In the beginning there was Wonder. Early Man lived !n a world of alternating light and dark, where wind faded to calm and sun succeeded storm, all without cause—where summer heat and winter’s ice were equally marvelous—where the fruit of the soil or the prize of the hunt might, unpredictably, either fill or kill a man.

Ancient Man learned about cause and effect. He sowed, and reaped; trapped the lightning for winter warmth; caught rain in pools against summer’s drought. He flew an arrow with the feathers of a bird; smelted ore for a sharper stone to tip the arrow; modeled a wheel from a rolling stone. The natural miracles he could control ceased to astonish him; those outside his grasp were, perhaps, supernatural? He wondered—about giants, gods, and demons.

Historic Man, guided by the recorded increment of wonders noted (resolved or unsolved), harnessed the energies of wind and water, grouped with his kin to raise up walls of stone, to stop the enemy before the battle; lived longer and more leisurely; learned to think in abstractions; devised mental tools—logic, morality, philosophy; made new tools with which to peer through at the macro-and micro-cosmic realms of the gods and devils. He saw the magnificent orderliness of the universe; banished wonder and base superstition together; rejoiced, and proclaimed the Age of Reason.

Rational Man inhabited a law-abiding world controlled absolutely by Cold Facts and Logic, Physical Laws and Mechanical Principles. He himself was the inevitable sum of Mendelian Laws, Chemistry, Conditioning, and Reflexes. A minimum of marveling was contained in a Rational Deity—a Great Architect who had (with compass, protractor, and Euclid’s Axioms) laid out the universe. The new verities were classified, catalogued, and cross-indexed for eternity. The new technique of observing, testing, and labelling was called the scientific method.

Modern Man used the new tool of experimentation, and learned: to unleash the lightning; make water from air, cloth from coal, food from metals; to create whirlwinds and earthquakes, brew storms and dispel them; defy distance and gravity; outstrip his own noise; cause a sunburst on Earth; and (now, newly) to animate matter.

Wonder—informed, thoughtful, purposeful wonder—is loose on the Earth again. And this is what “SF” means, what “science fiction” is: not gimmicks and gadgets, monsters and supermen, but trained wonderment—educated and disciplined imagination—a marvelous mirror for Modem Man and the world he is only beginning to make,

J.M., Milford, May, 1960

In one of the two very small towns where both he and I live —Milford, Pa., a river valley resort on the edge of the Poconos—Damon Knight is known as, “You know, the one who always walks down Broad Street reading!”

Milford, with more than a thousand year-round regular residents can, and does, offer a sort of pleased, affectionate, perhaps slightly proud, understanding to its reckless-reader street-crosser. The other (and much smaller) town we both live in—the curiously close-knit community of “science-fictionists”—is less indulgent by far: not that anyone minds how much reading he does; it’s what he says afterward that hurts.

When Anthony Boucher retired as reviewer for Fantasy and Science Fiction, the only logical successor to the post was Damon Knight, then already firmly established as “the other critic” in science fantasy. (I do mean “critic.” Damon has been known to like a book—but rarely to say so. All in all, he has probably poured more vinegar on troubled authors than any other monthly columnist ever thought to keep in stock.)

It is a double pleasure then, to an author-editor like myself, to see him turn his acerbity, auctorially, on a field once-removed from publishing—the world of entertainment.

When the big man came in, there was a movement in the room like a lot of bird dogs pointing. Piano player quits pounding, the two singing drunks shut up, all the beautiful people with cocktails in their hands stop talking and laughing.

“Pete!” the nearest women shrilled, and he walked straight into the room, arms around two girls, hugging them tight. “How’s my sweetheart? Susy, you look good enough to eat, but I had it for lunch. George, you pirate”-he let go both girls, grabbed a bald blushing little man and thumped him on the arm- “you were great, sweetheart, I mean it, really great. Now HEAR THIS!” he shouted, over all the voices that were clamoring Pete this, Pete that.

Somebody put a martini in his hand and he stood holding it, bronzed and tall in his dinner jacket, teeth gleaming white as his shirt cuffs. “We had a show!” he told them.

A shriek of agreement went up, a babble of did we have a show my God Pete listen a show-

He held up his hand. “It was a good show!”

Another shriek and babble.

“The sponsor kinda liked it-he just signed for another one in the fall!”

A shriek, a roar, people clapping, jumping up and down. The big man tried to say something else, but gave up, grinning, while men and woman crowded up to him. They were all trying to shake his hand, talk in his ear, put their arms around him.

“I love ya all!” he shouted. “Now what do you say, let’s live a little!”

The murmuring started again as people sorted themselves out. There was a clinking from the bar. “Jesus, Pete,” a skinny pop-eyed little guy was saying, crouching in adoration, “when you dropped that fishbowl I thought I’d pee myself, honest to God-“

The big man let out a bark of happy laughter. “Yeah, I can still see the look on your face. And the fish, flopping all over the stage. So what can I do, I get down there on my knees-” The big man did so, bending over and staring at imaginary fish on the floor. “And I say, ‘Well, fellows, back to the drawing board!’ “

Screams of laughter as the big man stood up. The party was arranging itself around him in arcs of concentric circles, with people in the back standing on sofas and the piano bench so they could see. Somebody yelled, “Sing the goldfish song, Pete!”

