation of sentinels. “Inform your classmates that I will be there in a moment.”

Translocation teleportation involved a complex combination of farsight and matter rearranging. Most of his students mastered some levels of farsight early in their days at the institute. Matter manipulation was more strenuous. Translocation involved seeing yourself in two places at once. The concept is relatively simple, but the practice required the discipline to allow yourself for one brief moment to be cast into oblivion. It was painful willing your atoms to dissolve, but pain could be overcome with discipline.

Relative time the process felt like an hour. From the student’s prospective, only a few seconds passed. He reassembled himself in front of the podium. The students gasped and whispered to each other. Cade smiled warmly, knowing that he had captured their attention and they would pay special attention this session. “Who can tell me why the Augments lost the Earth Unification War? They had superior firepower and armament.”

Several of the students raised their hands eagerly. Cade scanned the crowd looking for his problem pupil. “Ms. Williams, enlighten us.”

A number of the students craned their necks to the back of the room where Stephanie was visibly ducking behind the students in front of her. Blushing, she sat straight in her chair. “Professor, the Augments had less numbers and their resources were diminished early in the war.”

“A classic textbook answer, Ms. Williams,” Cade announced with a bit of disappointment. He glanced around the room taking note of the number of nodding students that agreed with her statement. “It is, however, completely incorrect.”

Stephanie waved her arm wildly, hoping to be called upon. Cade nodded, giving her permission. “Professor, the text clearly outlines that as the defining reasons the Augments lost the war.”

Cade smiled warmly. Stephanie was one of the top students in her class. He imagined that this class must have frustrated her more than all of the others combined. He had felt the same way as a student here. “I am well aware of what the textbook outlines, Ms. Williams.”

Her cheeks burned crimson. She hated it when the Professor decided that the text material was incorrect. “How are we supposed to learn, if the textbook is wrong?”

Stephanie was a thin girl, not yet a woman. Cade could sense her frustration building like a storm. In two years, she would graduate and receive advanced training. As a PSI-10, Stephanie was dangerous. She could melt steel when angered. He waited until she reinforced her mental shields to continue. “You learn by experience and adapting to new circumstances. What is the first principle of power?”

According to her file, Stephanie had somehow slipped through the testing cracks until she accidentally saved her parents during a transit accident. She had to work very hard to catch up with the rest of her class. “The first principle of power is that power without discipline to properly utilize that power is worthless.”

“Apply that principle to this historic scenario.”

Stephanie thought for a moment or two. “The Augments were given their power via cybernetics. They didn’t earn their power and they didn’t understand the limits of it. They assumed they would win by the very nature of their power. The non-augments were disciplined and were able to use the proper tactics to disable their superior enemies.”

Cade nodded approvingly. Now he understood why Professor Gavin chose that moment to come to him and what he wanted him to learn.

The Friday forums were usually sparsely attended. Decades of debate and experimentation had crafted the current curriculum and teaching methods to their present state and radical innovation was becoming increasingly rare. The news of the discovery had brought Professors from across the system to witness the debate. There were so many planned attendees, Professors past and present, that the regular Friday forum had been moved to the Emporium Amphitheater in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Emporium Amphitheater was a large white room centered on a small stage. The glass ceiling was curved so that aquatic telepaths could swim comfortably while monitoring the proceedings. Cade had hoped that this matter could be handled quietly, but Doctor Mayes had invited everyone on the voting council to witness his miracle treatment.

As the guests began to filter to their seats, Cade took the podium. “Professors and distinguished alumni, please take your seats. I’d like to say a few words before I introduce Doctor Mayes. First, thank you for attending. This is the largest Friday forum in nearly thirty years. In fact, the last time so many of us were in the same room was the forum that accepted Professor Gavin into our noble ranks. I hope that we show equal wisdom on this day.”

Cade’s words were met with enthusiastic applause. Professor Gavin nodded briskly from his seat. “Second, I’d like to introduce the august Doctor Mayes. Although not a professor at the Institute, he has been consulted several times when students and facility have required assistance. As a student, he passed his finals with honors. Doctor Mayes would like to present to you a new discovery and a proposal.”

The crowd was less generous this time, but still clapped enough to be polite. It was a polite, but weak introduction. Cade had subtly made his feelings on the subject known. Doctor Mayes took the stand. He was tall, husky man with oily black hair tied into a ponytail. “Esteemed colleges, thank you for your warm welcome. I’ve come here with a discovery that can alter the foundations of this fine institution. I’ve discovered a process that combines nanites and a chemical treatment that alters the brain chemistry of a human with a psi-rating resulting in a dramatical increase in the potency of his or her Psi-rating. In addition, this process allows the subject to master difficult tasks in mere moments.”

Doctor Mayes activated the holo-display sharing the critical formula. “This process takes less than three days to complete and then as long as the student continues to take the supplemental pills, their power will be increased exponentially.”

The room erupted into a confused babble of conversations mentally and vocally. Cade slammed his gavel until the room returned to order. “Questions will be answered at the end of the presentation!”

“I discovered the formula quite by accident.” Doctor Mayes smiled with false humility at the assembly. “As a matter of course, I perform many of the autopsies on students at the Institute. There was a training accident three years ago that lead to a cranial combustion.”

Doctor Mayes pushed a couple of buttons upon the podium and skipped to the next holo-slide. A rotating three dimensional display of Annisa May, age 18, flashed before the audience. “Annisa May discovered her abilities at age twelve, which is three years later than most of the human applicants to the Institute. Ms. May had no visible health problems, except for periodic headaches. Such headaches are often quite normal for a developing telepath. Ms. May was quite the athlete and achieved medals in both track and swimming. During a training exercise, she attempted to block a PSI-12 rated mental probe. Ms. May was used to stressing her body during her athletic trials and so pushed beyond her endurance against a superior trainer. The brain aneurism caused her to turn her energies inward.”

With a few clicks of his keypad, Doctor Mayes switched the hologrid to the training tapes. Cade bit his lip and narrowed his eyes. He didn’t need to see the replay of the accident.

“Sir, may I ask you a question?”

As a professor, Robert Cade strove to avoid having favorite students. Annisa May was one of the best students of her generation and quite pleasant to teach. “Of course, Ms. May.”

“You served thirty years as a sentinel. Was it worth it?” Annisa asked nerviously.

“Without question,” Cade replied proudly. He sensed her motives in asking this question. “Those years were spent defending the System and helping others. I can’t think of a higher calling.”

Annisa nodded, satisfied. “I’m planning on taking the testing when I turn eighteen next month. I’ve been rated a PSI-8 and I believe I can pass the physical requirements. While it is not required, I’ve been told I have a better chance at making it into the program if I have a mentor.”

Cade was careful to intensify his mental shields to block his feeling of pride. “If I agreed to sign on as your mentor, I’d be putting my own reputation on the line. I’d have to insist that we engage in practice sessions before your testing.”

Annisa’s brown eyes widened intensely and she bit her lip to keep from smiling. “Of course, sir.”

Cade raised his eyebrow affectionately. “I have time during fourth period, Ms. May. I shall reserve a training room. I expect you there Mondays and Wednesdays during that time.”

“Thank you, sir!”

Annisa hugged the Professor. Physical contact was unusual between telepaths as it was more difficult to maintain thought shields. Cade caught glimpses of her excitement, her worry about the future, and her crush for her favorite teacher. Knowing that she had broadcast private thoughts, she blushed. “Excuse me, sir. I have studying before my biology finals.”

Cade tried to rememeber when he last felt that excitement.

Annisa arrived at the fourth period training session a minute early. Cade had prepared a safe environment. The walls and floors were matted. He was sitting inside a circle on one end of the room. There was another circle on the other end.

“The first test is the blocking test. I’ll attempt to pierce your shields slowly until they break. I’ve had years of training, so you aren’t expected to keep me out. Just try your best.”

Annisa sat down into the lotus position in the opposite circle. “Yes, sir!”

The traditional approach to shattering a mind shield is to strike hard and fast like hitting it with a mental sledgehammer. This was a test of Annsia’s endurance. He pictured her mental shield like a balloon and instead of popping it with a tack; he began to apply subtle pressure to it.

Across the room, Annisa smiled at the slight mental contact. Slowly, Cade added additional psionic pressure to his attack. Annisa was resisting quiet well, above her last rating even.

“Are you doing well enough to continue, Ms. May?”

Annisa gritted her teeth and nodded.

“During the training session with Professor Cade, Annisa ignored the pain in her head. As an athlete, she was used pushing beyond her normal limits,” Doctor Mayes explained. Images of her brain flashed on the screens. “As a result, she suffered from an internal brain aneurysm that triggered an acute stroke. This stroke made it difficult for her to stop and caused the accident.”

Doctor Mayes pressed a button and the holo-grid displayed the image of Annisa’s head exploding. Several of the audience members gasped. There was a dull telepathic roar across the room. “The inquiry showed that Annisa May had a unique condition, which was unknown to the staff. Professor Cade was vindicated of any negligence.”

Cade mentally strengthened his shield and focused on running his body through breathing exercises. Doctor Mayes changed the display to an examination of Annsia’s brain. “While performing the autopsy, I noticed that certain areas of her frontal lobes were slightly swelled from a typical human. At first, I thought this might be due to the aneurysm, but this area was undamaged. It was a healthy zone surrounded by dead tissue. My theory was that this area might be responsible for psionoic activity in humans. I did a research query for other brains with this phenomenon and almost ninety eight percent of the sample autopsies with these enlarged lobes, that I am calling Mayes Lobes, were graduates from this academy.”

Startled, the assembled guests began to discuss the proposal amongst each other. It took several minutes for Cade to calm the crowd so that Doctor Mayes could continue. “Using a chemical formula and medical nanites, we’ve managed to enlarge these areas in humans with a zero psionic rating. We’ve been able to affect a shift of two to four levels. We believe that this increase will grow exponentially the more powerful the subject is. Further, the nanites allow the subjects to focus their potential and achieve their maximum potential in a matter of days rather than years. My proposal is simple. I wish to give the new students this treatment to advance the cause in science.”

Cade banged the gavel three times to dull the roar. “Chairpeople, do any of you have questions?”

According to the rules of the forum, the Department Chairs were allowed to ask direct questions before the opposing council addressed the forum. Professor Gavin stood, slowly and painfully. He broadcast his thoughts with great potency that somehow remained polite. “I can see how your process could increase potency, but not how it would decrease the learning curve. Please explain.”

“Very well, Professor Gavin,” Doctor Mayes replied, leaving a bit of mockery on the word Professor. “It is theorized that one way that psionics effect the material plane is via the shapes of the brainwaves broadcast. A psionic teaches their body to shape these thoughts. Bio-feedback allows students to practice and learn the hard way. The nanites allow students to learn the same process at an extremely accelerated rate.”

Professor Gavin sat back in his chair and chewed on an apple satisfied. “Any other questions?” Cade asked.

He slammed the gavel three more times. “Very well. My statement shall be short, but to the point. I have no doubt that Doctor Mayes’s treatment can perform as described. However, I believe that such a treatment will leave us with weak and inferior students.”

“What? Are you out of your mind, Professor Cade?” Doctor Mayes bellowed.

Cade glanced at the Doctor and smiled. “Not at all Doctor, but I am willing to allow you to change my mind. I challenge you to a duel.”

Doctor Mayes opened wide with fear. “Professor, you are ranked at a PSI-12. I am only a PSI-10, I can not possibly defeat you.”

“At the present, you are correct. However, according to your own words, you believe that your treatment will allow you to increase your rating at a fanatic rate. I propose the following. This day, you accept treatment of your formula. One week from now, we shall duel. If you win, I shall withdraw my objection. If I win, you will withdraw your proposal and destroy the work.”

The audience muttered their approval. Doctor Mayes’s face turned red as he bit back a retort. “Of course, Professor, but I can’t promise your safety in such a duel.”

“Excellent.” Cade winked briefly. Everything was falling into place. “Then we shall make it to the death, yes?”

Trapped, Doctor grunted his acceptance. “Professor Gavin, will you serve as legal witness?”

“Of course, my boy. Of course.”

The Institute buzzed with rumors and predictions about the coming duel. The last sanctioned duel to the death occurred twenty years ago when Professor Gavin first joined as an instructor. Cade noted that his students paid careful attention in his classes, half expecting that this would be his final week.

Cade maintained his usual weekly schedule. His ethics class continued to worry him. Stephanie seemed resistant to his instructions. “Ms. Williams, perhaps you can explain to me exactly what it is that you don’t understand.”

“You’ve been teaching us that it is wrong to force others to think as you do, but you are dueling in a few hours? What’s the difference if I make someone think better, or you kill them for disagreeing with you,” Stephanie asked, feeling bold.

“We are not dueling because we disagree, Stephanie. But I am glad that you brought up the subject,” Cade replied. He scanned the thoughts of the room feeling the buzz of their curiosity. “Why do you think that I am opposed to the treatment?”

“You don’t want to be out of a job, sir.”

The class laughed. Cade smiled. “I do have a pension from thirty years service so I imagine I would survive. Further, my field would not be affected. Even augmented psionics would require lessons in ethically using their abilities. Let me ask you another question, do I seem motivated by selfish desires?”

The class laughed again. Cade could have worked in the private sector and made a fortune instead of slaving away for a teacher’s salary. “Very well then, you have your assignment for Monday. Write an essay about why you think I oppose the proposal so much that I am willing to kill over it.”

“What happens if you die?” Stephanie asked.

“Well then, all of you will get full marks for completing your assignment,” Cade answered, gracefully.

“But why are you willing to risk death over this? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You seem awfully certain that I’m going to die, Ms. Williams,” Cade protested with a bit of humor.

“Sir, you can’t beat someone with a rating of two or more above you. It’s just not possible.”

Duels were usually held in training rooms, but Cade had insisted that this duel take place at the Friday forum. A protective energy shield was erected to protect the audience from accident harm. Passive and serene, Professor Gavin hovered in a small chair above the stage awaiting the arrival of the combatants.

Doctor Mayes and Cade entered the stage from opposite ends. “Please, Professor Cade, there is no need to die this day. I’ve been rated PSI-14 after the treatment. No one has ever defeated a psionic rated 2 levels higher than themselves. You don’t need to die to make a point.”

Cade smiled, flashing more teeth than usual. He clearly had been spending too much time with the Professor. “Thank you for your concern, Doctor Mayes. However, I feel fairly confident in the outcome.”

Professor Gavin rang a large brass bell. “Duelists should bow.”

Doctor Mayes and Cade bowed to the audience, to Professor Gavin, and then to each other. Satisfied, Professor Gavin rang the bell once more. “Begin!”

Doctor Mayes attacked immediately. His mental probe was fast and potent like a sledgehammer. Cade had expected such a tactic and had prepared his mental shields. Mayes pressed his advantage sending wave after wave of mental blasts. The attacks were potent and skillful, but they lacked experience. Dripping with sweat, Mayes’s face began to turn crimson. “How can this be?”

“Please note that Doctor Mayes is trying with all of his newfound abilities to pierce my mental shield,” Cade revealed calmly. He wasn’t talking to Mayes, but to the audience.

“I’ll smash your shield eventually. You can’t hold out forever!”

“I don’t need to hold out forever, Doctor Mayes, I merely need to outlast you.”

The psychic blasts grew in frequency and potency. Doctor Mayes was panting, trying to keep enough oxygen to his brain. Sensing that his opponent was weakening, Cade switched his tactics to the offensive.

Mayes had concentrated so much upon shattering Cade’s defenses; he failed to construct a solid mental shield. Cade’s attack was swift, like the trust of a switchblade in an alleyway. Doctor Mayes froze, surprised by the mental punch on the nose. It was a dirty tactic, but Cade didn’t have much choice. Taking advantage of the weakness, Cade pummeled through the shield and attacked his nervous centers. Mayes wildly flung his arms over his face. “No! No! This is not possible.”

Cade did not reply. He was too busy lobotomizing his opponent. Doctor Mayes dropped to the floor like a slab of meat. Satisfied, Cade bowed to Doctor Gavin and then to the audience.

“The proposal has been defeated,” Professor Gavin announced.

“I’ve read through your papers and some of you had curious insights into my motives. Ms. Williams, how did you come to your conclusion?”

Stephanie had been hoping that she would not be called upon. She had been hiding her face with her hair. “I saw the duel, sir. Some of us managed to sneak into the balcony.”

“Yes, I sensed you.” Cade had been pleased to see his students take such an interest. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“He was more powerful than you. And skilled. But he didn’t have the discipline. You beat him using the first principle of power. Power without discipline is useless. Discipline comes from not taking the easy road and working for your abilities. He hadn’t developed the stamina to break you. You waited until he was tired to strike.”

Cade nodded, proud. There was hope for this student. “Very good, Ms. Williams. This week we’re going to discuss applications of discipline and how to maintain it during times of temptation. I’ll know if you haven’t read the reading material.”

“Very good, my boy,” Professor Gavin thought-called. “I’ve been monitoring your class. All of them will make excellent sentinels, including your trouble maker.”

“Thank you, Professor. May I ask you a question?”

Cade sensed curiosity and pride from the orangutan. “Of course, my boy,” Professor Gavin

“You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”

Chuckling softly, Professor let a bit of pride slip through with his last thought. “Let’s just say that I enjoyed watching the first principle of power in action. It was very enlightening.”

I permeate this universe, which I’ve named Tom, and guard against its destruction. If someone had done that for the universe I came from, then Mary, my sweet Mary, would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have killed her and everyone else when I accidentally destroyed that universe.

And now I’m on the verge of destroying much more.

My name is also Tom. I was an undergrad in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that January in 2040 when I made the discovery that doomed us all. My field of study was cognitive science, the study of human consciousness. What makes us aware of ourselves? Is it just the biomechanical workings of the brain, or something else?

Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I spent countless hours in the lab eliminating the impossible, and there didn’t seem to be anything left, improbable or not. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness to exist was just too many levels beyond what was possible. By all rights, we should all be unconscious blobs of matter mechanically going about our business as directed by electronic impulses from the brain, with no more consciousness than a calculator. I suffered brain cramps in the lab trying to figure out what improbables were left.

When I could think of nothing else to try, it was time to relax and let my subconscious figure it out. So I got out the Frisbee and called my lab partners.

Mary, Joey, and I—Tommy, as they called me—called ourselves the “ees.” I’d only met Mary when we’d started college, and adored how she laughed when I explained my love for her in neurological terms, with dopamine and neurotransmitters. We did everything together, or so I thought; classes and labs, movies, and late-night bull sessions with pizza and ice cream, usually followed by pints of morning coffee. Our future together was assured; as soon as we graduated, we would get married. I’d even convinced her we should wear purity rings—I had special ones made up with a brain emblem.

Joey and I grew up together on the same street, playing stickball and videogames. He and I were going to be buddies for life.

Professor Wilson, our adviser, reluctantly let the three of us be lab partners even though he said it’s best not to put friends together. Amazingly, we got a lot done when we weren’t reading the neurology cartoons taped to the walls or playing with Catzilla, the lab’s iguana-bodied, cat-brained hybrid mascot. And then came that morning when we went outside the lab on Charles Street to toss the Frisbee around among the oak trees by the front steps. The fresh air was an escape from the antiseptic stench of the lab.

“You throw like a girl!” Joey said when my toss to him banged against the ground, way off line. He stood half a head taller than me, with that eternal mischievous grin I’d known for twenty years. He was the only person in the world who could get away with a ponytailed bouffant, which I would yank every chance.

“Like a girl, huh?” Mary said, throwing the Frisbee as hard as she could at Joey, who barely blocked it. Mary grabbed the rebound and faked another throw while Joey cringed. “Want some more?” She was my sweet pixie, five feet of tiger and spice, never still, never silent. Recently she’d taken to tying her long blond hair in a ponytail like Joey, giving me a second target to yank. I was the smart one, with a crew cut.

“Okay,” Joey said, “you win. You both throw like girls!” Mary smacked him with the frisbee again.

As we tossed it around, I became aware of my awareness of the Frisbee’s location at any given moment. Somehow my mind tracked this and so many other things. The complexities were staggering. I got so caught up thinking about this that I forgot to be aware of the spinning Frisbee coming at me.

It went bonk against my head, and suddenly the answer to my question shook free. Great complexity meant great interconnectivity meant great density meant…it wasn’t just improbable, it was astounding. But it was the only thing that wasn’t impossible.

The interconnectivity required for human consciousness could only be satisfied by infinite density at a single point. A singularity.

Unless Mr. Holmes was mistaken, every one of us carries a singularity in our head. The mass doesn’t register in our universe, or else your body—and everything else for a long way around—would fall into it and squoosh, a quick way to end one’s existence. No, the singularity is just a point that floats around, stuck in your brain, presumably created while your brain was being created, with its mass in some alternate universe or state.

Actually, as any physicist could tell you—and I’m not one, I learned this later on—singularities do not really explode, no matter how many times that happens in science fiction stories. All universes start as singularities that expand exponentially, the so-called “Big Bang.” There’s no explosion, just a single point that gets bigger and bigger until you have a full-sized universe.

“You okay, hot shot?” Mary asked. I realized I was still standing outside the lab, saliva trickling out the corner of my mouth. I wiped it off and re-entered the real world.

“I’ve got something!” I exclaimed, as visions of singularities danced in my head.

“So do I,” she said, hugging me, her red cardigan sweater pressing against me. Oh, if I’d only lost my train of thought and hugged back! I took off for the lab, colliding with three students on the way to the fourth floor. Mary and Joey followed. I ignored Catzilla’s rasping meow as I ran to my lab station to do research and think.

Once I knew about the singularity in my brain, the obvious next step was to experiment on it. But a singularity takes up no space, and is therefore rather hard to test. So I sought the advice of a physics grad student. I didn’t tell him why I needed to expand a singularity, and he didn’t tell me the consequences, thinking it was all just theory talk. He explained what was needed in the foreign language of physics, but I picked up the one part I needed: “Flood it with tachyons, so that the entire quantum evaporation happens in an instant.” I had no idea what the second part meant. It turned out that the physics lab had one of the new tachyon emitters, which he showed off for me. Just what the neurologist ordered!

He assured me that tachyons were harmless, essentially massless—my eyes glazed over when he started talking about “imaginary mass”—and would shoot right through anything at faster than light speeds. I felt in sudden need of a tachyon shower.

Mary and Joey had wandered off, which I thought strange at the time since we were at a key stage of our work, but I didn’t need them for this and so didn’t stop to wonder where they might be. (If I knew then what I knew now….) When no one was looking, I turned the tachyon emitter on full blast, entered the tachyon field chamber through the “Do Not Enter!” sign, and the rest is….

I started to say “history,” but of course it was actually the end of history. The singularity in my brain expanded like any other “Big Bang,” creating a universe and destroying ours.

Including Mary.

My friend the physics major never said anything about branes. Not brains, but branes, one of those physics terms that I knew nothing about back then. It seems our universe existed inside a brane, which in turn existed in a higher-dimensional space-time continuum, in equilibrium with other universes in their own branes. When the singularity in my head became a universe in its own brane, it knocked our universe and its brane out of equilibrium.

Our universe and its brane happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, near another brane which it now teetered into. There have probably been countless cases of singularities expanding into universes, but only rarely—as in this case—is a new one so close to another that it knocks the older one out of equilibrium.

What happens when two branes collide? Both of them, and everything inside, are destroyed. And it doesn’t take billions of years. Since it all takes place in a higher-dimensional space-time continuum, the collision takes place at all times and spaces simultaneously—as if that word has any meaning in this context—and the entire existence of the universe and its one hundred billion galaxies was wiped out. Not just gone forever, but never existed. The Milky Way Galaxy, Earth, humans, Baltimore, Frisbees, Catzilla, none of it ever happened. Mary who? She never was, no matter how vivid her memory was to me.

The only thing in my old universe that wasn’t destroyed was me. My body doesn’t exist anymore, and in fact now never existed. But when the singularity expanded from a point to an entire universe in its own brane, my consciousness expanded with it. That’s why I permeate this universe, which I named Tom since it all came from me. Every proton, electron, quark, lepton, tachyon, it’s all me.

But I miss Mary, the rose of my existence. In my human form I had never appreciated her as I did now—and her death, or non-existence, was my fault. Was there any penalty, any torture, I did not deserve?

I had actually done far worse, destroying the universe, billions of humans, and—as I soon learned—quadrillions of intelligent aliens scattered throughout the universe. Yet these were just numbers, faceless hordes I’d never meet or miss. With Mary, it was the ultimate betrayal, her life snuffed out by me, the one person she should have been able to trust, in the second worst betrayal of trust I would ever know.

Once free of my body, I had the quantum computing power of the entire Tom Universe at my beck and call, and I made use of it. I was a little confused during the Planck epoch (first 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang), but sometime during the Grand Unification epoch (up to 10^-35 seconds), I figured out what had happened. By the end of the Inflationary epoch (10^-32 seconds), I’d analyzed the previous universe and simulated in my mind all that had ever happened that I cared to see. (Of course, I never knew about these various “epochs” during my previous life.)

Seeing all that I had obliterated in such detail forced me to face what I had done. They were not just numbers or faceless hordes. They were real, intelligent beings, both human and alien ones throughout the universe. Their hopes and dreams not only wouldn’t be realized, they no longer ever had hopes and dreams, or even existed. My crimes were almost imagining. It took a hundred years to get past my depression.

But I learned something else in my analysis of my old universe. I learned what Joey and my sweet Mary had done. That made me forget about all I had destroyed.

I decided there were three things I needed to do, three goals that I would devote my entire being toward achieving.

I actually have very little direct influence over what happens in the Tom Universe. I barely have the horsepower to knock a stray pencil aside without a billion years’ notice. I can move tachyons about, but what’s the point of that? I’m the weakest of the five forces of nature, the other four being gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. I have so little influence over anything with real mass that nobody, not even the Einsteins from both universes, would deduce or detect me. And yet, in cosmological time, I get a lot done.

It took a huge force of will to concentrate on moving things just so, but I did so for billions of years as I influenced the movement of atomic particles this way and that, according to my calculations. It’s not easy when you have to constantly recalculate, thanks to the blasted Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the bane of my existence. I remember how difficult problems used to give me brain cramps; imagine a brain cramp the size of the universe. That’s what you get when you spend a few billion years concentrating on one thing. But I got results. Professor Wilson would have been proud.

With my influence over the course of a billion years, matter in one star system coalesced subtley differently than it would have otherwise. Two hunks of rock, a few hundred pounds each, would have missed each other, but with billions of years of focused thought I got them to collide just so. A large chunk of rock broke off one of them, and took off into space, a meteor. (Actually a meteoroid, but I prefer the colloquial term.) The second hunk of rock ricocheted off the first and hit another meteor, knocking off another large chunk of rock. This meteor took off in the same direction as the first one, about a minute behind, just as I’d calculated.

Those two meteors would take care of my second and third goals. But for now, forget about those meteors. They won’t be heard from again for ten billion years.

My first goal was the toughest. Mary, sweet Mary, how I missed her! I set about recreating her and my old universe in all its details, right from the beginning. With the quantum computing power of the Tom Universe, I could extrapolate all that had happened, and set about duplicating it.

You can call me God, since I applied whatever light touches were necessary to recreate my old universe. Trust me, galaxy formation is not an easy thing when a ninety-pound weakling at the beach can kick sand at you and all you can kick back with are a few photons. Just to get the raw materials needed I had to create supernovas, and explode them just right. But a photon here, an electron there, and it adds up if you do it long enough. Soon I had the matter and energy needed, all in the right place at the right time. I created our solar system, Earth, life, evolution, hamsters, and eventually Homo Sapiens, all exactly as it had happened in my old universe.

