In 1953 the first volume of Star Science Fiction Stories ap­peared. It was a curious, hybrid publishing format, not quite a magazine and yet not very like the ordinary vari­eties of book. Its plan was simply to find enough of the best science fiction stories that could be had and to print them; and the one editorial rule established was that they must never have been published before.

It is only rules of that sort—mechanical rules, rules which admit of a simple yes-no answer—that can rigor­ously be applied in the selection of science fiction stories. Every other rule begins with a numerous class of exceptions. Science fiction is not stories about the future. Or about space. Or about technology. It is all of these things, and more than them. Science fiction lies in the eye of the beholder. In fact, said the introduction to that first volume of Star, it is a limitless field, as spacious as space itself. Publisher, critic, and a good many readers have a tendency to think of science fiction as one of the "categories" of publishing, in the specific sense of the term, like detective stories and Westerns. But unless you can think of The Big Sky as a Western or Hamlet as a whodunit, you can hardly class in a tight little group so widely variant an assortment of stories as justly fit under the common label of science fiction.

Gerald Kersh writes much and very well, and Star's pleasure in having a Kersh to offer is one that has been shared by most of the best magazines in the world. Yet no matter where he appears, in sober, mass-circulation company or in small and select, the man has always his own flavor. He tastes of the wry, he exudes the not-quite-probable. This is the bouquet of the science fictioneer; and when Kersh turns to our sort of subject matter he shapes it with a sure hand—as you can see for yourself in—

Several thousand officers and privates of the U. S. Army who fought in Europe in World War II can bear witness to certain basic facts in this otherwise incredible story.

Let me refresh my witnesses' memories:

The Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary sailed from Greenock, at the mouth of the river Clyde, on July 6th, 1945, bound for New York, packed tight with passengers. No one who made that voyage can have forgotten it: there were fourteen thousand men aboard; a few ladies; and one dog. The dog was a gentle, intelligent German shepherd, saved from slow and painful death by a young American officer in Holland. I was told that this brave animal, exhausted, and weak with hunger, had tried to jump over a high barbed-wire fence, and had got caught in the barbs on the top strand, where it hung for days, unable to go forward or backward. The young officer helped it down, and so the dog fell in love with the man, and the man fell in love with the dog. Pets are not allowed on troopships. Still, the young officer managed to get his dog on board. Rumor has it that his entire com­pany swore that they would not return to the United States without the dog, so that the authorities were per­suaded to stretch a point, just for once; this is what Kipling meant when he referred to The Power Of The Dog. Everyone who sailed on the Queen Mary from Greenock on July 6th, 1954, remembers that dog. It came aboard in a deplorable state, arching its bedraggled back to ease its poor injured stomach, and when you stroked it, you felt its skeleton under the sickly, staring coat. After about three days of affectionate care—half a hundred strong hungry men begged or stole bits of meat for its sake—the dog began to recover. By July 11th, when the Queen Mary docked in New York, the dog was taking a dog's interest in a soft rubber ball with which several officers were playing on the sun deck.

I bring all this back into memory to prove that I was there, as a war correspondent, on my way to the Pacific. Since I was wearing battledress and a beard, I also must have been conspicuous, that voyage. And the secret school of illicit crapshooters must remember me with nostalgic affection: I arrived in New York with exactly fifteen cents, and had to borrow five dollars from an amiable Congre­gationalist minister named John Smith, who also will testify to the fact that I was on board. If further evidence were needed, a lady nurse, Lieutenant Grace Dimichele, of Vermont, took my photograph as we came into port.

But in the excitement of that tremendous moment, when thousands of men were struggling and jostling, laughing and crying, and snapping cameras at the New York skyline, which is the most beautiful in the world, I lost Corporal Cuckoo. I have made exhaustive inquiries as to his whereabouts, but that extraordinary man had dis­appeared like a puff of smoke.

Surely, there must be scores of men who retain some memory of Cuckoo, whom they must have seen hundreds and hundreds of times on the Queen Mary between July 6th and July 11th, 1945?

He was a light-haired man of medium height, but he must have weighed at least a hundred and ninety pounds, for he was ponderously built, and had enormously heavy bones. I beg my fellow passengers to remember, if they can. He had watery eyes of greenish-gray, and limped a little on his right leg. His teeth were powerful—large, square and slightly protruding; but generally he kept them covered with his thick, curiously wrinkled lips. People in general are unobservant, I know, but no one who saw Corporal Cuckoo could fail to remember his scars. There was a frightful indentation in his skull, between his left eyebrow and his right ear. When I first noticed him, I remembered an ax murder at which I shuddered many years ago when I was a crime reporter. He must have an extraordinary constitution if he lives to walk around with a scar like that, I thought. His chin and throat were puckered scar tissue such as marks the place where flesh has been badly burned and well healed. Half of his right ear was missing and close by there was another scar, from cheekbone to mastoid. The back of his right hand appeared to have been hacked with a knife —I counted at least four formidable cuts, all old and white and deep. He conveyed this impression: that a long time ago, a number of people had got together to butcher him with hatchets, sabers, and knives, and that in spite of their most determined efforts he had survived. For all his scars were old. Yet the man was young—not more than thirty-five, as I guessed.

He filled me with a burning curiosity. One of you must remember him! He went about, surly and unsociable, smoking cigarettes which he never took out of his mouth—he smoked them down and spat the ends out only when the fire touched his lips. That, I thought, must be why his eyes are so watery. He moped about, thinking, or brooding. He was particularly addicted to loitering on the stairs and lurking in dark corners. I made tentative in­quiries about him around the decks; but just then everyone was passionately interested in an officer who looked like Spencer Tracy. But in the end I found out for myself.

In Cyril Kornbluth was a sharp tooth, just right for puncturing, and he used it with wit and passion. His stories had bite. He was sensitive toward hypoc­risy and remorseless to poses ... and it is all very well, he kept saying through his life, to invent these faster-than-light radium-bearinged plastic dishwash­where he might have gone; but he died young. This a writer, Cyril grew and grew. There is no telling ers; but let us not forget that they will be paid for overs, who are in the doghouse with their wives. As on the installment plan by fretful men with hang-is almost his last story. He wrote it when he was thirty-five, and before it saw print he was dead.

It came to pass in the third quarter of the fiscal year that the Federal Reserve Board did raise the rediscount rate and money was tight in the land. And certain bankers which sate hi New York sent to Ben Graffis in Hollywood a writing which said, Money is tight in the land so let Poopy Panda up periscope and fire all bow tubes.

Whereupon Ben Graffis made to them this moan:

O ye bankers, Poopy Panda is like unto the child of my flesh and you have made of him a devouring dragon. Once was I content with my studio and my animators when we did make twelve Poopy Pandas a year; cursed be the day when I floated a New York loan. You have commanded me to make feature-length cartoon epics and I did obey, and they do open at the Paramount to sensational grosses, and we do re-release them to the nabes year on year, without end. You have commanded me to film live adventure shorts and I did obey, and in the cutting room we do devilishly splice and pull frames and flop neg­atives so that I and my cameras are become bearers of false witness and men look upon my live adventure shorts and say lo! these beasts and birds are like unto us in their laughter, wooing, pranks, and con­tention. You have commanded that I become a mountebank for that I did build Poopy Pandaland, whereinto men enter with their children, their silver, and their wits, and wherefrom they go out with their children only, sandbagged by a thousand catch-penny engines; even this did I obey. You have commanded that Poopy Panda shill every weekday night on television between five and six for the Poopy Panda Pals, and even this did I obey, though Poopy Panda is like unto the child of my flesh.

But O ye bankers, this last command will I never obey.

Whereupon the bankers which sate in New York sent to him an­other writing that said, Even so, let Poopy Panda up periscope and fire all bow tubes, and they said, Remember, boy, we hold thy paper.

And Ben Graffis did obey.

He called unto him his animators and directors and cameramen and writers, and his heart was sore but he dissembled and said:

In jest you call one another brainwashers, forasmuch as you addle the heads of children five hours a week that they shall buy our spon­sors' wares. You have fulfilled the prophecies, for is it not written in the Book of the Space Merchants that there shall be spherical trusts? And the Poopy Panda Pals plug the Poopy Panda Magazine, and the Poopy Panda Magazine plugs Poopy Pandaland, and Poopy Pandaland plugs the Poopy Panda Pals. You have asked of the Motiva­tional Research boys how we shall hook the little bastards and they have told ye, and ye have done it. You identify the untalented kid viewers with the talented kid performers, you provide in Otto Clodd a bumbling father image to be derided, you furnish in Jackie Whipple an idealized big brother for the boys and a sex-fantasy for the more precocious girls. You flatter the cans off the viewers by ever saying to them that they shall rule the twenty-first century, nor mind that those who shall in good sooth come to power are doing their homework and not watching television programs. You have created a liturgy of opening hymn and closing benediction, and over all hovers the spirit of Poopy Panda urging and coaxing the viewers to buy our sponsors' wares.

And Ben Graffis breathed a great breath and looked them not in the eye and said to them, Were it not a better thing for Poopy Panda to coax and urge no more, but to command as he were a god?

And the animators and directors and cameramen and writers were sore amazed and they said one to the other, This is the bleeding end, and the bankers which sit in New York have flipped their wigs. And one which was an old animator said to Ben Graffis, trembling, O chief, never would I have stolen for thee Poopy Panda from the Win­nie the Pooh illustrations back in twenty-nine had I known this was in the cards, and Ben Graffis fired him.

Whereupon another which was a director said to Ben Graffis, O chief, the thing can be done with a two-week buildup, and Ben Graffis put his hands over his face and said, Let it be so.

And it came to pass that on the Friday after the two-week buildup, in the closing quarter-hour of the Poopy Panda Pals, there was a spe­cial film combining live and animated action as they were one.

And in the special film did Poopy Panda appear enhaloed, and the talented kid performers did do him worship, and Otto Clodd did trip over his feet whilst kneeling, and Jackie Whipple did urge in manly and sincere wise that all the Poopy Panda Pals out there in television-land do likewise, and the enhaloed Poopy Panda did say in his lova­ble growly voice, Poop-poop-poopy.

And adoration ascended from thirty-seven million souls.

And it came to pass that Ben Graffis went into his office with his animators and cameramen and directors and writers after the show and said to them, It was definitely a TV first, and he did go to the bar.

Whereupon one which was a director looked at Who sate behind the desk that was the desk of Ben Graffis and he said to Ben Graffis, O chief, it is a great gag but how did the special effects boys manage the halo?

And Ben Graffis was sore amazed at Who sate behind his desk and he and they all did crowd about and make as if to poke Him, whereupon He in His lovable growly voice did say, Poop-poop-poopy, and they were not.

And certain unclean ones which had gone before turned unbeliev­ing from their monitors and said, Holy Gee, this is awful. And one which was an operator of marionettes turned to his manager and said, Pal, if Graffis gets this off the ground we're dead. Whereat a great and far-off voice was heard, saying, Poop-poop-poopy, and it was even so; and the days of Poopy Panda were long in the land.

Alfred Bester occupies a chair of honor on Holi­day's writing staff. He has to his credit countless radio scripts and a bright and astonishing novel of today's television world called Who He? Almost the only first-rate television play on a science fiction theme—"Murder and the Android"—came from his brain, and so did the remarkable, the trail-blazing, the award-winning—in a word, the unique The De­molished Man. He does everything, you see. And he has a touch of his own. When it comes to a time-travel story, most science fiction writers may content themselves with traveling to the future, or to the past, or perhaps sidewise to the parallel worlds of "if" that lie around us. Not Bester. He goes in a direction discovered by himself; and thus it is that he takes us along on this strange—

This one wasn’t the last war or a war to end war. They called it the War for the American Dream. General Carpenter struck that note and sounded it constantly. There are fighting generals (vital to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital to a war). General Carpenter was a master of public relations. Forthright and FourSquare, he had ideals as high and as understandable as the mottoes on money. In the mind of America he was the army, the administration, the nation’s shield and sword and stout right arm. His ideal was the American Dream.

“We are not fighting for money, for power, or for world domination,” General Carpenter announced at the Press Association dinner.

“We are fighting solely for the American Dream,” he said to the 137th Congress.

“Our aim is not aggression or the reduction of nations to slavery,” he said at the West Point Annual Officer’s Dinner.

“We are fighting for the meaning of civilization,” he told the San Francisco Pioneers’ Club.

“We are struggling for the ideal of civilization; for culture, for poetry, for the Only Things Worth Preserving,” he said at the Chicago Wheat Pit Festival.

“This is a war for survival,” he said. “We are not fighting for ourselves, but for our dreams; for the Better Things in Life which must not disappear from the face of the earth.”

America fought. General Carpenter asked for one hundred million men. The army was given one hundred million men. General Carpenter asked for ten thousand H-Bombs. Ten thousand H-Bombs were delivered and dropped. The enemy also dropped ten thousand H-Bombs and destroyed most of America’s cities.

“We must dig in against the hordes of barbarism,” General Carpenter said. “Give me a thousand engineers.”

One thousand engineers were forthcoming, and a hundred cities were dug and hollowed out beneath the rubble.

“Give me five hundred sanitation experts, three hundred traffic managers, two hundred air-conditioning experts, one hundred city managers, one thousand communication chiefs, seven hundred personnel experts. . .“

The list of General Carpenter’s demand for technical experts was endless. America did not know how to supply them.

“We must become a nation of experts,” General Carpenter informed the National Association of American Universities. “Every man and woman must be a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and sharpened by your training and education to win the fight for the American Dream.”

“Our Dream,” General Carpenter said at the Wall Street Bond Drive Breakfast, “is at one with the gentle Greeks of Athens, with the noble Romans of . . . er Rome. It is a dream of the Better Things in Life. Of music and art and poetry and culture. Money is only a weapon to be used in the fight for this dream. Ambition is only a ladder to climb to this dream. Ability is only a tool to shape this dream.”

Wall Street applauded. General Carpenter asked for one hundred and fifty billion dollars, fifteen hundred ambitious dollar-a-year men, three thousand able experts in mineralogy, petrology, mass production, chemical warfare and air-traffic time study. They were delivered. The country was in high gear. General Carpenter had only to press a button and an expert would be delivered.

In March of A.D. 2112 the war came to a climax and the American Dream was resolved, not on any one of the seven fronts where millions of men were locked in bitter combat, not in any of the staff headquarters or any of the capitals of the warring nations, not in any of the production centers spewing forth arms and supplies, but in Ward T of the United States Army Hospital buried three hundred feet below what had once been St. Albans, New York.

Ward T was something of a mystery at St. Albans. Like any army hospital, St. Albans was organized with specific wards reserved for specific injuries. All right arm amputees were gathered in one ward, all left arm amputees in another. Radiation burns, head injuries, eviscerations, secondary gamma poisonings and so on were each assigned their specific location in the hospital organization. The Army Medical Corps had designated nineteen classes of combat injury which included every possible kind of damage to brain and tissue. These used up letters A to S. What, then, was in Ward T?

No one knew. The doors were double locked. No visitors were permitted to enter. No patients were permitted to leave. Physicians were seen to arrive and depart. Their perplexed expressions stimulated the wildest speculations but revealed nothing. The nurses who ministered to Ward T were questioned eagerly but they were close-mouthed.

There were dribs and drabs of information, unsatisfying and self-contradictory. A charwoman asserted that she had been in to clean up and there had been no one in the ward. Absolutely no one. Just two dozen beds and nothing else. Had the beds been slept in? Yes. They were rumpled, some of them. Were there signs of the ward being in use? Oh yes. Personal things on the tables and so on. But dusty, kind of. Like they hadn’t been used in a long time.

Public opinion decided it was a ghost ward. For spooks only.

But a night orderly reported passing the locked ward and hearing singing from within. What kind of singing? Foreign language, like. What language? The orderly couldn’t say. Some of the words sounded like ... well, like: Cow dee on us eager tour.

Public opinion started to run a fever and decided it was an alien ward. For spies only.

St. Albans enlisted the help of the kitchen staff and checked the food trays. Twenty-four trays went in to Ward T three times a day. Twenty-four came out. Sometimes the returning trays were emptied. Most times they were untouched.