Shouts of approval, please-do-Pete, the goldfish song.

“Okay, okay.” Grinning, the big man sat on the arm of a chair and raised his glass. “And a vun, and a doo - vere’s de moosic?” A scuffle at the piano bench. Somebody banged out a few chords. The big man made a comic face and sang, “Ohhh … how I wish … I was a little fish … and when I want some quail … I’d flap my little tail.”

Laughter, the girls laughing louder than anybody and their red mouths farther open. One flushed blonde had her hand on the big man’s knee, and another was sitting close behind him.

“But seriously-” the big man shouted. More laughter.

“No, seriously,” he said, in a vibrant voice as the room quieted, “I want to tell you in all seriousness I couldn’t have done it alone. And incidentally I see we have some foreigners, litvaks and other members of the press here tonight, so I want to introduce all the important people. First of all, George here, the three-fingered band leader-and there isn’t a guy in the world could have done what he did this afternoon-George, I love ya.” He hugged the blushing little bald man.

“Next my real sweetheart, Ruthie, where are ya. Honey, you were the greatest, really perfect-I mean it, baby-” He kissed a dark girl in a red dress who cried a little and hid her face on his broad shoulder. “And Frank-” He reached down and grabbed the skinny pop-eyed guy by the sleeve. “What can I tell you? A sweetheart?” The skinny guy was blinking, all choked up; the big man thumped him on the back. “Sol and Ernie and Mack, my writers, Shakespeare should have been so lucky-” One by one, they came up to shake the big man’s hand as he called their names; the women kissed him and cried. “My stand-in,” the big man was calling out, and “my caddy,” and “now,” he said, as the room quieted a little, people flushed and sore-throated with enthusiasm, “I want you to meet my handler.”

In a recent volume of considerable arrogance, ill-considered opinion, and unconsidering slovenliness of research, a British humorist with pretensions to critical judgment of science fantasy, one Kingsley Amis, refers to the (unnamed) writer of a story entitled “Of Missing Persons” as “an author who has yet to make his name.”

“ ‘Of Missing Persons,’ “ says Mr. Amis, “is one of those things that offer themselves for analysis with an almost suspicious readiness.” I was not able to determine, in the three pages of quotes and comments that followed, just what analysis was being made, or whose readiness for what was under suspicion—but I may have been prejudiced by having read the story, several times, with great enjoyment, when it was included in the first annual volume of SF.

For the benefit of any readers who, like Mr. Amis, are unfamiliar with the author’s work—the name is Finney. Jack Finney. And it has been a familiar one in science-fantasy since Robert Heinlein’s 1951 anthology, “Tomorrow the Stars,” first offered it to the specialty field.

Mr. Finney’s most recent books include The Third level (Rinehart and Dell Book) and The Body Snatchers (Dell First Editions).

“… Will let me know the number of the pattern,” my wife was saying, following me down the hall toward our bedroom, “and I can knit it myself if I get the blocking done.” I think she said blocking, anyway-whatever that means. And I nodded, unbuttoning my shirt as I walked; it had been hot out today, and I was eager to get out of my office clothes. I began thinking about a dark-green eight-thousand-dollar sports car I’d seen during noon hour in that big showroom on Park Avenue.

“… kind of a ribbed pattern with a matching freggel-heggis,” my wife seemed to be saying as I stopped at my dresser. I tossed my shirt on the bed and turned to the mirror, arching my chest.

“… middy collar, batten-barton sleeves with sixteen rows of smeddlycup balderdashes….” Pretty good chest and shoulders, I thought, staring in the mirror; I’m twenty-six years old, kind of thin faced, not bad-looking, not good-looking.

“… dropped hem, doppelganger waist, maroon-green, and a sort of frimble-framble daisystitch….” Probably want two or three thousand bucks down on a car like that, I thought; the payments’d be more than the rent on this whole apartment. I began emptying the change out of my pants pockets, glancing at each of the coins. When I was a kid there used to be an ad in a boys’ magazine; “Coin collecting can be PROFITABLE,” it read, “and FUN too! Why don’t you start TODAY!” It explained that a 1913 Liberty-head nickel-“and many others!”-was worth thousands, and I guess I’m still looking for one.

“So what do you think?” Marion was saying. “You think they’d go well together?”

“Sure.” I nodded at her reflection in my dresser mirror; she stood leaning in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, staring at the back of my head. “They’d look fine.” I brought a dime up to my eyes for a closer look; it was minted in 1958 and had a profile of Woodrow Wilson, and I turned to Marion. “Hey, look,” I said, “here’s a new kind of dime-Woodrow Wilson.” But she wouldn’t look at my hand. She just stood there with her arms folded, glaring at me; and I said, “Now what? What have I done wrong now?” Marion wouldn’t answer, and I walked to my closet and began looking for some wash pants. After a moment I said coaxingly, “Come on, Sweetfeet, what’d I do wrong?”