It wasn’t easy affecting evolution since I could barely nudge a strand of DNA. I could move an atom so it affects a molecule, which affects a nucleotide, which affects the DNA. It took many millions of years, and I almost died for want of a galactic-sized aspirin. I had second thoughts about recreating history exactly as before, since that meant Hitler, bubonic plague, cooked spinach, and acne—five years of it for me—but any changes would alter future history, and I couldn’t risk that. Once I’d set the initial conditions early in Earth’s history, the rest was inevitable, with minor adjustments now and then, thanks to Heisenberg. As to the rest of the universe, I let it evolve on its own, and it ended up pretty close to the original.

Finally the Tom Universe reached TOM, the Time of Mary.

Oh, and me too. I got to watch both of us grow up. With me, it was diaper changing, playing with Joey, bullies stuffing me in lockers, dropping the fly ball to right field that blew the big playoff game—damn, I wanted to change that—then off to college. With Mary, it was diaper changing, ballet classes, middle school queen bee, high school prom queen, boyfriends I didn’t know about, then off to college where she finally buckled down and studied. We met, we dated, and then Joey joined us as we formed our lab group.

Joey, Joey, Joey. The things I know about you now!

But now I had Mary back. I couldn’t hold her in my arms because I didn’t really have arms, unless you count eighteen billion human arms, since they are all part of me. But after 13.7 billion years of planning and execution, her beautiful mind and body existed again. I had achieved my first goal.

I caressed her with the molecules that bounced against her body, as well as from within, since the very matter that made up her body was me. I felt her at every level of existence, the limbular, cellular, molecular, nuclear, and lepton/quarkular. Such sweetness and beauty…

…and such betrayal. There I was, just as before on that fateful day, experimenting on my singularity, unknowingly about to destroy the universe…again. And there, in Dr. Wilson’s office nearby, on his sofa, were Mary and Joey, just as before, with their bodies—made from me!—entwined, their lips locked. Mary’s purity ring lay on a table nearby.

I’d played it out in my mind a trillion times, always with the same result. Small bursts of cosmic rays spontaneously burst into being throughout the universe as I heaved universal shudders of horror. How could they?

In my youth as a universe, I could never go beyond that moment. What point was there? Mary and Joey betrayed me, and must pay the price.

And yet, as I matured as a universe, my youthful hot-bloodedness was replaced by a more experienced thoughtfulness. It took nearly 13.7 billion years—just a few brief million years before Mary, Joey and I would come into existence again—before I could bring myself to look past the betrayal and calculate what would have happened if I hadn’t destroyed the universe. It was just a simulation in my cosmic mind, and yet it seemed almost real to me.

“I can’t believe we did that,” Mary said as she dressed. “Right here, not fifteen feet from the lab.”

Joey was silent as he pulled up his pants and put on his socks and shoes. When he was done, he continued staring at his feet.

“We’re his best friends, and look what we’ve done,” Mary continued. There was a long silence. Mary stared at her purity ring for a long time before putting it back on. Catzilla stood nearby, staring with accusatory eyes.

“We can’t ever tell him,” Joey finally said. “It would be too much for him.”

“How can we face him?” Tears streamed down Mary’s face.

“We won’t,” Joey said, his face granite.

A week later, Joey transferred to another university, which he claimed focused more on his areas of neurological interest. For several years he maintained occasional email contact with Tom before fading into his past. He never contacted Mary again.

Mary missed a week of school, citing illness. When she returned, she surprised Tom with a candlelit dinner and the finest French food. Thoughts of singularity expansion were put on hold. Later they would work out the theoretical framework for consciousness—including singularities and their part—and their research would revolutionize the field. When Tom wanted to expand a singularity, she convinced him the dangers were too great.

A month after the candlelit dinner, Tom proposed. They married, had three kids, and had fifty happy years together.

I replayed over and over in my mind the simulation of what my life would have been like with Mary. The life I’d lost, and the two lives I was about to kill. A cosmic tear rolled down my metaphorical cheek.

For ten billion years, the two meteors had shot through space for their long-planned rendevous, my second and third goals. Now I watched as they approached Earth, just a few million years to go. What have I done? My betrayal was far worse than theirs. Mine was the greatest of all possible betrayals.

One of the meteors meant nothing to me; its destination deserved its fate. I focused my will from every corner of the universe on the other meteor as it soared through space. If I could just nudge it to the side, even a few feet….

I could have calculated in an instant if I would be successful, but I did not. If I was going to fail, I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to waste even a snippet of my mental energy on anything except saving Mary. I strained with all my mind, stretching the very fabric of the universe to the limit. If I had enough time, I could move mountains, but I did my best work in billions of years, not millions.

The meteor lurched slightly to the side. Would it be enough? I pushed and pushed, praying feverishly to whatever god there might exist beyond me. I could feel the meteor as it continued to veer off course.

It entered the solar system, still nearly on course. Fear permeated the universe as I watched it draw closer and closer…all I can do now is watch.

The first of the two meteors, now the size of a marble after going through the atmosphere at twenty-six miles per second, comes through the roof. As I’d planned ten billion years before, it strikes my other me, seconds before he/I would start the expansion in the singularity in my brain that would have led to the destruction of the Tom Universe. My head splatters in spectacular fashion, with red flowering out in a contrived Fibonacci pattern of great beauty. I’ve saved the Tom Universe and all its occupants from myself, my second goal. Billions of humans and quadrillions of intelligent aliens will now continue to exist. I no longer care.

The second meteor is only a minute behind. I’d fought it for millions of years, straining with every fiber of my being, and yet it is only barely off target…would my efforts be enough? I had been too afraid to calculate in advance. I can now see Mary and Joey in Dr. Wilson’s office, just as in our original universe, their bodies entwined in ways I would not believe possible if I weren’t sensing it with the very matter they use to do it with, their bodies. Joey, my good buddy and friend, is on top, facing Mary, who makes moaning sounds that I’d heard in my simulations a trillion times before.

A second before the meteor arrives, I see my efforts are for naught. The meteor is off target by only a few inches. My piercing scream shoots through the Tom Universe, unheard by anyone as it echoes through my cosmic mind, rattling constellations throughout my universe on the microcosmic scale.

The second meteor slices through Joey’s back and Mary’s stomach, leaving behind matching holes the size of Frisbees in their bodies and a trillion times larger in my heart. Catzilla, who’s been hiding under a nearby table, scurries from the room in fear. My third goal, revenge, has been achieved.

In desperation I let loose a storm of tachyons toward Mary’s head. Since tachyons are essentially massless, I can maneuver them easily. The tachyons flood the singularity in her brain, which begins to expand.

She will live! Embodied in her own universe, just as I am. Just as I had done, she will recreate our universe, and eventually me, and we will be together again…pleasure coarses through my universe.

And then I freeze, my metaphorical jaw dropping. Mary’s expanding singularity is not alone. Tachyons have also flooded Joey’s brain, and his singularity is also expanding.

I make one last use of the quantum computing power of my universe, and see the horrible truth. Joey’s and Mary’s universes, now in their own branes, are too close together. Their branes are on a collision course that will destroy both, leaving me alone in universal misery.

“NO!” I cry as pain explodes through me. Closer and closer the branes move together for their inevitable rendevous.

I react mindlessly, writhing in agony as my metaphorical muscles convulse. This has little effect on matter, but like corks shooting from bottles, tachyons shoot out everywhere, permeating the very fabric of my universe.

Singularities everywhere begin to expand. Not just the billions inside human brains, but also the quadrillions inside intelligent creatures throughout my universe. Quadrillions of new universes emerge and expand, in close proximity to their neighbors, overloading the uncountable branes. The branes, no longer in equilibrium, collide with each other like dominoes throughout the cosmos. One by one they pop like soap bubbles, until there is nothing, there never has been anything, and just as my existence ends, there is no pain.

When the bough breaks….

Karlyn ano-Kerr grips the interface around her head with heated disgust. Synapses are breaking down, some are shifting their pulse rhythms, others are stuck in flux; millions upon millions of nanos are running around, clueless, as if zapped by a heavy dose of the stupids.

She can’t understand it; the rooting had been flawless, the bio-programmers for Beta habitat integrated without rejection from the aboriginal millifibers and coaxed by their artificial programmers to grow natural habitats, enclosed and self-sufficient. It had been a textbook performance.

Then why is it collapsing, she chides the static-ridden threshold. Why? Why? Why?!

Karlyn writhes in her seat in the control bubble of the landing bug and seethes at the decay of her beloved systems-control ganglia. Her program buoy shudders. Algorithms manifest themselves and scatter past her like so many dead leaves on a Veronian wind burst. The leaves brush past her; the massive tangle of information before her strikes a discordant note.

She doesn’t need this now. Another failure…

From orbit, Cruz des-Manas is running cross-checks on the System Platform’s induction flow and stabilization subroutines. She sees him in the digilandscape distance. He appears as an octopus whose many tentacles flicker about at what looks like a swarm of large black flies. Beta is collapsing in upon itself.

“Systems are shutting down all over,” says Cruz. “Keep your eyes open. I suspect a possible leak over to the remaining ground systems.”

“My program buoy is sinking,” Karlyn whines. Her frustration begins to sting. She had sent out for a pattern trace, but so far no luck. The nanopolice had staggered back, babbling incoherently. She huffs. The surroundings become hazy, as if a sheen of ice has formed over an invisible glass window before her. The effect warps the landscape and things appear milky, distant and unclear.

“Organiform supports are dying,” announces Cruz. “Hold on the final coding sequence for the nodules. Karlyn, rig to reboot.”

“I know!” She sets up the program again. “No dice,” she says. “She’s sinkin’ fast!”

“Recommend we cut contact with Beta. Avoid possible contamination.”

Beta is not the only thing sinking, she thinks, as her stomach hits her lap. Whatever the problem is, she’s sure it’s her fault.

As she prepares to invoke the nanocrobe buffers to coat and isolate the undamaged programmers, a lightning crack ruptures the digisky above. Beta Platform, who’s garbled double speak has dominated most of her interchannels, howls and discharges a static burst.

With quick efficiency, her biolastic suit’s response mode kicks in. A silver screen goes up, catches the burst, amplifies it, and sends it right back at the Platform. There is a shower of blue-white particles, a wrenching noise that threatens to shatter her ears. Suddenly she is thrown clear, and the digivisor on her interface pulls back like melted plastic and withers.

She sits in her organiform chair, head aching, and curses Beta’s bloody haemoglobular flow.

“And that, as they say, is that,” says Cruz. “I’ll check our backups. If this happens again we’re gonna have problems growing the colonists.”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you!” she blurts. “Agh!” Her suit is peeling, the heat from the breakdown beginning to burn her skin. She works frantically and manages to pull it off. It crinkles up on the floor and turns from metallic grey to deep black.

“Something must have gotten through to my buoy. My suit has disintegrated.”

“Just the overload burst. I’ll grow you another.”

“‘Just the overload burst,’” she mimics. “I got fried, Cruz!”

“I know. I can’t scan you without an interface suit, though. Check with medical, please.”

She sinks back into the chair, careful of her burns. Not exactly the response she’s looking for. But then what did she expect? She grunts (intolerable little shit!) and wonders what the hell she ever saw in him.

“How’s the stock?” she asks. As planet-fall coordinator and biofarmer she needs to know that the colonists for this particular drop are unharmed. It has taken over sixteen stops this time to find a suitable host-planet, one with an eco-system from

which their nanos can grow the living habitats, like the ship grows her a terrestrial body for ground work. Diversity of terrestrial biologicals is not necessary, even a small ecosystem will do.

“Organiform nodules seem undamaged, although I can’t get a proper signal from its grid. If we can’t verify its authenticity, we’ll have to consider the stock contaminated. In which case, as resident biofarmer, I’ll need your signature on the liability forms.”

Her heart freezes. This is not what she had anticipated. She’s never lost stock before. Never. Liability forms? Had it come to this for her already? Why not? She had already felt the slow process of marginalisation creeping about her months ago. “You could be wrong, Cruz.”

“And what would you have me do? Start up the sequence? If there is even a slight chance of contamination, bringing them to life could be the cruellest thing we could do.”

“I want a thorough check, and a second opinion. I’m not convinced,” she says.

“Well, luckily you don’t have to be.”

“Wrong,” she replies. “We are in disagreement, and so protocol demands third-party inquest.”

“Just a minute, please—”

“You need me to be in full agreement with you on all and any aspects concerning the possible loss of stock. And I call for direct committee intervention.”

All department heads and their lieutenants sit on the committee. That includes Cruz and herself. But they will both be excluded from the voting process, as they can’t be seen as being unbiased: a conflict of interest in regard to the greater good.

“We both know that will take time. Time we don’t have. Karlyn,” he says in a low and even tone, leaning his round face into the camera, “stop fighting me.” She knows he’s tired of fighting her. He’s always fighting her.

“Already logged and received,” she spits out.

“Great.”

“I’m gonna run a diagnostic,” she insists. “A direct interface with its grid.”

He sighs in resignation. “Knock yourself out.”

“Grow me another suit. I’ll schedule a walk as soon as it is ready.”

“Sure. But first let’s run through the information on Beta’s failure.” Cruz begins rerunning the recorded data. “Funny. It shouldn’t be doing that!” he says to himself.

“Should take about five hours for the suit to be ready. Right?”

Milky ice crystals now form on the bubble as the sun sinks fast, smudging the view, producing an eerie, cloudy-white glow.

“Isolating pattern buffers,” he continues, then mumbles: “It shouldn’t do that!”

“I’ll be down in medical if you need me.”

She looks up through the bubble transparency and notices a group of humanoid aboriginals, squatting in the brush and tall flower-trees nearby. Some fondle with a loving fascination the twisted bits of biohabitat, supports bent in upon themselves, tips blackened, then turn to stroke each others faces with a slow, deliberate caressing, as they always do.

“Sixty percent corruption of Beta’s data,” he continues. “Still might be able to save it.”

A handful of the little hominids are watching her, now. Childishly, she sticks her tongue out at them.

“Karlyn, isolate the induction flow subroutines. We’re gonna need….Always intrigued by bloody mud crawlers….Hey! Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Clear as ice,” she snaps, getting up, and flips her camera the finger.

The first sign that something was going down came when Beta’s AI Systems Platform developed a flutter in her bioprogramming matrix. Karlyn thought it nothing at first, probably a power surge somewhere that shot through the system. Happens. Cruz had let it pass too, so even he had thought it not worth mentioning. But then it happened four times.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” says Cruz, voice booming through the bug’s speakers. “Find the problem and get back up here.”

Karlyn watches the morning sunlight ooze its way through the foliage, like a thick soup. Similarly, her mind oozes through her brain—An after effect of last night’s uneven sleep. She can hear the hanging foliage brush against the cloudy transparency in the breeze. A scratching sound, wanting to get in.

“If you think you can do it better, Cruz,” she replies, closing the last seal on her new biolastic suit, wincing, as her skin is still a bit raw, “by all means, feel free to join me.”

“No thanks. Terrestrial mud crawling is not my idea of a good time. The stench, the filth, bad working conditions, nah!”

This place isn’t the only thing that stinks, she thinks sourly as she rubs her eyes, attempting to wipe away the dream that follows her from the bed in medical. In the dream she was in a deep forest, surrounded by flowers, pollen gliding through the air rich in golden sun rays. Nice fairy tale image. Sniffing a bloom, the flower’s petals closed around her face, fine tentacles rushed down her throat. She felt like her insides were being ripped out. She awoke with a start, her body burning, throbbing.

She brushes the vision aside and now gets herself a cup of vitajuice from the service kitchen and proceeds to stalk through the empty lower deck to the equipment locker, her bones feeling heavy, her skin tough. It seems like only yesterday that she had been enjoying the ease of one-third gravity in the bioring ship, before climbing into the reconstruction couch and going into stasis to wake up here. Wherever here is….

She touches a panel and the locker door melts away. She stares at the untidy shelves.

….and to wake up here with him. With him. It never stops surprising her that she had renewed her work contract. Especially when he had been made supervisor of her beloved farming program. Four hundred years of seeding experience and that asshole gets the big chair. She rolls her eyes in disgust. Committee politics, and he was good at playing the game, his new squeeze toy being the assistant chairperson. Her stomach twists with that thought.

Farming has been her life. Now, would he dare threaten to take that, too?

She considers the pulse gun, hanging in its display.

Karlyn had renewed her registration of monogamy too, despite the demise of their affair. She had discovered later that he had never registered as monogamous when they were together. By rights he didn’t have too, but he should have informed her out of courtesy at least. Instead, he had let her heart accumulate unfair romantic notions, notions of unity and familial obligations, setting down roots, notions he had no intention of entertaining.

“This is who I am,” he had said, after she pleaded for him to reconsider their relationship. “Didn’t you know?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “You needed me,” she said accusingly. “To get on the committee.”

“Karlyn….”

“We never had a chance, did we? Did it mean anything to you? Did I?”

He spoke slowly. “It all means something to me.”

She kept to herself for a few weeks, taking time off from her duties. When she returned, six months later, she learned that he had been promoted. So what was she to him, then? Another one of his many partners, for sure. Most likely a stepping-stone, she had concluded. And he had left quite a footprint on her back.

And it had all gone downhill from there. And in her self-imposed social solitude, regressive feelings of anger and dejection, spawned from the depths of her wounded heart, began to bubble.

She frowns at the ceiling. “Where’s your dedication to the stock?”

“Whose stock? Theirs or ours?”

“Funny. I remember learning that there really isn’t much of a difference.”

He makes a guttural sound in his throat. “Huddling together in the slime like slugs.”

“Maybe mud dwellers like the sense of being grounded to something. Belonging.”

“Belonging to what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To each other.”

“Let ’em. We’re the flowers of the wide open spaces, my dear.”

“Wrong analogy,” she corrects him, digging through her mess for the equipment, ignoring the weapon on the shelf. “Try bees. Going from stem to stem. No,” she says to herself aloud. “Bees have a deep communal system. Wind bursts. Carrying wild new seed to unknown grounds. That might be the type of prosaic, expressive crap you’re looking for.”

He sniffs. “You stay down there any longer and I might recommend you for psychological re-adaptation sessions.”

It wouldn’t be the first time. Farmers have the usual interview session after every ground assignment. The shock and discomfort of being grounded does involve variations of disorientation and discomfort when adapting to a harsh gravity well, discomfort that can inhibit the usual motor coordination in conjunction with the ability to concentrate, to find her core.

She fumbles getting to the control bubble. She can hear the leg brace machinations purring. The ice crystals melt away in the morning’s quick and heavy heat. The distant images wriggle in the melting frost and warp into their proper shapes.

Cruz is still chattering in the background, his voice grating on her ears.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the chit-chat,” she blurts.

“Sure, but remember to wash when you’re done.”

“I’m laughing,” she says, flatly.

“Glad I could lighten your day. See you on the uplift.” The speakers snap off.

She tries to clear her mind as she heads for the antechamber, a hand running absently over her thigh as the muscles work their strange power.

We interrupt this program….

Karlyn slashes her way through the foliage, her sonic blade perfectly slicing the stalks of thin young trees in half. The humidity hangs in the air like slowly moving vapor clouds. Her digivisor works to keep her faceplate clear as she hacks her way to the clearing and the organiform nodules. Following close behind, as expected, come a swarm of aboriginals, dodging through the thick growth with ease.

She stops, teasing them, and they all stop, holding frozen their positions as if suddenly encased in ice. She moves suddenly, then stops. They do the same. She plays this little game with them for some time.

The curious little hominids had shown up the morning after landing, touching the bug, caressing, as if feeling its every living millifiber. When they had first arrived, her initial survey failed to report on other land creatures other than Species One, the “gelatins” (small, soft squirming creatures less than twenty centimeters long that lived high up in the flower-trees, either lain in the flower buds or placed there after birth, seemingly unattended, evidently being fed by them). As the seasons changed, she discovered that Species One was in fact an infant stage of Species Two. After completing their gestation externally, they then venture down to the soil for good.

She had spent some time observing them. She had sat with them, followed them, examined as best she could their close-knit, communal relationships. They appeared non-progressive as there was nothing of unnatural construction around, their villages being close groupings of flower-trees and large-leafed bushes that hung in an umbrella shape and provided shelter, as if the vegetation grew to accommodate them. When they slept, she used a nano probe to examine their genetic history, the history of a species unaltered in a billion years. An evolutionary dead end; she had concluded that it was safe to proceed with the seeding.

She bounces over fallen trees, dodges bushes, stops, zig-zags through the growth. Her playful audience is not far behind, imitating, simulating, like a group of over-excited preschool children at playtime.

She makes the clearing and stops to catch her breath. The hominids freeze where they are, looking as if they could go on like this for an hour or so, unfazed.

She feels something’s wrong. She looks up.

“Shit on me!”

The Beta habitat, or something resembling it, has sprung up during the night like a wild grouping of jungle vines, twisted and interlocking. Filaments resembling veins wander out across the smooth areas of lattices and giant cylindrical leafy enclosures.

“Shit….on….me,” she whispers, and quickly switches channels over to Beta. Although it is mumbling incoherently the Platform’s biosystems check out five-by-five down the line.

Her interface chimes.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was standing at the habitat, hand outstretched, rubbing the smooth lattices and snaking branches. At the centre sit the nodules in their mouldings, undisturbed. The aboriginals follow close behind, but avoid getting too close to the structure. They seem content to sit off at the clearing’s edge and watch her.

Her interface clangs.

She has never seen anything like it. Although mutations do occur to a small degree (all dependent on the differences in each planet’s particular biology) the sequencers have fail-safe coding to prevent extensive mutations; coding that behaves like dominant genes, intent on preventing any large scale rewriting.

But something broke through. Suddenly she is overwhelmed with fear, the fear of failure. She needs to check the nodules.

Her interface rattles for her attention. She tries to ignore it. His voice from earlier in the day is still echoing in the back of her head. Irritation threatens to multiply with each rattle.

Not now!

She sends the call to her answering service.

She has been plugged into the drop-grid for no more than five minutes when the short, leathery skinned aboriginals suddenly come swarming over to her, poking their heads around at her, hands probing her body with their little, spidery fingers, pulling at her. One bangs on her helmet, another begins tugging at her breast pocket. She brushes the little mud crawlers aside and continues working. The “inside” of the grid looks a bit….well….intoxicated.

She picks up a nodule from the moulding and examines it for a second time. And for a second time an aboriginal who had been sitting nearby quietly reaches for her and grips her wrists, softly but firmly, while another takes the nodule from her and places it back in the mould. The hominid lets her go and turns away, again.

She watches this lone alien now as it returns to its rocky perch to sit and watch, a solemn look to its brown face. Its small black eyes search her face with a kind of questioning sadness.

What? she wants to ask it. You don’t want me to touch the nodule? Is that it? You don’t understand why I touch it? Or is it something else?

They seem to grow bored now and move off a distance to touch each other, encompass each other in their long, skeletal arms, locking in full embrace. Sensory communication? Or simply overly affectionate? She had never been able to establish whether they possessed a true, structured language system. But they did seem to be communicating with each other.

She watches them now. She wishes for communication, the right kind, the soft kind, gentle and soothing, hands moving, skin on skin, motion and rhythm….

She closes her eyes, but cannot picture it. Not anymore. She opens her eyes, disheartened.

A group of youths have shaped a giant maroon-coloured leaf into a bowl, and catch the water dripping off the trees in the humidity. They hand it back and forth between one another. She knew that if she drank some, it would taste sweet.

“Just where the hell have you been?”

Karlyn tries several routes in order to reach the main template without success, the nanopolice bounce back at her without any reasonable explanation. Her frustration mounts.

“I’ve been busy,” she says and sighs, looking up at the towering structure before her.

“Busy,” he mumbles. Then says: “Well, about an hour ago I started receiving a strange pulsing over Beta channel. Thing just came back online. All of a sudden. Just like that!”

“I know. I’m looking right at it.”

“Looking at what?”

“The habitat. It’s up and running. Although she’s deformed somewhat.”

“Are you shitting me?”

She adjusts her biolastic suit’s camera eye. “See that?”

He whistles.

“Try boosting the bandwidth,” she says. “You should be getting a pulsing sound. I’m attempting to hack into the nodules. So far, no luck.”

Cruz is stunned; she knows this because for the first time since she could remember he has little or nothing to say.

“Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it all!” she shrieks.

“What now?”

“The buffers on the grid just melted,” she huffs, millifibers untwisting, silicrobes breaking apart and floating away. “There’s no way to tell if the coding sequence has been affected unless we activate it.”

“Gee, do you think?” Cruz remarks. “I’ve been saying that the moment Beta went down. And that hiccup earlier? I’ve traced the source and it’s not in the system. It’s from outside.”

She scoffs. “Nothing can get in from outside! That’s what the filters are for.”

“It can if its own coding comes across as a latent paragene, waiting for instructions,” he says flatly. “One of the most extreme probabilities, which is probably why we—why you—missed it.”

Here we go! She puts her fists up and bangs her own helmet several times. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! It was such a remote danger she’d never had the biofilters check for such a problem.

You’ve been waiting for something like this to happen. Haven’t you? she thought. Little man.

“So what’s that, like, a point-two percent probability?” She sits back on her thighs.

“Something like that,” says Cruz. “Well, it gets better. Every time we booted up to restart, the induction flow flushed the system, and the resulting surge multiplied the paragenes by a factor of three.”

“So we inadvertently caused the codes to multiply,” she says lamely. “Certainly explains a few things, anyway.”

“Like?”

“Platforms themselves are sentient. We know that Beta was contaminated during primary build-up to sentience after landing. While I was poking around in the matrix, I could have….well….I thought….”

“You thought what?”

“Well, I could have sworn the thing giggled!”

“Uh-huh,” says Cruz. “Well in the meantime we need to figure out what exactly is in those pseudo-paragenes. And Karlyn….”

Her skin flushes cold, knowingly. “What?”

“We’ll have to destroy the stock. I’ll need that signature, Karlyn.”

She shakes slightly. “I don’t concur.”

“You called a third-party inquest. It’s no longer your decision.”

Her heart sinks into her stomach. She sees another error made.

You give that little bitch a good one last night? Made it special, so to finish what you started? Trying to go all the way up the ranks, Cruz? Need me out of the way, first? My vote, which always counts against you? You emptied my life, my career. You want my committee seat empty, too? This might do it for you. Glad I could help.

“You hear? It’s not your decision.”

She stares at her idle hands, at her trembling fingers, impassively, trapped. Her voice wanders absently from her lips: “I wonder whose, then?”

She watches the little creatures spin around and begin dipping into the forest, disappearing one by one. She watches them go. The solemn one sits for a moment before getting up. It turns to face her and, before vanishing into the dense growth, sticks its tongue out.

And now a word from our sponsors….

The aboriginals are busy gathering water and food, the soft fruits that hang low on the dripping trees. They pass the water bowls and food back down a line toward the larger group that lay huddled with the coming darkness under an umbrella tree, touching each others’ faces softly while working. The solemn one sits off a ways by the nodules where she had been working for some time, like a solitary watchman.

Cruz has had no luck deciphering any biosequencing the paragenes might contain. The elusive alien life codes that they harbour remain shrouded in confusion. And with the stock’s authenticity in question, the committee has made its decision.