Public opinion built up pressure and decided that Ward T was a racket. It was an informal club for goldbricks and staff grafters who caroused within. Cow de on us eager tour indeed!

For gossip, a hospital can put a small town sewing circle to shame with ease, but sick people are easily goaded into passion by trivia. It took just three months for idle speculation to turn into downright fury. In January, 2112, St. Albans was a sound, well-run hospital. By March, 2112, St. Albans was in a ferment, and the psychological unrest found its way into the official records. The percentage of recoveries fell off. Malingering set in. Petty infractions increased. Mutinies flared. There was a staff shake-up. It did no good. Ward T was inciting the patients to riot. There was another shake-up, and another, and still the unrest fumed.

The news finally reached General Carpenter’s desk through official channels.

“In our fight for the American Dream,” he said, “we must not ignore those who have already given of themselves. Send me a Hospital Administration expert.” The expert was delivered. He could do nothing to heal St. Albans. General Carpenter read the reports and broke him.

“Pity,” said General Carpenter, “is the first ingredient of civilization. Send me a Surgeon General.”

A Surgeon General was delivered. He could not break the fury of St. Albans and General Carpenter broke him. But by this time Ward T was being mentioned in the dispatches.

“Send me,” General Carpenter said, “the expert in charge of Ward T.”

St. Albans sent a doctor, Captain Edsel Dimmock. He was a stout young man, already bald, only three years out of medical school but with a fine record as an expert in psychotherapy. General Carpenter liked experts. He liked Dimmock. Dimmock adored the general as the spokesman for a culture which he had been too specially trained to seek up to now, but which he hoped to enjoy after the war was won.

“Now look here, Dimmock,” General Carpenter began. “We’re all of us tools, today—sharpened and hardened to do a specific job. You know our motto: A job for everyone and everyone on the job. Somebody’s not on the job at Ward T and we’ve got to kick him Out. Now, in the first place, what the hell is Ward T?”

Dimmock stuttered and fumbled. Finally he explained that it was a special ward set up for special combat cases. Shock cases.

“Then you do have patients in the ward?”

“Yes, sir. Ten women and fourteen men.”

Carpenter brandished a sheaf of reports. “Says here the St. Albans patients claim nobody’s in Ward T.”

Dimmock was shocked. That was untrue, he assured the general.

“All right, Dimmock. So you’ve got your twenty-four crocks in there. Their job’s to get well. Your job’s to cure them. What the hell’s upsetting the hospital about that?”

“W-Well, sir. Perhaps it’s because we keep them locked up.”

“You keep Ward T locked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“To keep the patients in, General Carpenter.”

“Keep ‘em in? What d’you mean? Are they trying to get out? They violent, or something?”

“No, sir. Not violent.”

“Diinmock, I don’t like your attitude. You’re acting damned sneaky and evasive. And I’ll tell you something else I don’t like. That T classification. I checked with a Filing Expert from the Medical Corps and there is no T classification. What the hell are you up to at St. Albans?”

“W-Well, sir. . . We invented the T classification. It … They ... They’re rather special cases, sir. We don’t know what to do about them or how to handle them. W-We’ve been trying to keep it quiet until we’ve worked out a modus operandi, but it’s brand new, General Carpenter. Brand new!” Here the expert in Dinimock triumphed over discipline. “It’s sensational. It’ll make medical history, by God! It’s the biggest damned thing ever.”

“What is it, Dimmock? Be specific.”

“Well, sir, they’re shock cases. Blanked out. Almost catatonic. Very little respiration. Slow pulse. No response.”

“I’ve seen thousands of shock cases like that,” Carpenter grunted. “What’s so unusual?”

“Yes, sir. So far it sounds like the standard Q or R classification. But here’s something unusual. They don’t eat and they don’t sleep.”

“Never?”

“Some of them never.”

“Then why don’t they die?”

“We don’t know. The metabolism cycle’s broken, but only on the anabolism side. Catabolism continues. In other words, sir, they’re eliminating waste products but they’re not taking anything in. They’re eliminating fatigue poisons and rebuilding worn tissue, but without sleep. God knows how. It’s fantastic.”

“That why you’ve got them locked up? Mean to say... D’you suspect them of stealing food and cat naps somewhere else?”

“N-No, sir.” Dimmock looked shamefaced. “I don’t know how to tell you this, General Carpenter. I. . . We lock them up because of the real mystery. They. . . Well, they disappear.”

“They what?”

“They disappear, sir. Vanish. Right before your eyes.”

“The hell you say.”

“I do say, sir. They’ll be sitting on a bed or standing around. One minute you see them, the next minute you don’t. Sometimes there’s two dozen in Ward T. Other times none. They disappear and reappear without rhyme or reason. That’s why we’ve got the ward locked, General Carpenter. In the entire history of combat and combat injury there’s never been a case like this before. We don’t know how to handle it.”

“Bring me three of those cases,” General Carpenter said.

Star in its history was able to draw on the services of a clear majority of the best writers in the science fiction field; but there were, too, a sizable number of first-rate contributions by "mainstream" writers, drawn to science fiction because they had something to say that could not be said elsewhere. There were half a dozen of these—Gerald Kersh, Jessamyn West, one or two who elected the protection of pen names—and there is Mrs. Borgese, who is not only the daugh­ter of one of the greatest writers of all, but in her own right a talented artist with words. Have no doubt of this; discover it for yourself in—

When he first said, "It is not Martha's fault, why, any Martha would have done it; he got her to be that way; I too had a Martha like that," people simply thought he was crazy. But after he had pieced the facts together, patiently and humbly, they made sense. People began to wonder about the sense they made and wanted to hope for the best, wish them well, Phil and Martha, whoever they were. Somehow it seemed the toll was paid; what for, no one could quite discern, but a toll was paid. They could go ahead now, Phil and Martha.

Vanyambadi, April 24, 1918.

Joseph Samachson, Ph.D., is a quiet and indus­trious chemist who translates technical works from difficult languages, does complicated things on the research staff of a major New York hospital and, in spare time, writes books about archeology and the ballet with his wife, Dorothy. There is, however, another area of extreme competence in the man. Under the pseudonym of "William Morrison," Dr. Samachson has for years been among the foremost writers of science fiction. When the two halves of his personality fuse, when the biochemist meets the science fictioneer, we reap such a splendid hybrid harvest as—

He had long resigned himself to thinking that opportunity had passed him by for life. Now, when it struck so unex­pectedly and so belatedly, he wasn't sure that it was wel­come.

He had gone to sleep early, after an unusually hectic day. As if the need for immunizing against the threat of an epidemic hadn't been enough, he had also had to treat the usual aches and pains, and to deliver one baby, plus two premature Marsopolis calves. Even as he pulled the covers over himself, the phone was ringing, but he let Maida answer it. Nothing short of a genuine first-class emergency was going to drag him out of the house again before morning if he could help it. Evidently the call wasn't that important, for Maida hadn't come in to bother him about it, and his last feeling, before dropping off to sleep, was one of gratitude for her common sense.

He wasn't feeling grateful when the phone rang again. He awoke with a start. The dark of night still lay around the house, and from alongside him came the sound of his wife's slow breathing. In the next room, one of the kids, he couldn't tell which, said drowsily, "Turn off the alarm." Evidently the sound of the ringing hadn't produced com­plete wakefulness.

While he lay there, feeling too heavy to move, Maida moaned slightly in her sleep, and he said to himself, "If that's old Bender, calling about his constipation again, I'll feed him dynamite pills." Then he reached over to the night table and forced himself to pick up the phone. "Who is it?"

"Doctor Meltzer?" He recognized the hoarse and excited tones of Tom Linton, the city peace officer. "You better get over here right away!"

"What is it, Tom? And where am I supposed to get?"

"Over at the space port. Ship out of control—almost ran into Phobos coming down—and it landed with a crash. They need you fast."

"I'm coming."

The sleep was out of his eyes now. He grabbed his emergency equipment, taking along a plentiful supply of antibiotics and adjustable bandages. There was no way of knowing how many men had been hurt, and he had better be ready to treat an entire crew.

Outside the house, his bicar was waiting for him. He tossed in his equipment and hopped in after it. A throw of the switch brought in full broadcast power, and a fraction of a second later he had begun to skim over the smooth path that led over the farmland reclaimed from the desert.

The space port was less than twenty miles away, and it took him no more than ten minutes to get there. As he approached, the light blinked green at an intersection. Ah, he thought, one advantage of being a country doctor with a privileged road is that you always have the right of way. Are there any other advantages? None that you can think of offhand. You go through college with a brilliant record, you dream of helping humanity, of doing research in medicine, of making discoveries that will lengthen human life and lend it a little added happiness. And then, somehow, you find yourself trapped. The frontier outpost that's supposed to be the steppingstone to bigger things turns out to be a lifetime job. You find that your most important patients are not people, but food-animals. On Mars there are plenty of men and women, but few cows and sheep. Learn to treat them, and you really amount to something. Save a cow, and the news gets around faster than if you saved a man. And so, gradually, the animals begin to take more and more of your time, and you become known and liked in the community. You marry, you have children, you slip into a routine that dulls the meaning of the fast-hurrying days. You reach fifty—and you realize suddenly that life has passed you by. Half your alloted hundred years are gone, you can't tell where. The opportunities that once beckoned so brightly have faded in the distance.

What do you have to show for what the years have taken? One wife, one boy, one girl—

A surge of braking-power caught him from the direction of the space port. The sudden deceleration brought him out of his musings to realize that the entire area was brightly lit up. A huge ship lay across the middle of the field. Its length was at least a thousand feet, and he knew that there must be more than two dozen men in its crew. He hoped that none had been killed.

"Doc!"

Tom was rushing over to him. "How many hurt, Tom?"

"Our injuries are all minor, Doctor," said a sharp voice. "Nothing that I can't handle well enough myself."

As he stared at the man in the gold-trimmed uniform who was standing alongside Tom, he had a feeling of disappointment. If there were no serious injuries, what was the rush all about? Why hadn't they telephoned him while he was riding over, told him there was no need of him, let him get back to bed?

"I thought there was a serious crash."

"The crash was nothing, Doctor. Linton, here, was excited by our near-miss of Phobos. But we've no time to waste discussing that fact. I understand, Doctor Meltzer, that you're a first-class vet."

He flushed. "I hope you didn't drag me out of bed to treat a sick dog. I'm not sentimental about ship's pets—"

"This is no pet. Come along, and I'll show you."

He followed silently as the Captain led the way up the ramp and into the ship. Inside the vessel, there were no indications of any disorder caused by the crash. One or two of the men were bandaged around the head, but they seemed perfectly capable of getting around and doing their work.

He and the Captain were on a moving walkway now, and for three hundred feet they rode swiftly along it to­gether, toward the back of the ship. Then the Captain stepped off, and Dr. Meltzer followed suit. When he caught sight of the thing that was waiting for him, he jaw dropped.

Almost the entire stern of the ship, about one third its length, was occupied by a great reddish creature that lay there quietly like an overgrown lump of flesh taken from some giant's butcher shop. A transparent panel walled it off from the rest of the ship. Through the panel Dr. Meltzer could see the thirty-foot-wide slit that marked the mouth. Above that was a cluster of breathing pores, look­ing like gopher holes, and above these was a semicircle of six great eyes, half closed and dulled as if with pain.

He had never seen anything like it before. "My God, what it it?"

"For lack of a better name, we call it a space-cow. Actually, it doesn't inhabit free space—we picked it up on Ganymede as a matter of fact—and as you can see, it doesn't resemble a cow in the least."

"Is that supposed to be my patient?"

"That's it, Doctor."

He laughed, with more anger than amusement. "I haven't the slightest idea what that behemoth is like and what's wrong with it. How do you expect me to treat it?"

"That's up to you. Now, wait a minute, Doctor, before you blow up. This thing is sick. It isn't eating. It hardly moves. And it's been getting worse almost from the time we left Ganymede. We meant to land at Marsopolis and have it treated there, but we overshot the place and when something went wrong with our drive we had no choice but to come down here."

"Don't they have any doctors to spare from town?"

"They're no better than you are. I mean that, Doctor. The vets they have in Marsopolis are used to treating pets for a standard series of diseases, and they don't handle animals as big as the ones you do. And they don't meet the kind of emergencies you do, either. You're as good a man as we can get."

"And I tell you, I don't know a thing about this overgrown hunk of protein."

"Then you'll just have to find out about it. We've radioed Earth, and hope to be getting some information soon from some of their zoo directors. Meanwhile—"

The crewmen were bringing over what appeared to be a diver's uniform. "What's this?" he asked suspiciously.

"Something for you to wear. You're going to go down into this animal."

"Into that mass of flesh?" For a moment horror left him with his mouth open. Then anger took over. "Like hell I am."

"Look, Doctor, it's necessary. We want to keep this beast alive—for scientific purposes, as well as possible value as a food animal. And how can we keep it alive unless we learn something about it?"

"There's plenty we can learn without going into it. Plenty of tests we can make first. Plenty of—"

He caught himself abruptly because he was talking nonsense and he knew it. You could take the thing's tempera­ture—but what would the figure you got tell you? What was normal temperature for a space-cow? What was normal blood pressure—provided the creature had blood? What was normal heartbeat—assuming there was a heart? Presumably the thing had teeth, a bony skeleton—but how to learn where and what they were? You couldn't X-ray a mass of flesh like this—not with any equipment he had ever seen, even in the best-equipped office.

There were other, even more disquieting ways in which he was ignorant. What kind of digestive juices did the thing have? Suppose he did go down in a divers uniform —would the juices dissolve it? Would they dissolve the oxygen lines, the instruments he used to look around and probe the vast inside of the beast?

He expressed his doubts to the Captain, and the latter said, "These suits have been tested, and so have the lines. We know that they can stand a half hour inside without being dissolved away. If they start to go, you'll radio to us, and we'll pull you up."

"Thanks. How do I know that once the suit starts to go, it won't rip? How do I know that the juices simply won't eat my skin away?"

There was no answer to that. You just didn't know, and you had to accept your ignorance.

Even while he was objecting, Dr. Meltzer began putting on the suit. It was thin and light, strong enough to withstand several atmospheres of pressure, and at the same time not so clumsy as to hamper his movements considerably. Scaled pockets carried an assortment of in­struments and supplies. Perfect two-way communication would make the exchange of ideas—such as they might be—as easy as if the person he was talking to were face to face with him. With the suit came a pair of fragile-looking gloves that left his hands almost as free as if they were bare. But the apparent fragility was misleading. Mechanical strength was there.

But what about resistance to biological action? The question kept nagging him. You can't know, he told himself. About things like that you take a chance. You take a chance and hope that if anything goes wrong, they'll pull you up before the juices have time to get working on you.

They had everything in readiness. Two of the other men were also wearing uniforms like his own, and when he had put his on, and tested it, the Captain gave the signal, and they all went into a small airlock. The door sealed behind them, a door in front opened. They were in the chamber where the great beast lay and quivered dully as if in giant pain.

They tied strong thin plastic cords around Doctor Meltzer's waist, tested the oxygen lines. Then they put a ladder up in front of the beast's face. Doctor Meltzer had a little trouble breathing, but it was not because of anything wrong with the oxygen supply. That was at the right pressure and humidity, and it was mixed with the correct amount of inert gases. It was merely the thought of going down into the creature's belly that constricted his throat, the idea of going into a strange and terrible world so dif­ferent from his own, of submitting to unimaginable dangers.

He said hoarsely into the radio speaker, "How do I get in anyway, knock? The mouth's at least forty feet off the ground. And it's closed. You've got to open it, Captain. Or do you expect me to pry it open myself?"

The two men with him stretched out a plastic ladder. In the low gravity of Mars, climbing forty feet was no problem. Dr. Meltzer began to pull his way up. As he went higher, he noticed that the great mouth was slowly opening. One of the men had poked the creature with an electric prod.

Dr. Meltzer reached the level of the low jaw, and with the fascinated fear of a bird staring at a snake, gazed at the great opening that was going to devour him. Inside there was a gray and slippery surface which caught the beam of his flashlight and reflected it back and forth until the rays faded away. Fifty feet beyond the opening, the passage made a slow turn to one side. What lay ahead, he couldn't guess.