“Oh, Al!” she wailed. “You don’t listen to me; you really don’t! Half the time you don’t hear a word I say!”

“Why, sure I do, honey.” I was rattling the hangers, hunting for my pants. “You were talking about knitting.”

“An orange sweater, I said, Al-orange. I knew you weren’t listening and asked you how an orange sweater would go with- Close your eyes.”

“What?”

“No, don’t turn around! And close your eyes.” I closed them, and Marion said, “Now, without any peeking, because I’ll see you, tell me what I’m wearing right now.”

It was ridiculous. In the last five minutes, since I’d come home from the office, I must have glanced at Marion maybe two or three times. I’d kissed her when I walked into the apartment, or I was pretty sure I had. Yet standing at my closet now, eyes closed, I couldn’t for the life of me say what she was wearing. I worked at it; I could actually hear the sound of her breathing just behind me and could picture her standing there, a small girl five feet three inches tall, weighing just over a hundred pounds, twenty-four years old, nice complexion, pretty face, honey-blond hair, and wearing-wearing-

“Well, am I wearing a dress, slacks, medieval armor, or standing here stark naked?”

“A dress.”

“What color?”

“Ah-dark green?”

“Am I wearing stockings?”

“Yes.”

“Is my hair done up, shaved off or in a pony tail?”

“Done up.”

“O.K., you can look now.”

Of course the instant I turned around to look, I remembered. There she stood, eyes blazing, her bare foot angrily tapping the floor, and she was wearing sky-blue wash slacks and a white cotton blouse. As she swung away to walk out of the room and down the hall, her pony tail was bobbing furiously.

Well, brother-and you, too, sister-unless the rice is still in your hair, you know what came next: the hurt, indignant silence. I got into slacks, short-sleeved shirt and huarachos, strolled into the living room, and there on the davenport sat Madame Defarge grimly studying the list, disguised as a magazine, of next day’s guillotine victims. I knew whose name headed the list; and I walked straight to the kitchen, mixed up some booze in tall glasses and found a screw driver in a kitchen drawer.

In the living room, coldly ignored by what had once been my radiant, laughing bride, I set the drinks on the coffee table, reached behind Marion’s magazine and gripped her chin between thumb and forefinger. The magazine dropped, and I instantly inserted the tip of the screw driver between her front teeth, pried open her mouth, picked up a glass and tried to pour in some booze. She started to laugh, spilling some down her front, and I grinned, handing her the glass, and picked up mine. Sitting down beside her, I saluted Marion with my glass, then took a delightful sip; and as it hurried to my sluggish blood stream, I could feel the happy corpuscles dive in, laughing and shouting, and felt able to cope with the next item on the agenda, which followed immediately.

“You don’t love me any more,” said Marion.

“Oh, yes, I do.” I leaned over to kiss her neck, glancing around the room over her shoulder.

“Oh, no, you don’t; not really.”

“Oh, yes, I do; really. Honey, where’s that book I was reading last night?”

“There! You see! All you want to do is read all the time! You never want to go out! The honeymoon’s certainly over around here, all right!”

“No, it isn’t, Sweetknees; not at all. I feel exactly the way I did the day I proposed to you; I honestly do. Was there any mail?”

“Just some ads and a bill. You used to listen to every word I said before we were married and you always noticed what I wore and you complimented me and you sent me flowers and you brought me little surprises and”-suddenly she sat bolt upright-“remember those cute little notes you used to send me! I’d find them all the time,” she said sadly, staring past my shoulder, her eyes widening wistfully. “Tucked in my purse maybe”-she smiled mournfully- “or in a glove. Or they’d come to the office on post cards, even in telegrams a couple times. All the other girls used to say they were just darling.” She swung to face me. “Honey, why don’t you ever-“

“Help!” I said. “Help, help!”

“What do you mean?” Marion demanded coolly, and I tried to explain.

“Look, honey,” I said briskly, putting an arm companionably around her shoulders, “we’ve been married four years. Of course the honeymoon’s over! What kind of imbeciles,” I asked with complete reasonableness, “would we be if it weren’t? I love you, sure,” I assured her, shrugging a shoulder. “Of course. You bet. Always glad to see you; any wife of old Al Pullen is a wife of mine! But after four years I walk up the stairs when I come home; I no longer run up three at a time. That’s life,” I said, clapping her cheerfully on the back. “Even four-alarm fires eventually die down, you know.” I smiled at her fondly. “And as for cute little notes tucked in your purse-help, help!” I should have known better, I guess; there are certain things you just can’t seem to explain to a woman.

I had trouble getting to sleep that night-the davenport is much too short for me-and it was around two forty-five before I finally sank into a kind of exhausted and broken-backed coma. Breakfast next morning, you can believe me, was a glum affair at the town home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred E. Pullen, devoted couple.