“That’s funny. My interface is having trouble linking with Beta,” Cruz says. “I can’t hear her biorhythms.”

“Oh?” she whispers to herself.

“Have you downloaded the toxin into the Platform?”

“Yes,” she lies. “Yes, I have.”

The mouldings have burst into small flower-trees; nodules nested carefully among the large pink petals, waiting for the final coding sequence that would let them begin their new life.

At least they’d have a fair chance, fairer than any stellar dweller could hope, of that she is certain. Roots. Roots from which to grow….

The bug’s primer chimes, signalling the craft’s readiness for launch. She waits at the hatch, her eyes swallowing the final picture as hard as they could. Gripping the interface controls around her helmet she logs on and links to Beta’s digilandscape. The induction flow appears stable, despite the strange whooping sound it makes. The program buoy holds.

This will be her last action as a farmer. With a strange calmness, she keys in the final coding sequence from her wrist pad. She strains to hear the biomatrix flutter and hum in her earpiece. At first the algorithms scatter, then twirl like a cyclone. Piece by piece they fall into place, creating a new, yet familiar landscape.

With the system fully automated, she disengages the link.

“I can’t get a reading,” Cruz says. “Termination complete?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “Yes it is.”

Over the distance the solemn one’s voice booms a deep-throated tune, thick in the air. This is the first time she’s ever heard anything like this spring forth from their alien mouths. She finds something alluring about the song, something rich with deep, yet obscured meaning. She thinks to hit the recorder, but for no reason known to her she doesn’t move. Maybe it doesn’t seem important in the greater scheme of things.

I wish you well. Whoever you are. Whoever, whatever you might become. You, who are rooted and set in your lives to come….

She palms the wall panel. The hatch closes like a flower at sunset. She returns her suit and equipment to the locker, folding it neatly, placing the devices correctly in their holding slots, directly beneath that fully loaded pulse gun. She strokes its transparent sheath; a finger tracing the weapon’s every curve, eyes locked on the trigger. She grips the gun’s handle firmly…

“Countdown begun. Twenty minute ETA,” Cruz remarks. “See you soon.”

“Yeah,” she says, placing the cold weapon in her belt and covering it with her shirt. “See you real soon.”

As night falls hard the condensation on the bubble begins to crystallize. The view becomes hazy, discordant, and her heart feels a strange release, an unwanted wave of contentment filling the void once there.

“System nominal,” says Cruz. “Run a diagnostic on—”

And although I know you will not, could not, ever hope to know me, remember me. I, in my envy, shall remember you.

Cruz’s voice cracks over the speakers. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Clear as ice,” she says, distantly. “Clear as ice.”

I met Jo in a bookshop, I remember that much. I’ve always thought it an excellent place to meet the woman I fell in love with. Neither of my previous girlfriends had liked to read much and so our relationships didn’t last long. What can you talk about if not books? I’d picked up an Austen and was browsing through its pages, looking for annotations, when she spoke to me.

“Oh, I love that one. I can’t believe he dumps her.”

I looked up and there she was, somehow resplendent in a hoody and jeans: Joanne. She was beautiful, and something of my reaction to that must have shown, although she misinterpreted it.

“Oh God. You’ve not read it.”

I was able to recover by then. “I don’t think so.”

“Seen the movie?”

“Nope.”

“And now I’ve ruined it for you. I’m so sorry.”

I was in love. The smooth-talking type would have said, “Have dinner with me and all’s forgiven.” I said, “No problem.”

“Forget I said it.”

“Good idea. I’ll sell the memory.”

“Yeah, right, who’d buy a ‘spoiled book’ memory?”

Looking at the person who’d spoiled it, I figured just about anyone with a sexual interest in women.

“You’d be surprised what people buy,” I said instead.

“Not really. I work in a charity shop. Sold a painting of a goldfish this morning. Watercolour, naturally.” And she smiled.

That’s how we met.

I wasn’t joking about the memory selling thing, I really do work for Lucid. Yeah, it’s hard to get on their books, but sell something big and they keep you on for the little stuff. To get through uni I sold something big. Obviously I’m not sure what, but I strongly suspect it was winning a regional swim because I have the trophy at home with my name on. After that I made a little extra reading classic literature and selling the experience on; it’s popular with students. Twain said a classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read, and it seems he was right. I have well thumbed copies of Dickens, Joyce, and funnily enough some Twain. That year was Austen. Shakespeare’s popular as well, of course. Pays more, too.

But that was just a little extra to tide me over. For a proper job, when I met Jo, I worked at the university where I used to study. After my degree I couldn’t find anywhere to use it, so I taught others how to get my degree. Not very different from what I do for Lucid, really.

Jo, she volunteered at a charity place but she also worked as a florist. She’d come home smelling like camellia and carnations and forget-me-nots and I’d take deep breaths of her hair to get the scent that was hers.

“Weirdo,” she’d say, but she said it smiling and she always kissed me afterwards.

When Jo moved in we celebrated with takeout pizza and bottles of beer. She folds her pizza pieces before eating them so nothing falls off and I love her for it. One of her funny little ways.

“When are you going to read something good?” She was picking mushrooms out of the box. They must have fallen from one of my pieces.

“I always read something good.”

“You always read the same something good. Try Chandler or Christie or Crais for a change.”

“No one buys crime fiction. Those who want it, read it themselves. To work it out.”

“That’s what I’m saying, read it for you.”

“Novel idea,” I said, and drank to my own pun.

She slapped my arm. “You used to read all the time.”

“I still do.”

“Sense and Sensibility again? Law books? The fucking Highway Code?”

The truth was, money was tight and we needed the extra from Lucid. With Jo moved in, things would get easier. Then I’d read again. I told her this.

“Fine. But the first thing I’m buying, my contribution to the place, is a proper bookshelf.”

I looked to where we had boards stacked on blocks, each curving under the heavy load of books. “What about living the cliché?”

That earned me another same slap to the arm but with a bit of tickling afterwards and then we were rolling around amidst empty beer bottles and boxes full of her things waiting to be unpacked.

Good memories.

“What would we do if I was pregnant?”

We were in bed, having just made love for the second time that lazy Sunday, and without missing a beat I said, “Well obviously I’d want a paternity test.”

She straddled me with a mock cry of outrage and before long we were at it for a third time.

I sold my first memory of us when the boiler went. After nearly two weeks of our breath clouding the air, I went to Lucid and sold the time we went to the park for a picnic. We’d said “I love you” by then, but so recently that everything else we said was still a sense-heightened echo of it. Hands that touched when reaching for paper plates held a charge between them, and lips that kissed tasted for stories yet to be shared. We made shapes out of the clouds like you’d expect, fed the ducks like we were supposed to, and everything felt like we were the only ones who were ever really in love.

That’s what her diary tells me anyway.

Later, when I sold them the memory of our first holiday, it was because I thought Jo was pregnant. She wasn’t. But she was furious.

“Why would you sell that? It was personal!”

“All memories are.”

(Yeah, I know; it was pathetic.)

“But Greece! Our first holiday? Come on. We went snorkelling, took that cruise around the island—”

“We have pictures.”

“—had sex in the fucking surf. Pictures?”

“Well not of that.”

“Jesus. And now someone else has those memories. Some emotional retard loser who can’t get a girlfriend remembers fucking me in the sea and drinking cocktails every night.”

I wanted to tell her it doesn’t work that way, but she knew. She was just angry. They don’t give the memory whole, they can’t. When you buy a memory you buy the sensations of recall, the feelings, the emotional experience. Think back to a memory of your own; it’s hazy, right? Sense impressions and big gaps, a spliced movie reel of images. Well with Lucid there are no images except the ones they give you after some tinkering, and maybe there’s some token souvenirs they rustle up for an extra cost. I also wanted to tell her that if we drank cocktails every night I was surprised she could remember much of it herself.

“I thought we were having a baby,” I said. “I thought we’d need the money. I teach. You arrange flowers into pretty patterns and sell junk to help old people. We’re not exactly swimming in cash right now.”

“We swam in the Med, but of course you wouldn’t remember that.”

“Actually, we’ve been to Turkey, too. I remember the Med.”

“Twat,” she said, and threw my Rubik’s Cube at me. I ducked and it smashed against the wall. I didn’t care. I could never do the fucking thing.

We weren’t having a baby, so I took her back to Greece with the money. We had a great time, fixed things, made love to repair what we had. Made new memories. On a balcony eating salad and feta cheese we decided Jo would go on the pill. Just for a while.

We had a lot of good times. I know because I still have the receipts. We were in love, and people always want that. It’s in demand, you could say, and it’s a seller’s market. For every roll around in a tangle of bed sheets, every romantic dinner, every walk along the beach I do remember, I’m sure I’ve sold just as many. I was careful, though. Or thought I was, anyway.

At first the extra money was great. We were able to do more things together, enjoy ourselves, snuggle deeper into our love as we decorated the flat, ate out, saw the newest films and pulled them apart over drinks in cosy bars. The more things we did, the more I could sell one or two of them so we could have more. But it wasn’t long before it started to show. Jo would make jokes I didn’t understand or I’d ask questions I should’ve known the answers to, things like that. Once, as she stripped off her shirt for another bout in the bedroom, I noticed she had a tattoo hooked around her belly-button, a curl of ivy with little green hearts for leaves. It freaked me out a bit, that one, because I didn’t know she had it. Luckily her shirt was up over her head at the time, caught on her ponytail, and she didn’t see my surprise. I helped her undress with a shaky laugh and we rolled around together. I kissed her tattoo a lot and as she traced patterns on the back of my shoulder I realised I had one too.

But on the whole, things were good.

Lucid Ltd is a large building, new and expensive but otherwise modest about its identity. There are no signs outside except for an engraved panel of glass. Inside it’s all thick carpet and huge photographs of weddings, newborns, children on swings, graduations, acceptance speeches, other stuff. The pair on the front desk wear their smiles like it’s part of the uniform, but I know from experience they’re nice enough really. If they still have the same staff there.

The man on the front desk was called David and he told me they couldn’t divulge the sort of information I required. I offered him money, but they must give the desk staff training or something because he turned it down. And it was a lot.

“Please. I need to remember.”

“Sales are non-returnable,” he said. “Come on, you know this.”

I was a regular by then. I no longer got the “sir” treatment.

The woman he shared the desk with was looking on with interest. She was new. I should have tried her.

“Jenny, can you go and tell Martin to come to the front please?”

Her eyes widened just a little and she picked up the phone. Martin was security.

“No, go get him personally. It’ll hurry him up.”

She nodded obediently and went. David took the cash I still held out and pocketed it quickly.

“I’ll email you,” he said. “And you’ll delete it immediately afterwards, ok?”

I nodded. Delete it. I could do that.

Jo and I ate the rest of our meal in silence. I’d reminisced about the time we ate here last, me relishing every mouthful of rainbow trout and she nearing orgasm with every forkful of truffle-topped risotto.

“What did I look like?” she asked eventually, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. She never dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She put her hands flat on the table and looked at me. “Did I have red hair, maybe? Blonde? Blue eyes? Maybe I had bigger tits.”

“What are you talking about?”

I was pretty sure she hadn’t changed her hair in a while, and I was certain she hadn’t had any surgery. Whatever the trap was, I was missing it.

“The girl you came here with last time, what did she look like?” She smiled, but it was her quick one, sharp like a paper cut. “When we came, you and me, for our anniversary, the place was a sushi bar.”

I had no reply. I didn’t need to explain.

“You said you wouldn’t go there anymore. You promised me no more Lucid. We’re doing fine now. We don’t need the money.”

“I promised I wouldn’t sell anything else.” I sounded whiny even to me. “I bought something this time. I bought back our anniversary but they must have tinkered with it, changed some things.”

“No shit.”

That was when the waiter turned up to ask if everything was alright. He meant with our meal. We both told him yes, and Jo ordered dessert as if nothing had happened in that way women can do. As soon as he was gone she was back in combat mode.

“They ‘tinkered’ with it so the dick who bought it wouldn’t see me in the street and say hi.”

I tried to speak but she held up a finger and continued, anticipating my comeback.

“No doubt they tinkered me back in for you. What did you do, take them a photo? And they must have tinkered the food too, or not tinkered it, or whatever, because I fucking. Hate. Risotto.”

She pushed away from the table and left.

I ate her sorbet when it came and paid the bill. The sorbet tasted of frozen nothing.

I stopped selling anything to Lucid for a while then, except for the occasional Great Expectations. We got back to normal again, and eventually normal wasn’t bickering and making up; normal was only good stuff. We visited family, that’s how serious we were, and one day in January, when the air was so crisp it hurt your nose to breathe it and the sky was such a frosted blue you thought it would break if you could throw a rock high enough, I proposed. We’d moved from our dingy flat above the pet shop to a rented house that had cycle routes into the country. We’d pedalled our way through leafless woods and over tiny streams that crackled their ice beneath our wheels and when we stopped at a kissing gate I refused to let her pass until she’d said yes. I’m not making any of this up or reading it from her diary. I remember. It hurts the same way the wind did as it bit our hands and faces going downhill. We sped our way down to the nearest pub and celebrated our engagement with mulled wine and a ploughman’s lunch, of all things.

I still have the ring. Lucid offered me a lot of money for it when I sold the wedding day, but I told them they’d have to make do with just the one. It’s engraved, anyway. The best of times, the worst of times. She likes Dickens. I kept the memory of buying it, too, because the woman in the shop had said “If it makes her as happy to wear it as it’s making you to look at it, you’ll be fine.”

I like to remember that and imagine it’s true.

There was a case in the papers, you might remember it, about a young woman who breezed through her exams two years early because she’d bought memories from her lecturer. That lecturer was me. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it, but it was the one that got me fired. The little bitch sold the story to the papers herself to recoup the money she’d spent at Lucid. The university couldn’t fire me for the memory thing, it’s not illegal (though my case forced a few revisions there, I think), but they could fire me for being under qualified, which they decided I was after I failed an exam of my own.

Jo wasn’t angry. She was upset and cried a lot (which was worse) but she wasn’t angry. I’d started selling my education because I wanted to keep everything that was ours, but I needed to sell something because by then she was pregnant. Our darling little Daniel. Oh, Danny boy. So, so beautiful.

We moved closer to her family after the scandal. With me looking for work, and a baby on the way, we needed their support more than I liked to admit, and she needed them in ways I used to be good enough for. I got a job in a warehouse. There was no need to promise not to go to Lucid because Lucid had made a show of firing me too. But that’s all it was; a show. I was kept on as a sort of thank you for the publicity. You know, just so we could pay the bills.

By the time Danny was born we never talked about the good times anymore, so I sold a few.

We got married before Danny was born. Neither of us were religious, and our families didn’t push for it, but we wanted it done before raising a family of our own. I often wonder if Jo knew back then that I’d eventually sell the day and so did me the courtesy of keeping Danny out of the picture. Maybe it just turned out that way. He would have been barely a bump back then.

I’ll never sell my memories of him. Not ever.

There are still some things I haven’t forgotten. I remember the day we met. I remember Jo asking me to move in, and then us deciding she’d be better at mine then getting the most drunk we’d ever been. We ended up singing karaoke in a gay bar somehow. I remember her hiding her Sex and the City DVDs for the first three months we lived together. I remember the time she laughed so hard she wet herself because of the way I looked in scuba gear. I remember the way she shudders if kissed on the back of the neck during sex, and I remember the way she sings in the morning after an all-nighter. I remember her at the kissing gate, sobbing so hard she had to say “yes” three times before I heard her, and I remember the way the ground felt under my knee, and the way we kissed against the fence, and the bikes toppling over, and the way we cycled to the pub so fast that our faces were red with cold, and I remember grinning so hard for so long that my cheeks actually hurt for a while after.

She’s remarried now.

When divorce looked like a possibility I went to my guy at Lucid and tried to buy back everything I’d ever sold about Jo. I got a few of them. Some people I couldn’t find, whereas others wouldn’t believe the memories were mine in the first place. One man even got violent and broke my nose. I broke his. I was cautioned by the police.

When divorce was discussed, I thought about forcing the names I’d been given to sell back what was mine. I fantasised abductions and drugged cooperation and wondered how much a Lucid employee would need to extract a memory by force. But they were only daydreams. I stole Jo’s diary instead and tried to recall firsthand the things she’d written. She found me reading it and used it as the final straw.

We split up, divided our things, and arranged custody and visitations.

I got to keep the diary.

At 19.37 on Tuesday the 25^th of March I kidnapped James McVey from a supermarket car park. I forced him into my vehicle at knifepoint and instructed him to drive us to a remote location where I held him captive and threatened him with violence for two hours. I only released him when the recollection provider—Lucid Ltd—notified authorities after I attempted to bribe an employee to perform an illegal transfer. I was arrested and James was returned home to his family who were described as “relieved and thankful.”

The newspapers tell me all of this.

Charges were dropped provided I sought psychiatric help, though a restraining order was put in place. I’m not allowed within a thousand feet of Mr McVey or his family due to a history of violence and the broken nose to prove it.

His family?

The papers can only speculate as to my motives, but they’re more than happy to do so. Theirs is a feasible story. I don’t know for sure because I sold the kidnap (like I said, you’d be surprised what people will buy), but considering James McVey is Jo’s new husband, it seems likely I wanted at least a few of his memories.

He sees my son more than I do.

I’m a newsagent now, selling papers that printed me on their front pages once upon a time. That’s how I saw Danny this morning; he came in for sweets. I watched him walk slowly up the rows of confectionary, choosing carefully just like I do with books. He took so long deciding that his mother had to come in and hurry him up. She looked good, dressed smart in a skirt and jacket. I wonder if she still carries a tangle of hearts beneath it all.

“Come on, Danny boy, your father’s waiting.”

For a foolish moment I’d thought she meant me. All my breath escaped in a rush and I smiled a ridiculously thankful smile. “There’s no hurry,” I almost said, then realised she hadn’t seen me. She was talking about someone else, waiting outside. My heart clenched and forced a deep noise from me, a guttural groan that was primal in its depth of grief. That was when she saw me in my stupid uniform, waiting to serve them.

She handled it well.

“Hello.”

I only nodded. It was all I trusted myself with.

“I want this one,” Danny said. He was only talking about a Mars bar.

Jo’s eyes were still on me. She wiped at them before tears could fall. I’ve no idea why she might have wanted to cry.

“We can get it somewhere else,” she told him, “Come on.”

I wanted to tell her I’m okay now. I wanted to tell her the things I remember and see if she remembers them too. I wanted to tell her I’ve read Sense and Sensibility for the hundredth first time and that I liked it, except for the ending. Most of all I wanted to ask if we could try again, or try something different, wipe the slate clean, but she was ushering Danny out the door. The bell above it tinkled and he looked back. He smiled and then he was urged outside.

She needn’t have rushed him away, though.

He doesn’t remember me at all.

He had come back, though he knew what to expect. He had always come back to Klanvahr, since he had been hunted out of that ancient Martian fortress so many years ago. Not often, and always warily, for there was a price on Dantan’s head, and those who governed the Dry Provinces would have been glad to pay it. Now there was an excellent chance that they might pay, and soon, he thought, as he walked doggedly through the baking stillness of the night, his ears attuned to any dangerous sound in the thin, dry air.

Even after dark it was hot here. The dead ground, parched and arid, retained the heat, releasing it slowly as the double moons—the Eyes of Thar, in Klanvahr mythology—swung across the blazing immensity of the sky. Yet Samuel Dantan came back to this desolate land as he had come before, drawn by love and by hatred.

The love was lost forever, but the hate could still be satiated. He had not yet glutted his blood-thirst. When Dantan came back to Klanvahr, men died, though if all the men of the Redhelm Tribe were slain, even that could not satisfy the dull ache in Dantan’s heart.

Now they were hunting him.

The girl—he had not thought of her for years; he did not want to remember. He had been young when it happened. Of Earth stock, he had during a great Martian drought become godson to an old shaman of Klanvahr, one of the priests who still hoarded scraps of the forgotten knowledge of the past, glorious days of Martian destiny, when bright towers had fingered up triumphantly toward the Eyes of Thar.

Memories…the solemn, antique dignity of the Undercities, in ruins now…the wrinkled shaman, intoning his rituals…very old books, and older stories…raids by the Redhelm Tribe…and a girl Samuel Dantan had known. There was a raid, and the girl had died. Such things had happened many times before; they would happen again. But to Dantan this one death mattered very much.

Afterward, Dantan killed, first in red fury, then with a cool, quiet, passionless satisfaction. And, since the Redhelms were well represented in the corrupt Martian government, he had become outlaw.

The girl would not have known him now. He had gone out into the spaceways, and the years had changed him. He was still thin, his eyes still dark and opaque as shadowed tarn-water, but he was dry and sinewy and hard, moving with the trained, dangerous swiftness of the predator he was—and, as to morals, Dantan had none worth mentioning. He had broken more than ten commandments. Between the planets, and in the far-flung worlds bordering the outer dark, there are more than ten. But Dantan had smashed them all.

In the end there was still the dull, sickening hopelessness, part loneliness, part something less definable. Hunted, he came back to Klanvahr, and when he came, men of the Redhelms died. They did not die easily.

But this time it was they who hunted, not he. They had cut him off from the air-car and they followed now like hounds upon his track. He had almost been disarmed in that last battle. And the Redhelms would not lose the trail; they had followed sign for generations across the dying tundras of Mars.

He paused, flattening himself against an outcrop of rock, and looked back. It was dark; the Eyes of Thar had not yet risen, and the blaze of starlight cast a ghastly, leprous shine over the chaotic slope behind him, great riven boulders and jutting monoliths, canyon-like, running jagged toward the horizon, a scene of cosmic ruin that every old and shrinking world must show. He could see nothing of his pursuers, but they were coming. They were still far behind. But that did not matter; he must circle—circle—

And first, he must regain a little strength. There was no water in his canteen. His throat was dust-dry, and his tongue felt swollen and leathery. Moving his shoulders uneasily, his dark face impassive, Dantan found a pebble and put it in his mouth, though he knew that would not help much. He had not tasted water for—how long? Too long, anyhow.

Staring around, he took stock of resources. He was alone—what was it the old shaman had once told him? “You are never alone in Klanvahr. The living shadows of the past are all around you. They cannot help, but they watch, and their pride must not be humbled. You are never alone in Klanvahr.”

But nothing stirred. Only a whisper of the dry, hot wind murmuring up from the distance, sighing and soughing like muted harps. Ghosts of the past riding the night, Dantan thought. How did those ghosts see Klanvahr? Not as this desolate wasteland, perhaps. They saw it with the eyes of memory, as the Mother of Empires which Klanvahr had once been, so long ago that only the tales persisted, garbled and unbelievable.

A sighing whisper…he stopped living for a second, his breath halted, his eyes turned to emptiness. That meant something. A thermal, a river of wind—a downdraft, perhaps. Sometimes these eon-old canyons held lost rivers, changing and shifting their courses as Mars crumbled, and such watercourses might be traced by sound.

Well—he knew Klanvahr.

A half mile farther he found the arroyo, not too deep—fifty feet or less, with jagged walls easy to descend. He could hear the trickle of water, though he could not see it, and his thirst became overpowering. But caution made him clamber down the precipice warily. He did not drink till he had reconnoitered and made sure that it was safe.

And that made Dantan’s thin lips curl. Safety for a man hunted by the Redhelms? The thought was sufficiently absurd. He would die—he must die; but he did not mean to die alone. This time perhaps they had him, but the kill would not be easy nor without cost. If he could find some weapon, some ambush—prepare some trap for the hunters—

There might be possibilities in this canyon. The stream had only lately been diverted into this channel; the signs of that were clear. Thoughtfully Dantan worked his way upstream. He did not try to mask his trail by water-tricks; the Redhelms were too wise for that. No, there must be some other answer.

A mile or so farther along he found the reason for the diverted stream. Landslide. Where water had chuckled and rustled along the left-hand branch before, now it took the other route. Dantan followed the dry canyon, finding the going easier now, since Phobos had risen…an Eye of Thar. “The Eyes of the god miss nothing. They move across the world, and nothing can hide from Thar, or from his destiny.”

Then Dantan saw rounded metal. Washed clean by the water that had run here lately, a corroded, curved surface rose dome-shaped from the stream bed.

The presence of an artifact in this place was curious enough. The people of Klanvahr—the old race—had builded with some substance that had not survived; plastic or something else that was not metal. Yet this dome had the unmistakable dull sheen of steel. It was an alloy, unusually strong or it could never have lasted this long, even though protected by its covering of rocks and earth. A little nerve began jumping in Dantan’s cheek. He had paused briefly, but now he came forward and with his booted foot kicked away some of the dirt about the cryptic metal.

A curving line broke it. Scraping vigorously, Dantan discovered that this marked the outline of an oval door, horizontal, and with a handle of some sort, though it was caked and fixed in its socket with dirt. Dantan’s lips were very thin now, and his eyes glittering and bright. An ambush—a weapon against the Redhelms—whatever might exist behind this lost door, it was worth investigating, especially for a condemned man.

With water from the brook and a sliver of sharp stone, he pried and chiseled until the handle was fairly free from its heavy crust. It was a hook, like a shepherd’s crook, protruding from a small bowl-shaped depression in the door. Dantan tested it. It would not move in any direction. He braced himself, legs straddled, body half doubled, and strained at the hook.

Blood beat against the back of his eyes. He heard drumming in his temples and straightened suddenly, thinking it the footsteps of Redhelms. Then, grinning sardonically, he bent to his work again, and this time the handle moved.

Beneath him the door slid down and swung aside, and the darkness below gave place to soft light. He saw a long tube stretching down vertically, with pegs protruding from the metal walls at regular intervals. It made a ladder. The bottom of the shaft was thirty feet below; its diameter was little more than the breadth of a big man’s shoulders.

He stood still for a moment, looking down, his mind almost swimming with wonder and surmise. Old, very old it must be, for the stream had cut its own bed out of the rock whose walls rose above him now. Old—and yet these metal surfaces gleamed as brightly as they must have gleamed on the day they were put together—for what purpose?

The wind sighed again down the canyon, and Dantan remembered the Redhelms on his track. He looked around once more and then lowered himself onto the ladder of metal pegs, testing them doubtfully before he let his full weight come down. They held.

There might be danger down below; there might not. There was certain danger coming after him among the twisting canyons. He reached up, investigated briefly, and swung the door back into place. There was a lock, he saw, and after a moment discovered how to manipulate it. So far, the results were satisfactory. He was temporarily safe from the Redhelms, provided he did not suffocate. There was no air intake here that he could see, but he breathed easily enough so far. He would worry about that when the need arose. There might be other things to worry about before lack of air began to distress him.

He descended.

At the bottom of the shaft was another door. Its handle yielded with no resistance this time, and Dantan stepped across the threshold into a large, square underground chamber, lit with pale radiance that came from the floor itself, as though light had been poured into the molten metal when it had first been made.

The room—

Faintly he heard a distant humming, like the after-resonance of a bell, but it died away almost instantly. The room was large, and empty except for some sort of machine standing against the farther wall. Dantan was not a technician. He knew guns and ships; that was enough. But the smooth, sleek functionalism of this machine gave him an almost sensuous feeling of pleasure.

How long had it been here? Who had built it? And for what purpose? He could not even guess. There was a great oval screen on the wall above what seemed to be a control board, and there were other, more enigmatic devices.

And the screen was black—dead black, with a darkness that ate up the light in the room and gave back nothing.