The sensible thing was to go in at once, but he couldn't help hesitating. Suppose the jaws closed just as he got between them? He'd be crushed like an eggshell. Suppose that throat constricted with the irritation he caused it? That would crush him too. He recalled suddenly an ancient fable about a man who had gone into a whale's belly. What was the man's name, now? Daniel—no, he had only gone into a den of lions. Job—wrong again. Job had been afflicted with boils, the victim of staphylo­cocci at the other end of the scale of size. Jonah, that was it. Jonah, the man whose name was a symbol among the superstitious for bad luck.

But a scientist had no time for superstition. A scientist just thrust himself forward.

He stepped off the ladder into the great mouth. Beneath him, the jaw was slippery. His feet slid out from under him, and then his momentum carried him forward, and he glided smoothly down the yawning gullet. It was like going down a Martian hillside on a greased sled, the low gravity making the descent nice and easy. He noticed that the cords around his waist, as well as the oxygen lines, were descending smoothly after him. He reached the turn, threw his body away from the gray wall, and continued sliding. Another fifty feet, and he landed with a small plash in a pool of liquid.

The stomach? Never mind what you called it, this was probably the beginning of a digestive tract. He'd have a chance now to see how resistant his suit was.

He was immersed in the liquid now, and he sank slowly until his feet touched more solid flesh again. By the beam from his flashlight, he saw that the liquid around him was a light green. The portion of the digestive tract on which he stood was slate gray, with bright emerald streaks.

A voice spoke anxiously in his ears. "Doctor Meltzer! Are you safe?"

"Fine, Captain. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here."

"What's it like in there?"

"I'm standing at the bottom of a pool of greenish liquid. I'm fascinated, but not greatly instructed."

"See anything that might be wrong?"

"How the devil would f tell right from wrong in here? I've never been in one of these beasts before. I've got sample bottles, and I'm going to fill them in various places. This is going to be sample one. You can analyze it later."

"Fine, Doctor. You just keep on going."

He flashed the beam around him. The liquid was churn­ing gently, possibly because of the splash he himself had made. The gray-green walls themselves were quiet, and the portion underfoot yielded slightly as he put his weight upon it, but was otherwise apparently undisturbed by his presence.

He moved ahead. The liquid grew shallower, came to an end. He climbed out and stepped cautiously forward. "Doctor, what's happening?"

"Nothing's happening. I'm just looking around." "Keep us informed. I don't think there's any danger, but—"

"But in case there is, you want the next man to know what to watch out for? All right, Captain."

"Lines all right?"

"They're fine." He took another step forward. "The ground—I suppose I can call it the ground—is getting less slippery. Easier to walk on. Walls about twenty feet apart here. No sign of macroscopic flora or fauna. No artifacts to indicate intelligent life."

The Captain's voice sounded pained. "Don't let your sense of humor carry you away, Doctor. This is important. Maybe you don't realize exactly how important, but—"

He interrupted. "Hold it, Captain, here's something interesting. A big reddish bump, about three feet across, in the gray-green wall."

"What is it?"

"Might be a tumor. I'll slice some tissue from the wall itself. That's sample number two. Tissue from the tumor, sample number three."

The wall quivered almost imperceptibly as he sliced into it. The fresh-cut surface was purple, but it slowly turned red again as the internal atmosphere of the beast got at it.

"Here's another tumor, like the first, this time on the other side of the wall. And here are a couple more. I'm leaving them alone. The walls are getting narrower. There's still plenty of room to walk, but—wait a minute, I take that back. There's some kind of valve ahead of me. It's opening and closing spasmodically."

"Can you get through?"

"I'd hate to take a chance. And even if I did make it while it was open, it could crush the oxygen lines when it closed."

"Then that's the end of the road?"

"I don't know. Let me think."

He stared at the great valve. It moved rapidly, opening and closing in a two-second rhythm. Probably a valve separating one part of the digestive system from another, he thought, like the human pylorus. The green-streaked gray flesh seemed totally unlike human muscle, but all the same it appeared to serve a similar function. Maybe the right kind of drug would cause muscular relaxation.

He pulled a large hypodermic syringe from one of the sealed pockets of his diver's uniform. He plunged the needle quickly into the edge of the valve as it paused for a fraction of a second before closing, shot a pint of drug solution into the flesh, and ripped the needle out again. The valve closed once more, but more slowly. It opened, closed again, opened once more—and stayed open.

How long before it recovered, and shut off his retreat? He didn't know. But if he wanted to find out what was on the other side, he'd have to work fast. He plunged forward, almost slipping in his eagerness, and leaped through the motionless valve.

Then he called up to tell the Captain what he had done.

The Captain's voice was anxious. "I don't know whether you ought to risk it, Doctor."

"I'm down here to learn things. I haven't learned much yet. By the way, the walls are widening out again. And there's another pool of liquid ahead. Blue liquid, this time."

"Are you taking a sample?"

"I'm a sampler from way back, Captain."

He waded into the blue pond, filled his sample bottle, and put it into one of his pockets. Suddenly, in front of him something broke the surface of the pond, then dived down again.

He came to a full stop. "Hold it, Captain. There seems to be fauna."

"What? Something alive?"

"Very much alive."

"Be careful, Doctor. I think there's a gun in one of the pockets of that uniform. Use it if necessary."

"A gun? Don't be cruel, Captain. How'd you like to have somebody shooting off guns inside you?"

"Be careful, man!"

"I'll use my hypodermic as a weapon."

But the creature, whatever it was, did not approach him again, and he waded further into the blue pool. When his eyes were below the surface of the liquid, he saw the thing moving again.

"Looks like an overgrown tadpole, about two feet long." "Is it coming close?"

"No, it's darting away from me. And there's another one. I think the light bothers it."

"Any signs that the thing is dangerous?"

"I can't tell. It may be a parasite of the big creature, or it may be something that lives in symbiosis with it."

"Stay away from it, Doctor. No use risking your life for nothing."

A trembling voice said, "Larry! Are you all right?"

"Maida! What are you doing here?"

"I woke up when you left. And then I had trouble going to sleep again."

"But why did you come to the space port?"

"Ships began to flash by overhead, and I began to wonder what had happened. So I called up—and they told me."

"Ships overhead?"

The Captain's voice cut in again. "The news services, Doctor. This case has aroused great interest. I didn't want to tell you before, but don't be surprised if you come up to find yourself famous."

"Never mind the news services. Have you heard from Earth yet?"

"No messages from Earth. We did hear from the curator of the Marsopolis Zoo."

"What did he say?"

"He never even heard of a space-cow, and he has no suggestions to make."

"That's fine. By the way, Captain, are there any photographers around from those news services?"

"Half a dozen. Still, motion picture, television—"

"How about sending them down inside to take a few pictures?"

There was a moment of silence. Then the Captain's voice again: "I don't think they can go down for a while yet. Maybe later."

"Why can't they go down now? I'd like to have some company. If the beast's mouth is open—" A disquieting thought struck him. "Say, it is open, isn't it?"

The Captain's voice sounded tense. "Now, don't get upset, Doctor, we're doing all we can!"

"You mean it's closed?"

"Yes, it's closed. I didn't want to tell you this, but the mouth closed unexpectedly, and then, when we did have the idea of sending a photographer down inside, we couldn't get it open again. Apparently the creature has adapted to the effects of the electric shock."

"There must be some way of getting it open again."

"Of course there's a way, There's always a way. Don't worry, Doctor, we're working on it. We'll find it."

"But the oxygen—"

"The lines are strong, and the mouth isn't closed tight enough to pinch them off. You can breathe all right, can't you?"

"Now that I think of it, I can. Thanks for telling me."

"You see, Doctor, it isn't so bad."

"It's perfectly lovely. But what happens if my uniform or the oxygen lines start to dissolve?"

"We'll pull you out. We'll do something to open the mouth. Just don't get caught behind that valve, Doctor."

"Thanks for the advice. I don't know what I'd do without it, Captain."

He felt a sudden surge of anger. If there was one thing he hated, it was good advice, given smugly when the giver could stand off to one side, without sharing the danger of the person he was helping. Don't let this happen, don't get caught here, take care of yourself. But you were down here to do a job, and so far you hadn't done it. You hadn't learned a thing about what made this monstrous creature tick.

And the chances were that you wouldn't learn, either. The way to examine a beast was from the outside, not from within. You watched it eat, you studied the transfer of the food from one part of the body to another, you checked on the circulation of the body fluids, using radioactive tracers if no other methods offered, you dissected specimens of typical individuals. The Captain should have had a few scientists aboard, and they should have done a few of these things instead of just sitting there staring at the beast. But that would have made things too easy. No, they had to wait for you to come aboard, and then send you deliberately sliding down into the guts of an animal you didn't know anything about, in the hope of having a miracle happen to you. Maybe they thought a loop of intestine or some gland of internal secretion would come over to you and say, "I'm not working right. Fix me, and everything will be fine."

Another of the tadpole-like creatures was swimming over toward him, approaching slowly, the forepart twitching like the nose of a curious dog. Then, like the others, the creature turned and darted away. "Maybe that's the cause," he thought. "Maybe that's the parasite that's causing the trouble."

Only—it might just as well be a creature necessary to the larger creature's health. Again and again you were faced with the same problem. Down here you were in a world you knew nothing about. And when everything was so strange to you—what was normal, and what wasn't?

When in doubt, he decided, move on. He moved.

The blue pool was shallow, and once more he came up on what he decided to call dry ground. Once more the walls grew narrow again. After a time he could reach out and touch the walls on either side of him at the same time.

He flashed his light into the narrow passage, and saw that a dozen yards ahead of him it seemed to come to an end. "Blind alley," he thought. "Time to turn back."

The Captain's voice came to him again, "Doctor, is everything all right?"

"Beautiful. I've had a most interesting tour. By the way, did you get the creature's mouth open yet?"

"We're still working on it."

"I wish you luck. Maybe when those reports from Earth come in—"

"They've come. None of the curators knows anything about space-cows. For some reason, the electric shock method doesn't work any more, and we're trying all sorts of other stimuli."

"I take it that nothing is effective."

"Not yet. One of the photo service men suggested we use a powerful mechanical clamp to pull the jaws open. We're having one flown over."

"Use anything," he said fervently. "But for God's sake, get that mouth open!"

Dr. Meltzer cursed the photo service people, to whom he meant nothing more than a series of colored lines in space. Then he added an unkind word or two for the Captain, who had got him into this mess, and started back.

The tadpole creatures seemed to be interested in his progress. They came swarming around him, and now he could see that there were almost a dozen of them. They moved with quick flips of their tails, like the minnows he had once seen back on Earth, where he had attended med­ical school. Between each pair of flips there was a mo­mentary pause, and when they came close he was able to get a reasonably good look at them. He was surprised to see that they had two rows of eyes each.

Were the eyes functional or vestigial? In the former case, they must spend some part of their life cycle outside the host creature, in places where they had need of the sense of sight. In the latter case, they were at least des­cended from outside creatures. Maybe I'll try to catch one of them, he thought. Once I get it outside I can give it a real examination.

Once I get it outside, he repeated. Provided I get outside myself.

He waded through the pond again. As he reached the shallow part of the blue liquid, a voice came to him—this time his wife's voice. "Larry, are you all right?"

"Doing fine. How are the kids?"

"They're with me. They woke up during the excitement, and I brought them along."

"You didn't tell me that before!"

"I didn't want to upset you."

"Oh, it doesn't upset me in the least. Nothing like a nice family picnic. But how do you expect them to go to school in the morning?"

"Oh, Larry, what difference does it make if they miss school for once? A chance to be in on something like this happens once in a lifetime."

"That's a little too often to suit me. Well, now that I know they're here, let me talk to them."

Evidently they had been waiting for the chance, for Jerry's voice came at once. "Hiya, Dad."

"Hiya, Jerry. Having a good time?"

"Swell. You oughtta be out here, Dad. There are a lot of people. They're treatin' us swell."

Martia cut in. "Mom, he isn't letting me talk. I want to talk to Daddy too."

"Let her talk, Jerry. Go ahead, Martia. Say something to Daddy."

A sudden blast almost knocked out his eardrum. "Dad, can you hear me?" Martia screamed. "Can you hear me, Dad?"

"I can hear you, and so can these animals. Not so loud, sweetheart."

"Gee, Dad, you oughtta see all the people. They took pictures of me and Mom. Oh, we're so thrilled!"

"They took pictures of me too, Dad," said Jerry.

"They're sending the pictures all over. To Earth and Venus, and everywhere. We're gonna be on television too, Dad. Isn't it exciting?"

"It's terrific, Martia. You don't know what this does for my morale."

"Aw, all she thinks about is pictures. Mom, make her get away from the microphone, or I'll push her away."

"You've had your chance, Martia. Let Jerry talk again."

"You know what, Dad? Everybody says you're gonna be famous. They say this is the only animal of its kind ever discovered. And you're the only person ever went into it. Can I go down there too, Dad?"

"No!" he yelled.

"Okay, okay. Say, Dad know what? If you bring it back alive, they're gonna take it to Earth, and put it in a special zoo of its own."

"Thank them for me. Look, Jerry, did they get the animal's mouth open yet?"

"Not yet, Dad, but they're bringing in a great big machine."

The Captain's voice again: "We'll have the mouth open soon, Doctor. Where are you now?"

"Approaching the valve again. Having you heard anything that could be useful? Maybe some explorer or hunter might be able to tell you something about space-cows—"

"Sorry, Doctor. Nobody knows anything about space-cows."

"That's what you said before. All right, Captain, stand by for further news. I've got a shoal of these tadpole beasts in attendance. Let's see what happens now."

"They're not attacking, are they?"

"Not yet."

"You feel all right otherwise?"

"Fine. A little short of breath, though. That may be the result of tension. And a little hungry. I wonder how this beast would taste raw—my God!"

The Captain asked anxiously, "What is it?"

"That valve I paralyzed. It's working normally once more!"

"You mean it's opening and closing?"

"The same rhythm as before. And every time it closes, it squeezes those oxygen tubes. That's why I sometimes feel short of breath. I have to get out of here!"

"Do you have enough drug to paralyze the valve again?"

"No, I don't. Keep quiet, Captain, let me figure this out."

"That valve I paralyzed. It's working normally once more!" place to take off from.

He might have dived safely through the opening during the near-second when the muscles were far apart. But there was no place for a take-off. He had to approach up a slippery slope, hampered by uniform and lines. And if he misjudged the right moment to go through, he'd be caught when the valve closed again.

He stood there motionless for a moment, sweat pouring down his forehead and into his eyes. Damn it, he thought, I can't even wipe it away. I've got to tackle this thing half blind.

Through one partially fogged eyeplate he noticed the tadpole creatures approaching more closely. Were they vicious after all? Were they coming closer because they sensed that he was in danger? Were they closing in for the kill?

One of them plunged straight at him, and involuntarily he ducked. The thing turned barely aside at the last mo­ment, raced past him, slithered out of the blue liquid, and squirmed up the slope toward the valve.

Unexpectedly, the valve opened to twice its previous width, and the creature plunged through without trouble. "Doctor Meltzer? Are you still all right?"

"I'm alive, if that interests you. Listen, Captain, I'm going to try getting through that valve. One of the tadpole beasts just did it, and the valve opened a lot wider to let it through."

"Just how do you expect to manage?"

"I'll try grabbing one of the beasts and hitch-hike through. I just hope it isn't vicious, and doesn't turn on me."

But the tadpole creatures wouldn't let themselves be grabbed. In this, their home territory, they moved a great deal faster than he did, and even though they didn't seem to be using their eyes to see with, they evaded his grasp with great skill.

At last he gave up the attempt and climbed out of the blue pool. The creatures followed him.

One of the biggest of them suddenly dashed forward. Sensing what the thing was going to do, Dr. Meltzer hur­ried after it. It scurried up the slope, and plunged through the valve. The valve opened wide. Dr. Meltzer, racing desperately forward, threw himself into the opening. The valve paused, then snapped at him. He felt it hit his heel.

The next moment he was gasping for breath. The oxy­gen lines had become tangled.

He fought frenziedly to untwist them, and failed. Then he realized that he was trying to do too much. All he needed to do was loosen the knot and straighten out the kinks. By the time he finally succeeded, he was seeing black spots in front of his eyes.