Who can say whether the events of the night before affected those which now followed? I certainly couldn’t; I was too tired, dragging home from the office along Third Avenue, heading uptown from Thirty-fourth Street about five-thirty the next evening. I was tired, depressed, irritated and in no hurry at all to get home. It was hot and muggy outside, and I was certain Marion would give me cold cuts for supper-and all evening long, for that matter. My tie was pulled down, my collar open, hat shoved back, coat slung over one shoulder, and trudging along the sidewalk there I got to wishing things were different.

I didn’t care how, exactly-just different. For example, how would things be right now, it occurred to me, if I’d majored in creative botany at college instead of physical ed? Or what would I be doing at this very moment if I’d the job with Enterprises, Incorporated, instead of Serv-Eez? Or if I’d gone to Siam with Tom Biehler that time? Or if I hadn’t broken off with what’s-her-name, that big, black-haired girl who could sing “Japanese Sandman” through her nose?

At Thirty-sixth Street I stopped at the corner newsstand, planking my dime down on the counter before the man who ran it; we knew each other long since, though I don’t think we’ve ever actually spoken. Glancing at me, he scooped up my dime, grabbed a paper from one of the stacks and folded it as he handed it to me; and I nodded my thanks, tucking it under my arm, and walked on. And that’s when it happened; I glanced up at a brick building kitty-corner across the street, and there on a blank side wall three or four stories up was a painted advertisement-a narrow-waisted bottle filled with a reddish-brown beverage and lying half buried in a bed of blue-white ice. Painted just over the bottle in a familiar script were the words, “Drink Coco-Coola.”

Do you see? It didn’t say “Coca-Cola”; not quite. And staring up at that painted sign, I knew it was no sign painters’ mistake. They don’t make mistakes like that; not on great big outdoor signs that take a couple of men several days to paint. I knew it couldn’t possibly be a rival soft drink either; the spelling and entire appearance of this ad were too close to those of Coca-Cola. No, I knew that sign was meant to read “Coco-Coola,” and turning to walk on finally-well, it may strike you as insane what I felt certain I knew from just the sight of that painted sign high above a New York street.

But within two steps that feeling was confirmed. I glanced out at the street beside me; it was rush hour and the cars streamed past, clean cars and dirty ones, old and new. But every one of them was painted a single color only, mostly black, and there wasn’t a tail fin or strip of chromium in sight. These were modern, fast, good-looking cars, you understand, but utterly different in design from any I’d ever before seen. The traffic lights on Third Avenue clicked to red, the cars slowed and stopped, and now as I walked along past them I was able to read some of their names. There were a Ford, a Buick, two Wintons, a Stutz, a Cadillac, a Dort, a Kissel, an Oldsmobile and at least four or five small Fierce-Arrows. Then, glancing down Thirty-seventh Street as I passed it, I saw a billboard advertising Picayune Cigarettes; “America’s Largest-Selling Brand.” And now a Third Avenue bus dragged past me, crammed with people as usual this time of day, but it was shaped a little differently and it was painted blue and white.

I spun suddenly around on the walk, looking frantically for the Empire State Building. But it was there, all right, just where it was supposed to be; and I actually sighed with relief. It was shorter, though-by a good ten stories at least. When had all this happened? I wondered dazedly and opened my paper, but there was nothing unusual in it-till I noticed the name at the top of the page. New York Sun, it said, and I stood on the sidewalk gaping at it; because the Sun hasn’t been published in New York for years.

Do you understand now? I did, finally, but of course I like to read-when I get the chance, that is-and I’m extremely well grounded in science from all the science fiction I’ve read. So I was certain, presently, that I knew what had happened; maybe you’ve figured it out too.

Years ago someone had to decide on a name for a new soft drink and finally picked “Coca-Cola.” But certainly he considered other possible alternatives; and if the truth could be known, I’ll bet one of them was “Coco-Coola.” It’s not a bad name-sounds cool and refreshing-and he may have come very close to deciding on it.

And how come Ford, Buick, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile survived while the Moon, Willys-Knight, Hupmobile and Kissel didn’t? Well, at some point or other maybe a decision was made by the men who ran the Kissel Company, for example, which might just as easily have been made another way. If it had, maybe Kissel would have survived and be a familiar sight today.

Instead of Lucky Strikes, Camels and Chesterfields, we might be buying chiefly Picayunes, Sweet Caporals and Piedmonts. We might not have the Japanese beetle or the atom bomb. While the biggest newspaper in New York could be the Sun, and George Coopernagel might be President. If-what would the world be like right now, what would you or I be doing?-if only things in the past had happened just a tiny bit differently. There are thousands of possibilities, of course; there are millions and trillions. There is every conceivable kind of world, in fact; and a theory of considerable scientific standing-Einstein believed it-is that these other possible worlds actually exist; all of them, side by side and simultaneously with the one we happen to be familiar with.

I believed it too now, naturally; I knew what had happened, all right. Walking along Third Avenue through the late afternoon on my way home from the office, I had come to one of the tiny points where two of these alternate worlds intersected somehow. And I had walked off out of one into another slightly altered, somewhat different world of “If” that was every bit as real, and which existed quite as much, as the one I’d just left.