Yet there was something—

“Sanfel,” a voice said. “Sanfel. Coth dr’gchang. Sanfel—sthan!”

Sanfel…Sanfel…have you returned, Sanfel? Answer!

It was a woman’s voice…the voice of a woman used to wielding power, quiet, somehow proud as the voice of Lucifer or Lilith might have been, and it spoke in a tongue that scarcely half a dozen living men could understand… A whole great race had spoken it once; only the shamans remembered now, and the shamans who knew it were few. Dantan’s godfather had been one. And Dantan remembered the slurring syllables of the rituals he had learned, well enough to know what the proud, bodiless voice was saying.

The nape of his neck prickled. Here was something he could not understand, and he did not like it. Like an animal scenting danger he shrank into himself, not crouching, but withdrawing, so that a smaller man seemed to stand there, ready and waiting for the next move. Only his eyes were not motionless. They raked the room for the unseen speaker—for some weapon to use when the time came for weapons.

His glance came back to the dark screen above the machine. And the voice said again, in the tongue of ancient, Klanvahr:

“I am not used to waiting, Sanfel! If you hear me, speak. And speak quickly, for the time of peril comes close now. My Enemy is strong—”

Dantan said, “Can you hear me?” His eyes did not move from the screen.

Out of that blackness the girl’s voice came, after a pause. It was imperious, and a little wary.

“You are not Sanfel. Where is he? Who are you, Martian?”

Dantan let himself relax a little. There would be a parley, at any rate. But after that—

Words in the familiar, remembered old language came hesitantly to his lips.

“I am no Martian. I am of Earth blood, and I do not know this Sanfel.”

“Then how did you get into Sanfel’s place?” The voice was haughty now. “What are you doing there? Sanfel built his laboratory in a secret place.”

“It was hidden well enough,” Dantan told her grimly. “Maybe for a thousand years, or even ten thousand, for all I know. The door has been buried under a stream—”

“There is no water there. Sanfel’s home is on a mountain, and his laboratory is built underground.” The voice rang like a bell. “I think you lie. I think you are an enemy—When I heard the signal summoning me, I came swiftly, wondering why Sanfel had delayed so long. I must find him, stranger. I must! If you are no enemy, bring me Sanfel!” This time there was something almost like panic in the voice.

“If I could, I would,” Dantan said. “But there’s no one here except me.” He hesitated, wondering if the woman behind the voice could be—mad? Speaking from some mysterious place beyond the screen, in a language dead a thousand years, calling upon a man who must be long-dead too, if one could judge by the length of time this hidden room had lain buried.

He said after a moment, “This place has been buried for a long time. And—no one has spoken the tongue of Klanvahr for many centuries. If that was your Sanfel’s language—” But he could not go on with that thought. If Sanfel had spoken Klanvahr then he must have died long ago. And the speaker beyond the screen—she who had known Sanfel, yet spoke in a young, sweet, light voice that Dantan was beginning to think sounded familiar… He wondered if he could be mad too.

There was silence from the screen. After many seconds the voice spoke again, sadly and with an undernote of terror.

“I had not realized,” it said, “that even time might be so different between Sanfel’s world and mine. The space-time continua—yes, a day in my world might well be an age in yours. Time is elastic. In Zha I had thought a few dozen—” she used a term Dantan did not understand, “—had passed. But on Mars—centuries?”

“Tens of centuries,” agreed Dantan, staring hard at the screen. “If Sanfel lived in old Klanvahr his people are scarcely a memory now. And Mars is dying. You—you’re speaking from another world?”

“From another universe, yes. A very different universe from yours. It was only through Sanfel that I had made contact, until now—What is your name?”

“Dantan. Samuel Dantan.”

“Not a Martian name. You are from—Earth, you say? What is that?”

“Another planet. Nearer the sun than Mars.”

“We have no planets and no suns in Zha.

This is a different universe indeed. So different I find it hard to imagine what your world must be like…”

The voice died.

And it was a voice he knew. Dantan was nearly sure of that now, and the certainty frightened him. When a man in the Martian desert begins to see or hear impossibilities, he has reason to be frightened. As the silence prolonged itself he began almost to hope that the voice—the implausibly familiar voice—had been only imagination. Hesitantly he said, “Are you still there?” and was a little relieved, after all, to hear her say,

“Yes, I am here. I was thinking…I need help. I need it desperately. I wonder—has Sanfel’s laboratory changed? Does the machine still stand? But it must, or I could not speak to you now. If the other things work, there may be chance… Listen.” Her voice grew urgent. “I may have a use for you. Do you see a lever, scarlet, marked with the Klanvahr symbol for ‘sight’?”

“I see it,” Dantan said.

“Push it forward. There is no harm in that, if you are careful. We can see each other—that is all. But do not touch the lever with the ‘door’ symbol on it. Be certain of that… Wait!” Sudden urgency was in the voice.

“Yes?” Dantan had not moved. “I am forgetting. There is danger if you are not protected from—from certain vibration that you might see here. This is a different universe, and your Martian physical laws do not hold good between our worlds. Vibration…light…either things might harm you. There should be armor in Sanfel’s laboratory. Find it.”

Dantan glanced around. There was a cabinet in one corner. He went over to it slowly, his eyes wary. He had no intention of relaxing vigilance here simply because that voice sounded familiar…

Inside the cabinet hung a suit of something like space armor, more flexible and skin tight than any he had ever seen, and with a transparent helmet through which vision seemed oddly distorted. He got into the suit carefully, pulling up the rich shining folds over his body, thinking strangely how long time had stood still in this small room since the last time a man had worn it. The whole room looked slightly different when he set the helmet into place. It must be polarized, he decided, though that alone could not account for the strange dimming and warping of vision that was evident.

“All ready,” he said after a moment.”

“Then throw the switch.”

With his hand upon it Dantan hesitated for one last instant of wariness. He was stepping into unknown territory now, and to him the unknown meant the perilous. His mind went back briefly to the Redhelms scouring the canyons above for him. He quieted his uneasy mind with the thought that there might be some weapon in the world of the voice which he could turn against them later. Certainly, without a weapon, he had little to lose. But he knew that weapon or no weapon, danger or not, he must see the face behind that sweet, familiar, imperious voice.

He pressed the lever forward. It hesitated, the weight of milleniums behind its inertia. Then, groaning a little in its socket, it moved.

Across the screen above it a blaze of color raged like a sudden shining deluge. Blinded by the glare, Dajatan leaped back and swung an arm across his eyes.

When he looked again the colors had cleared. Blinking, he stared—and forgot to look away. For the screen was a window now, with the world of Zha behind it… And in the center of that window—a girl. He looked once at her, and then closed his eyes. He had felt his heart move, and a nerve jumped in his lean cheek.

He whispered a name.

Impassively the girl looked down at him from the screen. There was no change, no light of recognition upon that familiar, beloved face. The face of the girl who had died at the Redhelm hands, long ago, in the fortress of Klanvahr… For her sake he had hunted the Redhelms all these dangerous years. For her sake he had taken to the spaceways and the outlaw life. In a way, for her sake the Redhelms hunted him now through the canyons overhead. But here in the screen, she did not know him.

He knew that this was not possible. Some outrageous trick of vision made the face and the slender body of a woman from another universe seem the counterpart of that remembered woman. But he knew it must be an illusion, for in a world as different as Zha surely there could be no human creatures at all, certainly no human who wore the same face as the girl he remembered.

Aside from the girl herself, there was nothing to see. The screen was blank, except for vague shapes—outlines—The helmet, he thought, filtered out more than light. He sensed, somehow, that beyond her stretched the world of Zha, but he could see nothing except the shifting, ever-changing colors of the background.

She looked down at him without expression. Obviously the sight of him had wakened in her no such deep-reaching echoes of emotion as her face woke in him. She said, her voice almost unbearably familiar; a voice sounding from the silence of death over many chilly years,

“Dantan. Samuel Dantan. Earthly language is as harsh as the Klanvahr I learned from Sanfel. Yet my name may seem strange to you. I am Quiana.”

He said hoarsely, “What do you want? What did you want with Sanfel?”

“Help,” Quiana said. “A weapon. Sanfel had promised me a weapon. He was working very hard to make one, risking much…and now time has eaten him up—that strange, capricious time that varies so much between your world and mine. To me it was only yesterday—and I still need the weapon.”

Dantan’s laugh was harsh with jealousy of that unknown and long-dead Martian.

“Then I’m the wrong man,” he said roughly. “I’ve no weapon. I’ve men tracking me down to kill me, now.”

She leaned forward a little, gesturing. “Can you escape? You are hidden here, you know.”

“They’ll find the same way I found, up above.”

“The laboratory door can be locked, at the top of the shaft.”

“I know. I locked it. But there’s no food or water here… No, if I had any weapons I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Would you not?” she asked in a curious voice. “In old Klanvahr, Sanfel once told me, they had a saying that none could hide from his destiny.”

Dantan gave her a keen, inquiring look. Did she mean—herself? That same face and voice and body, so cruelly come back from death to waken the old grief anew? Or did she know whose likeness she wore—or could it be only his imagination, after all? For if Sanfel had known her too, and if Sanfel had died as long ago as he must have died, then this same lovely image had lived centuries and milleniums before the girl at Klanvahr Fortress…

“I remember,” said Dantan briefly.

“My world,” she went on, oblivious to the turmoil in his mind, “my world is too different to offer you any shelter, though I suppose you could enter it for a little while, in that protective armor that Sanfel made. But not to stay. We spring from soil too alien to one another’s worlds… Even this communication is not easy. And there is no safety here in Zha either, now. Now that Sanfel has failed me.”

“I—I’d help you if I could.” He said it with difficulty, trying to force the remembrance upon himself that this was a stranger… “Tell me what’s wrong.”

She shrugged with a poignantly familiar motion.

“I have an Enemy. One of a lower race. And he—it—there is no word!—has cut me off from my people here in a part of Zha that is—well, dangerous—I can’t describe to you the conditions here. We have no common terms to use in speaking of them. But there is great danger, and the Enemy is coming closer—and I am alone. If there were another of my people here to divide the peril I think I could destroy him. He has a weapon of his own, and it is stronger than my power, though not stronger than the power two of my race together can wield. It—it pulls. It destroys, in a way I can find no word to say. I had hoped from Sanfel something to divert him until he could be killed. I told him how to forge such a weapon, but—time would not let him do it. The teeth of time ground him into dust, as my Enemy’s weapon will grind me soon.”

She shrugged again.

“If I could get you a gun,” Dantan said. “A force-ray—”

“What are they?”

He described the weapons of his day. But Quiana’s smile was a little scornful when he finished.

“We of Zha have passed beyond the use of missile weapons—even such missiles as bullets or rays. Nor could they touch my Enemy. No, we can destroy in ways that require no—no beams or explosives. No, Dantan, you speak in terms of your own universe. We have no common ground. It is a pity that time eddied between Sanfel and me, but eddy it did, and I am helpless now. And the Enemy will be upon me soon. Very soon.”

She let her shoulders sag and resignation dimmed the remembered vividness of her face. Dantan looked up at her grimly, muscles riding his set jaw. It was almost intolerable, this facing her again in need, and again helpless, and himself without power to aid. It had been bad enough that first time, to learn long afterward that she had died at enemy hands while he was too far away to protect her. But to see it all take place again before his very eyes!

“There must be a way,” he said, and his hand gripped the lever marked “door” in the ancient tongue.

“Wait!” Quiana’s voice was urgent.

“What would happen?”

“The door would open. I could enter your world, and you mine.”

“Why can’t you leave, then, and wait until it’s safe to go back?”

“I have tried that,” Quiana said. “It will never be safe. The Enemy waited too. No, it must come, in the end, to a battle—and I shall not win that fight. I shall not see my own people or my own land again, and I suppose I must face that knowledge. But I did hope, when I heard Sanfel’s signal sound again…” She smiled a little. “I know you would help me if you could, Dantan. But there is nothing to be done now.”

“I’ll come in,” he said doggedly. “Maybe there’s something I could do.”

“You could not touch him. Even now there’s danger. He was very close when I heard that signal. This is his territory. When I heard the bell and thought Sanfel had returned with a weapon for me, I dared greatly in coming here.” Her voice died away; a withdrawn look veiled her eyes from him.

After a long silence she said, “The Enemy is coming. Turn off the screen, Dantan. And goodbye.”

“No,” he said. “Wait!” But she shook her head and turned away from him, her thin robe swirling, and moved off like a pale shadow into the dim, shadowless emptiness of the background. He stood watching helplessly, feeling all the old despair wash over him a second time as the girl he loved went alone into danger he could not share. Sometimes as she moved away she was eclipsed by objects he could not see—trees, he thought, or rocks, that did not impinge upon his eyes through the protective helmet. A strange world indeed Zha must be, whose very rocks and trees were too alien for human eyes to look upon in safety… Only Quiana grew smaller and smaller upon the screen, and it seemed to Dantan as though a cord stretched between them, pulling thinner and thinner as she receded into danger and distance.

It was unbearable to think that the cord might break—break a second time…

Far away something moved in the cloudy world of Zha. Tiny in the distance though it was, it was unmistakably not human. Dantan lost sight of Quiana. Had she found some hiding place behind some unimaginable outcropping of Zha’s terrain?

The Enemy came forward.

It was huge and scaled and terrible, human, but not a human; tailed, but no beast; intelligent, but diabolic. He never saw it too clearly, and he was grateful to his helmet for that. The polarized glass seemed to translate a little, as well as to blot out. He felt sure that this creature which he saw—or almost saw—did not look precisely as it seemed to him upon the screen. Yet it was easy to believe that such a being had sprung from the alien soil of Zha. There was nothing remotely like it on any of the worlds he knew. And it was hateful. Every line of it made his hackles bristle.

It carried a coil of brightly colored tubing slung over one grotesque shoulder, and its monstrous head swung from side to side as it paced forward into the screen like some strange and terrible mechanical toy. It made no sound, and its progress was horrible in its sheer relentless monotony.

Abruptly it paused. He thought it had sensed the girl’s presence, somewhere in hiding. It reached for the coil of tubing with one malformed—hand?

“Quiana,” it said—its voice as gentle as a child’s.

Silence. Dantan’s breathing was loud in the emptiness.

“Quiana?” The tone was querulous now.

“Quiana,” the monster crooned, and swung about with sudden, unexpected agility. Moving with smooth speed, it vanished into the clouds of the background, as the girl had vanished. For an eternity Dantan watched colored emptiness, trying to keep himself from trembling.

Then he heard the voice again, gentle no longer, but ringing like a bell with terrible triumph, “Quiana!”

And out of the swirling clouds he saw Quiana break, despair upon her face, her sheer garments streaming behind her. After her came the Enemy. It had unslung the tube it wore over its shoulder, and as it lifted the weapon Quiana swerved desperately aside. Then from the coil of tubing blind lightning ravened.

Shattering the patternless obscurity, the blaze of its color burst out, catching Quiana in a cone of expanding, shifting brilliance. And the despair in her eyes was suddenly more than Dantan could endure.

His hand struck out at the lever marked “door”; he swung it far over and the veil that had masked the screen was gone. He vaulted up over its low threshold, not seeing anything but the face and the terror of Quiana. But it was not Quiana’s name he called as he leaped.

He lunged through the Door onto soft, yielding substance that was unlike anything he had ever felt underfoot before. He scarcely knew it. He flung himself forward, fists clenched, ready to drive futile blows into the monstrous mask of the Enemy. It loomed over him like a tower, tremendous, scarcely seen through the shelter of his helmet—and then the glare of the light-cone caught him.

It was tangible light. It flung him back with a piledriver punch that knocked the breath from his body. And the blow was psychic as well as physical. Shaking and reeling from the shock, Dantan shut his eyes and fought forward, as though against a steady current too strong to breast very long. He felt Quiana beside him, caught in the same dreadful stream. And beyond the source of the light the Enemy stood up in stark, inhuman silhouette.

He never saw Quiana’s world. The light was too blinding. And yet, in a subtle sense, it was not blinding to the eyes, but to the mind. Nor was it light, Dantan thought, with some sane part of his mind. Too late he remembered Quiana’s warning that the world of Zha was not Mars or Earth, that in Zha even light was different.

Cold and heat mingled, indescribably bewildering, shook him hard. And beyond these were—other things. The light from the Enemy’s weapon was not born in Dantan’s universe, and it had properties that light should not have. He felt bare, emptied, a hollow shell through which radiance streamed.

For suddenly, every cell of his body was an eye. The glaring brilliance, the intolerable vision beat at the foundations of his sanity. Through him the glow went pouring, washing him, nerves, bone, flesh, brain, in floods of color that were not color, sound that was not sound, vibration that was spawned in the shaking hells of worlds beyond imagination.

It inundated him like a tide, and for a long, long, timeless while he stood helpless in its surge, moving within his body and without it, and within his mind and soul as well. The color of stars thundered in his brain. The crawling foulness of unspeakable hues writhed along his nerves so monstrously that he felt he could never cleanse himself of that obscenity.

And nothing else existed—only the light that was not light, but blasphemy.

Then it began to ebb…faded…grew lesser and lesser, until—Beside him he could see Quiana now. She was no longer stumbling in the cone of light, no longer shuddering and wavering in its violence, but standing erect and facing the Enemy, and from her eyes—something—poured.

Steadily the cone of brilliance waned. But still its glittering, shining foulness poured through Dantan. He felt himself weakening, his senses fading, as the tide of dark horror mounted through his brain.

And covered him up with its blanketing immensity.

He was back in the laboratory, leaning against the wall and breathing in deep, shuddering draughts. He did not remember stumbling through the Door again, but he was no longer in Zha. Quiana stood beside him, here upon the Martian soil of the laboratory. She was watching him with a strange, quizzical look in her eyes as he slowly fought back to normal, his heart quieting by degrees, his breath becoming evener. He felt drained, exhausted, his emotions cleansed and purified as though by baths of flame.

Presently he reached for the clasp that fastened his clumsy armor. Quiana put out a quick hand, shaking her head.

“No,” she said, and then stared at him again for a long moment without speaking. Finally, “I had not known—I did not think this could be done. Another of my own race—yes. But you, from Mars—I would not have believed that you could stand against the Enemy for a moment, even with your armor.”

“I’m from Earth, not Mars. And I didn’t stand long.”

“Long enough,” She smiled faintly. “You see now what happened? We of Zha can destroy without weapons, using only the power inherent in our bodies. Those like the Enemy have a little of that power too, but they need mechanical devices to amplify it. And so when you diverted the Enemy’s attention and forced him to divide his attack between us—the pressure upon me was relieved, and I could destroy him. But I would not have believed it possible.”

“You’re safe now,” Dantan said, with no expression in voice or face.

“Yes. I can return.”

“And you will?”

“Of course I shall.”

“We are more alike than you had realized.”

She looked up toward the colored curtain of the screen. “That is true. It is not the complete truth, Dantan.”

He said, “I love you—Quiana.” This time he called her by name.

Neither of them moved. Minutes went by silently.

Quiana said, as if she had not heard him, “Those who followed you are here. I have been listening to them for some time now. They are trying to break through the door at the top of the shaft.”

He took her hand in his gloved grasp. “Stay here. Or let me go back to Zha with you. Why not?”

“You could not live there without your armor.”

“Then stay.”

Quiana looked away, her eyes troubled. As Dantan moved to slip off his helmet her hand came up again to stop him.

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

For answer she rose, beckoning for him to follow. She stepped across the threshold into the shaft and swiftly began to climb the pegs toward the surface and the hammering of the Redhelms up above. Dantan, at her gesture, followed.

Over her shoulder she said briefly, “We are of two very different worlds. Watch—but be careful.” And she touched the device that locked the oval door.

It slipped down and swung aside.

Dantan caught one swift glimpse of Redhelm heads dodging back to safety. They did not know, of course, that he was unarmed. He reached up desperately, trying to pull Quiana back but she slipped aside and sprang lightly out of the shaft into the cool gray light of the Martian morning.

Forgetting her warning, Dantan pulled himself up behind her. But as his head and shoulders emerged from the shaft he stopped, frozen. For the Redhelms were falling. There was no mark upon them, yet they fell…

She did not stir, even when the last man had stiffened into rigid immobility. Then Dantan clambered up and without looking at Quiana went to the nearest body and turned it over. He could find no mark. Yet the Redhelm was dead.

“That is why you had to wear the armor,” she told him gently. “We are of different worlds, you and I.”

He took her in his arms—and the soft resilience of her was lost against the stiffness of the protective suit. He would never even know how her body felt, because of the armor between them… He could not even kiss her—again. He had taken his last kiss of the mouth so like Quiana’s mouth, long years ago, and he would never kiss it again. The barrier was too high between them.

“You can’t go back,” he told her in a rough, uneven voice. “We are of the same world, no matter what—no matter how—You’re no stranger to me, Quiana!”

She looked up at him with troubled eyes, shaking her head, regret in her voice.

“Do you think I don’t know why you fought for me, Dantan?” she asked in a clear voice. “Did you ever stop to wonder why Sanfel risked so much for me, too?”

He stared down at her, his brain spinning, almost afraid to hear what she would say next. He did not want to hear. But her voice went on inexorably.

“I cheated you, Dantan. I cheated Sanfel yesterday—a thousand years ago. My need was very great, you see—and our ways are not yours. I knew that no man would fight for a stranger as I needed a man to fight for me.”

He held her tightly in gloved hands that could feel only a firm body in their grasp, not what that body was really like, nothing about it except its firmness. He caught his breath to interrupt, but she went on with a rush.

“I have no way of knowing how you see me, Dantan,” she said relentlessly. “I don’t know how Sanfel saw me. To each of you—because I needed your help—I wore the shape to which you owed help most. I could reach into your minds deeply enough for that—to mould a remembered body for your eyes. My own shape is—different. You will never know it.” She sighed. “You were a brave man, Dantan. Braver and stronger than I ever dreamed an alien could be. I wish—I wonder—Oh, let me go! Let me go!”

She whirled out of his grasp with sudden vehemence, turning her face away so that he could not see her eyes. Without glancing at him again she bent over the shaft and found the topmost pegs, and in a moment was gone.

Dantan stood there, waiting. Presently he heard the muffled humming of a muted bell, as though sounding from another world. Then he knew that there was no one in the ancient laboratory beneath his feet.

He shut the door carefully and scraped soil over it. He did not mark the place. The dim red spot of the sun was rising above the canyon wall. His face set, Dantan began walking toward the distant cavern where his aircar was hidden. It was many miles away, but there was no one to stop him, now.

He did not look back.

Last cybercast from Google-Fox reporter Daniel Lundgren:

Lundgren [in a hallway bustling with suited men and women]: “This is Dan Lundgren, Google-Fox News, in Paris. I’m at the World Health Organization Conference on Genetic Therapy, where doctors and scientists are expressing alarm at the latest fashion trend. ‘A fashion trend?’ you might say? Medicine has nothing to do with style. Or, rather, had. A medical breakthrough has become just another fashion statement.”

Cut to a young woman onstage, playing electric guitar in front of a thunderous retro-industrial band. Cut to Lundgren backstage with the woman: “We’re speaking with Marie Durand, lead guitarist of Jackhammer. Marie, many people would say you’re abusing genetic therapy. They believe you’re desecrating a medical miracle for the sake of au couture.”

Durand [in a heavy French accent]: “They are fools. It has nothing to do with style.” Her hands rise into sight, gesturing. They seem too large for her slight size. “Fashion is transient. Art is eternal.” Closeup of one hand: The fingers are too long for the palm, and there are too many of them. Six. “I cut off my fingers. I would never do such a thing, except for art.”

Cut to a bandaged hand, a stump without fingers or thumb. Time-lapse video shows five bumps peeping through the bandage, and the bandage bulging along the outside edge of the palm. Then the palm is bare, fingers and thumb growing—growing too long—and a second thumb swelling from once-raw flesh.

Durand [voiceover]: “I cut off my fingers only to become the greatest guitarist in the world.”

Cut to a small brown tailless lizard, sprouting a tail in time-lapse. Lundgren [voiceover]: “Once genetic engineers decoded the lizard’s ability to regenerate a lost tail, human limb regeneration was no longer a fantasy. But no one realized the fantastic uses to which it could, and would, be put.”

Cut to a beautiful Congolese woman with one brown eye, one green eye, and, in the center of her forehead, one blue eye.

Voiceover: “Are we taking regeneration too far?”

Cut to Lundgren, alone: “One thing is clear: Genetic therapists are giving plastic surgery a whole new meaning.”

Cut to Lundgren with an East Indian man in a Western suit tailored to reveal a long, supple, black-haired tail: “Dr. Charaka Ashok is a genetic engineer participating in the WHO Conference. Dr. Ashok, many would claim you’ve made a mockery of your profession by giving yourself a monkey’s tail.”

Dr. Ashok [in a faint Bengali accent]: “They speak from ignorance. I haven’t introduced a single gene from another species into my body. My tail is from the human genetic code—from the ‘junk DNA.’ ‘Junk genes’ are fossils: dormant genes inherited from our prehuman ancestors. Selective activation of the lizard gene and other fossil genes can stimulate the growth of tails, fangs, body fur, and other physical features not normally part of the human body.”

Lundgren: “I…see. But I don’t see why a distinguished scientist would grow a tail.”

Dr. Ashok: “It’s a demonstration of truth. How better to manifest the fact of evolution? How better to refute religious fundamentalists who claim man was created by God? And refutation is more necessary than ever, with so many fundamentalists seeking to impose their ignorance on others. Religious terrorists are murdering genetic engineers and bombing gene-therapy clinics. Fanatics are clashing the world over.” Jump-cuts: screaming protestors; bombed-out buildings; battlefields. “In India, extremist Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are in violent conflict with one another. And an apocalyptic Hindu sect has declared a man the latest avatar of the god Vishnu.”

Cut to: Very long shot of East Indians; most appear to be laborers, farmers, and beggars. They cover a hill, surrounding a man in richly colored traditional clothing. The man is mounted on a white horse. He holds aloft a sword bathed in holographic flames. He has four arms.

Dr. Ashok [voiceover]: “According to Hindu belief, the next incarnation of Vishnu will be the tenth—and last. The last avatar, Kalki, heralds the end of the Kali-Yuga, the Iron Age—the end of the world as we know it. The extremists believe Kalki is here and it is their duty to bring the world to an end.”

Cut to Lundgren and Dr. Ashok: “Dr. Ashok, I find it hard to believe a mob of poor, ignorant fanatics can destroy the world.”

Dr. Ashok: “I was in the University of Washington graduate biotech program with Kalki when he was two-armed Sunesh Bannerjee. Kalki is a brilliant virologist and genetic engineer. He has the knowledge and the ability to kill millions.”

Cut to Lundgren alone: “There you have it. Regenerative changes that look like fashion are, in fact, acts of faith. Guitarist Marie Durand believes adding a second thumb to each hand will make her a great artist. Dr. Charaka Ashok believes his tail is evidence of the truth of Darwinism. And it seems a brilliant, four-armed scientist may believe himself a god destined to destroy the world. Tomorrow night at 9 PM Eastern time, we investigate Dr. Sunesh ‘Kalki’ Bannerjee. With Google-Fox News, this is Dan Lundgren.”