"Doctor Meltzer, Doctor Meltzer!"

The sound had been in his ears for some time. "Still alive," he gasped.

"Thank God! We're going to try to open the mouth now, Doctor. If you hurry forward, you'll be in a position to be pulled out."

"I'm hurrying. By the way, those tadpoles are still with me. They trailing along as if they'd found a long-lost friend. I feel like a pie-eyed piper."

"I just hope they don't attack."

"You're not hoping any harder than I am."

He could catch his breath now, and with the oxygen lines free, the perspiration that had dimmed his sight slow­ly evaporated. He caught sight of one of the reddish tumors he had noticed on his forward passage.

"May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamp," he mur­mured. "It would take an axe really to chop that tumor out, but I may as well slice into it and see what I can learn."

From one of his pockets he took a sharp oversize scalpel, and began to cut around the edges.

The tumor throbbed convulsively.

"Well, well, I may have something here," he said, with a surgeon's pleasure. He dug deeper.

The tumor erupted. Great gobs of reddish liquid spurted out, and with one of them came another of the tadpole creatures, a small one, half the average size of those he had first encountered.

"Glory be," he muttered. "So that's the way they grow."

The creature sensed him and darted aside, in the di­rection of the valve. As it approached, the open valve froze in place, and let the small creature through, further into the host, without enlarging. Then the valve began to close again.

They're adapted to each other, he thought. Probably symbiosis, rather then a one-sided parasitism.

He moved upwards, toward the greenish liquid. An earthquake struck.

The flesh heaved up beneath his feet, tossing him head over heels into the pool. The first shock was followed by a second and third. A tidal wave hit him, and carried him to the side of the pool. He landed with a thud against the hard side and bounced back.

The sides began to constrict, hemming him in.

"Captain!" he yelled. "What's going on out there? What are you doing to the beast?"

"Trying to pry open its mouth. It doesn't seem to like the idea. It's threshing around against the walls of the ship."

"For God's sake, cut it out! It's giving me a beating in here."

They must have halted their efforts at once, for immedi­ately afterwards the beast's movements became less convul­sive. But it was some time before the spasmodic quivering of the side walls came to an end.

Dr. Meltzer climbed out of the pool of liquid, making an automatic and entirely useless gesture to wipe the new perspiration from his forehead.

"Is it better in there, Doctor?"

"It's better. Don't try that again," he panted.

"We have to get the mouth open some way."

"Try a bigger electric shock."

"If you want us to. But it may mean another beating for you, Doctor."

"Then wait a minute. Wait till I get near the upper part of the gullet."

"Whenever you say. Just tell us when you're ready."

Better be ready soon, he thought. My light's beginning to dim. When it goes out altogether, I'll probably be in a real panic. I'll be yelling for him to do anything, just to get me out of there.

And what about the suit and the oxygen lines? I think the digestive fluid's beginning to affect them. It's hard to be sure, now that the light's weakening, but they don't have the clear transparent look they had at first. And when they finally go, I go with them.

He tried to move forward faster, but the surface underfoot was slimy, and when he moved too hastily, he slipped. The lines were getting tangled too. Now that the creature's mouth was closed, it was no use tugging at the cord around his waist. That wouldn't get him up.

"Doctor Meltzer!"

He didn't answer. Instead, he pulled out his lancet and cut the useless cords away. The oxygen lines too were a nuisance, in constant danger of kinking and tangling, now that they were no longer taut. But at least the gas was still flowing through them and would continue to flow—until the digestive fluid ate through.

The tadpole creatures seemed to have developed a positive affection for him. They were all around him, not close enough for him to grab them, but too close for com­fort. At any moment they might decide to take a nip out of his suit or an oxygen line. And with the plastic already weakened, even a slight tear might be fatal.

He reached the sharp slope that signified the gullet. "Dr. Meltzer?"

"What do you want?"

"Why didn't you answer?"

"I was busy. I cut the cords away from around my waist. Now I'm going to try climbing up inside this thing's throat."

"Shall we try that sharp electric shock?"

"Go ahead."

He had a pair of small surgical clamps, and he took one in each hand. The flashlight he put in a holder at his waist. Then, getting down on all fours, he began to crawl up, digging each pair of clamps into the flesh in turn to give him a grip. A slow wave ran away in both directions every time he inserted one of the pairs of clamps into the flesh, but otherwise the beast didn't seem to mind too much.

He was about halfway up, when the earthquakes began again. The first one sent him tumbling head over heels down the slope. The others added some slight injury to the insult, knocking him painfully against the walls. They must have used a powerful electric jolt, for some of it was transmitted through the creature to him, making his skin tingle. He hadn't lost his flashlight, but by now it was exceedingly dim, and shed only a feeble circle of light. Far ahead of him, where the mouth was to open, was blackness.

"No luck, Captain?"

"No luck, Doctor. We'll try again."

"Don't. You just make things worse."

"Larry, were you hurt? Larry—"

"Don't bother me now, Maida," he said roughly. "I have to figure out a way to get out."

A faint hiss came from the oxygen line. A leak. Time was growing short.

The tadpole creatures were swimming around faster now. They too must have been upset by the shock. One of them darted ahead of him, and wriggled ahead until it was lost in blackness.

That seems to be trying to get out too, he told himself. Maybe we can work this together. There must be some way, something to get this creature to open its mouth. Maybe the Captain can't do it from outside, but I'm in here, where the beast's most sensitive. I can hit it, slash at it, tickle it—

There's a thought. Tickle it. It's a monster, and it'll take some monstrous tickling, but sooner or later, something should affect it.

He stamped hard with his foot. No effect. He took his large lancet from his pocket and slashed viciously with it. A shudder ran through the flesh, but that was all.

And then he had an idea. That green liquid undoubtedly contained hormones. Hormones, enzymes, co-enzymes, antibiotics, biological chemicals of all kinds. Stuff to which some tissues would be adapted and some would not. And those that weren't would react violently.

He turned back, filled his hypodermic syringe with the greenish liquid, and ran forward again. The light was almost gone by now, and the hissing from the oxygen line was growing ominously, but he climbed forward as far as he could before plunging the hypodermic in and injecting its contents.

The creature heaved. He dropped hypodermic, light, and clamps, and let the huge shuddering take him where it would. First it lifted him high. Then it let him fall suddenly—not backwards, but in the same place. Two of the tadpole beasts were thrown against him. Then he was lifted way up again, and this time forward. A huge cavern opened before him. Light bathed the gray surface and he was vomited out.

The light begun to flicker, and he had time for one last thought. Oxygen lack, he told himself. My suit's ripped, the lines have finally torn.

And then blackness.

When he came to, Maida was at his side. He could see that she had been crying. The Captain stood a little fur­ther off, his face drawn, but relieved.

"Larry, dear, are you all right? We thought you'd never get out."

"I'm fine." He sat up and saw his two children, standing anxious and awestricken on the other side of the bed. Their silence showed how strongly they had been affected. "I hope you kids didn't worry too much about me."

"Of course I didn't worry," said Jerry bravely. "I knew you were smart, Dad. I knew you'd think of a way to get out."

"While we're on the subject," interposed the Captain, "What was the way out?"

"I'll tell you later. How's the patient?"

"Doing fine. Seems to have recovered completely."

"How many of the tadpoles came out with me?"

"About six. We're keeping them in the same low-oxygen atmosphere as the creature itself. We're going to study them. We figure that if they're parasites—"

"They're not parasites. I finally came to a conclusion about them. They're the young."

"What?"

"The young. If you take good care of them, they'll eventually grow to be as big as the mother-monster you've got in the ship."

"Good God, where will we keep them?"

"That's your worry. Maybe you'd better expand that zoo you're preparing. What you'll do for money to feed them, though, I don't know."

"But what—"

"The trouble with that monster—its `illness'—was merely that it was gravid."

"Gravid?"

"That means pregnant," exclaimed Jerry.

"I know what it means." The Captain flushed. "Look, do we have to have these kids in here while we discuss this?"

"Why not? They're a doctor's children. They know what it's all about. They've seen calves and other animals being born."

"Lots of times," said Martia.

"Confined as it was on the ship, your beast couldn't get the exercise it needed. And the young couldn't get themselves born."

"But that was the digestive tract you went down—"

"What of it? Are all animals born the same way? Ask the average kid where a baby grows, and he'll tell you that it's in the stomach."

"Some kids are dopes," said Jerry.

"They wouldn't be in this case. What better place to get a chance at the food the mother eats, in all stages from raw to completely digested? All that beast needed to give birth was a little exercise. You gave it some from the outside, but not enough. I finished the job by injecting some of its own digestive fluid into the flesh. That caused a pretty little reaction."

The Captain scratched his head. "Doctor, you did a good job. How would you like to take care of that beast permanently? I could recommend you—"

"To go down inside that monster again? No, thanks. From now on, I treat nothing but small monsters. Sheep, cows—and human beings."

There was a pounding of feet in the hallway. Then the door swung in, violently. Flashbulbs that gave invisible light began to pop with inaudible bursts of high-frequency sound. Cameras pointed menacingly at him and sent his image winging to Earth and far-off planets. Reporters be­gan to fire their questions.

"My God," he muttered wearily, "who let these ani­mals in here? They're worse than the ones I met inside the blue pool."

"Be nice to them, dear," chided Maida gently. "They're turning you into a great man."

Then Maida and Jerry and Martia grouped themselves around him, and the cameras caught them too. The proud look on their faces was something to see. And he realized that he was glad for their sake.

Opportunity had knocked, and when he had opened the door to it, it had proved to be an exacting guest. Still, he hadn't been a bad host—not a bad host at all, he thought. And slowly his features relaxed into a tired and immediately famous grin.

With indignation Bob Bloch denies a libel: "It is not true that I am a monster! I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in my desk drawer." Heart he has (no matter whose); he also has wit and insight. And if sometimes what he has to tell us is monstrous (witness his recent shuddery suspense novel Psycho, or, for that matter, the following), it is not that he exaggerates a picture, but only that his perceptions are so clear. Almost any writer could have conceived the setting he describes below, but only Robert Bloch could have made it into—

Up in the sky the warheads whirled, and the thunder of their passing shook the mountain.

Deep in his vaulted sanctuary he sat, godlike and inscrutable, marking neither the sparrow's nor the missile's fall. There was no need to leave his shelter to stare down at the city.

He knew what was happening—had known ever since early in the evening when the television flickered and died. An announcer in the holy white garb of the healing arts had been delivering an important message about the world's most popular laxative—the one most people preferred, the one four out of five doctors used them-selves. Midway in his praise of this amazing new medical discovery he had paused and advised the audience to stand by for a special bulletin.

But the bulletin never came; instead the screen went blank and the thunder boomed.

All night long the mountain trembled, and the seated man trembled too; not with anticipation but with real­ization. He had expected this, of course, and that was why he was here. Others had talked about it for years; there had been wild rumors and solemn warnings and much muttering in taverns. But the rumor-mongers and the warning-sounders and the tavern-mutterers had made no move. They had stayed in the city and he alone had fled.

Some of them, he knew, had stayed to stave off the inevitable end as best they could, and these he saluted for their courage. Others had attempted to ignore the future, and these he detested for their blindness. And all of them he pitied.

For he had realized, long ago, that courage was not enough and that ignorance was no salvation. Wise words and foolish words are one—they will not halt the storm. And when the storm approaches, it is best to flee.

So he had prepared for himself this mountain retreat, high over the city, and here he was safe; would be safe for years to come. Other men of equal wealth could have done the same, but they were too wise or too foolish to face reality. So while they spread their rumors and sounded their warnings and muttered in their cups, he built his sanctuary; lead-guarded, amply provisioned, and stocked with every need for years to come, including even a generous supply of the world's most popular laxative.

Writer, lecturer, skin diver, travel expert, and interpreter of science for the lay audience, Arthur Clarke is not quite all things to all men but he is giving it a good try. He helped British pilots outwit the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. He was one of the founders of the British rocket society. He has had no fewer than six sightings of UFOs (all of which he explains in non-saucerian terms). And, in general, he has shown a remarkable capacity for being where the excitement is, and coming back to tell the rest of us about it. He is also a science fiction writer at the very rarefied level of general excellence shared by only a few. You already know this, of course; but if you didn't you would soon learn in reading—

There was a killer loose on the range. A 'copter patrol, five hundred miles off Greenland, had seen the great corpse staining the sea crimson as it wallowed in the waves. Within seconds, the intricate warning system had been alerted : men were plotting circles and moving count­ers on the North Atlantic chart—and Don Burley was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he dropped silently down to the twenty-fathom line.

The pattern of green lights on the tell-tale was a glowing symbol of security. As long as that pattern was un­changed, as long as none of those emerald stars winked to red, all was well with Don and his tiny craft. Air—fuel—power—this was the triumvirate which ruled his life. If any of them failed, he would be sinking in a steel coffin down toward the pelagic ooze, as Johnnie Tyndall had done the season before last. But there was no reason why they should fail; the accidents one foresaw, Don told himself reassuringly, were never the ones that hap­pened.

He leaned across the tiny control board and spoke into the mike. Sub 5 was still close enough to the mother ship for radio to work, but before long he'd have to switch to the sonics.

"Setting course 255, speed 50 knots, depth 20 fathoms, full sonar coverage. . . . Estimated time to target area, 70 minutes.... Will report at 10-minute intervals. That is all.... Out."

The acknowledgement, already weakening with range, came back at once from the Herman Melville.

"Message received and understood. Good hunting. What about the hounds?"

Don chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. This might be a job he'd have to handle alone. He had no idea, to within fifty miles either way, where Benj and Susan were at the moment. They'd certainly follow if he signaled for them, but they couldn't maintain his speed and would soon have to drop behind. Besides, he might be heading for a pack of killers, and the last thing he wanted to do was to lead his carefully trained porpoises into trouble. That was common sense and good business. He was also very fond of Susan and Benj.

"It's too far, and I don't know what I'm running into," he replied. "If they're in the interception area when I get there, I may whistle them up."

The acknowledgement from the mother ship was barely audible, and Don switched off the set. It was time to look around.

He dimmed the cabin lights so that he could see the scanner screen more clearly, pulled the polaroid glasses down over his eyes, and peered into the depths. This was the moment when Don felt like a god, able to hold within his hands a circle of the Atlantic twenty miles across, and to sec clearly down to the still-unexplored deeps, three thousand fathoms below. The slowly rotating beam of inaudible sound was searching the world in which he floated, seeking out friend and foe in the eternal dark­ness where light could never penetrate. The pattern of soundless shrieks, too shrill even for the hearing of tile bats who had invented sonar a million years before man, pulsed out into the watery night: the faint echoes came tingling back as floating, blue-green flecks on the screen.

Through long practice, Don could read the message with effortless ease. A thousand feet below, stretching out to his submerged horizon, was the scattering layer—the blanket of life that covered half the world. The sunken meadow of the sea, it rose and fell with the passage of the sun, hovering always at the edge of darkness. But the ultimate depths were no concern of his. The flocks he guarded, and the enemies who ravaged them, belonged to the upper levels of the sea.

Don flicked the switch of the depth-selector, and his sonar beam concentrated itself into the horizontal plane. The glimmering echoes from the abyss vanished, but he could see more clearly what lay around him here in the ocean's stratospheric heights. That glowing cloud two miles ahead was a school of fish; he wondered if Base knew about it, and made an entry in his log. There were some larger, isolated blips at the edge of the school—the carnivores pursuing the cattle, insuring that the endlessly turning wheel of life and death would never lose momen­tum. But this conflict was no affair of Don's; he was after bigger game.

Sub 5 drove on toward the west, a steel needle swifter and more deadly than any other creature that roamed the seas. The tiny cabin, lit only by the flicker of lights from the instrument board, pulsed with power as the spinning turbines thrust the water aside. Don glanced at the chart and wondered how the enemy had broken through this time. There were still many weak points, for fencing the oceans of the world had been a gigantic task. The tenuous electric fields, fanning out between gener­ators many miles apart, could not always hold at bay the starving monsters of the deep. They were learning, too. When the fences were opened, they would sometimes slip through with the whales and wreak havoc before they were discovered.