For maybe a block I walked on, stunned, but with a growing curiosity and excitement-because it had occurred to me to wonder where I was going. I was walking on with a definite purpose and destination, I realized; and when a traffic light beside me clicked to green, I took the opportunity to cross La Guardia Avenue, as it was labeled now, and then continue west along Thirty-ninth Street. I was going somewhere, no doubt about that; and in the instant of wondering where, I felt a chill along my spine. Because suddenly I knew.

All the memories of my life in another world, you understand, still existed in my mind; from distant past to the present. But beginning with the moment that I had turned from the newsstand to glance up at that painted sign, another set of memories-an alternate set of memories of my other life in this alternate world-began stirring to life underneath the first. But they were dim and faint yet, out of focus. I knew where I was going-vaguely; and I no more had to think how to get there than any other man on his way home from work. My legs simply moved in an old familiar pattern, carrying me up to the double glass doors of a big apartment building, and the doorman said, “Evening, Mr. Pullen. Hot today.”

“You said it, Charley,” I answered and walked on into the lobby; and then my legs were carrying me up the stairs to the second floor, then down a corridor to an apartment door which stood open. And just as I did every night, I realized, I walked into the living room, tossing my copy of the Sun to the davenport. I was wearing a suit I’d never seen before, I noticed, but it fitted me perfectly, of course, and was a little worn.

“Hi, I’m home,” I heard my voice call out as always; and at one and the same time I knew, with complete and time-dulled familiarity-and also wondered with intense and fascinated curiosity-who in the world was going to answer; who in this world?

An oven door slammed in the kitchen as I turned to hang up my suit coat in the hall closet as always, then footsteps sounded on the wood floor between the kitchen and the living room. And as she said, “Hi, darling,” I turned to see my wife walking toward me.

I had to admire my taste in this world. She was a big girl, tall and not quite slim; black-haired and with a very fair complexion; quite a pretty face with a single vertical frown line between her brows; and she had an absolutely gorgeous figure with long handsome legs. “Why, hel-lo,” I said slowly. “What a preposterously good-looking female you are!”

Her jaw dropped in simple astonishment, her blue eyes narrowing suspiciously. I held my arms wide then, walking toward her delightedly, and while she accepted my embrace, she drew back to sniff my breath. She couldn’t draw back very far, though, because my embrace-I simply couldn’t help this-was tight and close; this fine-looking girl was a spectacular armful. “Now I know why I go to the office every day,” I was saying as I nuzzled her lovely white neck, an extremely agreeable sensation. “There had to be a reason, and now I know what it is. It’s so I can come home to this.”

“Al, what in the world is the matter with you!” she said. Her voice was still astonished, but she’d quit trying to draw back.

“Nothing you can’t remedy,” I said, “in a variety of delightful ways,” and I kissed her again.

“Honey,” she murmured after a considerable time, “I have to fix supper,” and she made a little token effort to get away.

“Supper can wait,” I answered, and my voice was a full octave deeper, “but I can’t.” Again I kissed her, hard and eagerly, full on the lips. Her great big beautiful blue eyes widened in amazement-then they slowly closed and she smiled langorously.

Marion’s face abruptly rose up in my mind. There in the forefront of my consciousness and conscience, suddenly, was her betrayed and indignant face, every bit as vivid as though she’d actually walked in through the door to discover this sultry brunette in my arms; and I could feel my face flame with guilt. Because I couldn’t kid myself, I couldn’t possibly deny the intensity of the pleasure I’d felt at this girl in my arms. I knew how very close I’d come to betraying Marion, and I felt terribly ashamed, and stood wondering-this long length of glorious girlhood still in my arms-how to end the situation, and with charm and grace. Now a moment later, her eyes opened, and she looked up at me questioningly, those full ripe moist lips slightly apart. “Hate to say this,” I said then, sniffing the air thoughtfully, “but seems to me I smell something burning-besides me.”

“Oh!”-she let out a little shriek, and as she ran to the kitchen I actually closed my eyes and sighed with a terrible relief. I didn’t know how I’d walked into this other alternate world, or how I could leave it; but Marion was alive in my mind, while the world around me seemed unreal. In the kitchen I heard the oven door open, heard water run in the sink, then the momentary sizzle of cooking meat; and I walked quickly to the davenport and snatched up my copy of the Sun.

As I raised it to my face, the tap of high heels sounded on thai wood floor just outside the kitchen door. There was silence as they crossed the rug toward me, then the davenport cushion beside me sank; I felt a deliciously warm breath on my cheek, and I had to lower my trembling, rattling newspaper, turn and manage to smile into the sloe eyes of the creature beside me.

Once again-my head slowly shaking in involuntary approval-I had to admire my own good taste; this was not a homely woman. “I turned the oven down,” she murmured. “It might be better to have dinner a little later. When it gets cooler,” she added softly.

I nodded quickly. “Good idea. Paper says it’s the hottest day in five hundred years,” I babbled. “Doctors advise complete immobility.”