Last private communication from Lundgren:

“Why’d you ignore my emails and voicemails telling you to cancel upload of my WHO report? I told you I’m too sick to move, never mind investigate Kalki. I don’t remember drinking any local water, but I must’ve forgotten to tell somebody to hold the ice for a Coke. I’ve got dysentery from Hell. And India’s hotter than Hell and I can’t get anyone to fix my air conditioning. This is supposed to be a four-star hotel, but I haven’t been able to reach a staff member all day. They’re not answering the phone, you’re not answering the phone—oh. Oh, God, no—”

“Your Imperiality!” said someone in the little group of nine brightly dressed men and women, who whirled, then bowed low or curtsied to me. I’d revived that custom from Old Earth this morning, after I accepted the crown of the Imperium.

As I strode among these friends of mine from the days when I had been just a very junior professor of Pre-Spaceflight History, I longed to smile and joke and be my old self, the same Jad denRigen they’d known and worked with for endless tennights at the University. The Imperial title had not yet penetrated my inner self any more than the purple of my Imperial robes. Still, these former colleagues were but a small wave in the ocean of humanity that surrounded me in the Coronation Ballroom, and I forced myself to remain stiff-backed and aloof. Roman emperors had died for smaller sins than getting too close to the common folk.

I allowed myself a low-voiced, “Hello,” as they straightened up again.

“Imperiality!” said Rina; she was even more breathless than I remembered. “Everything’s been so—so—oh, these last two tennights, and your coronation this morning, and a whole space-cruiser just to bring us here in time, and the delegations from all over the Galaxy, and everything running so smoothly!”

“It should, by now,” I said with a tight smile. “After all, they’ve gone through four High Emperors in the last fifty tennights, not counting—”

“Your Imperiality,” she protested, “I didn’t mean—”

She dropped into a deep curtsy again. I could see the blush spreading across her face and neck.

“—not counting my great-uncle Tolan,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her upright. “But that’s all history now, Rina, and we’ve got better things to think about. Right?”

“Yes, Ja—I mean, Your Imperiality!” She started to curtsy again, but I motioned her to stop.

“Once is more than enough, really, Rina.” I turned to the rest of my friends from the University. “How do you like it, all this? Quent?”

“Well…” He licked his lips thoughtfully, then gestured at the gigantic room around us. “It’s so, big, even for an Imperial Coronation Ball. The size just doesn’t come through, reading about it. You know what I mean, Jad—uh, sorry, um—Your Imperiality.”

I had to laugh. Normally he was the most polished lecturer at the University. And suddenly I found myself relaxing for the first time in more than a few tennights. These were my friends; I knew I could be myself around them. I was the Emperor, after all, and if I wanted to talk and joke with old colleagues, who would dare object?

Smiling broadly now, I said, “Jon, Mara, all of you, I’m so happy you’re here. How are things at the University? And who took over my classes?”

Jon shook his dark head. “Rather more of a turmoil than we expected, actually, Your Imperiality. Ever since you left for Center System, everyone within parsecs has been calling the History Department with meaningless questions about you and your old job. Truth is, they think that since Your Imperiality came from there, we’ll know all the palace gossip… ”

“Well, I suppose that’s the price one has to pay for fame. If I’d come from Center System instead of a backwater world, they’d already know all about me.”

“And your classes,” Jon went on. “Mara took them.”

“Your Imperiality’s notes were quite complete,” said Mara, with the barest suggestion of a curtsy. “We finished the pre-Conquest kings of Britain just before the invitations came.”

“Good. I don’t think my students could be in better hands.”

She smiled at something over my shoulder. “I could take your compliments all night, Imperiality, but I think you’re about to be dragged away.”

I turned to find two grave, gray-haired old men approaching: Vance Alderman and Teren al mar Axtant, two Grand Counsellors who had made it their duty to try to mold a poor young academic like me into their ideal High Emperor. I sighed.

Beramis scowled at them. “Four Emperors gone mad in just fifty tennights? I’d be careful, Imperiality—Jad, those men are doing their job too well.”

“Only three went mad,” I said. “Emperor Tolan resigned, after all.” I shook my head. “This is no time for gloom. Let’s—let’s dance!”

Rina looked around vaguely. “Do you… does Your Imperiality think the music will begin soon?”

“There are certain advantages in being High Emperor,” I said. I knew there were monitors in the ceiling picking up my every word, every Imperial command. I raised my hand, motioned, and the music started on cue, an ancient quadrille from pre-spaceflight Vienna.

Too soon, the dance ended and the music played out. The hundred or so people who had gathered to watch gave a brief spatter of applause. I beckoned to Mara; together, we swept around in one last whirl.

“Wonderful!” she said. “Scarcely a missed step throughout.”

“It’s not as though we were unprepared,” I said. Servants brought champaigne; I took a glass for each of us and we sipped gently. “The University holds dances every Saturday night, and all.”

“You still couldn’t have planned it better. I’m sure you impressed everyone.”

I laughed. “Not the Grand Counsellors, surely. But you’re right, I couldn’t have planned it better. I knew you’d all dance as well as ever. In fact, you’re all quite predictable.”

“Oh, really?”

“Certainly. Rina is going to hang on Quent’s every word for the rest of the evening, like she always does. And in a minute Beramis will join us and start telling those funny stories of his, and after that—”

“Shh! He’s coming now!”

I grinned. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Beramis and the others joined us. “Have you heard the story about the archaeologist, the historian, and the paleontogist, Imperiality?” Beramis said, then he launched into the first of a series of deftly-told jokes. As always, I tried to keep a straight face; as always, I was soon grinning, then chuckling, then roaring. I laughed as much at the wildly improbable stories as Beramis’s own struggle to hold a straight face throughout them.

“Enough, enough!” I said, breathless. I wiped my eyes.

Still chuckling, I turned away, waving a hand behind me.

“Enough,” I said, following the familiar ritual of oh-so-many gathering, back at the little University on a rather out-of-the-way planet, back when I’d been just plain Jad to everyone. “Somebody stop him; he’s too far!”

“But you haven’t heard what happened next,” said Beramis, behind me now. “Then the Macedonian—Hey!”

A disruptor hissed close by. I whirled, instantly alert, as Rina’s scream broke a sudden deathly silence. I heard a roaring in my ears; the world seemed to be moving too slowly, unnaturally slowly. Beramis was crumpling to the floor.

“No!” I shouted. I leaped forward, but it was too late and I knew it. He was dead, his face grossly distorted, blotches of red and blue and yellow replacing the tan of his skin.

I closed his eyes—I knew I couldn’t do anything else for him now. Then, hearing sounds of a scuffle, I jerked my head up.

Jon and Quent were struggling with a man, one of the onlookers, while Ganion scrambled to help. The powerfully built stranger wore intricately embroidered clothing, a bright gold shirt and wine-red pants such as any high official might own. And he still held a disruptor pistol in his hand.

“Kill—” I started, then caught myself. “No! Wait! I said wait!” The struggle froze, disruptor pistol pointed up at the distant ceiling. “That’s better.”

Slowly I stood. My mind seemed to be whirling along at an astounding rate, and all sorts of mental alarms shrilled at me. Something was very, very wrong here. Why would an assassin kill Beramis rather than me? And how had he managed to smuggle a disruptor into the Coronation Ballroom? A thousand safety devices should have prevented it. It didn’t make sense… unless it were part of some larger plot.

I looked across the crowd that had gathered. Which one of you is playing Livia to my Augustus?

My first impulse had been to kill the murderer; my second, to question him. Either might be what was expected of me. I had to break out of the pattern, do something totally unexpected, if I was to get to the bottom of this.

I said: “Mara!”

“Jad?”

“Take his weapon. Hang on to it.” I pointed to the killer. “You there! Put your pistol on ‘safety’. Give it to her. Give her all your weapons. Understand?”

“Yes, Your Imperiality,” the stranger said.

Jon and Quent loosened their hold enough for him to hand Mara both his disruptor pistol and a nasty-looking thermo-dagger.

“But if Your Imperiality will let me—”

“Explain?” I barked. “No! You will wait until I’m ready.”

“But if Your Imperiality will let—”

“Shut up!”

He did so. I glanced around.

Ganion stood close, hands still full of purple satin.

“Vest me,” I said quietly, and waited until the robes were on my shoulder again. Then, cautiously, step by step, I moved toward the killer. He cringed a bit as I neared, then caught himself, squared his shoulders, and tried to look me in the eye.

“Let me explain, Your—” he started.

“No!” I said. Pausing, I took a deep breath. “It seems to me that—” I stopped again, glanced around.

Behind me, Rina crouched over Beramis’s body, sobbing quietly. Ganion stood at my elbow, Deak a few paces behind, and Quent and Jon still held the killer’s arms. Mara stood a few paces behind Quent, holding the disruptor.

All around us, the crowd was growing larger. I saw, at its front, Grand Counsellor Alderman, Grand Counsellor Axtant, Grand Counsellor—my eyes picked out members of the Grand Council faster than I could recall their names.

“Fascinating,” I muttered.

“What, Jad?” asked Ganion. “I mean, Your—”

I shushed him with a curt gesture, then said quietly, “Deak, Ganion, listen: Somebody’s about to try to kill our assassin. Be ready. Understand?”

“Kill him?” asked Deak. “But—ah!”

“That’s right,” I said, still keeping my voice low.

“Think!” I approached the killer again, and in a voice trained to cope with crowded lecture halls and bad acoustics, I declaimed, “This appears to be very eager to tell us something.”

“Yes,” said the killer. “Your Imperiality, I—”

“He is so eager,” I continued, drowning out his voice, “that I have three times—three times—specifically ordered him not to speak, and still he tries.”

“You slimy ert,” growled Jon, wrenching the killer’s arms behind his back. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Later,” I said.

“But he killed—”

“Trust me. First, how would you describe this—the way he’s acting?”

“Huh?” asked Jon. “Are you crazy, Jad? I mean—”

“The Grand Council is in charge of deciding if I’m crazy,” I said. “Oddly enough, the entire Council appears to be gathered here. But we can rest assured there’s an explanation for that. Now, my question?”

“Imperiality,” said Mara, “he—that murderer—refuses to follow your commands, even your most direct and specific commands.” She gave me a shrewd glance, then demanded of the others, “Does anyone say otherwise? No? All agree, Imperiality.”

Ganion said, “You called him ‘assassin.’ This would suppose someone sent him to kill Beramis.”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it does. But can you tell me what’s supposed to happen when he has his say? Will he really tell us why? Or is something else planned?”

I raised my voice. “Quickly, assassin, tell us all you know!”

Rina’s shout alerted me, sent Deak and Ganion into a headlong dive at another bystander who had suddenly pulled out a disruptor pistol. Deak seized the man’s arm in a vicelike grip, forced it back until he dropped the pistol. It clattered noisily on the floor.

“You get the wrong signal?” Deak demanded. He scooped up the pistol and brandished it wildly. “Talk!”

“Give the disruptor to Susa to hold,” I said. “Put the safety on first.”

“I’ve got that much sense, Jad—uh, damn!—Your Imperiality.” He handed the weapon over. “Now what?”

I was at a loss. “What do you suggest, Quent?”

“Hmm. Well, in the first place, we’re starting to run out of assassin-holders.” More loudly, he said, “I should say, Imperiality, that the next time somebody pulls out a weapon, the bystanders had better grab him. If they don’t, Mara and Susa are going to start shooting, and with their aim, a lot of people, including the Grand Council, are going to get hit.”

“Especially the Grand Council,” put in Mara. I could see she had all picked up on the strangeness of the Counsellors’ presence. “I wonder, Imperiality,” she continued, “just why the Council is gathered here, why your guards haven’t arrived yet even after a disruptor blast and several loud screams, and who is responsible for arranging this.”

“And Beramis?” I asked, somehow keeping my voice from breaking.

“His death must be part of the same plot.”

I thought a moment, then spoke to the arched ceiling. “Monitoring crew, relay this to my guards. I want them here, now, without weapons, I repeat, without weapons. Mara, the woman with the disruptor pistol and the blond hair, is temporarily their commander. They are to do as she instructs. Understand?”

A second later, a low-powered laser locked onto my right retina and flashed an acknowledgement: GUARDS ADVISED. It stayed in my line of sight as an after-image for a good minute.

Now, to get to the heart of this plot.

I said, “What were you saying, Jon?”

“I think this goes even deeper than it seems. This ert,” he said, giving the a shake, “was to have been killed by that one.” He bared his teeth in a humorless grin as his captive suddenly paled. “What’s wrong, assassin? Did you just realize you’d been set up? But there’s more than Beramis’s murder… ”

“I didn’t!” the gasped. “His Imperiality told me—”

“I told you to shut up,” I said. I saw, then, why so many High Emperors had gone insane of late. The Grand Council had been responsible. Like any bureaucracy, it had been taking on more and more power at every opportunity… and what better way to keep gaining power than to drive Emperors insane? Their final intention, I thought, would be discrediting so many High Emperors that the very institution was destroyed. Then the Council could easily step in to run things.

I couldn’t be the first to say it, or they’d have reason to throw me out of office: insanity due to paranoia.

From the expression on Jon’s face, I saw he understood, too.

I smiled. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Jon.”

And he did, in short, blunt, angry words. He accused the Grand Council of everything short of murdering me. All the time, I looked on sagely.

“Preposterous!” snorted Grand Counsellor Alderman. He took a stately step forward. “Madness.” Another. “How can you even think such a—”

“Grand Counsellor,” Mara said, “I think that if you get any closer, His Imperiality’s temporary commander of his guard is going to blast you.”

Alderman shut up and took a quick step back.

In a moment, a small squad of uniformed guards pushed their way though the crowd and saluted me. The holsters for their disruptor pistols were empty.

“Search the crowd for weapons,” I said quickly. “I want to know if we have any more assassins hiding among us.”

“Outrageous!” shouted Counsellor Alderman.

“Start with him,” Mara said.

“Get your hands off me!” Alderman said, as several guards began going through his pockets. “It’s unheard of to assault a Grand Counsellor!”

“Sir.” One of the searchers pulled a small weapon from his pocket and held it up for me to see.

“This is pretty unheard of, too,” I said. “Needle-pistol, isn’t it, Counsellor?”

“I can explain—”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Jon?”

“As for the technique, it appears quite simple: making the High Emperor as word-bound as the Bureaucracy itself, until the Emperor is locked into a fear-pattern regarding his speech. That is, he becomes afraid to speak lest he accidentally get himself or a close friend killed. The pressure simply drives him mad. And, if he does figure out what’s going on—that the plot is turning his every word against him—then the Grand Council can rule him insane due to paranoia.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Nonsense!” snapped Alderman. “If that gun-waving woman will permit me?” At Mara’s nod, he went on: “His Imperiality incautiously ordered someone to stop that unfortunate young there. So, in his haste to obey, for the High Emperor’s every word is absolute law, this man pulled out his disruptor—”

“Which he just happened to be carrying?” said Jon. “And at the Imperial Coronation Ball? And then another of your assassins just happens to be ready to blast him?”

“Clearly a function such as this, even here, must have some armed men in unobtrusive attendance,” Alderman said.

“These are things which you from the more backward corners of the Imperium cannot be expected to understand, of course. But, needless to say, when the first gunman went so far as to try to blame the Emperor himself for—”

“Shut your lying face,” growled Quent. “You set up this bloody-handed killer to get Beramis, and you set up that one to shut the first murderer up afterwards, and then you had a gun yourself, just in case.”

“Insanity,” hissed Alderman. He raised his voice, shouted, “Madness.” He turned to the rest of the watching Grand Council. “Colleagues of the Council, it is just as I feared; now we must consider the matter of the fitness of His Imperiality. All this talk of wild plots by the bureaucracy—”

“Counsellor!” gasped Mara. “Jad, what shall—”

I moved slowly toward Alderman and the Council, motioning Mara aside. “Now, if a High Emperor from a backward corner of the Imperium may make a small observation?”

Alderman edged back nervously.

“Leaving aside the matter of the killer, who appears extraordinarily and literally obedient one moment and quite unable to take orders the next; leaving aside the matter of the second gunman, who wants to defend My Imperiality even before I’ve been blamed for anything—” I continued to advance, step by step, slowly herding Alderman in a broad loop. We moved through the Grand Counsellors, who scrambled aside to give him room. “—and leaving aside the question of whether you were close enough to hear exactly what I said, the observation I would like to make is that I haven’t said a word about any plots by you, the Bureaucracy, the Grand Council, or anyone else.” I paused a heartbeat, just long enough for Alderman to begin to hope. “Yet.”

I noticed that the guards had finished their search of the immediate crowd: no more weapons. Ahead of me, behind the still-retreating Alderman, I saw Rina mourning over Beramis’s body. Grimly, I maneuvered the Grand Counsellor toward the corpse.

I said, “I think the captain of the guard should be summoned next, if I want more answers. I’m sure he knows what, or who, kept the guards so long.”

“Y-Your Imperiality,” said Counsellor Alderman, face grown quite pale, “we, uh, we meant no harm, but Your Imperiality must be made to, uh, must realize the responsibilities of omnipotence and infallibility and—and—”

“You’d better stop backing up,” I said. “You’re about to step on a dead man.”

Alderman looked back and saw Beramis lying there, all crumpled, on the floor of the great ballroom. Beyond the corpse, Rina rose to her feet.

I turned to Mara. “Have our two assassins brought over here.” Then I turned back to Grand Counsellor Alderman and took a deep breath. “So,” I said, shifting to my lecturing voice, “you would have me infallible and omnipotent? You would have one obey my words rather than my meaning, and a second commit murder to protect my infallibility? You would, then, if you do not drive me mad, make me into the image of the Bureaucracy, bound by words and rules instead of meaning and reality? Well?”

Grand Counsellor Alderman recoiled a step. His foot touched Beramis’s body. He jerked away. “Yes, Y-Your Imperiality.”

“So be it,” I said. I pointed to Beramis. “Now, bring him back to life.”

“Im-Imperiality?” said Alderman. “I don’t understand.”

“Your murderer didn’t understand before; did that stop him?”

“But—”

I turned to the two captured assassins. “Bring my friend back to life,” I said. “I order it.”

“But that’s impossible!” the first assassin whispered.

“Am I not omnipotent? Am I not infallible? Show us all how omnipotent and infallible I really am by carrying out my orders.”

I found a guard close at hand and motioned him forward.

“Your Imperiality,” he said, dropping to one knee.

“You will attend to these three,” I said, “making sure they take neither food nor drink nor sleep until they have fulfilled their task.” I waited, eyes on the guard.

“Your Imperiality, have I permission to ask a question?”

“Any order authorizes one to ask for its meaning.”

“Do we… are we to attend in shifts, or…?”

“I leave it up to you.”

My gaze swept over the group of Grand Counsellors. Teren al Axtant dropped to one knee, head bowed. Others, evidently unsure whether to go up or down, half crouched, watching me.

I said to Axtant, to them all, “I think you cannot judge My Imperiality’s sanity unless you also investigate plots against My Imperiality. You may start with this current plot. You will attend these three, as part of your investigation, until they succeed in their task or die.”

“Yes, Imperiality.” Axtant took a deep breath. “How shall we attend them? In the same manner as the guards?”

“Select a suitable system.”

The Grand Counsellor got stiffly to his feet. “As you command, Imperiality. But how did Your Imperiality and Your Imperiality’s friends discover Alderman’s plot?”

“Oh, that.” I made a deprecating gesture. “The Bureaucracy dates only from the Spaceflight Era. The institution of the High Emperor is but a few centuries old, the Grand Council less than that. Neither has any real experience in intrigue and conspiracy and assassination.”

“But you?”

“Us?” Mara swept up to my side. “We have forty-nine centuries of experience to draw on. As for Alderman and his hirelings… ”

“Your Imperiality, please!” It was the second gunman. He was on his knees, begging. “We can’t bring him back. Please, Your—”

“You can die trying,” I said. I turned away, started to walk. “Come,” I said to my friends. “We’ve still got work to do.”

Once clear of the guards, Grand Counsellors, and bystanders, I began to plan aloud: “My every word being taken literally has got to stop. Jon, wasn’t there some old formula kings used when speaking for the record? ‘I have spoken,’ or something like that? And Mara’s going to need some help with the guard for a while; maybe Quent and Rina. Then I think there are going to be some vacancies on the Grand Council. We’re going to get that reorganized, too. For all the mess it’s caused, I still need it.” I walked on, oblivious to those around me, to the vast room that spread in all directions. “It isn’t power that corrupts; it’s being beyond punishment. But there’s no sense worrying, is there, not when—”

“Jad,” said Rina.

“What?” I said. I stopped and the others eddied around me. I saw her then, face haggard but eyes dry now.

“You’re in shock,” she said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “I’m all right. It’s just—just—Oh, Rina, he’s dead. Beramis is—dead!”

And I, My Imperiality, High Emperor Jad the First, wept at last.

The subject freaked out today.

It happened in a plastic little restaurant tacked onto the back of one of those big box stores, the kind with the faux wood tables and uncomfortable orange-red seats that look as though they’ve been ripped off from some fast food franchise.

At first calmly eating breakfast (the same breakfast he has everyday, what the menu calls The Standard: two eggs, three slices of bacon, potatoes, toast and coffee), he’d been making notes in a small purple book, scribbling lines about politics, disagreeing with this or that on some point of strategy.

The place was Wednesday morning quiet; a couple of blue hairs nattering over tea, the subject, and me. The subject—John, I guess I’ll call him—became increasingly agitated. Eventually his head snapped up, glancing around with panicked eyes, pushing his plate away without finishing. At first I thought maybe he was suffering from some sort of gastric anomaly, but none of the gut-clenching or washroom-fleeing one normally associates with this kind of thing occurred. And John’s behavior became even more erratic. For an instant I thought maybe he’d realized the problem, saw the hole, the bleed…

He slapped a few bucks down on the table, hurriedly making for the exit, scurrying into the store proper.

Seemingly unnoticed I followed, the subtle restaurant dim giving way to the store’s harsh overhead fluorescents. John seemed to be wandering without purpose, without examining the store’s plethora of products, muttering to himself under his breath. I was concerned a passerby might think he was a lunatic and call the police, or at the very least, store security.

Behind me the store’s restaurant construct dammed, linear time ceasing. The waitress and the blue hairs statued, frozen into the moment when the dam hit. John remained blissfully ignorant, unaware of the happenings in his wake.

A voice in my ear urged discretionary speed, listing the resources consumed to maintain the constant construct dam, reminding me John’s ignorance was necessary to the integrity of the experiment.

John, looking like a bum in his ratty overcoat, meandered into a maze of shelves, momentarily lost in stacks packed with plastic toys, a distracting animated promo running on a twelve-inch screen angled overhead.

He stopped in front of a display shelf jammed with the newest action figure, a disturbing toy tagged Occupying Sam. It stood three feet high, replete with M-16 and desert fatigues. Some imaginative stock boy had twisted the moveable plastic parts into a combat stance. A nearby box claimed the thing “really speaks!”

John gave a little chuckle, and felt for the switch. The toy’s voice came surprisingly clear and realistic, commanding; none of the scratchy G.I. Joe sounds from the past, “Do you have your papers? Let me see your papers.”

John stared at it, no longer smiling, shaking his head. He placed the toy back on the shelf, mentally chalking it up as another in a long line of signposts on the declining road of western civilization.

Overhead an echo crackled static, “Good morning, shoppers. There’s a red light special on torsine, torsine derivatives and synthetic torsites in the pharmaceutical section. Please have your insurance cards and government documents ready at the checkout counter. Thank you.”

John continued muttering to himself, but started toward the red light special. I kept far enough back to avoid his wide-eyed, scattered gaze.

We wandered through women’s lingerie and women’s shoes. We drifted into the electronics department. John stopped in front of a vast screen displaying grim scenes from the occupation. He faced it, silhouetted, gesturing at a black hooded form standing over a blindfolded, kneeling man. The dark figure flashed a long knife. John didn’t stick around to see how the scene played out.

We strayed into the Homeland Security section. Above us yet another television prattled on about the various threats to the nation, God and our families, reminding everyone the Threat Level was now at Orange, just a click away from the Dread Red.

I tried to remember a time when there hadn’t been a Threat Level.

The shelves stocked duct tape (for sealing windows in case of chemical attack), freeze-dried goods and bottled water. A uniformed security guard wearing an American flag armband stood next to a counter displaying handguns and Pro-Life pamphlets.

John kept glancing at him, talking madness, his hands batting at the air about his head. Thank God the dam hit before the hard-faced guard had a chance to call for back up.

I took out my purple notebook and jotted a few lines regarding some of these intriguing mannerisms. John’s case was completely unique, and the bleed was producing several interesting effects. I read my earlier entry: Sept. 21. Breakfast at the Big Box Restaurant. The Standard. Eggs too runny. Ask for them over-easy they come like snot. Ask for them over-medium they come like rock—

I kept ahead of the construct dam. The National Security section gave way to automotive parts. John made a weird little zag, zigging behind a shelf stocked with massive pistons, disappearing. I followed suit.

Behind the shelf a hallway lined with large unopened boxes and lit by a wire-meshed bulb. The floor was gray concrete littered with old advertising flyers and flattened cardboard. I guessed it to be some sort of staff access passage. I spotted John about halfway down its length, his shadow elongating beneath the unnatural light. He headed for an orange swinging door, a door which looked as though it had been repeatedly battered by forklifts.

The doors still swung when I reached them. The light dimmed considerably, bordering on dark.

The space I entered was football field large. The floor, still dirty concrete, was cluttered with tables, around each a tightly packed group of silently working people.

John had apparently vanished.

I walked along an aisle, moving deeper into the warehouse, glimpsing the hospital masked workers and their labors. Some weaved designer shirts. Some attached plastic soles to designer shoes. Some packed Bibles into boxes labeled in Arabic markings. Some assembled pistols and automatic weapons. Some sweated over crude dynamite bombs. I watched a man with missing fingers carefully attach a timer. White signs demanded ‘TOTAL SILENCE’ in big black letters. Still, I couldn’t find John.

I passed a glass room, inside another table, radiation suits delicately piecing together a strange metallic device about the size of a television set. Their foreman, done in the spectacularly real guise of a so-called “gray alien”, drank cola and smoked a cigarette in a clearly marked No Smoking area. No one seemed to care.

Finally I came to the back wall of the warehouse. Following its long length, I eventually spotted a closet-sized door hidden among a forest of acrylic Christmas trees.

I opened the door and entered another dimly lit hallway, this one narrow. It cornered, spilling into a darkened, forgotten storage space. Mannequins sported faded fashions; outdated toys smiled though a child’s hand had never touched them; ancient advertisements beckoned with impossibly low prices. The place was a sort of time capsule, an odd collection of consumer nostalgia marooned in a dirty corner caught outside of time. Not even the construct dam could effect it—for all intents and purposes, the space had already been dammed.

I searched for an exit, finally discovering one behind a garish shoe rack from the 1970s. The door was wider than the last, hard to push open. Something was blocking it on the other side. Again the voice in my ear, the miniature speaker cautioning…the reality tear was becoming unmanageable, the resources allocated extending beyond budgetary parameters. The voice advised the coordinates would be severed if the problem wasn’t soon dealt with…

I put my shoulder against the door, pushing hard, forcing movement. A dusty beam of light bled through.

A crowd, a cacophony of urgent voices. I wormed my way through the crack, joining the mob. The door closed behind me and became a shelf stocked with antacids.

I was in the pharmaceutical section, packed in among a hundred or so individuals chaotically trying to take advantage of the red light torsine special. I spotted John, already in line, his ID vise-clutched in his hand. To the store’s credit the queue was moving relatively rapidly.