The long-range receiver bleeped plaintively, and Don switched over to TRANSCRIBE. It wasn't practical to send speech any distance over an ultrasonic beam, and code had come back into its own. Don had never learned to read it by ear, but the ribbon of paper emerging from the slot saved him the trouble.

Don started to set the coordinates on the plotting grid, then saw that it was no longer necessary. At the extreme edge of his screen, a flotilla of faint stars had appeared. He altered course slightly, and drove head-on toward the approaching herd.

The 'copter was right: they were moving fast. Don felt a mounting excitement, for this could mean that they were on the run and luring the killers toward him. At the rate at which they were traveling he would be among them in five minutes. He cut the motors and felt the backward tug of water bringing him swiftly to rest.

Don Burley, a knight in armor, sat in his tiny dim-lit room fifty feet below the bright Atlantic waves, testing his weapons for the conflict that lay ahead. In these mo­ments of poised suspense, before action began, his rac­ing brain often explored such fantasies. He felt a kinship with all shepherds who had guarded their flocks back to the dawn of time. He was David, among ancient Pales­tinian hills, alert for the mountain lions that would prey upon his father's sheep. But far nearer in time, and far closer in spirit, were the men who had marshaled the great herds of cattle on the American plains, only a few lifetimes ago. They would have understood his work, though his implements would have been magic to them. The pattern was the same; only the scale had altered. It made no fundamental difference that the beasts Don herd­ed weighed almost a hundred tons, and browsed on the endless savannahs of the sea.

The school was now less than two miles away, and Don checked his scanner's continuous circling to concentrate on the sector ahead. The picture on the screen altered to a fanshaped wedge as the sonar beam started to flick from side to side; now he could count every whale in the school, and even make a good estimate of its size. With a practiced eye, he began to look for stragglers.

Don could never have explained what drew him at once toward those four echoes at the southern fringe of the school. It was true that they were a little apart from the rest, but others had fallen as far behind. There is some sixth sense that a man acquires when he has stared long enough into a sonar screen—some hunch which enables him to extract more from the moving flecks than he has any right to do. Without conscious thought, Don reached for the control which would start the turbines whirling into life. Sub 5 was just getting under way when three leaden thuds reverberated through the hull, as if some-one was knocking on the front door and wanted to come in.

"Well I'm damned," said Don. "How did you get here?" He did not bother to switch on the TV; he'd know Benj's signal anywhere. The porpoises must have been in the neighborhood and had spotted him before he'd even switched on the hunting call. For the thousandth time, he marveled at their intelligence and loyalty. It was strange that Nature had played the same trick twice —on land with the dog, in the ocean with the porpoise. Why were these graceful sea-beasts so fond of man, to whom they owed so little? It made one feel that the human race was worth something after all, if it could inspire such unselfish devotion.

It had been known for centuries that the porpoise was at least as intelligent as the dog, and could obey quite complex verbal commands. The experiment was still in progress, but if it succeeded then the ancient partnership between shepherd and sheep-dog would have a new lease on life.

Don switched on the speakers recessed into the sub's hull and began to talk to his escorts. Most of the sounds he uttered would have been meaningless to other human ears; they were the product of long research by the ani­mal psychologists of the World Food Administration. He gave his orders twice to make sure that they were understood, then checked with the sonar screen to see that Benj and Susan were following astern as he had told them to.

The four echoes that had attracted his attention were clearer and closer now, and the main body of the whale pack had swept past him to the east. He had no fear of a collision; the great animals, even in their panic, could sense his presence as easily as he could detect theirs, and by similar means. Don wondered if he should switch on his beacon. They might recognize its sound pattern, and it would reassure them. But the still unknown enemy might recognize it too.

He closed for an interception, and hunched low over the screen as if to drag from it by sheer will power every scrap of information the scanner could give. There were two large echoes, some distance apart, and one was ac­companied by a pair of smaller satellites. Don wondered if he was already too late. In his mind's eye, he could picture the death struggle taking place in the water less than a mile ahead. Those two fainter blips would be the enemy—either shark or grampus—worrying a whale while one of its companions stood by in helpless terror, with no weapons of defense except its mighty flukes.

Now he was almost close enough for vision. The TV camera in Sub 5's prow strained through the gloom, but at first could show nothing but the fog of plankton. Then a vast shadowy shape began to form in the center of the screen, with two smaller companions below it. Don was seeing, with the greater precision but hopelessly limited range of ordinary light, what the sonar scanners had already told him.

Almost at once he saw his mistake. The two satellites were calves, not sharks. It was the first time he had ever met a whale with twins; although multiple births were not unknown, a cow could suckle only two young at once and usually only the stronger would survive. He choked down his disappointment; this error had cost him many min­utes and he must begin the search again.

Then came the frantic tattoo on the hull that meant danger. It wasn't easy to scare Benj, and Don shouted his reassurance as he swung Sub 5 round so that the camera could search the turgid waters. Automatically, he had turned toward the fourth blip on the sonar screen—the echo he had assumed, from its size, to be another adult whale. And he saw that, after all, he had come to the right place.

"Jesus!" he said softly. "I didn't know they came that big." He'd seen larger sharks before, but they had all been harmless vegetarians. This, he could tell at a glance, was a Greenland shark, the killer of the northern seas. It was supposed to grow up to thirty feet long, but this specimen was bigger than Sub 5. It was every inch of forty feet from snout to tail, and when he spotted it, it was already turning in toward the kill. Like the coward it was, it had launched its attack at one of the calves.

Don yelled to Benj and Susan, and saw them racing ahead into his field of vision. He wondered fleetingly why porpoises had such an overwhelming hatred of sharks; then he loosed his hands from the controls as the auto-pilot locked on to the target. Twisting and turning as agilely as any other sea-creature of its size, Sub 5 began to close in upon the shark, leaving Don free to concentrate on his armament.

The killer had been so intent upon his prey that Benj caught him completely unawares, ramming him just behind the left eye. It must have been a painful blow: an iron-hard snout, backed by a quarter-ton of muscle at fifty miles an hour is something not to be laughed at even by the largest fish. The shark jerked round in an impossibly tight curve, and Don was almost jolted out of his seat as the sub snapped on to a new course. If this kept up, he'd find it hard to use his String. But at least the killer was too busy now to bother about his intended victims.

Benj and Susan were worrying the giant like dogs snapping at the heels of an angry bear. They were too agile to be caught in those ferocious jaws, and Don mar­veled at the coordination with which they worked. When either had to surface for air, the other would hold off for a minute until the attack could be resumed in strength.

There was no evidence that the shark realized that a far more dangerous adversary was closing in upon it, and that the porpoises were merely a distraction. That suited Don very nicely; the next operation was going to be difficult unless he could hold a steady course for at least fifteen seconds. At a pinch he could use the tiny rocket torps to make a kill. If he'd been alone, and faced with a pack of sharks, he would certainly have done so. But it was messy, and there was a better way. He preferred the technique of the rapier to that of the hand-grenade.

Now he was only fifty feet away, and closing rapidly. There might never be a better chance. He punched the launching stud.

From beneath the belly of the sub, something that looked like a sting-ray hurtled forward. Don had checked the speed of his own craft; there was no need to come any closer now. The tiny, arrow-shaped hydrofoil, only a couple of feet across, could move far faster than his vessel and would close the gap in seconds. As it raced forward, it spun out the thin line of the control wire, like some underwater spider laying its thread. Along that wire passed the energy that powered the Sting, and the signals that steered it to its goal. Don had completely ignored his own larger craft in the effort of guiding this underwater missile. It responded to his touch so swiftly that he felt he was controlling some sensitive high-spirited steed.

The shark saw the danger less than a second before impact. The resemblance of the Sting to an ordinary ray confused it, as the designers had intended. Before the tiny brain could realize that no ray behaved like this, the missile had struck. The steel hypodermic, rammed forward by an exploding cartridge, drove through the shark's horny skin, and the great fish erupted in a frenzy of terror. Don backed rapidly away, for a blow from that tail would rattle him around like a pea in a can and might even cause damage to the sub. There was nothing more for him to do, except to speak into the microphone and call off his hounds.

The doomed killer was trying to arch its body so that it could snap at the poisoned dart. Don had now reeled the Sting back into its hiding place, pleased that be had been able to retrieve the missile undamaged. He watched without pity as the great fish succumbed to its paralysis.

Its struggles were weakening. It was swimming aimless­ly back and forth, and once Don had to sidestep smartly to avoid a collision. As it lost control of buoyancy, the dying shark drifted up to the surface. Don did not bother to follow; that could wait until he had attended to more important business.

He found the cow and her two calves less than a :mile away, and inspected them carefully. They were uninjured, so there was no need to call the vet in his highly special­ized two-man sub which could handle any cetological crisis from a stomach-ache to a Caesarian. Don made a note of the mother's number, stencilled just behind the flippers. The calves, as was obvious from their size, were this season's and had not yet been branded.

Don watched for a little while. They were no longer in the least alarmed, and a check on the sonar had shown that the whole school had ceased its panicky flight. He wondered how they knew what had happened; much had been learned about communication among whales, but much was still a mystery.

"I hope you appreciate what I've done for you, old lady," he muttered. Then, reflecting that fifty tons of mother love was a slightly awe-inspiring sight, he blew his tanks and surfaced.

It was calm, so he cracked the airlock and popped his head out of the tiny conning tower. The water was only inches below his chin, and from time to time a wave made a determined effort to swamp him. There was little danger of this happening, for he fitted the hatch so closely that he was quite an effective plug.

Fifty feet away, a long slate-colored mound, like an overturned boat, was rolling on the surface. Don looked at it thoughtfully and did some mental calculations. A brute this size should be valuable; with any luck there was_, a chance of a double bonus. In a few minutes he'd radio his report, but for the moment it was pleasant to drink the fresh Atlantic air and feel the open sky above his head.

A gray thunderbolt shot up out of the depths and smashed back onto the surface of the water, smothering Don with spray. It was just Benj's modest way of draw­ing attention to himself; a moment later the porpoise had swum up to the conning tower, so that Don could reach down and tickle its head. The great, intelligent eyes stared back into his; was it pure imagination, or did an almost human sense of fun also lurk in their depths?

Susan, as usual, circled shyly at a distance until jeal­ousy overpowered her and she butted Benj out of the way. Don distributed caresses impartially and apologized be-cause he had nothing to give them. He undertook to make up for the omission as soon as he returned to the Herman Melville.

"I'll go for another swim with you, too," he promised, "as long as you behave yourselves next time." He rubbed thoughtfully at a large bruise caused by Benj's playful­ness, and wondered if he was not getting a little too old for rough games like this.

"Time to go home," Don said firmly, sliding down into the cabin and slamming the hatch. He suddenly realized that he was very hungry, and had better do something about the breakfast he had missed. There were not many men on earth who had earned a better right to eat their morning meal. He had saved for humanity more tons of meat, oil and milk than could easily be estimated.

Don Burley was the happy warrior, coming home from one battle that man would always have to fight. He was holding at bay the specter of famine which had confronted all earlier ages, but which would never threaten the world again while the great plankton farms harvested their millions of tons of protein, and the whale herds obeyed their new masters. Man had come back to the sea after aeons of exile; until the oceans froze, he would never be hungry again....

Don glanced at the scanner as he set his course. He smiled as he saw the two echoes keeping pace with the central splash of light that marked his vessel. "Hang around," he said. "We mammals must stick together." Then, as the autopilot took over, he lay back in his chair.

And presently Benj and Susan heard a most peculiar noise, rising and falling against the drone of the turbines. It had filtered faintly through the thick walls of Sub 5, and only the sensitive ears of the porpoises could have detected it. But intelligent beasts though they were, they could hardly be expected to understand why Don Burley was announcing, in a highly unmusical voice, that he was Heading for the Last Round-up....

The present editor was (and still is) a fan; and almost the first fan letter he ever wrote was to the Weird Tales of the Thirties, attempting to communi­cate his high excitement at having read a story by a brand-new name in that magazine. The story was a ghastly, shuddery bit of horror; and the author was Henry Kuttner, just beginning, a long way from the heights of competence and creativity he was to attain, but already showing a most individual capac­ity for stirring the guts of his readers. Henry Kuttner wrote an incredible quantity for more than two decades after that (all good, and much superb) until his tragic death in 1958. Almost the last—and one of the best—of his countless fine science fiction stories is—

They called him Christ. But he was not the Man who had toiled up the long road to Golgotha five thousand years before. They called him Buddha and Mohammed; they called him the Lamb, and the Blessed of God. The called him the Prince of Peace and the Immortal One.

His name was Tyrell.

He had come up another road now, the steep path that led to the monastery on the mountain, and he stood for a moment blinking against the bright sunlight. His white robe was stained with the ritual black.

The girl beside him touched his arm and urged him gently forward. He stepped into the shadow of the gateway.

Then he hesitated and looked back. The road had led up to a level mountain meadow where the monastery stood, and the meadow was dazzling green with early spring. Faintly, far away, he felt a wrenching sorrow at the thought of leaving all this brightness, but he sensed that things would be better very soon. And the brightness was far away. It was not quite real any more. The girl touched his arm again and he nodded obediently and moved forward, feeling the troubling touch of approach­ing loss that his tired mind could not understand now.

I am very old, he thought.

In the courtyard the priests bowed before him. Mons, the leader, was standing at the other end of a broad pool that sent back the bottomless blue of the sky. Now and again the water was ruffled by a cool, soft breeze.

Old habits sent their messages along his nerves. Tyrell raised his hand and blessed them all.

His voice spoke the remembered phrases quietly.

“Let there be peace. On all the troubled earth, on all the worlds and in God’s blessed sky between, let there be peace. The powers of—of——” his hand wavered; then he remembered—”the powers of darkness have no strength against God’s love and understanding. I bring you God’s word. It is love; it is understanding; it is peace.”

They waited till he had finished. It was the wrong time and the wrong ritual. But that did not matter, since he was the Messiah.

Mons, at the other end of the pool, signaled. The girl beside Tyrell put her hands gently on the shoulders of his robe.

Mons cried, “Immortal, will you cast off your stained garment and with it the sins of time?”

Tyrell looked vaguely across the pool.

“Will you bless the worlds with another century of your holy presence?”

Tyrell remembered some words.

“I leave in peace; I return in peace,” he said.

The girl gently pulled off the white robe, knelt, and removed TyrelI’s sandals. Naked, he stood at the pool’s edge.

He looked like a boy of twenty. He was two thousand years old.

Some deep trouble touched him. Mons had lifted his arm, summoning, but Tyrell looked around confusedly and met the girl’s gray eyes.

“Nerina?” he murmured..

“Go in the pool,” she whispered. “Swim across it.”

He put out his hand and touched hers. She felt that wonderful current of gentleness that was his indomitable strength. She pressed his hand tightly, trying to reach through the clouds in his mind, trying to make him know that it would be all right again, that she would be waiting—as she had waited for his resurrection three times already now, in the last three hundred years.

She was much younger than Tyrell, but she was un­mortal too.

For an instant the mists cleared from his blue eyes.

“Wait for me, Nerina,” he said. Then, with a return of his old skill, he went into the pool with a clean dive.

She watched him swim across, surely and steadily. There was nothing wrong with his body; there never was, no matter how old he grew. It was only his mind that stiffened, grooved deeper into the iron ruts of time, lost its friction with the present, so that his memory would fragment away little by little. But the oldest memories went last, and the automatic memories last of all.

She was conscious of her own body, young and strong and beautiful, as it would always be. Her mind...there was an answer to that too. She was watching the answer.

I am greatly blessed, she thought. Of all women on all the worlds, I am the Bride of Tyrell, and the only other immortal ever born.

Lovingly and with reverence she watched him swim. At her feet his discarded robe lay, stained with the mem­ories of a hundred years.

It did not seem so long ago. She could remember it very clearly, the last time she had watched Tyrell swim across the pool. And there had been one time before that—and that had been the first. For her; not for Tyrell.

He came dripping out of the water and hesitated. She felt a strong pang at the change in him from strong sureness to bewildered questioning. But Mons was ready. He reached out and took Tyrell’s hand. He led the Messiah toward a door in the high monastery wall and through it. She thought that Tyrell looked back at her, with the tenderness that was always there in his deep, wonderful calm.