But the long-legged beauty beside me wasn’t listening. “So I’m the reason you like to come home, am I?” she breathed into my ear. “It’s been a long time, darling, since you said anything like that.”

“H’mm,” I murmured and nodded frantically at the paper in my hands. “I see they’re going to tear down City Hall,” I muttered wildly, but she was blowing gently in my ear now; then she pulled the Sun from my paralyzed fingers, tossed it over her shoulder and leaned toward me. Marion! I was shrieking silently. Help! Then the raven-haired girl beside me had her arms around my neck, and I simply did not know what to do; I thought of pretending to faint, claiming sunstroke.

Then with the blinding force of a revelation it came to me. Through no fault of my own, I was in another world, another life. The girl in my arms-somehow that’s where she was now-was singing softly, almost inaudibly. It took me a moment to recognize the tune; then finally I knew, finally I recognized this magnificent girl. “Just a Japanese Sand-man,” she was singing softly through her lovely nose, and now I remembered fully everything about the alternate world I was in. I hadn’t broken off with this girl at all-not in this particular world! Matter of fact, I suddenly realized, I’d never even met Marion in this world. It was even possible, it occurred to me now, that she’d never been born. In any case, this was the girl I’d married in this world. No denying it, this was my wife here beside me with her arms around my neck; we’d been married three years, in fact. And now I knew what to do-perfectly well.  Oh, boy! What a wonderful time Vera and I had in the months that followed. My work at the office was easy-no strain at all. I seemed to have an aptitude for it and, just as I’d always suspected, I made rather more money at Enterprises, Incorporated, than that Serv-Eez outfit ever paid in their lives. More than once, too, I left the office early, since no one seemed to mind, just to hurry back home -leaping up the stairs three at a time-to that lovely big old Vera again. And at least once every week I’d bring home a load of books under my arm, because she loved to read, just like me; and I’d made a wonderful discovery about this alternate world.

Life, you understand, was different in its details. The San Francisco Giants had won the ‘Fifty-eight Series, for example; the Second Avenue El was still up; Yucatan gum was the big favorite; television was good; and several extremely prominent people whose names would astound you were in jail. But basically the two worlds were much the same. Drugstores, for example, looked and smelled just about the same; and one night on the way home from work I stopped in at a big drugstore to look over the racks of paper-back books and made a marvelous discovery.

There on the revolving metal racks were the familiar rows of glossy little books, every one of which, judging from the covers, seemed to be about an abnormally well-developed girl. Turning the rack slowly I saw books by William Faulkner, Bernard Glemser, Agatha Christie, and Charles Einstein, which I’d read and liked. Then, down near the bottom of the rack my eye was caught by the words, “By Mark Twain.” The cover showed an old side-wheeler steamboat, and the title was South From Cairo. A reprint fitted out with a new title, I thought, feeling annoyed; and I picked up the book to see just which of Mark Twain’s it really was. I’ve read every book he wrote- Huckleberry Finn at least a dozen times since I discovered it when I was eleven years old.

But the text of this book was new to me. It seemed to be an account, told in the first person by a young man of twenty, of his application for a job on a Mississippi steamboat. And then, from the bottom of a page, a name leaped out at me. ” ‘Finn, sir,’ I answered the captain,” the text read, ” ‘but mostly they call me Huckleberry.’”

For a moment I just stood there in the drugstore with my mouth hanging open; then I turned the little book in my hands. On the back cover was a photograph of Mark Twain; the familiar shock of white hair, the mustache, that wise old face. But underneath this the brief familiar account of his life ended with saying that he had died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California. Mark Twain had lived eight years longer in this alternate world, and had written-well, I didn’t yet know how many more books he had written in this wonderful world, but I knew I was going to find out. And my hand was trembling as I walked up to the cashier and gave her two bits for my priceless copy of South From Cairo.

I love reading in bed, and that night I read a good half of my new Mark Twain in bed with Vera, and then afterward-well, afterward she fixed me a nice cool Tom Collins. And oh, boy, this was the life all right.

In the weeks that followed-that lanky length of violet-eyed womanhood cuddled up beside me, singing softly through her nose-I read a new novel by Ernest Hemingway; the best yet, I think. I read a serious, wonderfully good novel by James Thurber, and something else I’d been hoping to find for years-the sequel to a marvelous book called Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich. In fact, I read some of the best reading since Gutenberg kicked things off-a good deal of it aloud to Vera, who enjoyed it as much as I did. I read Mistress Murder, a hilarious detective story by George S. Kaufman; The Queen Is Dead, by George Bernard Shaw; The Third Level, a collection of short stories by someone or other I never heard of, but not too bad; a wonderful novel by Alien Marple; a group of fine stories about the advertising business by Alfred Eichler; a terrific play by Orson Welles; and a whole new volume of Sherlock Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle.

For four or five months, as Vera rather aptly remarked, I thought, it was like a second honeymoon. I did all the wonderful little things, she said, that I used to do on our honeymoon and before we were married; I even thought up some new ones. And then-all of a sudden one night- I wanted to go to a nightclub.