The pharmacy was bright whites and hanging, banner-style adverts, some pushing trademarked Sailing Away brand torsine. To my right was a wall stacked floor to ceiling with tampons, and to my left, a triple-paned window into the cold and bleak. I couldn’t see outside though, the view was eclipsed by faces, gaunt faces, the huddled masses, stark and staring in at the products they couldn’t have. A hauntingly sad-eyed little girl caught my attention, not looking at the candy just out of reach, not looking at the riot, but looking at me. It was disconcerting. I turned away, turned to the overhead and ever-present television, to the soothing cathode fire. A news announcer spoke, his words barely heard over the din, a demented monologue riding the heedless, dissonant soundscape, “…and it was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy against church and country, to expose them to the secret doctrines—there would have been panic in the streets. It would have meant initiating the multitude, it would have meant lifting the veil of Isis. The only recourse was to find denouncers and false witnesses…easily done, of course. When the temporal, spiritual and political tyrannies unite to crush a victim they never want for serviceable instruments…”

And then it was my turn at the counter, a mean-faced clerk wearing a sidearm and a blue cross on his government-issue ball cap asked for my ID. I passed it to him. He swiped my card through a scanner, the machine beeped its approval. He passed it back, sliding a pair of happy, colorfully stickered ampoules across the counter. His blank eyes looked through me, “Next.”

I turned and was immediately swallowed by the crowd. Tossed, bounced and jostled, I was finally ejected into the adjoining books and magazines section. I thought I heard someone at my ear, a familiar voice, but then it was gone, replaced by a buzz, a fuzz—a fly perhaps.

I browsed magazines not really seeing the pages. Eventually a young clerk approached, her cheeks cartoonishly rouged, gingerly touching my arm, “Is there something I can help you with, sir?”

Her voice reminded me of Mickey Mouse. I found myself staring at a copy of Guns & Ammo, a concept I didn’t really grip until I put the magazine back on the shelf.

“No. Thanks.”

I walked out of the section.

In my pocket the ampoules clinked a cadence. It occurred to me there’d been a time before Sailing Away, a time before the pharmaceutical corporations. You had to give it to them, they’d been clever…prescriptions for synth-torsine called anything but synth-torsine, kickbacks to doctors ensuring complicity. They’d given the shit a legion of names: Poxacet, Dracson, Eulliud, Semoral. They have at their disposal a population so distracted by the loud flashing noises they don’t even know what they’re taking. “Painkillers” for that broken leg. “Painkillers” for that back ache. “Painkillers” after that accident. “What? You’re all out of Tacaset and now you feel sick? Here’s another prescription…I’m sure it’ll help.”

Smile. Touch the arm. Hey, trust your mechanic.

There was that buzz at my ear again. Someone said, “Severed.” I turned to see who’d addressed me, turned to see…

Nobody.

The buzz continued, an odd bit of static with the slightest trace of an echo. I batted at the air around my head—anyone watching would’ve thought me a madman.

I floated along one of the store’s main arteries, aiming myself toward the dreary plastic restaurant tacked onto the back.

The place was quiet; a couple of old ladies and a man in an overcoat similar to mine. He openly stared.

A human gnome in the store’s clashing colors served breakfast. The Standard. I took out my little purple book, noting the sorry state of the meal: Sept. 21. Breakfast at the Big Box Restaurant. The Standard. Eggs too runny. Ask for them over-easy they come like snot. Ask for them over-medium they come like rock—

The buzz interrupted, startlingly loud this time, almost a voice but not quite. I pushed my plate away. I glanced around, panicked. The man in the overcoat similar to mine furrowed his brow in confusion. I fished in a pocket and left money on the table, the restaurant shrinking around me. I started to sweat, my shirt sticking to my skin. I wandered out of the restaurant’s subtle dim, back into the store’s harsh overhead fluorescents…

And I couldn’t shake the feeling someone was following me.

The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent paths across her face, and now she needed certain remedial undergarments at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was also looking for a husband.

This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a Prince Charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and talk about it all to Matilda.

The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she had been waiting for him.

Matilda, you see, had patience.

She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A. B. from exclusive Ursula Johns College, and Radcliffe had yielded her Masters degree, yet Matilda was an avid follower of the pen-pal columns. She would read them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity to her own. To the gentlemen to whom these names were affixed, Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws, that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws impatiently told her to go out and get dates.

That particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was rocking on the glider, and Matilda said hello.

The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda’s left hand in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.

“I thought so,” she said. “I knew this was coming when I saw that look in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman’s engagement ring?”

Matilda smiled. “It wouldn’t have worked out, Ma. He was too darned stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway, and he smiled politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth college reunion was this week end and he had already turned down the invitation.

The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. “That was thoughtful of Herman to hide his feelings.”

“Hogwash!” said her daughter. “He has no true feelings. He’s sorry that he had to miss his college reunion. That’s all he has to hide. A stuffy Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others.”

“But, Matilda, that’s your fifth broken engagement in three years. It ain’t that you ain’t popular, but you just don’t want to cooperate. You don’t fall in love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you slowly, without your even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.”

Matilda admired her mother’s use of the word “osmoses,” but she found nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact of love. She said good night and went upstairs, climbed out of her light summer dress, and took a cold shower.

She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen-pal section of the current Literary Review, and because the subject matter of that magazine was somewhat high-brow and cosmopolitan, she could expect a gratifying selection of pen pals.

She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl’s sleeping in the nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.

Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!). Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her postnasal drip—and took the latest issue of the Literary Review off the night table.

She flipped through the pages and came to Personals. Someone in Nebraska wanted to trade match books; someone in New York needed a Midwestern pen pal, but it was a woman; an elderly man interested in ornithology wanted a young chick correspondent interested in the same subject; a young, personable man wanted an editorial position because he thought he had something to offer the editorial world; and—

Matilda read the next one twice. Then she held it close to the light and read it again. The Literary Review was one of the few magazines that printed the name of the advertiser rather than a box number, and Matilda even liked the sound of the name. But mostly, she had to admit to herself, it was the flavor of the wording. This very well could be it. Or, that is, him.

The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded as though he would have reason indeed. He wanted only the best because he was the best. Like calls to like.

The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda. Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had no nationality, for all intents and purposes; he was an international man, a figure among figures, a paragon…

Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town not fifty miles from her home, and she’d get there a hop, skip, and jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of—writing a letter.

Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.

Matilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom, dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and figure-molding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger, and tiptoed downstairs.

The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stair well.

“Mother,” gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something unexpected. “What on earth are you doing up?”

The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. “I’m fixing breakfast, of course…”

Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak about the house without her mother’s knowing about it, and that even if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with, such as only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.

Driving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour, Matilda hummed Mendelssohn’s Wedding March all the way. It was her favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar Falls and find out.

And so she got there.

The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses that hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.

“Hello,” said Matilda.

The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.

“What?”

“I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?”

“Is that in the United States?”

“It’s not a that; it’s a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live? What’s the quickest way to get there?”

The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. “Now take it easy, ma’am. First place, I don’t know any Haron Gorka—”

Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an oh under her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda, almost happily, that he was sorry he couldn’t help her. He grudgingly suggested that if it really was important, she might check with the police.

Matilda did, only they didn’t know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned out that no one did. Matilda tried the general store, the fire department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at random. As far as the gentry of Cedar Falls were concerned, Haron Gorka did not exist.

Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she knew that she’d rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked to analyze other people’s mistakes, especially Matilda’s.

Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls’ small and unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by browsing through the dusty stacks.

This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the old librarian as she passed.

Then Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray hair, suspicious eyes, and a broomstick figure…

On the other hand—why not? Why couldn’t the librarian help her? Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well educated as Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent residence here in Cedar Falls, one couldn’t expect that he’d have his own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.

Matilda cleared her throat. “Pardon me,” she began. “I’m looking for—”

“Haron Gorka.” The librarian nodded.

“How on earth did you know?”

“That’s easy. You’re the sixth young woman who came here inquiring about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka…”

Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear. “You know him? You know Haron Gorka?”

“Certainly. Of course I know him. He’s our steadiest reader here at the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn’t take out three, four books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty years younger—”

Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. “Only ten,” she assured the librarian. “Ten years would be more than sufficient, I’m sure.”

“Are you? Well. Well, well.” The librarian did something with the back of her hair, but it looked just as it had before. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right, at that.” Then she sighed. “But I guess a miss is as good as a mile.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka…”

The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.

“Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?”

“I’m not supposed to do this, you know. We’re not permitted to give the addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.”

“What about the other five women?”

“They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.”

Matilda reached into her pocketbook and withdrew a five-dollar bill.

“Was this the way?” she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this sort of thing.

The librarian shook her head.

Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her hand. “Then is this better?”

“That’s worse. I wouldn’t take your money—”

“Sorry. What, then?”

“If I can’t enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me faithfully, and you’ll get his address. That’s what the other five will do, and with half a dozen of you, I’ll get an over-all picture. Each one of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?”

Matilda assured her that it was and, breathlessly, wrote down the address. She thanked the librarian and then went out to her car, whistling to herself.

Haron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the librarian’s account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked him all the more for it.

There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda’s made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the only one with the idea of visiting Haron Gorka in person. With half a dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought had been her ingenuity and which now turned out to be something that she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps she wouldn’t be needed; perhaps she was too late…

As it turned out, she wasn’t. Not only that, she was welcomed with open arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead, someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked if she had come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly. He told her that was fine and ushered her straight into a room that evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small, undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the wall, there was a button.

“You want any food or drink,” the servant told her, “and you just press that button. The results will surprise you.”

“What about Mr. Gorka?”

“When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.”

A little doubtful, now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda’s ears had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.

It must be said to Matilda’s credit that she sobbed only once. After that, she realized that what is done is done, and here, past thirty, she wasn’t going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a neurotic servant.

For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn’t last long, however: she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to her overwrought nerves.

At that point she remembered what the servant had said about food, and she thought at once of the supreme justice she could do to a juicy beefsteak. Well, maybe they didn’t have a beefsteak. In that case, she would take what they had, and, accordingly, she walked to the little slot in the wall and pressed the button.

She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup, mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root beer, a parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.

Matilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka’s neurotic servant.

When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.

The feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka’s servant, and he said, “Mr. Gorka will see you now.”

“Now?”

“Now. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

He had a point there, but Matilda hardly had time even to fix her hair. She told the servant so.

“Miss,” he replied, “I assure you it will not matter in the least to Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all that matters.”

“You sure?” Matilda wanted to take no chances.

“Yes. Come.”

She followed him out of the little room and across what should have been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her own, and that each, in turn, had already had her first visit with Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him better than did all the rest; and later, when she returned to tell the old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and compare notes.

She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was just that he was so ordinary-looking. She would almost have preferred the monster of her dreams.

He wore a white linen suit and had mousy hair, drab eyes, an almost Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist at each corner.

He said, “Greetings. You have come—”

“In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?”

She hoped she wasn’t being too formal. But then, there was no sense assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to keep in the middle of the road.

“I am fine. Are you ready?”

“Ready?”

“Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do you not?”

“I—do.” Matilda had had visions of her Prince Charming sitting back and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to know the man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.

“I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for dinner,” she told him brightly.

“Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that you have a high psi quotient or that you were very hungry.”

“Yes,” said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.

“Ready?”

“Uh—ready.”

“Well?”

“Well what, Mr. Gorka?”

“What would you like me to talk about?”

“Oh, anything.”

“Please. As the ad read, my universal experience—is universal. Literally. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me about some of your far travels? Unfortunately, while I’ve done a lot of reading, I haven’t been to all the places I would have liked—”

“Good enough. You know, of course, how frigid Deneb VII is?”

Matilda said, “Beg pardon?”

“Well, there was the time our crew—before I had retired, of course—made a crash landing there. We could survive in the vac suits, of course, but the thiomots were after us almost at once. They go mad over plastic. They will eat absolutely any sort of plastic. Our vac suits—”

“—were made of plastic,” Matilda suggested. She did not understand a thing he was talking about, but she felt she should act bright.

“No, no. Must you interrupt? The air hose and the water feed, those were plastic. Not the rest of the suit. The point is that half of us were destroyed before the rescue ship could come, and the remainder were near death. I owe my life to the mimicry of a flaak from Capella III. It assumed the properties of plastic and led the thiomots a merry chase across the frozen surface of D VII. You travel in the Deneb system now, and Interstellar Ordinance makes it mandatory to carry flaaks with you. Excellent idea, really excellent.”

Almost at once, Matilda’s educational background should have told her that Haron Gorka was mouthing gibberish. But on the other hand she wanted to believe in him, and the result was that it took until now for her to realize it.

“Stop making fun of me,” she said.

“So, naturally, you’ll see flaaks all over that system—”

“Stop!”

“What’s that? Making fun of you?” Haron Gorka’s voice had been so eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child’s, and now he seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of resignation, and he said, “Very well. I’m wrong again. You are the sixth, and you’re no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again, she is right and I am wrong…”

Haron Gorka turned his back.

Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed, not without surprise, that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of Haron Gorka’s guests to depart.

As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly. Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all alone.

As she drove back to town, the disappointment slowly melted away. There were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in particular about places that had no existence outside his mind, his voice high-pitched and eager.

It was not until she had passed the small library building that she remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it outside the library.

The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her: gray, broomstick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up visibly.

“Hello, my dear,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You’re back a bit sooner than I expected. But then, the other five have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.”

“I don’t know what they told you,” Matilda said. “But this is what happened to me.”

She then related quickly everything that had happened, completely and in detail. She did this first because it was a promise and second because she knew it would make her feel better.

“So,” she finished, “Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or insane. I’m sorry”

“He’s neither,” the librarian contradicted. “Perhaps he is slightly eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he leave a message for his wife?”

“Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the five.”

“No. He didn’t. But you were the last, and I thought he would give you a message for his wife—”

Matilda didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all, but she told the little librarian what the message was. “He wanted her to return,” she said.

The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you something.”

“What’s that?”

“I am Mrs. Gorka.”

The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. “You see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.”

Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for anybody, but here she found herself confronted by a second.

“We’ve been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given the opportunity just to listen to him.

“But he’s wrong. It’s a hard life for a woman. Some day—five thousand, ten thousand years from now—I will convince him. And then we will settle down on Canopus XIV and cultivate torgas. That would be so nice—”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, if Haron wants me back, then I have to go. Have a care, my dear. If you marry, choose a homebody. I’ve had the experience, and you’ve seen my Haron for yourself.”

And then the woman was gone. Numbly, Matilda walked to the doorway and watched her angular figure disappear down the road. Of all the crazy things.

Deneb and Capella and Canopus, those were stars. Add a number, and you might have a planet revolving about each star. Of all the insane—

They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually, they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter Matilda would seek the happy medium.

And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen-pal columns. They were, she realized; for kids.

She ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then went out to her car again, preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale rainbow bridge in the sky.

Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon, and that was the direction of Haron Gorka’s place.

The glow increased; soon it was a bright red pulse pounding on the horizon. It flickered. It flickered again, and finally it was gone.

The stars were white and brilliant in the clear country air. That was why Matilda liked the country better than the city, particularly on a clear summer night when you could see the span of the Milky Way.

But, abruptly, the stars and the Milky Way were paled by the brightest shooting star Matilda had ever seen. It flashed suddenly and remained in view for a full second, searing a bright orange path across the night sky.

Matilda gasped and rushed into her car. She meshed the gears and pressed the accelerator to the floor, keeping it there all the way home.

It was the first time she had ever seen a shooting star going up.

The year of 2046—and peace…

The wreckage of past ages of barbarism had been cleared away. All over the Earth stood flawless cities. The peoples had nothing to complain of. They lived in a tempered, happy world of smoothly working machines and vast foolproof control panels. But in this there perhaps lay the seeds of danger.

Selby Doyle, President of the Earth, voted into office by common consent, was a shrewd man. Slim, wiry, with gray hair swept back from an expansive brow, there was little to stamp him as extraordinary, unless it was the resolute tightness of his lips or the squareness of his chin. Here was a man who reasoned, decided, and then acted.

He had accomplished all that he had set out to do and molded the world afresh. It gave him pleasure to sit as he was now, in the dim half light of the lowering night, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, his gray eyes gazing on the lights of Major City as they sprang automatically into being at the scheduled times. The lower lights first, then the higher ones, as the tide of day ebbed from the deeper walks.

Presently he glanced round as the warning light on his great desk proclaimed somebody’s approach. Instantly he was the chief magistrate—self-possessed, ready for his visitor. He closed the switches that filled the room with an intense yet restful brilliance.

The automatic door opened. Doyle sat looking at the tall man who crossed the threshold. Vincent Carfax, chairman of the Committee for Public Welfare, inclined his bald head in greeting.

“Your excellency!” he acknowledged, and stepped forward to shake hands.

Doyle waved him to a chair. Carfax was an inhuman index of a man who carried endless statistics in his agile brain. Poker-faced, emaciated as a skeleton, it was his proud boast that he had never been known to smile.

“You will overlook the lateness of the hour, Mr. President?” he asked at length in his precise voice.

“I was about to leave,” Doyle answered. “However, only an important matter could bring you here, Carfax. What is it?”

“Unrest.”

“Unrest?” President Doyle raised his eyebrows. “Unrest in Major City? My dear fellow!”

“Unrest!” Carfax insisted. “I have suspected it for a long time, but have refrained from bringing it to your notice until I was absolutely certain. Now I have conclusive evidence. Major City is resting on quicksand, your excellency.”

Doyle pondered for a moment. “Tell me about it,” he invited.

“The facts are plain,” Carfax answered slowly. “The reaction of perfect security after many years spent in wars and struggle is going directly against the adaptive strain Nature builds up. I have had the First in Biology check on that. The human body and mind, keyed to every emergency, had until recently something it could grapple with. Now there is nothing but perfection. The mind has of necessity to find a new form of excitation in order to maintain its equilibrium. Do I make it clear?”

“I provided science for the people,” President Doyle said quietly. “Is not that exciting enough?”

“Science, sir, is for the chosen few. Men such as you and I, and all the other master-brains who have brought this sublime state into being, are different. Call them geniuses if you will. At least they do not represent the masses. I have been forced to the unpleasant realization that very few minds are adapted to scientific study. Just as in the pre-Wars Era a man accepted the electric light for what it is without involving himself in the electronic processes embodied in it, so today there is that same aspect of laziness and torpor—and there, Mr. President, lie the seeds of unrest and mischief.”

Doyle smiled. “It can be stopped. The Congress has the power.”

“This goes deeper than you realize,” Carfax said, shaking his bald head, “It is not confined to Major City. It exists nearly everywhere. So much so I felt it my duty to warn you. If this unrest is, not quelled it means—back to war!”

The Chief Executive was silent.

“There is a. way,” Carfax said.

“There is?”

“It is becoming increasingly clear that the Last War did not entirely kill the belief in men’s minds that force of arms is the only sure way to Right. The element of unrest now present will grow rapidly. At the moment it takes the form of vicious words. It would like to build up a barrier against all things scientific and tear down the perfect structure we have created. But I say—if I may—that the close of the Last War really did end war for ever.”

“Perhaps.” The President smiled gravely.

“Listen,” Carfax resumed, tapping his finger emphatically on the desk. “We must forever outlaw war as a disease. Until now Man has not had sufficient power at his disposal—scientific power that is—to make his dreams come true. The earlier men tried it with pacts, treaties, and leagues of nations—and they all came to grief—because there was no science back of them.”

“And now?”

“Now, with tremendous scientific resources at our command, we can make a stand against this eternal enemy of progress, destroy it while it is still young.” Carfax hesitated briefly and looked apologetic. “What I am about to say, your Excellency, may make it appear I am teaching you your business. You will forgive that?”

Doyle shrugged. “Only a fool refuses to learn. Continue.”

“Many years ago men adopted the principle of arbitration,” Carfax resumed. “They were enlightened enough, in civil matters at least, to place any matter of dispute, particularly in instances of capital and labor, before a council usually composed of three experts. That council was vested with complete power to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ upon the point at issue. Thus matters were arbitrated. Endeavors were made, futilely enough, to devise an arbitration scheme between nations

“The principle of arbitration relied on the good faith of nations to seek arbitration, but was lost in a welter of power politics, and overcome with greed, backed by terrific man power and armaments. Wars followed wars. Arbitration was ignored. But, sir, the idea was not lost. Why cannot a new arbiter arise? Not a man, not three men—but twelve! In olden times a jury was usually composed of twelve men and women. So in respect to that judicial tradition let it still be twelve. Twelve—to arbitrate!”

President Doyle sighed a little. “An excellent idea, old friend. But what twelve men or women, however competent, would be accepted by the masses as sole judges?”

“There comes the difference!” the Statistician said calmly. “I have been investigating on my own account. Ever since this unrest began I have pondered the idea of an Arbiter. I have interviewed at great length, twelve men and women—each one of them equipped with the finest brain in the world for their particular sphere. The twelve major sciences of present day civilization can each have a master at the head. Yes, I have talked with them. Each one of them has foreseen as we have the grim fate that awaits mankind if unrest is allowed to prevail. Now I have their assurance, once the word is made lawful by you, that each one of them is prepared to sacrifice their life for the particular science they control in order that the future of mankind may be assured.”

Doyle sat bolt upright. “Sacrifice their life!” he cried. “What on earth do you mean, man? Why should they?”

“Because there can be no other way to make a true Arbiter!”

The President got to his feet, stood by the window with his hands clasped behind him. “Go on,” he said, lost in thought.

“Twelve brains will be pooled for the common good,” Carfax explained. “Twelve brains will work in unison to provide a common answer, and a just one, for every conceivable difficulty in every walk of life. Twelve brains, functioning as one unit, will be the judge of humanity’s future actions and set discord at naught.”

“Even brains die,” President Doyle pointed out, turning. “It is only putting off the vital issue for a short period. When the brains die the old trouble will be back. This is just—just a temporary panacea, making things comfortable for the present age. What of posterity, Carfax? This is the problem.”

“The brains will never die!” the Statistician said, and at Doyle’s look of astonishment he was tempted to smile. But remembering his one boast he didn’t.

“I said we could outlaw unrest and war forever, Mr. President. This is no hasty plan. I have conferred with Gascoyne, the First in Anatomy. He says the plan I have devised is feasible. Did it ever occur to you what a poor instrument the brain is for the interpretation of thought?”

“Often. What of it?”

“Gascoyne has asked himself that question long enough to find an answer. We of this age know science agrees that thought is everywhere, that it is expressed in greater or lesser degree according to the quality of the ‘receiver’ or brain interpreting it. According to Gascoyne a brain is basically an electronic machine—a radio receiver, if you wish it. In proportion to its quality it absorbs and uses the ideas of all-pervading mind and expresses ideas clearly or badly through the medium of a physical body, which in itself is an expression of mind-force.”

Doyle was clearly interested now. A faint, unaccustomed flush of pleasure stole into Carfax’s pallid cheeks.

“Since, then, mind contains the quintessence of every known science,” he went on, “certain brains—or receivers—are better fitted than others, and can be completely duplicated in a mechanical, imperishable mould! Every convolution of a brain, every neuron, every synaptic resistance, can be imitated just as surely as in old days an impression could be taken of a man’s gums for the fitting of false dentures. It can be done just as surely as the artificial leg of today has false muscles.”

President Doyle came back to the desk and stood waiting.

“With your sanction,” Carfax finished slowly, “I propose to model twelve synthetic, imperishable brains on the exact convolutions and measurements belonging to these twelve scientists. It will be done in the fashion of taking a death-mask. The image of the face at death remains in the mask forever. In this case the mechanical brains will be modeled over the real ones, duplicating them in every detail. When this has been done, the mechanical equivalent will take over from the natural organ, probably with even better results because it will be devoid of the inevitable clogging of human construction. The real brain will shrivel and die afterwards, leaving the mechanical image.

“Once the operation is complete these mechanical brains will be linked together, will go on gaining knowledge with a speed compatible with that of an ordinary brain if it were permitted to live for eternity. That is how the Arbiter will become indestructible and a paragon of justice for all mankind.”

Doyle thought, then shook his head.

“Even though I am the elected executive of all Earth, Carfax, I am still human. Twelve people to die—if I give the word—it is unthinkable!”

The Statistician got to his feet, his pale face adamant.

“As the Chief Magistrate, Doyle, you have, to a certain extent, to be devoid of emotion. You spoke of posterity. Posterity can be assured by your word—now. And remember, the twelve will give their lives voluntarily. Think of the thousands of scientists in the past who have given their lives willingly for a lesser cause.”

“But the decision to slay twelve did not rest with one man,” President Doyle pointed out. Then he turned impatiently. “Carfax, don’t misunderstand me. I see the value of your idea. I appreciate the great lengths you must have been to, to get the plan worked, but it would be better if the decision did not rest so completely with me!”

Carfax shrugged. “The facts are plain enough,” he said quietly. “The personal brain power of the twelve best men and women will be pooled. Twelve will die, in order that thousands to come may live in peace!”

After a brief silence Doyle began to hedge with vague desperation. He drummed his fingers on the desk. There was an inhuman persuasion in Carfax’s cold, emotionless voice.

“What guarantee have we that opposing factions will consult the Arbiter?”

“We have the guarantee of twelve imperishable brains in a mobile machine—a machine controlled by thought waves reacting on special mechanisms. In the event of two opposing factions, the Arbiter will cut off all possible means that might lead to force between the parties concerned. Compulsory arbitration will come into being. It’s that—or decay!”

“It is ruling by force,” Doyle muttered. “Our present method is by votes.”

“It is common sense! All other scientists are strongly in favor of the plan. I convinced them of its value. That leaves only your sanction.”

“Not immediately, my friend. I must think.” The President pressed a hand to his forehead. “Leave me for a while. I must talk with Gascoyne first. I’ll acquaint you with my decision later.”

As something apart he heard the soft click of the door as Carfax went…

Even after he had beard Rolf Gascoyne’s fully detailed surgical description of the idea of the Arbiter, it took President Doylc several more days of deliberation before he finally gave his consent to the project, And he did it then only when he was assured of the willingness of the twelve people concerned to sacrifice themselves in order that posterity might have an assured peace.

So he gave the order—and with the twelve men and women and Gascoyne he shut himself away from city affairs for a while in the surgical laboratories.

He answered no calls except those that demanded his personal attention, leaving everything else to Carfax, his deputy.

From then on Doyle watched activity in a field that was unfamiliar to him. He saw the twelve human beings go willingly under the anaesthetic. He saw the brains, still living, being fed by synthetic bloodstream and artificial heart. Then, under orders from Gascoyne, the first brain was duly imprisoned within a soft mold of ductile metal.

Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, under the control of instruments so sensitive that light-vibration disturbed them, metallic molds were set up, fitted into place by slender rods of force timed to a split thousandth of a second, the slightest error in which would have meant utter failure.

But there was no error. Gascoyne saw to that. He was coldly efficient, intolerant of mistakes. The controlling forces made no slip. They had no human qualities in them to err.

Day after day the scientists worked on. From time to time Doyle received disquieting reports from Carfax concerning the rapid increase of unrest amongst the unscientific populace. He handed the information on to Gascoyne who promptly made a speed-up all round.

In a month the first brain was complete. The dried shell of the dead brain was removed and the mechanical counterpart, deadly precise in its way of reasoning, came into being. The actual entity of Unwin Slater, First m Mathematics, had vanished and given place to the computations of Brain Unit No. 1.