A priest picked up the stained robe from her feet and carried it away. It would be washed clean now and placed on the altar, the spherical tabernacle shaped like the mother world. Dazzling white again, its folds would hang softly about the earth.

It would be washed clean, as Tyrell’s mind would be washed clean too, rinsed of the clogging deposit of mem­ories that a century had brought.

The priests were filing away. She glanced back, beyond the open gateway, to the sharply beautiful green of the mountain meadow, spring grass sensuously reaching to the sun after the winter’s snow. Immortal, she thought, lifting her arms high, feeling the eternal blood, ichor of gods, singing in deep rhythm through her body. Tyrell was the one who suffered. I have no price to pay for this—wonder.

Twenty centuries.

And the first century must have been utter horror.

Her mind turned from the hidden mists of history that was legend now, seeing only a glimpse of the calm White Christ moving through that chaos of roaring evil when the earth was blackened, when it ran scarlet with hate and anguish. Ragnarok, Armageddon, Hour of the Anti­christ—two thousand years ago!

Scourged, steadfast, preaching his word of love and peace, the White Messiah had walked like light through earth’s descent into hell.

And he had lived, and the forces of evil had destroyed themselves, and the worlds had found peace now—had found peace so long ago that the Hour of the Antichrist was lost to memory; it was legend.

Lost, even to Tyrell’s memory. She was glad of that. It would have been terrible to remember. She turned chill at the thought of what martyrdom he must have endured.

But it was the Day of the Messiah now, and Nerina, the only other immortal ever born, looked with reverence and love at the empty doorway through which Tyrell had gone.

She glanced down at the blue pool. A cool wind ruffled its surface; a cloud moved lightly past the sun, shadowing all the bright day.

It would be seventy years before she would swim the pool again. And when she did, when she woke, she would find Tyrell’s blue eyes watching her, his hand closing lightly over hers, raising her to join him in the youth that was the springtime where they lived forever.

In science fiction, nearly everybody reads Galaxy. Since its first issue, and in all of the decade that fol­lowed, it has ranked among the best science fiction magazines—always exciting, and, mutatis mutandis, always reliable. The man whose editorial skill steers Galaxy past the rocks where scores of other maga­zines founder is, in his off-duty hours, a talented author in his own right. You didn't know this? You will know it very soon ... if you go on to read—

Lying in the hospital, Edgar Stone added up his misfortunes as another might count blessings. There were enough to infuriate the most temperate man, which Stone notoriously was not. He smashed his fist down, accidentally hitting the metal side of the bed, and was astonished by the pleasant feeling. It enraged him even more. The really maddening thing was how simply he had goaded himself into the hospital.

He'd locked up his drygoods store and driven home for lunch. Nothing unusual about that; he did it every day. With his miserable digestion, he couldn't stand the restaurant food in town. He pulled into the driveway, rode over a collection of metal shapes his son Arnold had left lying around, and punctured a tire.

"Rita!" he yelled. "This is going too damned far! Where is that brat?"

"In here," she called truculently from the kitchen. He kicked open the screen door. His foot went through the mesh,

"A ripped tire and a torn screen!" he shouted at Arnold, who was sprawled in angular adolescence over a blueprint on the kitchen table. "You'll pay for them, by God! They're coming out of your allowance!"

"I'm sorry. Pop," the boy said.

"Sorry, my left foot," Mrs. Stone shrieked. She whirled on her husband. "You could have watched where you were going. He promised to clean up his things from the driveway right after lunch. And it's about time you stopped kicking open the door every time you're mad."

"Mad? Who wouldn't be mad? Me hoping he'd get out of school and come into the store, and he wants to be an engineer. An engineer and he can't even make change when he—hah!—helps me out in the store!"

"He'll be whatever he wants to be," she screamed in the conversational tone of the Stone household.

"Please," said Arnold. "I can't concentrate on this plan." Edgar Stone was never one to restrain an angry impulse. He tore up the blueprint and flung the pieces down on the table.

"Aw, Pop," the boy said.

"Don't say 'Aw, Pop' to me. You're not going to waste a summer vacation on junk like this. You'll eat your lunch and come down to the store. And you’ll do it every day for the rest of the summer!"

"Oh, he will, will he?" demanded Mrs. Stone. "He'll catch up on his studies. And as for you, you can go back and eat in a restaurant."

"You know I can't stand that slop!"

"You'll eat it because you're not having lunch here any more. I've got enough to do without making three meals a day."

"But I can't drive back with that tire…"

He did, though not with the tire—he took a cab. It cost a dollar plus tip, lunch was a dollar and a half plus tip, bicarb at Rite Drug Store a few doors away and in a great hurry came to another fifteen cents only it didn't work. And then Miss Ellis came in for some material. Miss Ellis could round out any miserable day. She was fifty, tall, skinny and had thin, disapproving lips. She had a sliver of cloth clipped very meagerly on a hem that she intended to use as a sample.

"The arms of the slipcover on my reading chair wore through," she informed him. "I bought the material here, if you remember."

Stone didn't have to look at the fragmentary swatch.

"That was about seven years ago"

"Six-and-a-half," she corrected. "I paid enough for it. You'd expect anything that expensive to last."

"The style was discontinued. I have something here that-"

"I do not want to make an entire slipcover, Mr. Stone. All I want is enough to make new panels for the arms. Two yards should do very nicely."

Stone smothered a bilious hiccup. "Two yards, Miss Ellis?"

"At the most."

"I sold the last of that material years ago." He pulled a bolt off a shelf and partly unrolled it for her. "Why not use a different pattern as a kind of contrast?"

"I want this same pattern," she said, her thin lips getting even thinner and more obstinate.

"Then I'll have to order it and hope one of my wholesalers still has some of it in stock."

"Not without looking for it first right here, you won't order it for me. You can't know all these materials you have on these shelves."

Stone felt all the familiar symptoms of fury—the sudden pulsing of the temples, the lurch and bump of his heart as adrenalin came surging in like the tide at the Firth of Forth, the quivering of his hands, the angry shout pulsing at his vocal cords from below.

"I’ll take a look. Miss Ellis," he said.

She was president of the Ladies Cultural Society and dominated it so thoroughly that the members would go clear to the next town for their dry goods, rather than deal with him, if he offended this sour stick of stubbornness. If Stone's life insurance salesman had been there, he would have tried to keep Stone from climbing the ladder that ran around the three walls of the store. He probably wouldn't have been in time. Stone stamped up the ladder to reach the highest shelves, where there were scraps of bolts. One of them might have been the remnant of the material Miss Ellis had bought six-and-a-half years ago. But Stone never found out.

He snatched one, glaring down meanwhile at the top of Miss Ellis's head, and the ladder skidded out from under him. He felt his skull collide with the counter. He didn't feel it hit the floor.

"God damn it!" Stone yelled. "You could at least turn on the lights."

"There, there, Edgar. Everything's fine, just fine." It was his wife's voice and the tone was so uncommonly soft and soothing that it scared him into a panic.

"What's wrong with me?" he asked piteously. "Am I blind?"

"How many fingers am I holding up?" a man wanted to know.

Stone was peering into the blackness. All he could see before his eyes was a vague blot against a darker blot.

"None," he bleated. "Who are you?"

"Dr. Rankin. That was a nasty fall you had, Mr. Stone concussion of course, and a splinter of bone driven into the brain. I had to operate to remove it."

"Then you cut out a nerve!" Stone said. "You did something to my eyes!"

The doctor's voice sounded puzzled. "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them. I'll take a look, though, and see."

"You’ll be all right, dear," Mrs. Stone said reassuringly, but she didn't sound as if she believed it.

"Sure you will. Pop," said Arnold.

"Is that young stinker here?" Stone demanded. "He's the cause of all this!"

"Temper, temper," the doctor said. "Accidents happen." Stone heard him lower the Venetian blinds. As if they had been a switch, light sprang up and everything in the hospital became brightly visible.

"Well!" said Stone. "That's more like it. It's night and you're trying to save electricity, hey?"

"It's broad daylight. Edgar dear," his wife protested. "All Dr. Rankin did was lower the blinds and—"

"Please," the doctor said. "If you don't mind, I'd rather take care of any explanations that have to be made." He came at Stone with an ophthalmoscope. When he flashed it into Stone's eyes, everything went black and Stone let him know it vociferously.

"Black?" Dr. Rankin repeated blankly. "Are you positive? Not a sudden glare?"

"Black," insisted Stone. "And what's the idea of putting me in a bed filled with bread crumbs?"

"It was freshly made—"

"Crumbs. You heard me. And the pillow has rocks in it."

"What else is bothering you?" asked the doctor worriedly.

"It's freezing in here." Stone felt the terror rise in him again. "It was summer when I fell off the ladder. Don't tell me I've been unconscious clear through till winter!"

"No, Pop," said Arnold. "That was yesterday"

"I'll take care of this," Dr. Rankin said firmly. "I'm afraid you and your son will have to leave, Mrs. Stone. I have to do a few tests on your husband."

"Will he be all right?" she appealed.

"Of course, of course," he said inattentively, peering with a frown at the shivering patient. "Shock, you know," he added vaguely.

"Gosh, Pop," said Arnold, "1m sorry this happened. I got the driveway all cleaned up."

"And we'll take care of the store till you're better," Mrs. Stone promised.

"Don't you dare!" yelled Stone. "You’ll put me out of business!"

The doctor hastily shut the door on them and came back to the bed. Stone was clutching the light summer blanket around himself. He felt colder than he'd ever been in his life.

"Can't you get me more blankets?" he begged. "You don't want me to die of pneumonia, do you?"

Dr. Rankin opened the blinds and asked, "What's this like?"

"Night," chattered Stone. "A new idea to save electricity booking up the blinds to the light switch?"

The doctor closed the blinds and sat down beside the bed. He was sweating as he reached for the signal button and pressed it. A nurse came in, blinking in their direction.

"Why don't you turn on the light?" she asked.

"Huh?" said Stone. "They are."

"Nurse, I'm Dr. Rankin. Get me a piece of sandpaper, some cotton swabs, an ice cube and Mr. Stone's lunch."

"Is there anything he shouldn't eat?"

"That's what I want to find out. Hurry, please."

"And some blankets," Stone put in, shaking with the chill.

"Blankets, Doctor?" she asked, startled.

"Half a dozen will do," he said. "I think." It took her ten minutes to return with all the items. Stone wanted them to keep adding blankets until all seven were on him. He still felt cold.

"Maybe some hot coffee?" he suggested.

The doctor nodded and the nurse poured a cup, added the spoon and a half of sugar he requested, and he took a mouthful. He sprayed it out violently.

"Ice cold!" he yelped. "And who put salt in it?"

"Salt?" She fumbled around on the tray. "It's so dark here—"

"I'll attend to it," Dr. Rankin said hurriedly. "Thank you." She walked cautiously to the door and went out.

"Try this," said the doctor, after filling another cup.

"Well, that's better!" Stone exclaimed. "Damned practical joker. They shouldn't be allowed to work in hospitals."

"And now, if you don't mind," said the doctor, "I'd like to try several tests."

Stone was still angry at the trick played on him, but he cooperated willingly.

Dr. Rankin finally sagged back in the chair. The sweat ran down his face and into his collar, and his expression was so dazed that Stone was alarmed.

"What's wrong. Doctor? Am I going to—going to—"

"No, no. It's not that. No danger. At least, I don't believe there is. But I can't even be sure of that any more."

"You can't be sure if I'll live or die?"

"Look." Dr. Rankin grimly pulled the chair closer. "It's broad daylight and yet you can't see until I darken the room. The coffee was hot and sweet, but it was cold and salty to you, so I added an ice cube and a spoonful of salt and it tasted fine, you said. This is one of the hottest days on record and you're freezing. You told me the sandpaper felt smooth and satiny, then yelled that somebody had put pins in the cotton swabs, when there weren't any, of course. I've tried you with different colors around the room and you saw violet when you should have seen yellow, green for red, orange for blue, and so on. Now do you understand?"

"No," said Stone frightenedly. "What's wrong?"

"All I can do is guess. I had to remove that sliver of bone from your brain. It apparently shorted your sensory nerves."

"And what happened?"

"Every one of your senses has been reversed. You feel cold for heat, heat for cold, smooth for rough, rough for smooth, sour for sweet, sweet for sour, and so forth. And you see colors backward."

Stone sat up. "Murderer! Thief! You've ruined me!" The doctor sprang for a hypodermic and sedative. Just in time, he changed his mind and took a bottle of stimulant instead. It worked fine, though injecting it into his screaming, thrashing patient took more strength than he'd known he owned. Stone fell asleep immediately.

There were nine blankets on Stone and he had a bag of cement for a pillow when he had his lawyer, Manny Lubin, in to hear the charges he wanted brought against Dr. Rankin. The doctor was there to defend himself. Mrs. Stone was present in spite of her husband's objections. She always takes everybody's side against me," he explained in a roar.

"I'll be honest with you, Mr. Lubin," the doctor said, after Stone had finished on a note of shrill frustration. "I've hunted for cases like this in medical history and this is the first one ever to be reported. Except," he amended quickly, "that I haven't reported it yet. I'm hoping it reverses itself. That sometimes happens, you know."

"And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?" raged Stone. "I'll have to go out wearing an overcoat in the summer and shorts in the winter—people will think I'm a maniac. And they'll be sure of it because I'll have to keep the store closed during the day and open at night1 can't see except in the dark. And matching materials! I can't stand the feel of smooth cloth and I see colors backward!" He glared at the doctor before turning back to Lubin. "How would you like to have to put sugar on your food and salt in your coffee?"

"But we'll work it out, Edgar dear," his wife soothed. "Arnold and I can take care of the store. You always wanted him to come into the business, so that ought to please you—"

"As long as I'm there to watch him!"

"And Dr. Rankin said maybe things will straighten out."

"What about that. Doctor?" asked Lubin. "What are the chances?"

Dr. Rankin looked uncomfortable. "I don't know. This has never happened before. All we can do is hope."

"Hope, nothing!" Stone stormed. "I want to sue him. He had no right to go meddling around and turn me upside ' down. Any jury would give me a quarter of a million!"

"I'm no millionaire, Mr, Stone," said the doctor.

"But the hospital has money. We'll sue him and the trustees."

There was a pause while the attorney thought. "I'm afraid we wouldn't have a case, Mr. Stone." He went on more rapidly as Stone sat up, shivering, to argue loudly.

"It was an emergency operation. Any surgeon would have had to operate. Am I right, Dr. Rankin?"

The doctor explained what would have happened if he had not removed the pressure on the brain, resulting from the concussion, and the danger that the bone splinter, if not extracted, might have gone on traveling and caused possible paralysis or death.

"That would be better than this," said Stone.

"But medical ethics couldn't allow him to let you die," Lubin objected. "He was doing his duty. That's point one."

"Mr. Lubin is absolutely right, Edgar," said Mrs. Stone.

"There, you see?" screamed her husband. "Everybody's right but me! Will you get her out of here before I have a stroke?"

"Her interests are also involved," Lubin pointed out.

"Point two is that the emergency came first, the after-effects couldn't be known or considered."

Dr. Rankin brightened. "Any operation involves risk, even the excising of a corn. I had to take those risks."

"You had to take them?" Stone scoffed. "All right, what are you leading up to, Lubin?"

"We'd lose," said the attorney.

Stone subsided, but only for a moment. "So well lose. But if we sue, the publicity would ruin him. I want to sue!"

"For what, Edgar dear?" his wife persisted. "Well have a hard enough time managing. Why throw good money after bad?"

"Why didn't I marry a woman who'd take my side, even when I'm wrong?" moaned Stone. "Revenge, that's what. And he won't be able to practice, so hell have time to find out if there's a cure . . . and at no charge, either! I won't pay him another cent I—"

The doctor stood up eagerly. "But I'm willing to see what can be done right now. And it wouldn't cost you anything, naturally."

"What do you mean?" Stone challenged suspiciously.

"If I were to perform another operation, I'll be able to see which nerves were involved. There's no need to go into the technical side right now, but it is possible to connect nerves. Of course, there are a good many, which complicates matters, especially since the splinter went through several layers—"

Lubin pointed a lawyer's impaling finger at him. "Are you offering to attempt to correct the injury, gratis?"