All of a sudden I wanted to get out of the house in the evening, and do something else for a change. Vera was astonished-wanted to know what was the matter with me, which is typical of a woman. If you don’t react precisely the same way day after day after endless day, they think something must be wrong with you. They’ll even insist on it. I didn’t want any black-cherry ice cream for desert, I told Vera one night at dinner. Why not, she wanted to know- which is idiotic if you stop to think about it. I didn’t want any because I didn’t want any, that’s all! But being a woman she had to have a reason; so I said, “Because I don’t like it.”

“But of course you like it,” she said. “You always used to like it!”

You see what I mean? Anyway, we did go to this nightclub, but it wasn’t much fun. Vera got sleepy, and we left, and were home before twelve. Then she wasn’t sleepy, but I was. Couple nights later I came home from the office and was changing my clothes; she said something or other, and I didn’t hear her and didn’t answer, and we actually had a little argument. She wanted to know why I always looked at every coin in my pocket, like an idiot, every time I changed clothes. I explained quietly enough; told her about the ad I used to read as a kid and how I was still looking for a 1913 Liberty-head nickel worth thousands of dollars, which was the truth.

But it wasn’t the whole truth. As I looked through the coins I’d collected in my pocket during the day-the Woodrow Wilson dimes, the Grover Cleveland pennies, the nickels with George Coopernagel’s profile, and all the other familiar coins of the world I now lived in-I understood something that had puzzled me once.

These other alternate worlds in which we also live intersect here and there-at a corner newsstand, for example, on Third Avenue in New York and at many another place, too, no doubt. And from these intersecting places every once in a while something from one of these worlds-a Woodrow Wilson dune, for example-will stray into another one. I’d found such a dime and when I happened to plank it down on the counter of that little newsstand, there at an intersection of the two alternate worlds, that dime bought a newspaper in the world it belonged in. And I walked off into that world with the New York Sun under my arm. I knew this now, and I’d known it long since. I understood it finally, but I didn’t tell Vera. I simply told her I was looking for a 1913 Liberty-head nickel. I didn’t tell her I was also looking for a Roosevelt dime.

I found one too. One night, finally, sure enough, there it lay in my palm; a dime with the profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt on its face. And when I slapped it down on the counter of the little newsstand next evening, there at the intersection of two alternate worlds, I was trembling. The man snatched up a paper, folding it as he handed it to me, and I tucked it under my arm and walked on for three or four steps, hardly daring to breathe. Then I opened the paper and looked at it. New York World-Telegram, the masthead read, and I began to run-all the way to Forty-fourth Street, then east to First Avenue and then up three flights of stairs.

I could hardly talk I was so out of breath when I burst into the apartment, but I managed to gasp out the only word that mattered. “Marion!” I said and grabbed her to me, almost choking her, because my arms hit the back of her head about where Vera’s shoulders would have been. But she managed to talk, struggling to break loose, her voice sort of muffled against my coat.

“Al!” she said. “What in the world is the matter with you?”

For her, of course, I’d been here last night and every night for the months and years past. And of course, back in this world, I remembered it, too, but dimly, mistily. I stepped back now and looked down at the marvelous tiny size of Marion, at that wonderful, petite figure, at her exquisite and fragile blond beauty. “Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said, grinning down at her. “It’s just that I’ve got a beautiful wife and was in a hurry to get home to her. Anything wrong with that?”

There wasn’t; not a thing, and-well, it’s been wonderful, my life with Marion, ever since. It’s an exciting life; we’re out three and four nights a week, I guess-dancing, the theater, visiting friends, going to night clubs, having dinner out, even bowling. It’s the way things used to be, as Marion has aptly said. In fact, she remarked recently, it’s like a second honeymoon, and she’s wonderfully happy these days and so am I.

Oh, sometimes I’m a little tired at night lately. There are times after a tough day at Serv-Eez when I’d almost rather stay home and read a good book; it’s been quite a while since I did. But I don’t worry about that. Because the other night, about two-thirty in the morning, just back from The Mirimba, standing at my dresser looking through the coins in my pocket, I found it-another Woodrow Wilson dime. You come across them every once in a while, I’ve noticed, if you just keep your eyes open; Wilson dimes, Ulysses Grant quarters, Coopernagel nickels. And I’ve got my Wilson dime safely tucked away, and-well, I’m sure Vera, that lithe-limbed creature, will be mighty glad to see her husband suddenly acting his old self once again. I imagine it’ll be like a third honeymoon. Just as-this time-it will be for Marion.

So there you are, brother, coin collecting can be profitable. And fun too! Why don’t you start-tonight!

The same Mr. Amis who was so “suspiciously ready” to attempt to analyze a nameless Jack Finney, says in the introductory chapter of his book that “science fiction” is hardly an appropriate name for the field any longer. Regretfully, I must agree with Mr. A. on this one point (without seeing the need for the emphasis on the first word). And I leap to agree, again, with his next statement:

“… the plea that politics and economics and psychology and anthropology and even ethics are really or nearly as much sciences as atomic physics, is chiefly valuable as an indication of a state of mind… .”