Thereafter it was not difficult. Assured now of success in the operation, Doyle felt a little easier in mind—and the experts worked steadily on. Brain after brain was linked up, until at the end of three months the transference was complete. The knowledge of each was unified to the other by delicate vibratory wires, and thence carried back to a central brain pan—in truth a contrivance of machinery of profound complexity, reactive only to the thoughts of twelve combined brains.

Gascoyne had been clever here. Without twelve brains in unity the machinery would not function, and since this seat of all motivation and pooled knowledge was protected by metals of interlocking atoms, the Arbiter was absolutely foolproof. In fact, the more the atoms of the housing metal continued to disorganize, the more impossible it would be to break down.

On October 9, 2046, the Arbiter became visible in public for the first time. In appearance it resembled a great circle of metal about fifty feet wide, studded at regular intervals round the edge with unbreakable domes that sheathed the metallic brains inside. The wires, protected by similar armor, led directly to the circle’s center wherein stood the governing machine-unit. For locomotion the thing possessed skillfully jointed metal legs, perfectly balancing the circle of metal they carried. In many ways the Arbiter resembled an enormous wheel studded with twelve nodules and supplied with feet.

In response to public demand, after Doyle’s initial introduction of it and outline of its purpose, it gave a brief speech, world-relayed. Its thought waves, passing into photoelectric devices, which m turn forced air through replicas of human vocal cords, produced a voice that was completely impartial and yet arresting.

“People of the world, you are asked to forget that this contrivance is the carrier of twelve brains,” the great machine said. “It is a unity, a single unity with a twelve-fold purpose. That purpose is peace on earth and goodwill towards men. To that end I, the Arbiter, will work. Let any man or woman who thinks of transgressing the peace pause now and think! The Arbiter stands ready!”

Thereafter the Arbiter was allowed complete liberty. It was entirely self-contained, sleepless. It moved as it chose, but usually stayed pretty close to Major City.

Its first decisive action was to subdue to a considerable extent the activities of the restive ones. With an uncanny sense of deduction it unearthed a plot whereby a thousand unscientific insurgents were plotting to seize a territory between Major City and its nearest neighbor one hundred miles away.

The insurgents had hoped to establish a colony for themselves. Had they succeeded they would undoubtedly have been the first to break the unity of a great world-wide nation in which all class distinction and creed had been leveled into one brotherhood.

But the Arbiter sifted the rebels’ plans from top to bottom, and since in this case there was no question of arbitration between parties the mechanical judge took the next most effective step.

One by one the entire thousand met death, ruthlessly, inexplicably—but certainly. The scientists became a little worried. That the first act of the Arbiter should be to slay without question was something of a shock.

If it did nothing else, the action at least quelled all the other restive spirits. They turned in increasing numbers to scientific study.

Thereafter, for a year, the Arbiter had little of importance to do. It sorted out minor disputes with calm, emotionless words and its decision was implicitly obeyed. President Selby Doyle felt satisfied. His first fears had vanished. The Arbiter was a panacea after all. Then came the affair of Grenson, the physicist.

Grenson, a young and ardent man of the New Era, was sure that he had discovered the real meaning of an electron’s wave and particle motion. Working alone in his laboratory he knew that he was on the verge of probing the long sought for secret of fusion power from the atom.

Immediately, he went to the President, stood at the desk and looked for the first time upon the quiet, calm personage who ruled the world.

“Sit down, young man,” Doyle invited at last, eying his visitor steadily and inwardly deciding that he liked him. “Sit down and give me the full details.”

Grenson gathered his courage. President Doyle snapped a recording switch then he sat back to listen to the rush of eager, excited phrases. For fifteen minutes Grenson held forth on the possibilities of his discovery, still theoretical, and through it all the Chief Executive sat in silence, linking up the points in his keen mind, fitting together postulation with postulation.

At last Grenson became silent, flushed with his own energies. Doyle gave him an encouraging smile. “In theory, young man, I shoukd say your scheme is feasible. If so, you may be sure that Major City will fully reward you. But first we must have advice in this very specialized field.” He pressed the switch of his intercom. “Send in the First in Physics,” he ordered.

For ten minutes President and worker sat in silence, the young man looking round the great office and Doyle busy at his desk. Then Horley Dodd, the First in Physics, arrived—a sharp-nosed, scrub-headed man with thick-lens eyeglasses.

“You want me, sir?” His tone was by no means pleasant.

“Yes, Dodd, I do. This young man here, if his theory is as good as it sounds, has the secret of fusion power. Just listen to the playback of his exposition.”

President Doyle flicked a button. There was silence as Grenson’s eager voice came forth from the instrument. The First in Physics stood with his hands locked behind him, biting his lower lip and staring up at the ceiling. The voice ceased at last. An automatic switch started the sound track ribbon reeling back to the start again.

“Well?” the President asked, leaning back in his chair.

“Frankly, I’d say it’s impossible,” Dodd said briefly. “It is at best a mere theory, and as such does not advance us one iota beyond what we already know.”

“That is a very narrow viewpoint,” the President observed. Dodd’s sharp little eyes sparked defiance.

“It’s the only viewpoint, your Excellency.”

“But, sir, I have it all worked out!” Grenson sprang to his feet earnestly. “Naturally, I am a man of only moderate means. I cannot afford the costly apparatus necessary to prove my idea. That is why I brought the scheme to the President. Now you say it’s no good.”

“You had no right to bring it here!” Dodd snapped.

“He had every right,” the President said. “What is more, Dodd, I have neither time nor patience for this unseemly wrangling.” He got to his feet decisively. “We have the Arbiter to decide such things for us. Come into the laboratory, both of you.”

He preceded the pair to a sealed inner door and opened it. They passed within to the monster of legs and nodules occupying the center of the floor.

“Arbiter, a question arises,” President Doyle stated quietly, stopping before the thing’s sensitive pickup. “Is the theory of atomic energy from fusion about to be given to you practical—or not?” He turned aside and switched on a relay of Grenson’s voice-record. Again that silence and Grenson stood with his gaze uncertainly watching the glittering monster that was to determine his life’s ideal.

After long thought at the close of the exposition the Arbiter spoke.

“The theory of Grenson is not practicable! The secret of controllable fusion power will never be found because the very nature of the atom makes it impossible. The judgment is awarded to Horley Dodd.”

The First in Physics smiled acidly and glanced at the President. Doyle was stroking his chin slowly. Then he turned to the dazed Grenson and patted him gently on the shoulder.

“I am sorry, my boy—I really am. I did feel that you had something, but the Arbiter cannot be wrong. The decision is final.”

“Final!” Grenson shouted. “Do you think I am going to take the opinion of a thing like this—this Arbiter? Do you think I shall give up a theory because a few canned brains say so? Not on my life! I’m going on, and on. Yes, I’ll make the money somehow to prove my idea.”

He swung round, red-faced with anger, and vanished through the doorway.

Doyle watched him go, then shrugged.

“You’re too sentimental, Mr. President,” Dodd said brusquely. “You allow too many of these crack-brained theorists to take advantage of you. He has the wrong idea entirely. What he and his sort need is control, not encouragement.”

“As long as I am Chief Magistrate I shall make my own decisions,” Doyle answered quietly. “I shall not need to detain you any longer, Dodd. Thank you for coming.”

The scientist went out and President Doyle returned slowly into his own office, stood by the-desk, thinking. That young man had had a great idea.

It was towards evening when the private wire buzzed. Doyle look up the receiver and Vincent Carfax’s lean, cold visage came onto the screen.

“Your Excellency, I understand from my agents that you had a young man to see you today? Chap named Grenson? And that the decision of the Arbiter went against him?”

“Correct.”

“He died at five thirty this afternoon! He was slain by mind-force from the Arbiter. I thought it would interest you.”

Doyle stared at the screen fixedly. “You are sure?”

“I never make mistakes,” Carfax answered dispassionately. “I don’t like it, this continued display of force!”

“No. Neither do I!”

President Doyle cut off, his jaw set with uncommon hardness. He got to his feet and walked into the adjoining laboratory, stood staring at the metal monster. Even as he stood making his survey he could sense the inhuman aura the thing radiated.

“Arbiter, you slew without provocation!” he snapped suddenly. “Why? I demand to know. You told Grenson he was wrong, but what need was there to murder him as well?”

“That question is outside your province. You are the President, yes, but you had me created for the undisputed adjudication of all matters capable of argument, for the carrying out of these adjudications afterwards. The only way to prevent a continued disobedience of commands is to kill! Grenson, in spite of my decision, was determined to work in spite of me. So he died. So it must always be with those who are defiant. Otherwise, the purpose of the Arbiter is lost.”

“But it’s barbarism!” President Doyle cried hoarsely. “The very thing I believed you’d stop!”

“I am not answerable to anybody for what I believe or think,” the Arbiter answered implacably.

“But suppose young Grenson had been right? Suppose he had touched the verge of unlocking fusion power? Think what it could have meant to us. We need that power. Earth’s stores of radioactive materials, petroleum, coal, and certain metals cannot last much longer. Supplies were drained to the uttermost in building and equipping the cities. Fusion power would solve many things at one bound. Even the economic transmutation of elements, a secret we desperately need to find. At the least you could have let Grenson go on experimenting.”

“Not in face of my decision. I acted as I saw best. So far as I am concerned the matter is finished.”

Doyle hesitated, staring at the thing bitterly, then with clenched fists he went slowly from the laboratory. Somewhere, he knew, something was wrong.

The treasured plans for security had gone utterly awry.

Very gradually it was forced on the adherents of scientific progress that the Arbiter was anything but what it was intended to be. Science became divided into two camps—the strugglers and the opposers, with Dodd as chief of the opposers.

Dodd, though a scientist, firmly believed in the inaccessibility of Nature’s inner secrets, and had neither vision nor tolerance. He was too content to accept science for what it was rather than for what it might become. In that very fact lay the seed of disaster; The camp of Science, divided against itself, began to show signs of decay.

Time and again the Arbiter was called in, and every time the verdict went to Horley Dodd and his party.

Baffled, sickened by the obvious breakdown in the scheme for universal peace, President Selby Doyle’s grip on things commenced to weaken. Already worn out with the cares of office, to which had been added crushing disappointment, the illness that preceded his demise was brief.

Officials were present round his deathbed—but officials were all they were, men who had served him because it had been their duty to serve. To the dying President there was only one face that represented loyalty and friendship, and it belonged to Carfax.

“Carfax; you must be President,” Doyle whispered. “As—as it is my final wish, you will be chosen. All around this bed are the men who will elect you. I have their promise. I think that I have—have been too lenient, but no such emotions will trouble you, Carfax. You are younger. You are an expert scientist. You must defeat this Arbiter, my friend. Find out why it has turned traitor! You promise?”

“I promise,” Carfax answered.

President Doyle relaxed and smiled. It was a smite that remained fixed. The President of the Earth was dead.

An hour later the assembled scientists, all of them leaders on the side of the Strugglers, filed into the main office to face their new President. They found Carfax at the great desk, coldly silent. He wailed until the group was fully assembled.

“Gentlemen, for seven years now we have been chained hand and foot by an invention of our own making—a metal dictator—and it bas betrayed us. We don’t know why, yet—but we do know that unless we defy this Arbiter, or find forces which can destroy it, we are a doomed people.”

Gascoyne shook his head.

“We cannot destroy it—at least not in the light of present scientific knowledge,” he said seriously. “We made the thing of a metal whose atoms interlock, remember. It is sealed forever. We made it foolproof—and to what end?”

“It is in our own hands to determine the end,” President Carfax retorted. “Unless we act, we’re finished. It is the very law of the Universe that there must be progress. Every day now brings us up against new difficulties. Sources of power are running low. New sources—intended for us by Nature—are barred, because the scientists that would develop them are prevented by this twelve-brained monstrosity. I tell you we must defeat it!”

Assured that he might be able to succeed, President Carfax went to work to prove his words. The Strugglers began anew the experiments that had been truncated by the death of Grenson.

They worked to within an ace of solving the secret of controllable fusion power. Carfax himself got far enough to extract a terrific amount of energy from a cube of copper. From incredibly small pieces of highly conducive metal he built up a model power plant, which, on a giant scale, would replace the already sadly worn and failing equipment from which the cities derived their light and power.

The other scientists explored different realms. Some reasoned out new methods of synthesis by which the fast waning supplies of oil and coal could be replaced. Another was convinced that he had transmutation of metals in his grip, with which the cities could be repaired as time went on. Yet another saw his chance of harnessing the waste energy of the sun on a large scale.

By degrees, under Carfax’s fine leadership, the determined scientists began to lay plans for the foundation of real Utopia.

Then the Arbiter struck! In a public speech it declared that the discoveries claimed, by President Vincent Carfax and his colleagues were nothing better than fancy. The Arbiter took sides with the Opposers and launched a small but savagely effective massacre against the Strugglers. In three days of desperate skirmish and slaughter Carfax and his followers were wiped out. Horley Dodd, leader of the Opposers, was killed too.

Not that it signified much. The Opposers were now in complete control, backed always by the implacable Arbiter.

Languid with victory, the Opposers lazily repaired the damage and then sat back to enjoy the comforts that Vincent Carfax had sworn were coming to an end. Apathy set in, born of lack of anything to accomplish. Even the Arbiter had nothing left to judge. The final vanquishing had shown to the Opposers that progress was a form of disease and entirely unnecessary. Better to relax and enjoy the fruits of labor.

The year 2048 passed away and was followed by a gap of somnolent, drifting years until 2060. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing done. Life was one great bliss of effortless satisfaction. The pioneers were lost in the mists of memory. Science, as an art; had ceased to be.

2060—2080—3000—and the Arbiter was still in faultless condition. Indeed it had been made indestructible.

Men and women died, children were born in limited members, grew up, each one knowing less of science than those before them. Astronomy, physics, mathematics? They were things the ancients had studied, said the history records. Somewhere in the smeared archives was the name of Selby Doyle.

Then in 3000 came the first warnings of the trouble Carfax had foreseen. The weather controlling machinery broke down, its central bearings worn out from continued inattention. In consequence the weather suddenly reverted to its former unreliable state and deluged whole continents of synthetic crops, destroyed a world’s food supply for a year.

Hurricanes tore across the world. Cities that were slow1y eroding through continued lack of repair eroded still more. That gray metal, so shiny at first, was cracking now, flaking under the continued onslaught of the elements.

A nervous flurry passed through the people. For the first time they were really alarmed. They rushed to the weather controlling station but could only stare helplessly at silent, useless machinery. Knowledge was dead.

This was not all. Trouble came thick and fast. With the failure of the crops, animals began to die off. The machines that tended them only functioned so long as they received—from still other machines—steady supplies of crops, specially developed for cattle consumption. When the supply stopped the machines stopped too, and nobody knew what to do about it.

The seed of disaster flourished with terrific speed, burst the foundations of the formerly calm cities and upset the tranquility of the pleasure-softened people. The collapse of the weather machinery presaged the overture to the end. Blinding cataracts of rain seeped through corroded roofs, the water short-circuiting the vital power and light machinery, already at breaking point through wear and tear.

Light and power failed in each city simultaneously. Famine reared over a disturbed, turmoiled world girt about with scurrying clouds. In desperation the people turned to the Arbiter, their leader.

But the Arbiter did nothing! It ignored the wild pleas hurled at it, marched out of the insecure laboratory that was its home and departed into the storm-lashed country. In the hour of need it had deserted them.

Panic seized the people at the realization. They fled from cities, whither they knew not, floundered in a mad exodus seeking food that was not there, cursing aloud to the heavens because synthesis had destroyed all natural growth and cultivation. Specialization had been proved a tragedy. Escape from a world that was too perfect became an obsession.

Gradually, inevitably, it was forced upon the people in those hours of mad struggle and desperation that they were face to face with certain extinction.

3010. Panic and struggle had gone. A strange calm was on the world. Cities, crumbled through disuse, ravaged by tempest and flood, poked blind, inquisitive spires to cleared skies. The sun crossed a sky that was, in the main, peaceful again. Climate had adjusted back to its normal vagaries.

But the soft winds of spring, the hot sun of summer, the cool chill of the fall, and the heavy snows of winter fell on bones that were scattered, white and forgotten, across Earth’s face. Alone in this world of emptiness, where natural grass and trees were trying once more to struggle through, there moved a cumbersome affair of metal, still cold and impartial, inhuman and relentless.

It climbed mountains. it prowled plains, it searched the ruins of cities, it brooded alone. The Arbiter.

3040 A.D. 3060 A.D. Then the aliens came.

They were strange, birdlike creatures, masters of space travel, lords of their own peculiar science. They came not as conquerors but with the intention of making friends with the third-world people. Their amazement was complete when they could not find a soul alive.

Then eventually they found the Arbiter. With their superior science they analyzed it, probed its deepest secrets, broke open the supposedly impregnable sheathing by four-dimensional tools.

The aliens remained on Earth for several days while the leading scientist, Cor Santu, pondered over the curious mystery of a lost race. From studying the dissembled Arbiter and the still remaining records of human events, transcribed by the Leader of Languages, he built up an explanation of the problem.

“Poor earthly scientists!” was his final comment. “Brilliant men indeed—but they forgot one thing. If a world or people are to survive it must have progress, even as we have found in our own experience. Wars are indeed evil and should be prevented. But dictators are worse. Right alone can prevail in the end.

“Selby Doyle and Vincent Carfax did not trust to Right, to a Universal mind control for guidance. No, they invented a machine of twelve mechanical brains to bring them peace. Such a device could not solve the problem. They forgot that a brain, in progressing, must expand. We have seen that, in any case, these Earth beings only used a fifth of their full brain capacity. That, later, would have developed. But in the machine they strangled it. Carfax and the surgeon Gascoyne made these mechanical brains fixed to what was, at that time, the present. To the Arbiter it was always the present! Being rigid metal the imprisoned brains could not expand, could not go a step beyond the day of their creation. That is why the Arbiter destroyed all things that suggested progress, and also because it feared any sign of progress would bring its power to an end. It was just another dictator.

“Such metal bound brains, living in a past world, could not visualize anything progressive. Conservationism gone mad! From the instant the brains were molded of metal they deteriorated. And having no human sentiment they destroyed without question. So when the great catastrophe came the Arbiter was powerless—as powerless as all the others who had not kept pace with progress. Nature must progress, or perish. That is evolution.”

Thereon Cor Santu ended his observations. But when his fleet of spaceships soared through the sunny sky towards fresh worlds of exploration, there was left behind a smashed, irreparable mass of melted cogs, wires, and movements. It was a rusting monument to a race that had died—a race that had fallen prey to laziness and surrendered its freedom to the ruthless whims of a machine.

Dr. Hannah Vang watched the cephalid turn the box over with his tentacles. She leaned forward, aware of the timer out of the corner of her eye without watching it. He was a smart beastie, she knew, and would get into the box to get the icthyoid in it. The question was whether he’d learned anything from last time. It was the same box, the same latching mechanism, everything as much the same as she could make it.

The seconds ticked by. Finally the box sprung open, and Hannah sighed; seventy-two-point-three seconds. It had taken seventy-one-point-eight before.

The squid-like alien did not remember. Probably it could not remember. And that was going to be a problem.

Delta Moncerotis Four was home to a human colony of about twenty thousand. No one knew how many of the native cephalids there were, in seven different major species. They swarmed through the oceans, some of them phosphorescing merrily. They mingled with each other, except for the ones that didn’t seem to. They used things to pry into other things, if the other things were good to eat.

The two things they did not seem to do were remembering and communicating with the alien monkeys who had invaded the part of their planet they weren’t using anyway.

Which would not have been important if the alien monkeys in question hadn’t wanted to gently but firmly kick the cephalids out of the waters around their city to build an isolated area for human-edible aquaculture.

Hannah was sure that having the cephalids where they belonged would be good for the environment and good for the colonists. There was so much planet left to survey that the cephalid interactions with local coraloids and icthyoids might vary extremely, and, from her marine xenobiologist standpoint, interestingly. She had chosen a largely watery planet for a reason. But with an entire planet worth of oceans for the cephalids to inhabit, it was hard to convince the colony government that the specific area around the city was absolutely necessary for the continued well-being of anyone in particular.

“We change planets when we settle,” the governor had told her. “That’s just how it is. If it was an intelligent species—”

“They’re tool-users!” Hannah had protested.

“They appear to be opportunistic tool-users. You know that as well as I do. They’ll pick something up and make it into a skewer or a pry bar, and then they’ll drop it in the silt and do the whole thing over again with a different piece of vegetation or rock next time they need the very same tool. If they could tell us they wanted to be where they are, we’d listen. We’ve had a good record of that since the third wave of colonies.”

“I know. It’s just—even if they don’t remember things like us, they have their own interactions with their environment, that we barely know about yet!”

The governor had sighed. “If you can get any form of communication with them, we’ll see what they have to say. But if we can’t talk to them, we’ll have to treat them like animals.” At her sad look, the governor said, “We treat animals better than we used to.”

Still, even with the aquaculture developments well into development, Hannah found herself more determined, not less, that she would find some way to communicate. This was not proving easy with a species that seemed to figure everything out as if for the first time.

On the other hand, it made them easy to keep entertained. She left the cephalid with a ring puzzle it had seen a dozen times before, busily trying the different ways to get the rings unhooked, and went home for the night.

When the door slid open, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice in the living room. “You’re in my house, and you look like me, so you must be my daughter—no, granddaughter?”

“That’s right, Granny Dee,” Lily said. “I’m your granddaughter. Lily.”

“But I don’t remember you,” said Dee thoughtfully. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned against the door, letting them go through the ritual without her. It was best when Dee was not interrupted once she’d pulled the implant loose. The long pause was always the same. “And I remember that we’ve gotten good at curing genetic memory problems, so this isn’t the normal deterioration with age.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Lily. “You were in an accident. But we’ve got a device that can help you. You just have to plug this little cord back into the socket here, see?”

The pause here was even longer, as it always was: Dee deciding whether she could trust her granddaughter, then agreeing, as always, to plug the augmenter back in. And then Dee’s voice was surer, just as analytical but with better data. “I’m sorry, Lily.”

“Hey, no problem.” Hannah decided that was her cue to enter, just in time to see Lily kissing her grandmother on the cheek. “Could happen to anyone.”

In fact, if it could happen to anyone, if it was common the way organic memory problems were, they might have a better design. Hannah had asked her mother three times if she didn’t want to move back to a larger colony, somewhere they had the personnel and equipment for a more permanent implant. But Dee’s response had been impatient.

“This is your home,” she’d said. “And it’s my home, and more than all that, it’s Lily’s home. I don’t want to be somewhere else. We’ll plug it back in and go along with our lives, you and me and Brian and Lily. We’ll get by.”

But Brian had left. He couldn’t stand dealing with Dee, and Hannah, when she was honest with herself, couldn’t entirely blame him. Her mother couldn’t live alone with the implant’s unreliability, and the colony wasn’t big enough to have facilities. But she wished things had been otherwise.

“It’s easy for you,” Brian had said, throwing his clothes in his suitcase.

Hannah had let her voice rise: “Easy?”

For a moment he was the old Brian, the man she’d married. The one she’d counted on for Lily’s sake. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean easy. I know it’s not; she’s your mother. I know it’s not. But when you come home and she’s pulled the implant loose, she lets you talk her through to plugging it back in again. I don’t have time to deal with the constable every time I get back from work before Lily gets home from school! I don’t have the energy, Hannah. You know I always liked Dee, but—”

“But,” Hannah agreed.

“The good memories are getting soiled with every conversation with the constable,” said Brian. “With every time I have to justify my existence in my own house again.”

Lily was like most of the colony kids, tough and talented, resilient, not afraid of work. She was not thrilled to have her father living across town. She was not thrilled to have to plug her grandmother back together every few days. But Hannah was proud to see that her daughter already understood that her life was not a series of endless thrills; Lily did what needed doing without a great deal of fuss about it.

Hannah tried not to brood over dinner with her mother and her daughter. “Still nothing from the squids, huh?” said Lily.

“Nothing,” said Hannah miserably. “I keep thinking I’ve got a chance at least, and then—” She wiggled her fingers in the air like tentacles. “They’re so clever. They’re so very good at figuring things out. If the other species are as clever as the pink ones, no wonder there’s sort of a squiddy feel to the whole ocean.”

“But they’re still not clever enough to signal back and forth,” said her mother.

“They’re not the right kind of clever. It’s not what they do,” said Hannah. “I’m really starting to think we’re on the brink of proving—to beyond a shadow of my doubt anyway—that this is just not what they do.”

“But it’s what we do,” said Lily.

Hannah sighed. “Exactly.”

And if the alien species they encountered couldn’t bend far enough to do things the human way, would the humans bend enough to see how they were doing them instead? It had worked with some of the larger colonies of lichen-like species on Gamma Centauri Four, but elsewhere results were mixed. And on Earth, dogs and cats were immensely more popular as pets than squid and lichen.

The cephalid did not grow easier over the next few weeks. Hannah watched her clever subject make his morning rounds. The pink tentacles groped along the tank, then slowed, delicately searching for something in the silt. Hannah’s heart skipped a beat: had he hidden something there for later? Would he remember after all?

But no; after churning up the silt so that it wafted into the water, the cephalid resumed his exploration of the tank. He had likely been looking for a snack, and that was the sort of terrain in which juicy tidbits lurked. Instinct, not memory. Or perhaps they should think of it as species memory rather than individual memory? In that case, they’d be relying upon generations upon generations of mutation to teach the cephalids how to communicate with humans. Not, Hannah thought, heartening.

She tried putting one of the remote machines into the tank with the cephalid and showing it how to do a few of the tricks she’d done. It repeated them, watching; there was something there that looked like short-term memory. But it didn’t last. No matter how many times she went back to the same puzzles, the cephalids didn’t recall how to work them after they’d been out of sight, or after even a few minutes had passed.

Her return home was smooth and peaceful; Dee’s implant had stayed plugged in, and she and Lily were frying tofu for dipping in nuoc leo sauce. Their hands were equally sure, and all the tofu came out soft in the middle and crisp on the outside, just perfect, just the way Hannah liked it, just the way she could never make it herself.

Hannah watched Lily doing the dishes. She was nearing the age when colony kids found apprenticeships or went offworld to study. She wanted to ask Lily what she hoped to do, but she was afraid of the answer. Instead, she sought the mundane. “Got any plans for the weekend?”

“I’m taking Grandma to the beach again tomorrow,” said Lily. “She liked it last time. And I have astronomy homework.”

“Are you enjoying astronomy?” Hannah tried not to hold her breath for the answer. Astronomers traveled too much to keep close ties to their families on colony worlds; time dilation made it impossible.

“It’s fine. Biology’s better,” said Lily. “Biology looks back at you.”

“I think the astronomers would say that about astronomy.”

Lily shrugged. “Then I guess I’m not an astronomer.”

Hannah laughed and hugged her. “Have a good time at the beach with Grandma, then.”

Lily smiled her self-contained little smile. “Oh, we will.”

Later that night, when Lily was off typing homework answers into her handheld, Hannah sat down on the couch across from her mother’s armchair. Dee paused her book and looked expectant.

“Do you remember that microscope you got me when I was a kid? Maybe five years younger than Lily, maybe more,” said Hannah dreamily. Dee made an encouraging noise, so Hannah went on: “It came with one of those books showing what you would expect to see, and I looked at a drop of water—we were on Alpha Moncerotis Six then, remember? And it was so different from in the book. The little unicellular creatures swimming around on Alpha Mon Six were totally different from the Earth ones.