"Certainly. I mean to say, I'll do my absolute best. But keep in mind, please, that there is no medical precedent." The attorney, however, was already questioning Stone and his wife. "In view of the fact that we have no legal grounds whatever for suit, does this offer of settlement satisfy your claim against him?"

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Stone cried.

Her husband hesitated for a while, clearly tempted to take the opposite position out of habit. "I guess so," he reluctantly agreed.

"Well, then, it's in your hands. Doctor," said Lubin. Dr. Rankin buzzed excitedly for the nurse. "I'll have him prepared for surgery right away."

"It better work this time," warned Stone, clutching a handful of ice cubes to warm his fingers.

Stone came to foggily. He didn't know it, but he had given the anesthetist a bewildering problem, which finally had been solved by using fumes of aromatic spirits of ammonia. The four blurred figures around the bed seemed to be leaning precariously toward him.

"Pop!" said Arnold. "Look, he's coming out of it! Pop!"

"Speak to me, Edgar dear," Mrs. Stone beseeched. Lubin said, "See how he is, Doctor."

"He's fine," the doctor insisted heartily, his usual bedside manner evidently having returned. "He must be—the blinds are open and he's not complaining that it's dark or that he's cold." He leaned over the bed. "How are we feeling, Mr. Stone?"

It took a minute or two for Stone to move his swollen tongue enough to answer. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

"What smells purple?" he demanded.

A few years back, in Ireland, Ray Bradbury spent some very productive months. Not only did he write the script of one of the best motion pictures of recent years—Moby Dick was its name—but on a side trip he met a young writer who had just turned his hand to science fiction, and persuaded him to let American editors see the results. Star was delighted to acquire two of them; the first was "Nor the Moon by Night," and the second is—

Sparkson was relieved to see the evening sky melt into the terrain of the planet where he had been forced down, slowly obliterating the forms of the aliens on each side of him. He had been looking forward to night because he had thought it over and he hoped—rather optimistically, he admitted to himself—that they might let him leave the rocket, or something.

Anything.

Anything was better than walking around the ship for the equivalent of three earth days, the only diversion being the mechanical Translator and that exasperating as hell as it tried to make sense of what the alien said and type it out for him on white little slips of paper: "NAME, I am worried. Could Sparkie (eat) (be nourished by) GAR­BLE?"

And then the answer: "!, (stop) (cease) (desist from) worrying, NAME. Sparkie is (in admirable condition) (fine) !"

It had taken him twenty years to get "Sparkie" out of his family's vocabulary. And now the first two "people" he met in outer space called him Sparkie.

Just because they were bigger than he was!

They lay on each side of him, gigantic whales from an ocean of soot, their lights glowing handfuls of sand. Noth­ing came out, nothing went in.

There were just two.

Many of his controls had ceased to function when they had pulled him down between them. Others were as usual. He couldn't take off, of course—except when that message came out of the Translator: "NAME, Sparkie might (desire) (want) (thirst for) exercise."

He leapt to the chance—it was foolish of them to think that the ship was the man and needed exercise, but that foolishness might help him escape—but they had gone with him, limiting him to graceful figure eights. He tried turn­ing out of one of them, away into space.

He was returned to his place, gently.

When they had captured him, naturally, his first move was to open communications with them through the radio. They received him well, with the help of the translator. They said hello, yes we know where you came from, hope you had a good trip, and then they were quiet.

He had asked them the first forty-nine questions on the checklist designed for making contact with aliens. Nothing. At the end he was yelling at them.

Then he forgot his briefings. "What's the matter, battery gone dead?"

They said only: "Time to rest, Sparkie."

They were not exactly their last words, because while he was "exercising" he had asked if he could fire a nuclear missile, hoping to arouse a little more respect.

Then the one that always seemed subservient to the other said, "NAME, I am frightened. Sparkie might not (throw) (hurl) (eject) it free of his vessel. (Moreover) (Also) it might GARBLE the alignment of the GARBLE GARBLE."

The other didn't even answer that. "Fire away, Sparkie!"

So he threw the lever and there was a wondrous sun and a mushroom that would have turned Einstein over in his grave, certainly, if it had grown under him.

One said, "That's (enough) (sufficient) for (period of time)!" And the other said, "Better than 4th of July, eh, Sparkie?"

"It sure is. How come you know about the 4th?" "We know what we need to know. Let us rest now." Sparkson tried everything, even "I'm lonely!" But rest it was.

Before Fritz Leiber sat down to tell us what lay in the heart and mind of a kitten named Gummitch, he had already behind him a considerable career as writer ("Gather, Darkness!", the award-winning "The Big Time," and scores of other memorable stories), editor (of a popular scientific magazine) and, of all things, Shakespearean actor (following in the footsteps of the older Fritz Leiber, his father). Surely he has at least as much before him; and it is with confidence and glee that we contemplate the fact that the future may hold many more stories from his as moving and insighted as—

Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn't talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn't talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn't talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn't pour her coffee and she didn't talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q.E.D.

Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projec­tion and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could olav by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel-show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating material: The Encyclopedia of Odors, An­thropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Won­ders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.

So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring not clumsiness), Old Starved­-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection not sex), Spook and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation: the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats:

The good science fiction movies can be counted on the fingers of the hands. One of them (say, about the left thumb) is The Incredible Shrinking Man, made, with unusual fidelity, from the novel of almost the same name by Richard Matheson. Matheson is youngish, talented, prolific; and it is a pleasure to in­clude him here (in distinguished company, where he belongs) with his shocking

I wanna RIDE! with my Rota-Mota honey by my SIDE! As we whiz along the highway

If your father read science fiction, he very likely counted Jack Williamson high among his favorite writers—as you very likely do today. Young enough to have served with the Air Force in the South Pacific in World War II, Williamson is old enough, and has been writing excellent science fiction stories often enough, to have attained an almost unique status as combination revered old master and bright new star. For more than thirty years his stories have been the delight of hundreds of thousands of readers. Such consistent loyalty demonstrates the existence of talent; such talent implies the ability to create so bright a bit as—

The collector puffed angrily into the commandant's office in the quarantine station, on the moon of Earth. He was a heavy hairless man with shrewd little ice-green eyes sunk deep in fat yellow flesh. He had a genial smile when he was getting what he wanted. Just now he wasn't.

"Here we've come a good hundred light-years, and you can see who I am." He riffled his psionic identification films under the commandant's nose. "I intend to collect at least one of those queer anthropoids, in spite of all your silly red tape."

The shimmering films attested his distinguished scien­tific attainments. He was authorized to gather specimens for the greatest zoo in the inhabited galaxy, and the quarantine service had been officially requested to expedite his search.

"I see." The commandant nodded respectfully, trying to conceal a weary frown. The delicate business of safe guard­ing Earth's embryonic culture had taught him to deal cau­tiously with such unexpected threats. "Your credentials are certainly impressive, and we'll give you whatever help we can. Won't you sit down?"

The collector wouldn't sit down. He was thoroughly an­noyed with the commandant. He doubted loudly that the quarantine regulations had ever been intended to apply to such a backward planet as Earth, and he proposed to take his specimen without any further fiddle­faddle.

The commandant, who came from a civilization which valued courtesy and reserve, gasped in spite of himself at the terms that came through his psionic translator, but he attempted to restrain his mounting impatience.

"Actually, these creatures are human," he answered firmly. "And we are stationed here to protect them."

"Human?" The collector snorted. "When they've never got even this far off their stinking little planet!"

"A pretty degenerate lot," the commandant agreed re­gretfully. "But their human origins have been well es­tablished, and you'll have to leave them alone."

The collector studied the commandant's stern-lipped face and modified his voice.

"All we need is a single specimen, and we won't injure that." He recovered his jovial smile. "On the contrary, the creature we pick up will be the luckiest one on the planet. I've been in this game a good many centuries, and I know what I'm talking about. Wild animals in their native en­vironments are invariably diseased. They are in constant physical danger, generally undernourished, and always more or less frustrated sexually. But the beast we take will receive the most expert attention in every way."

A hearty chuckle shook his oily yellow yowls.

"Why, if you allowed us to advertise for a specimen, half the population would volunteer."

"You can't advertise," the commandant said flatly. "Our first duty here is to guard this young culture from any outside influence that might cripple its natural development."

"Don't upset yourself." The fat man shrugged. "We're undercover experts. Our specimen will never know that it has been collected, if that's the way you want it."

"It isn't." The commandant rose abruptly. "I will give your party every legitimate assistance, but if I discover that you have tried to abduct one of these people I'll con­fiscate your ship."

"Keep your precious pets," the collector grunted un­graciously. "We'll just go ahead with our field studies. Live specimens aren't really essential, anyhow. Our technicians have prepared very authentic displays, with only animated replicas."

"Very well." The commandant managed a somewhat sour smile. "With that understanding, you may land."

He assigned two inspectors to assist the collector and make certain that the quarantine regulations were re­spected. Undercover experts, they went on to Earth ahead of the expedition, and met the interstellar ship a few weeks later at a rendezvous on the night side of the planet.

The ship returned to the moon, while the outsiders spent several months traveling on the planet, making psionic records and collecting specimens from the unpro­tected species. The inspector reported no effort to violate the Covenants, and everything went smoothly until the night when the ship came back to pick up the expedition.

Every avoidable hazard had been painstakingly avoided. The collector and his party brought their captured speci­mens to the pickup point in native vehicles, traveling as Barstow Brothers' Wild Animal Shows. The ship dropped to meet them at midnight, on an uninhabited desert plateau. A thousand such pickups had been made without an incident, but that night things went wrong.

A native anthropoid had just escaped from a place of confinement. Though his angered tribesmen pursued, he had outrun them in a series of stolen vehicles. They blocked the roads, but he got away across the desert. When his last vehicle stalled, he crossed a range of dry hills on foot in the dark. An unforeseen danger, he blundered too near the waiting interstellar ship.

His pursuers discovered his abandoned car, and halted the disguised outsiders to search their trucks and warn them that a dangerous convict was loose. To keep the natives away from the ship, the inspectors invented a tale of a frightened man on a horse, riding wildly in the op­posite direction.

They guided the native officers back to where they said they had seen the imaginary horseman, and kept them oc­cupied until dawn. By that time, the expedition was on the ship, native trucks and all, and safely back in space.

The natives never recaptured their prisoner. Through that chance-in-a-million that can never be eliminated by even the most competent undercover work, he had got aboard the interstellar ship.

The fugitive anthropoid was a young male. Physically, he appeared human enough, even almost handsome. Lean from the prison regime, he carried himself defiantly erect. Some old injury had left an ugly scar across his cheek and his thin lips had a snarling twist, but he had a poised alertness and a kind of wary grace.

He was even sufficiently human to possess clothing and a name. His filthy garments were made of twisted animal and vegetable fibers and the skins of butchered animals. His name was Casey James.

He was armed like some jungle carnivore, however, with a sharpened steel blade. His body, like his whole planet, was contaminated with parasitic organisms. He was quivering with fear and exhaustion, like any hunted animal, the night he blundered upon the ship. The pangs of his hunger had passed, but a bullet wound in his left arm was nagging him with unalleviated pain.

In the darkness, he didn't even see the ship. The trucks were stopped on the road, and the driver of the last had left it while he went ahead to help to adjust the loading ramp. The anthropoid climbed on the unattended truck and hid himself under a tarpaulin before it was driven aboard.

Though he must have been puzzled and alarmed to find that the ship was no native conveyance, he kept hidden in the cargo hold for several days. With his animal crafti­ness, he milked one of the specimen animals for food, and slept in the cab of an empty truck. Malignant organisms were multiplying in his wounded arm, however, and pain finally drove him out of hiding.

He approached the attendants who were feeding the animals, threatened them with his knife, and demanded medical care. They disarmed him without difficulty and took him to the veterinary ward. The collector found him there, already scrubbed and disinfected, sitting up in his bed.

"Where're we headed for?" he wanted to know.

He nodded without apparent surprise when the collector told him the mission and the destination of the ship.

"Your undercover work ain't quite so hot as you seem to think," he said. "I've seen your flying saucers myself."

"Flying saucers!" The collector sniffed disdainfully, "They aren't anything of ours. Most of them are nothing but refracted images of surface lights, produced by atmos­pheric inversions. The quarantine people are getting out a book to explain that to your fellow creatures."

"A good one for the cops!" The anthropoid grinned. "I bet they're still scratching their dumb skulls, over how I dodged 'em." He paused to finger his bandaged arm, in evident appreciation of the civilized care he had received. "And when do we get to this wonderful zoo of yours?"

"You don't," the collector told him. "I did want exactly such a specimen as you are, but those stuffy bureaucrats wouldn't let me take one."

"So you gotta get rid of me?"

The psionic translator revealed the beast's dangerous desperation, even before his hard body stiffened.

"Wait!" The collector retreated hastily. "Don't alarm yourself. We won't hurt you. We couldn't destroy you, even to escape detection. No civilized man can destroy a human life."

"Nothing to it," the creature grunted. "But if you ain't gonna toss me out in space, then what?"

"You've put us in an awkward situation." The yellow man scowled with annoyance. "If the quarantine people caught us with you aboard, they'd cancel our permits and seize everything we've got. Somehow, we'll have to put you back."

"But I can't go back." The anthropoid licked his lips nervously. "I just gut-knifed a guard. If they run me down this time, it's the chair for sure."

The translator made it clear that the chair was an elabo­rate torture machine in which convicted killers were put to a ceremonial death, according to a primitive tribal code of blood revenge.

"So you gotta take me wherever you're going." The creature's dark, frightened eyes studied the collector cun­ningly. "If you put me back, you'll be killing me."

"On the contrary." The collector's thick upper lip twitched slightly, and a slow smile oozed across his wide putty face, warming everything except his frosty little eyes. "Human life is sacred. We can arrange to make you the safest creature of your kind—and also the hap­piest—so long as you are willing to observe two necessary conditions."

"Huh?" The anthropoid squinted. "Whatcha mean?"

"You understand that we violated the quarantine in allowing you to get aboard," the collector explained pa­tiently. "We, and not you, would be held responsible in case of detection, but we need your help to conceal the violation. We are prepared to do everything for you, if you will make and keep two simple promises."

"Such as?"

"First, promise you won't talk about us."

"Easy enough." The beast grinned. "Nobody'd believe me, anyhow."

"The quarantine people would." The collector's cold eyes narrowed. "Their undercover agents are alert for rumors of any violation."

"Okay, I'll keep my mouth shut." The creature shrugged. "What else?"

"Second, you must promise not to kill again." The anthropoid stiffened. "What's it to you?"

"We can't allow you to destroy any more of your fellow beings. Since you are now in our hands, the guilt would fall on us." The collector scowled at him. "Prom­ise?"

The anthropoid chewed thoughtfully on his thin lower lip. His hostile eyes looked away at nothing. The collector caught a faint reflection of his thoughts, through the trans­lator, and stepped back uneasily.

"The cops are hot behind me," he muttered. "I gotta take care of myself."

"Don't worry." The collector snapped his fat fingers. "We can get you a pardon. Just say you won't kill again."

"No." Lean muscles tightened in the anthropoid's jaws. "There's one certain man I gotta knock off. That's the main reason I busted outs the pen."

"Who is this enemy?" The collector frowned. "Why is he so dangerous?"

"But he ain't so dangerous," the beast grunted. "I just hate his guts."

"I don't understand."

"I always wanted to kick his face in." The creature's thin lips snarled. "Ever since we was kids together, back in Las Verdades."

"Yet you have never received any corrective treatment for such a monstrous obsession?" The collector shook his head incredulously, but the anthropoid ignored him.

"His name is Gabriel Melendez," the creature muttered. "Just a dirty greaser, but he makes out he's just as good as me. I had money from my rich aunt and he was hungry half the time, but he'd never stay in his place. Even when he was just a snotty-nosed kid, and knew I could beat him because I was bigger, he was always trying to fight me." The beast bared his decaying teeth. "I aim to kill him, before I'm through."

"Killing is never necessary," the collector protested un­easily. "Not for civilized men."

"But I ain't so civilized." The anthropoid grinned bleakly. "I aim to gut-knife Gabe Melendez, just like I did that dumb guard."

"An incredible obsession!" The collector recoiled from the grim-lipped beast and the idea of such raw violence. "What has this creature done to you?"

"He took the girl I wanted." The beast caught a rasping breath. "And he put the cops on me. At least I think it was him, because I got caught not a month after I stuck up the filling station where he works. I think he recognized me, and I aim to get him."

"No--"

"But I will!" The anthropoid slipped out of bed and stood towering over the fat man defiantly, his free hand clenched and quivering. "You can't stop me, not with all your fancy gadgets."

The beast glared down into the collector's bright little eyes. They looked back without blinking, and their lack of brows or lashes made them seem coldly reptilian. Abruptly, the animal subsided.

"Okay, okay!" He spat deliberately on the spotless floor and grinned at the collector's involuntary start. "What's it worth, to let him live?"

The collector shook off his shocked expression.

"We're undercover experts and we know your planet." A persuasive smile crept across his gross face. "Our resources are quite adequate to take care of anything you can demand. Just give your word not to kill again, or talk about us, and tell me what you want."

The anthropoid rubbed his hairy jaw, as if attempting to think.

"First, I want the girl," he muttered huskily. "Carmen Quintana was her name, before she married Gabe. She may give you a little trouble, because she don't like me a bit. Nearly clawed my eyes out once, even back before I shot her old man at the filling station." His white teeth flashed in a wolfish grin. "Think you can make her go for me?"

"I think we can." The collector nodded blandly. "We can arrange nearly anything."

"You'd better arrange that." The anthropoid's thin brown hand knotted again. "And I'll make her sorry she ever looked at Gabe!"

"You don't intend to injure her?"

"That's my business." The beast laughed. "Just take me to Las Verdades. That's a little 'dobe town down close to the border."

If editors know more than writers about what is good and bad (admittedly an arguable point), Jerry Bixby should know very much more than almost any other writer at all. Other writers have been tempted to do a stint of editing; Bixby was so lost to self-control that he found himself, one time and another, editing at least half a dozen magazines, including some of the very best. He has also a good many new, fine TV scripts to his credit. Oh, and he illustrates. And he plays a fine piano. And But read on; and you'll learn all that anyone ever needs to learn about the fine creative talents of Jerome Bixby, in—

Aunt Amy was out on the front porch, rocking back and forth in the high-backed chair and fanning herself, when Bill Soames rode his bicycle up the road and stopped in front of the house.

Perspiring under the afternoon “sun,” Bill lifted the box of groceries out of the big basket over the front wheel of the bike and came up the front walk.

Little Anthony was sitting on the lawn, playing with a rat. He had caught the rat down in the basement—he had made it think that it smelled cheese, the most rich-smelling and crumbly-deli­cious cheese a rat had ever thought it smelled, and it had come out of its hole, and now Anthony had hold of it with his mind and was making it do tricks.

When the rat saw Bill Soames coming, it tried to run, but An­thony thought at it, and it turned a flip-flop on the grass and lay trembling, its eyes gleaming in small black terror.

Bill Soames hurried past Anthony and reached the front steps, mumbling. He always mumbled when he came to the Fremont house, or passed by it, or even thought of it. Everybody did. They thought about silly things, things that didn’t mean very much, like two-and-two-is-four-and-twice-is-eight and so on; they tried to jumble up their thoughts and keep them skipping back and forth, so Anthony couldn’t read their minds. The mumbling helped. Because if Anthony got anything strong out of your thoughts, he might take a notion to do something about it—like curing your wife’s sick headaches or your kid’s mumps, or getting your old milk cow back on schedule, or fixing the privy. And while Anthony mightn’t actually mean any harm, he couldn’t be expected to have much notion of what was the right thing to do in such cases.

That was if he liked you. He might try to help you, in his way. And that could be pretty horrible.

If he didn’t like you—well, that could be worse.

Bill Soames set the box of groceries on the porch railing and stopped his mumbling long enough to say, “Everythin’ you wanted, Miss Amy.”

“Oh, fine, William,” Amy Fremont said lightly. “My, ain’t it terrible hot today?”

Bill Soames almost cringed. His eyes pleaded with her. He shook his head violently no, and then interrupted his mumbling again, though obviously he didn’t want to. “Oh, don’t say that, Miss Amy. It’s fine, just fine. A real good day!”

Amy Fremont got up from the rocking chair and came across the porch. She was a tall woman, thin, a smiling vacancy in her eyes. About a year ago Anthony had got mad at her, because she’d told him he shouldn’t have turned the cat into a cat rug, and al­though he had always obeyed her more than anyone else, which was hardly at all, this time he’d snapped at her. With his mind. And that had been the end of Amy Fremont’s bright eyes, and the end of Amy Fremont as everyone had known her. And that was when word got around in Peaksville (population forty-six) that even the members of Anthony’s own family weren’t safe. After that, everyone was twice as careful.

Someday Anthony might undo what he’d done to Aunt Amy. Anthony’s Mom and Pop hoped he would. When he was older, and maybe sorry. If it was possible, that is. Because Aunt Amy had changed a lot, and besides, now Anthony wouldn’t obey any­one.

“Land alive, William,” Aunt Amy said, “you don’t have to mumble like that. Anthony wouldn’t hurt you. My goodness, Anthony likes you!” She raised her voice and called to Anthony, who had tired of the rat and was making it eat itself, “Don’t you, dear? Don’t you like Mr. Soames?”

Anthony looked across the lawn at the grocery man—a bright, wet, purple gaze. He didn’t say anything. Bill Soames tried to smile at him. After a second Anthony returned his attention to the rat. It had already devoured its tail, or at least chewed it off—for Anthony had made it bite faster than it could swallow, and little pink and red furry pieces lay around it on the green grass. Now the rat was having trouble reaching its hindquarters.

Mumbling silently, thinking of nothing in particular as hard as he could, Bill Soames went stiff-legged down the walk, mounted his bicycle and pedaled off.

“We’lI see you tonight, William,” Aunt Amy called after him. As Bill Soames pumped the pedals, he was wishing deep down that he could pump twice as fast, to get away from Anthony all the faster, and away from Aunt Amy, who sometimes just forgot how careful you had to be. And he shouldn’t have thought that. Because Anthony caught it. He caught the desire to get away from the Fremont house as if it was something bad, and his purple gaze blinked, and he snapped a small, sulky thought after Bill Soames—just a small one, because he was in a good mood today, and besides, he liked Bill Soames, or at least didn’t dislike him, at least today. Bill Soames wanted to go away—so, petulantly, An­thony helped him.

Pedaling with superhuman speed—or, rather, appearing to, be­cause in reality the bicycle was pedaling him—Bill Soames van­ished down the road in a cloud of dust, his thin, terrified wail drifting back across the summerlike heat.

Anthony looked at the rat. It had devoured half its belly, and had died from pain. He thought it into a grave out deep in the cornfield—his father had once said, smiling, that he might as well do that with the things he killed—and went around the house, cast­ing his odd shadow in the hot, brassy light from above.

In the kitchen, Aunt Amy was unpacking the groceries. She put the Mason-jarred goods on the shelves, and the meat and milk in the icebox, and the beet sugar and coarse flour in big cans under the sink. She put the cardboard box in the corner, by the door, for Mr. Soames to pick up next time he came. It was stained and battered and torn and worn fuzzy, but it was one of the few left in Peaksville. In faded red letters it said “Campbell’s Soup.” The last cans of soup, or of anything else, had been eaten long ago, except for a small communal hoard which the villagers dipped into for special occasions—but the box lingered on, like a coffin, and when it and the other boxes were gone the men would have to make some out of wood.

Aunt Amy went out in back, where Anthony’s Mom—Aunt Amy’s sister—sat in the shade of the house, shelling peas. The peas, every time Mom ran a finger along a pod, went lollop-lollop-­lollop into the pan on her lap.

“William brought the groceries,” Aunt Amy said. She sat down wearily in the straight-backed chair beside Mom and began fan­ning herself again. She wasn’t really old; but ever since Anthony had snapped at her with his mind, something had seemed to be wrong with her body as well as her mind, and she was tired all the time.

“Oh, good,” said Mom. Lollop went the fat peas into the pan.

Everybody in Peaksvile always said, “Oh, fine,” or “Good,” or “Say, that’s swell!” when almost. anything happened or was men­tioned—even unhappy things like accidents or even deaths. They’d always say “Good” because if they didn’t try to cover up how they really felt Anthony might overhear with his mind, and then nobody knew what might happen. Like the time Mrs. Kent’s hus­band, Sam, had come walking back from the graveyard because Anthony liked Mrs. Kent and had heard her mourning.

Lollop.

“Tonight’s television night,” said Aunt Amy. “I’m glad. I look forward to it so much every week. I wonder what we’ll see to­night.”

“Did Bill bring the meat?” asked Mom.

“Yes.” Aunt Amy fanned herself, looking up at the featureless brassy glare of the sky. “Goodness, it’s so hot! I wish Anthony would make it just a little cooler—”

“Amy!”

“Oh!” Mom’s sharp tone had penetrated where Bill Soames’s agonized expression had failed. Aunt Amy put one thin hand to her mouth in exaggerated alarm. “Oh . . . I’m sorry, dear.” Her pale-blue eyes shuttled around, right and left, to see if Anthony was in sight. Not that it would make any difference if he was or wasn’t—he didn’t have to be near you to know what you were thinking. Usually, though, unless he had his attention on some­body, he would be occupied with thoughts of his own.

But some things attracted his attention you could never be sure just what.

“This weather’s just fine,” Mom said.

Lollop.

“Oh, yes,” Aunt Amy said. “It’s a wonderful day. I wouldn’t want it changed for the world!”

Lollop.

Lollop.

“What time is it?” Mom asked.

Aunt Amy was sitting where she could see through the kitchen window to the alarm clock on the shelf above the stove. “Four-thirty,” she said.

Lollop.

“I want tonight to be something special,” Mom said. “Did Bill bring a good lean roast?”

“Good and lean, dear. They butchered just today, you know, and sent us over the best piece.”

“Dan Hollis will be so surprised when he finds out that tonight’s television party is a birthday party for him, too!”

“Oh I think he will! Are you sure nobody’s told him?”

“Everybody swore they wouldn’t.”

“That’ll be real nice.” Aunt Amy nodded, looking off across the cornfield. “A birthday party.”

“Well—” Mom put the pan of peas down beside her, stood up and brushed her apron ”I’d better get the roast on. Then we can set the table.” She picked up the peas.

Anthony came around the corner of the house. He didn’t look at them, but continued on down through the carefully kept gar­den—all the gardens in Peaksville were carefully kept, very care­fully kept and went past the rustling, useless hulk that had been the Fremont family car, and went smoothly over the fence and out into the cornfield.

“Isn’t this a lovely day!” said Mom, a little loudly, as they went toward the back door.

Aunt Amy fanned herself. “A beautiful day, dear. Just fine!”

Out in the cornfield, Anthony walked between the tall, rustling rows of green stalks. He liked to smell the corn. The alive corn overhead, and the old dead corn underfoot. Rich Ohio earth, thick with weeds and brown, dry-rotting ears of corn, pressed between his bare toes with every step. He had made it rain last night so everything would smell and feel nice today.

He walked clear to the edge of the cornfield, and over to where a grove of shadowy green trees covered cool, moist, dark ground and lots of leafy undergrowth and jumbled moss-covered rocks and a small spring that made a clear, clean pool. Here Anthony liked to rest and watch the birds and insects and small animals that rustled and scampered and chirped about. He liked to lie on the cool ground and look up through the moving greenness over­head and watch the insects flit in the hazy soft sunbeams that stood like slanting, glowing bars between ground and treetops. Somehow, he liked the thoughts of the little creatures in this place better than the thoughts outside; and while the thoughts he picked up here weren’t very strong or very clear, he could get enough out of them to know what the little creatures liked and wanted, and he spent a lot of time making the grove more like what they wanted it to be. The spring hadn’t always been here; but one time he had found thirst in one small furry mind, and had brought sub­terranean water to the surface in a clear cold flow and had watched, blinking, as the creature drank, feeling its pleasure. Later he had made the pool, when he found a small urge to swim.

He had made rocks and trees and bushes and caves, and sun­light here and shadows there, because he had felt in all the tiny minds around him the desire—or the instinctive want—for this kind of resting place, and that kind of mating place, and this kind of place to play, and that kind of home. And somehow the crea­tures from all the fields and pastures around the grove had seemed to know that this was a good place, for there were always more of them coming in. Every time Anthony came out here there were more creatures than the last time, and more desires and needs to be tended to. Every time there would be some kind of creature he had never seen before, and he would find its mind, and see what it wanted, and then give it to it. He liked to help them. He liked to feel their simple gratification.

Today he rested beneath a thick elm and lifted his purple gaze to a red-and-black bird that had just come to the grove. It twit­tered on a branch over his head, and hopped back and forth, and thought its tiny thoughts, and Anthony made a big, soft nest for it, and pretty soon it hopped in.

A long brown, sleek-furred animal was drinking at the pool. Anthony found its mind next. The animal was thinking about a smaller creature that was scurrying along the ground on the other side of the pool, grubbing for insects. The little creature didn’t know that it was in danger. The long brown animal finished drinking and tensed its legs to leap, and Anthony thought it into a grave in the cornfield.

He didn’t like those kinds of thoughts. They reminded him of the thoughts outside the grove. A long time ago some of the peo­ple outside had thought that way about him, and one night they’d hidden and waited for him to come back from the grove—and he’d just thought them all into the cornfield. Since then the rest of the people hadn’t thought that way at least, very clearly. Now their thoughts were all mixed up and confusing whenever they thought about him or near him, so he didn’t pay much attention.

He liked to help them too, sometimes—but it wasn’t simple, or very gratifying either. They never thought happy thoughts when he did—just the jumble. So he spent more time out here.

He watched all the birds and insects and furry creatures for a while, and played with a bird, making it soar and dip and streak madly around tree trunks until, accidentally, when another bird caught his attention for a moment, he ran it into a rock. Petu­lantly, he thought the rock into a grave in the cornfield; but he couldn’t do anything more with the bird. Not because it was dead, though it was; but because it had a broken wing. So he went back to the house. He didn’t feel like walking back through the corn­field, so he just went to the house, right down into the basement.

It was nice down here. Nice and dark and damp and sort of fra­grant, because once Mom had been making preserves in a rack along the far wall and then she’d stopped coming down ever since Anthony had started spending time here, and the preserves had spoiled and leaked down and spread over the dirt floor and An­thony liked the smell.

He caught another rat, making it smell cheese, and after he played with it he thought it into a grave right beside the long animal he’d killed in the grove. Aunt Amy hated rats, and so he killed a lot of them, because he liked Aunt Amy most of all and sometimes did things Aunt Amy wanted. Her mind was more like the little furry minds out in the grove. She hadn’t thought any­thing bad at all about him for a long time.

After the rat, he played with a big black spider in the corner under the stairs, making it run back and forth until its web shook and shimmered in the light from the cellar window like a reflec­tion in silvery water. Then he drove fruit flies into the web until the spider was frantic trying to wind them all up. The spider liked flies, and its thoughts were stronger than theirs, so he did it. There was something bad in the way it liked flies, but it wasn’t clear— and besides, Aunt Amy hated flies too.

He heard footsteps overhead—Mom moving around in the kitchen. He blinked his purple gaze and almost decided to make her hold still—but instead he went up to the attic, and, after look­ing out the circular window for a while at the front lawn and the dusty road and Henderson’s tip-waving wheatfield beyond, he curled into an unlikely shape and went partly to sleep.

Soon people would be coming for television, he heard Mom think.

He went more to sleep. He liked television night. Aunt Amy had always liked television a lot, so one time he had thought some for her, and a few other people had been there at the time, and Aunt Amy had felt disappointed when they wanted to leave. He’d done something to them for that—and now everybody came to television.

He liked all the attention he got when they did.

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 60-13554 COPYRIGHT, 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959, BY BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. COPYRIGHT CQ 1960 BY FREDERIK POHL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ballantine Books edition published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York