“And I loved it, I just loved it. I begged cultures from anybody who’d give me one. Cheek cells, hairs from whatever animal they were studying, plants from the colony, anything. It was the best present.”

“Funny, you remembering that after all these years.”

Hannah glanced down automatically, but her mother followed her gaze. “No, the unit’s fine. I really think the solder will hold it awhile longer. I just don’t remember. I didn’t before the injury, and I never will. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten it, because you sound like it was a hugely important piece of your childhood—I wish I could remember. But it’s like that, honey. There’ll be something Lily thinks is the worst thing you ever did to ruin her life, or the best thing you ever did to make it work, and you will blink at her and say, ‘I did? Did I? Oh.’”

“I suppose that’s how it works,” said Hannah. “I remember her first steps, and of course she doesn’t. Why shouldn’t there be things that are the other way around.”

“There have to be, or she wouldn’t be her own person,” said Dee.

“Well, she’s certainly that,” said Hannah ruefully.

“Oh yes,” said Dee. “She’ll surprise you. That’s what children are for.”

A few weeks later, Hannah looked up from the cephalid tank and its computer and found Lily and Dee standing there watching her.

“We have a surprise for you,” said Lily.

“Can it wait, honey?” Hannah cast her mother an imploring glance, but Dee looked as implacable as Lily. “I’m in the middle of work here.”

“Is it going well?” asked Dee.

Hannah glared at her. “You know it’s not.”

“A break will be good for you. Come.”

Hannah walked with her mother through their ocean-side research complex. Lily danced ahead of them like a much younger child. Hannah sighed. “You know I like to spend time with both of you, Mom, but—”

“Hush, dear. Watch Lily.”

Lily was peeling off her clothes; she had her wetsuit underneath. She climbed onto the lip of one of the cephalid tanks. Hannah and Dee caught up with her.

“Lil,” said Hannah, “I don’t think now’s the time.”

“This is what I wanted to show you, Mom.”

Dee passed a tiny flashlight and a little black box up to her granddaughter, who jumped in the tank with it. Hannah stepped forward ineffectually, knowing she couldn’t stop her. “Oh, Mom.”

“It’s not my unit, it’s the spare,” said Dee. “They’re waterproof. Lily’s tried this before.”

“And if the spare gets damaged—”

“Relax. This is important. We knew you wouldn’t approve right away, or we wouldn’t have done it without you.”

Hannah shook her head. “That my mother and my daughter should use that line against me, yy.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “It’s not against you, it’s for you. Just watch.”

A curious cephalid was approaching Lily. She held out the leads to the memory unit. He probed them with one slender tentacle. Lily gently guided the leads into the cephalid’s mouth orifice.

“It’s got a light display,” said Dee. “I’ve been working on getting it connected to the output.”

“A light display?”

The cephalid engulfed the leads, and the light display made itself known: every diode in it blazed. Then they rippled in a random-looking series of patterns.

“We think he’s trying to remember how to work it,” said Dee. “We’re not sure. We thought you could figure it out.”

“An external memory unit with built-in communications,” said Hannah. “Oh my.”

“It was Lily’s idea. I told the nanites where to solder.”

Hannah took a breath and spoke gently. “Mom, you know that the cephalid may not be able to use your device as memory as we would understand it, right? Being able to light up the panel doesn’t necessarily mean being able to store thoughts as memory.”

“Oh, I know, dear. We thought of that. But we thought at least it’d be something to find out.”

“Oh yes,” Hannah agreed. “Definitely something to find out.”

Lily flashed the flashlight at the cephalid, three times. It recoiled. She flashed again, and the light display went dark. Then it lit up with a blue pattern, three times. Lily repeated it.

“She’s a natural,” said Hannah.

“Nature, nurture, whatever!” said Dee, grinning.

After a few more flash-patterns, Lily swam back to the lip of the tank. The cephalid made a green pattern at her, but she climbed out anyway.

“You can do it like a real experiment,” she said, shaking her black hair out. “You know how to design that sort of thing. Granny and I just got it together for you.”

“I’ll want to have a light bank set up,” said Hannah thoughtfully.

Lily pressed the tiny diode flashlight into her hand. “To begin with.”

Hannah turned to the cephalid and squeezed the trigger on the flashlight twice.

Two ripples of light appeared on the modified implant’s screen: first the blue pattern and then the green. “Hello again,” said Hannah aloud.

They had no idea what they’d done, she thought. If the cephalid could deal with an external electronic system, there had to have been something in their past that allowed for it. Something evolved? More likely something created and lost—and perhaps not by themselves? There would have to be a lot more xenoarchaeology before they would know who had been there before, and what they had taught the cephalids about the use of these tools.

But there would be time for that later. For now there was a conversation Hannah had wanted to have for a long time. Smiling at the retreating backs of her mother and daughter, she flashed the little flashlight in response.

I cannot say whether I am the victim of a very ingenious jest on the part of some of my wackier friends or whether I am just someone accidentally “in” on some top-secret business. But it happened, and it happened to me personally, while visiting Washington recently, just rubbernecking you know, looking at the Capitol and the rest of the big white buildings.

It was summer, fairly hot, Congress was not in session, nothing much was doing, most people vacationing. I was that day aiming to pay a visit to the State Department, not knowing that I couldn’t, for there was nothing public to see there unless it’s the imposing and rather martial lobby (it used to be the War Department building, I’m told). This I did not find out until I had blithely walked up the marble steps to the entrance, passed the big bronze doors, and wandered about in the huge lobby, wherein a small number of people, doubtless on important business, were passing in and out.

A guard, sitting near the elevators, made as if to start in my direction to find out who and what the deuce I wanted, when one of the elevators came down and a group of men hustled out. There were two men, evidently State Department escorts, neatly clad in gray double-breasted suits, with three other men walking with them. The three men struck me as a little odd; they wore long, black cloaks, big slouch hats with wide brims pulled down over their faces, and carried portfolios. They looked for all the world like cartoon representations of cloak-and-dagger spies. I supposed that they were some sort of foreign diplomats and, as they were coming directly toward me, stood my ground, determined to see who they were.

The floor was marble and highly polished. One of the men nearing me suddenly seemed to lose his balance. He slipped; his feet shot out from under him and he fell. His portfolio slid directly at my feet.

Being closest to him, I scooped up the folio and was the first to help raise him to his feet. Grasping his arm, I hoisted him from the floor—he seemed to be astonishingly weak in the legs; I felt almost that he was about to topple again. His companions stood about rather flustered, helplessly, their faces curiously impassive. And though the man I helped must have received a severe jolt, his face never altered expression.

Just then the two State Department men recovered their own poise, rushed about, and, getting between me and the man I had rescued, rudely brushed me aside and rushed their party to the door.

Now what bothers me is not the impression I got that the arm beneath that man’s sleeve was curiously woolly, as if he had a fur coat underneath the cloak (and this in a Washington summer!), and it’s not the impression that he was wearing a mask (the elastic band of which I distinctly remember seeing amidst the kinky, red, close-cropped hair of his head). No, it’s not that at all, which might be merely momentary misconstructions on my part. It’s the coin that I picked up off the floor where he’d dropped his portfolio.

I’ve searched through every stamp and coin catalogue I can find or borrow, and I’ve made inquiries of a dozen language teachers and professors, and nobody can identify that coin or the lettering around its circumference.

It’s about the size of a quarter, silvery, very light in weight but also very hard. Besides the lettering on it, which even the Bible Society, which knows a thousand languages and dialects, cannot decipher, there is a picture on one side and a symbol on the other.

The picture is the face of a man, but of a man with very curiously wolfish features: sharp canine teeth parted in what could be a smile; a flattened, broad, and somewhat protruding nose, more like a pug dog’s muzzle; sharp, widely spaced, vulpine eyes, and definitely hairy and pointed ears.

The symbol on the other side is a circle with latitude and longitude lines on it. Flanking the circle, one on each side, are two crescent-shaped moons.

I wish I knew just how far those New Mexico rocket experiments have actually gone.

As the early April sun made his cheeks flush, Michael didn’t know what to believe in anymore.

The birds bitched in the trees as he crossed through the middle of the park, which smelled of mud, dry grass, and strong marijuana. Two men wearing shirts and ties sat on a nearby bench on the rectangular perimeter, eating take-out lunches in Styrofoam boxes. A middle-aged blond man threw a Frisbee to his retriever in the centre of the park. Mid-morning traffic rushed by on all sides.

All this meant nothing to Michael, who glanced at his watch and sped up. The birds might vanish or change into other animals, the smells of spring might change to fall, the people might float away if the gravitational constant ended, and the speeding cars might suddenly have no traction.

He had spent enough time getting used to it but had never liked it. When Michael was growing up, he and other kids shared stories about where their parents were when the Wormhole Incident happened. Civilians didn’t know the details even now, except that scientists had discovered a wormhole in space, not far from Earth. Various interstellar agencies around the world had rushed in to study and capitalize on the discovery, but something had happened. One day, morning became night, and since then, things were always changing—time, eras, laws—the Conditions, as they called them. That was why Michael had checked the Weathering Change network before leaving the house, in case anything came up. The forecast had looked clear, but he knew they were rarely right.

But right now, he had only 15 minutes before his job interview and he was in a white-hot panic. That wasn’t enough time to walk the eight blocks to the office, and there wasn’t a bus around. Michael’s heart pounded faster. Sweat covered his knit brow, palms, and already-sweaty armpits. A smell of aftershave and cologne rose from him like steam.

Michael glanced down at his freshly ironed black dress pants to make sure he had not stepped in a puddle. They looked fine. The growling engine of an approaching bus made him look up.

Michael bore down on the far corner of the park where the bus pulled up to pick up a half-dozen passengers. Maybe he had finally had a lucky break. He quickly joined the line, boarded, paid, and shuffled with the crowd toward the rear of the bus.

The bus pulled away, passing the beer store and parking lot across the street.

A billboard at the far end of the lot advertised a tall, frosty mug full of ale that threatened to spill voluptuous foam over the lip of the glass. The ad read “In these times of change, remember that change is a good thing. Try Reef’s Crimson Ale.”

Michael wasn’t so sure that change was a good thing. But he needed rent money badly and hadn’t worked in a month. Now in his early 30s, the career crisis of finding a day job hit him each morning. This was his first interview call in months.

Michael jostled past a seated, overweight woman with a hair lip. Her dirty beige jogging pants had a stripe along each side. With her right foot, covered in a running shoe, she gently nudged a pudgy baby dressed in a red jumper and stuffed into a stroller. Michael narrowly avoided tripping over both of them. The woman coughed, her stale breath wafting up to him over the smells of sweat and soiled diapers.

Michael stumbled past a tall, black man with long dreadlocks listening to a yellow MP4 player. The man nodded and swayed his slim, muscular shoulders as Michael navigated to the back door and grabbed a metal railing with his right hand.

“Excuse me,” someone said timidly behind him.

Michael tried to stay to the right side of the door. A short Chinese man in a beige bomber vest squeezed by, brushing Michael with his pot belly.

A pressure loosened in Michael’s ears as though he had just come down from a higher altitude. He shook his head, squinted his eyes shut and opened them again.

The Chinese man rose into the air, a look of wide-eyed wonder on his face, scuffing Michael in the chest with his right shoe and flailing his hand against Michael’s cheek. The man latched onto the railing. Michael felt his own feet rise from the floor.

“That’s just the gravitational constant,” the voice of the bus driver crackled on the PA system in a thick Francophone accent. “Hold onto a bar and keep moving towards the back. Keep moving towards the back, please.”

As if to affirm the news, many passengers floated upward. The man listening to his MP4 did not notice, his thick dreadlocks rising around him like an umbrella. A skinny teenaged boy snored in the back, leaning over a side seat with his arms crossed and his jaw slack, oblivious to the fact that he would soon thud against the ceiling with the small of his back. A brunette with her hair tied back jostled to the door, chatting on her silver cell phone, which slipped from her hand and rose above her head.

The baby at the front of the bus giggled. Michael spotted the boy in the jumper floating feet-first toward the bus driver above everyone’s heads. His mother yelped, clutched his foot and yanked him back.

The bus stopped. The doors sighed open.

Michael pushed the stranger out by his wet soles. A few more passengers floated after him, clearing the space by the doors.

Two tall, fat men in their 40s floated into Michael’s field of vision.

“I’m telling you, Ralph,” said the man with a round, plump face, and a head of white and brown hair, wagging an index finger at Ralph. “I cannot believe Foreman still has the heavyweight title. Oh! Excuse me.”

Michael and the man traded a curt nod as Michael pulled himself up to the doors, and then traded a “Thank you” and a “You’re welcome.”

“The fight was pathetic!” the man continued. “The challenger was all over him the entire 12 rounds.”

Ralph, even larger than his companion, with a head of red hair, hovered toward a young couple sitting across from Michael. He tapped the metal bars on the top of the bus seats to keep moving.

“Didn’t he have the time problem?” asked Ralph.

The first man nodded. They hovered further toward the back, their baritone voices louder than the murmur of other conversations. “Halfway through the fight, it was the tenth round, then the ninth, then the eleventh. When they got back to round seven, Foreman looked rougher than ever. He’s just too old. They should’ve tested him for time steroid use.”

“I don’t know,” said Ralph, drifting toward the ceiling, much to the dismay of the seated passengers beneath him, who visibly stiffened at the sight of a 250-pound man hovering overhead. “He got the title for a reason.”

The bus turned north up a main street and toward the downtown business district. Michael rang the bell clumsily using the string by the door. The bus stopped, the doors opened, and he floated out above the street, which was like a busy river in a canyon of tall, glassy office buildings. A mob of bus passengers boarded around him, a shadow passing across them.

Michael looked up.

A small sports car, a red Jetta, floated overhead, probably an older model without non-gravity adjusters. People who buy used cars that aren’t safetied don’t understand the gravity of the situation, he thought.

Michael held the edge of the roof of the bus shelter he had floated toward and shoved himself from there, at a height of eight feet from the sidewalk, from light post to light post down the street. Around him, other commuters floated and negotiated the air. A newspaper flapped by, briefly revealing a color photo of an anemic blonde woman in a bikini, followed by a real-life French poodle with a bouffant hairdo and a tuft of tail. An elderly woman with a similar haircut did the front crawl behind the dog, yelling with each stroke. Michael thought it was like watching someone try to fly in a dream.

Michael passed her, reached a phone booth, grabbed a telephone post with both hands, and awkwardly pulled himself to the busy sidewalk. He was two feet from touching down when a cottony pressure returned in his ears.

Michael plummeted to the ground, landing on his right leg and arm and his rear.

Around him, similar accidents occurred in a cacophony of sounds—impact, curses and laughter. The lady with the poodle landed on the two large bus passengers, who were still discussing boxing.

A man screamed in a harsh, wailing note. A thunderous sound of crashing metal, plastic and glass came from down the block, shaking the sidewalk and rattling the glass of the bus shelters. Police sirens sounded in the distance.

Without looking back, Michael knew he had been lucky. Gravitational flux was a major cause of hundreds of accidental deaths every year, according to the All States polls.

His right shin hurt like hell and his forearm was scraped but not bleeding. Michael noted with disdain that he had scraped the elbow of his lucky maroon shirt. He brushed off the front of his pants, rose, assured his side satchel was still strung over his left shoulder, and walked toward the office.

“Good day, Mr. Atkinson,” said the man behind the desk. He had a receding hairline and a watermelon-shaped head. “I’m Jeremiah Steiner. Have a seat.”

Michael entered the office doorway. Steiner stood, one large hand on the back of his brush cut, his other hand out, indicating the chairs in front of him. He wore a baby-blue suit, a mustard-yellow dress shirt, and a thin, orange tie with a narrow metal clip.

Michael thanked him. They shook hands perfunctorily, and Michael sat in the chair on the right.

An impressive window took up the entire wall behind the desk, showcasing a breathtaking view of the city skyline. Rows of glassy buildings marched in all directions. The streets 15 stories below bustled with traffic and pedestrians the sizes of ants. To the left was a brown, 20-storey, box-shaped building with a logo, “Intel HR”, in large, thick, white letters at the top. To the right stood a row of skyscrapers whose silvery windows reflected the blue sky. In the distance, beyond the buildings, stood Parliament Hill. Behind that, the rolling hills of Hullatineau faded into the cobalt-colored horizon.

A tall, oak bookcase with rows of hardcover books with golden lettering on the spines stood to the left of Steiner’s desk. A mini-fridge stood in the other corner, along with a small magazine-and-newspaper-cluttered table and two chairs.

“So, Michael—is it okay if I call you that?” Steiner asked.

“Uh, yes,” Michael said quickly.

Steiner sat down, rubbed his palms together, and stared intently at him.

“Good. Care for anything to drink? Don’t be shy to speak up; I’m a little hard of hearing.”

“No thank you,” said Michael.

“Suit yourself,” said Steiner, reaching across the oak desk for a coffee mug. An aqua-colored pad lay in front of him, a phone to the left. In and Out files sat side-by-side on the right. A pile of manila folders and papers sat in the middle. Beside the phone stood a large, ornately framed photograph facing outward; Steiner beamed, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, his thick arm around a beaming woman with unnaturally orange hair, heavy red lipstick, and tight, black leather pants.

Steiner inhaled deeply, put his hands on the desk, scanning the papers quickly and, Michael thought, for the first time. After a moment, Steiner looked up again.

Michael was aware of silence, the smell of cigarettes and a cloying, musky cologne from the 1980s, a vintage brand named Brut.

“Why do you want to work for us?” Steiner asked. “What are some of the skills you can offer Time Company Incorporated?”

“My communications contracts have involved creating products, organizing events, raising the profiles of organizations, updating systems,” Michael said. “Between that and my financial and legal credentials, I have a lot to offer.”

“A lot to offer,” Steiner replied.

Michael was unsure whether his tone was mockery.

The man behind the desk nodded, his bulbous chin trying to escape from his tight collar. His bloated, pink face had a shaving nick just below the right ear. “You know what we do here, Mr. Acheson?”

LETTER OF RECORD, BLAINE TO McCARRAN, DATED AUGUST 10, 1951.

Mr. Cleveland McCarran

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Washington, D.C.

Jason Andrew lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Lisa. He is an associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and member of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. By day, he works as a mild-mannered technical writer. By night, he writes stories of the fantastic and occasionally fights crime. As a child, Jason spent his Saturdays watching the Creature Feature classics and furiously scribbling down stories; his first short story, written at age six, titled ‘The Wolfman Eats Perry Mason’ was rejected and caused his Grandmother to watch him very closely for a few years. You can read more about him at www.jasonbandrew.com.

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was a Russian American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.

John Gregory Betancourt is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and mysteries. He is the author of four Star Trek novels and the new Chronicles of Amber prequel series (to Roger Zelazy’s “Amber” books), as well as a dozen original novels, including The Blind Archer, Johnny Zed, Rememory, and Master of Dragons. He has published more than 100 short stories. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as Writer’s Digest, The Washington Post, and Amazing Stories.

Ray Cluley is the co-editor of the anthology Darker Minds (with Gary McMahon). His short fiction has appeared in such diverse markets as Interzone, Black Static, Black Gate, Not One Of Us, and Best Horror of the Year.

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered states. In his later works Dick’s thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.

John Russell Fearn (1908–1960) was a British author and one of the first British writers to appear in American pulp science fiction magazines. Fearn was a prolific writer who wrote Westerns and crime fiction as well as science fiction. His writing appeared under numerous pseudonyms. He wrote series like Adam Quirke, Clayton Drew, Golden Amazon, and Herbert. At times these drew on the pulp traditions of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

“David Grinnell” is a pseudonym used by Donald A. Wollheim. See his entry for more info!

Harry Harrison is an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973). Before becoming an editor, Harrison started in the science fiction field as an illustrator, notably with EC Comics’ two science fiction comic books, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. He has used house names such as Wade Kaempfert and Philip St. John to edit magazines, and has published other fictions under the names Felix Boyd, Leslie Charteris, and Hank Dempsey. Harrison is now much better known for his writing, particularly his humorous and satirical science fiction, such as the Stainless Steel Rat series and the novel Bill the Galactic Hero (which satirises Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers).

Harry’s contribution to The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack is the alternate, 1961 magazine version of his novel, Planet of the Damned.

Larry Hodges is an active member of SFWA with numerous short story sales. He was the 2010 Garden State Horror Writers Short Story Competition Grand Prize Winner. He’s a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a full-time writer with four books and over 1300 published articles. Visit him at www.larryhodges.org.

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Kuttner was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the “Lovecraft Circle”, a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft.

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) was the nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Wildside Press has many of his works in print.

Stephen Marlowe (born Milton Lesser, 1928–2008) was an American author of science fiction, mystery novels, and fictional autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is best known for his detective character Chester Drum, whom he created in the 1955 novel The Second Longest Night.

Marissa writes: “Like many people who write fiction for a living, I’m a good deal more comfortable making things up about other people who don’t exist than I am figuring out what to say about myself. I’ve sold enough short stories at this point that I have a standard one-sentence biography: ‘Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer who lives in Minnesota with two large men and one small dog.’ This is true but not perhaps optimally illuminating!”

Katherine Anne MacLean (born January 22, 1925) is an American science fiction author best known for her short fiction of the 1950s which examined the impact of technological advances on individuals and society.

James K. Moran writes: “My horror story, “Glimpses through the trees,” which appeared in Curtain Call: The Rolling Darkness Revue 2010, was included by editor Ellen Datlow in her ‘Honourable Mentions’ list for Best Horror of the Year 3. My fiction has also appeared in the Algonquin Roundtable Review and the Peter F. Yacht Club, while my poetry has appeared in various Canadian literary magazines.

Edgar Pangborn (1909–1976) was an American mystery, historical, and science fiction author. For the first 20 years of Edgar’s writing career, which started when he was 21, Edgar wrote what he referred to as “literary hackwork” for the pulp magazines. His serious work began in 1951, with the publication of his first science fiction story, “Angel’s Egg”, in Galaxy Science Fiction. By 1954 Edgar was well-known and his second science fiction novel, A Mirror for Observers won the International Fantasy Award.

Carmelo Rafalá’s stories have appeared in Jupiter, Estronomicon, Neon Literary Journal, and the anthologies The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories (Three Legged Fox Books) and Rocket Science (Mutation Press). Carmelo is Senior Editor for Immersion Press and lives on the south coast of England with his wife and daughter.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

George H. Scithers won the Hugo Award 4 times—twice for editing Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and twice for editing Amra, a sword & sorcery fan magazine. He went on to edit Amazing Stories and Weird Tales (with Darrell Schweitzer and John Gregory Betancourt).

James C. Stewart appeared in the debut issue of Paradox: The Magazine of Historical & Speculative Fiction. He’s currently seeking a publisher for two novels, and is at home working on his third. He lives in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Theodore Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo; 1918–1985) was an American science fiction and horror author. His most famous novel is More Than Human (1953).

Edwin Charles Tubb (1919–2010) was a British writer of science fiction, fantasy and western novels. The author of over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, Tubb is best known for The Dumarest Saga (US collective title: Dumarest of Terra) an epic science-fiction saga set in the far future. Michael Moorcock wrote “His reputation for fast-moving and colourful SF writing is unmatched by anyone in Britain.”

Mary A. Turzillo is an American science fiction writer noted primarily for short stories. She won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2000 for her story “Mars is No Place for Children,” (published originally in Science Fiction Age), and her story “Pride,” (published originally in Fast Forward 1), was a Nebula award finalist for best short story of 2007. Her first novel, An Old Fashioned Martian Girl was serialized in Analog magazine in 2004.

She was formerly a professor of English at Kent State University, where she wrote articles and several books of science fiction criticism under the name Mary T. Brizzi, including Reader’s Guide to Anne McCaffrey and Reader’s Guide to Philip Jose Farmer. She attended the Clarion Workshop in 1985, and she founded the Cajun Sushi Hamsters writing workshop in Cleveland, OH.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007) was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical liberal intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Cynthia Ward was born in Oklahoma and lived in Maine, Spain, Germany, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Tucson before moving to the Los Angeles area. A 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, she has sold stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and numerous other anthologies and magazines. Cynthia’s reviews appear regularly on Amazon.com and SciFiWire.com and irregularly in other websites and publications. She is working on her first novel, a futuristic mystery tentatively titled Stone Rain.

Donald Allen Wollheim (1914–1990) was an American science fiction editor, publisher (of DAW Books), writer, and fan. As an author, he published under his own name as well as under pseudonyms, including David Grinnell. A founding member of the Futurians, he was a leading influence on science fiction development and fandom in the 20th century United States.

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack is copyright © 2012 by Wildside Press LLC.

www.wildsidepress.com

All rights reserved.

Cover art copyright © 2012 by Diversipixel/Fotolia.

“Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads,” by Mary A. Turzillo, originally appeared in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. Copyright © 2007 by Mary A. Turzillo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Food for Friendship,” by E.C. Tubb, is copyright © 1956, 2003 by E.C. Tubb. Reprinted by permission of Cosmos Literary Agency.

“The Life Work of Professor Muntz,” by Murray Leinster, originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1949.

“Tiny and the Monster,” by Theodore Sturgeon, originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1947.

“Beyond Lies the Wub,” by Philip K. Dick, originally appeared in Planet Stories, July 1952.

“Pictures Don’t Lie,” by Katherine MacLean, originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, August, 1951.

“The Big Trip Up Yonder,” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1954.

“Storm Warning,” by Donald A. Wollheim, originally appeared in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1942.

“The Application of Discipline,” by Jason Andrew, originally appeared in School Days: Tales with an Edge. Copyright © 2010 by Jason Andrew. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tom the Universe,” by Larry Hodges, originally appeared as an audiobook in Escape Pod, April 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Larry Hodges. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Wild Seed,” by Carmelo Rafalá, originally appeared in The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories. Copyright © 2008 by Carmelo Rafalá. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tabula Rasa,” by Ray Cluley, originally appeared in Not One Of Us #46 (October 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Ray Cluley. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Eyes of Thar,” by Henry Kuttner, originally appeared in Planet Stories, Fall 1944.

“Regenesis,” by Cynthia Ward, originally appeared in Nature. Copyright © 2000 by Cynthia Ward. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Not Omnipotent Enough,” by George H. Scithers and John Gregory Betancourt, is original to this publication. Copyright © 2012 by John Gregory Betancourt.

“Plato’s Bastards,” by James C. Stewart is copyright © 2011 by James C. Stewart. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Pen Pal,” by Milton Lesser, originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951.

“The Arbiter,” by John Russell Fearn, originally appeared in Startling Stories, May 1947. Reprinted by permission of Cosmos Literary Agency.

“The Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy,” by Marissa Lingen, originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine #39. Copyright © 2009 by Marissa Lingen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Top Secret,” by David Grinnell (pseudonym of Donald A. Wollheim) originally appeared in Sir!, April 1948.

“Living Under the Conditions,” by James K. Moran, originally appeared in On Spec #69 (Summer 2007). Copyright © 2007 by James K. Moran. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sense of Obligation,” by Harry Harrison, originally appeared in Analog in 1961. It was later published in revised book form as Planet of the Damned.

“Angel’s Egg,” by Edgar Pangborn, originally appeared in Galaxy, June 1951.

“Youth,” by Isaac Asimov, originally appeared in Space Science Fiction, May 1952.