Frankly, I am not certain our agreement on this is fundamental; I don’t know what Mr. Amis meant, but what he said is very true. The fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology—yes, even ethics, hopefully—are now just at that burgeoning “state of mind” atomic physics was still passing through when science-fictionists began exploring its potential thirty years ago. As fine an example of the new “science fiction” as I know is this featured story from Playboy.

Doctor Colles was a thin, pale man with receding hair. Mr. Melchior’s chauffeured car had picked him up at his stuffy little office, crowded with papers. He had begun to talk almost at once, and he was still at it now. While waiting for the traffic light to change and listening to Doctor Colles’ conversation, Mr. Melchior took a long green cigar from his case and lit it.

“A breakdown of function and structure,” said Colles. “An absolute lack of communication. Isn’t it so?” Mr. Taylor, a trim, blond young man, who looked like an ad for expensive shirts, listened carefully, said nothing. Melchior looked impressed—and uncomprehending. Colles took his arm just above the elbow, pressed it. “Look at that fellow over there,” he said. “The one in the brown suit—see? Now: can I communicate with him? Or can you? On any save the most primitive level? No. Impossible, I assure you. I’ve only to look at him to know.” The crowd flowed across the street. The men in the car watched the vanishing brown suit.

“We think of, let us say, world problems. He thinks of bowling. We discuss art and letters. He watches the dog acts on TV. We are concerned with our vanishing natural resources. He wonders if he can put a dollar-fifty cab bill on his swindle sheet. Am I correct?” The car moved forward. “What do you think?”

Mr. Melchior thought he agreed one hundred percent. Taylor smiled faintly. “Just the same,” Melchior said, “there has to be some way of reaching these type people, getting inside of them.”

Dr. Colles cleared his throat. “Psychology,” he began.

“Good!” said Melchior. “Good. Go ahead—Oh. Here we are. You’ll have to explain this to me when we’re inside, Doctor.”

They went up the steps of what appeared to be a small parochial school, but which was, in fact, a club—and not the sort at which members were fined for not using first names in addressing one another. The guests’ dining room was small and dark. “A brandy to begin with, Doctor?”

“I hold with the ancient grammarian,” Dr. Colles said, suddenly jovial. “It is better to decline six nouns than one drink. Ha Ha!”

Melchior rolled his eyes toward Taylor, who nodded. It was so ordered. “Would you believe it, Doctor,” said Melchior, after the second sip, “I never tasted brandy till I was twenty-five years old? Times change … Ah. Good. Here’s the menu. Anything you especially like.”

The food came. They ate slowly, with grave pleasure appropriate. “Times change,” Melchior repeated, presently. “Take, for example, business: When my business began to get too big for me to handle the paper work myself, I hired my brother-in-law’s cousin to keep the books. But that family-style operation is outmoded. So now I have my personnel manager, Mr. Taylor here, he’s a college man himself, help me select the top men from the accountants’ college for Melchior Enterprises. Taylor knows what the score is.”

Dr. Colles inquired the precise nature of these enterprises. His host said that they included importing, manufacturing and distributing.

“Well, that covers just about the whole range of commerce, doesn’t it? Except for credit.”

“We do that, too.”

Colles chuckled, but seeing his host react with faint surprise, coughed. “Now, about these tests,” he said. And he proceeded to talk about the tests with young Mr. Taylor, while Mr. Melchior listened, nodding. After a while the personnel manager said, “Well, that seems to be all right, then, about the standard tests. Now, Mr. Melchior would like to discuss with you the possibility of setting up another test, one which would have to be personally constructed.”

“Oh?” Dr. Colles raised his eyebrows. “A special test. Well.”

Melchior rubbed his thin lips with his napkin. “We got—” He paused. “We have certain problems concerned with personnel procurement—maybe disprocurement is the right word, huh, Taylor? And we think you might be just the man to deal with them.”

“Well, that’s very flattering. ‘Disprocurement’? Ha ha. And challenging, too. Go on, go on.”

Joe Clock looked up from his lathe. It was that pest, Aberdeen, again. “Whaddaya want, Ab?” he asked. “Come on, come on—”

Ab smiled ingratiatingly. “Whaddaya want, for crysake?” Joe demanded.

The man looked around, nervously. “Uh. Look Joe, when you told me you needed that money couple weeks ago, you said you needed it so bad, I told you that I, uh, I, uh, could let you have it, sure, I mean, glad to help, I, uh—”

“Will ya quit needling me, for crysake? I told ya I’d pay it back.”

Ab smirked, weakly. “Yeah, but, uh, Joe, I told you then it was the, uh, rent money, so I’d, uh, I’d need it back in a week. And that was the truth, I mean … well, Joe, the, uh, the rent, I mean it was due a, a week ago, and I got to have it Joe. So—”

Joe turned back to his lathe. “You’ll get it. Tell ya landlord to keep his pants on, because I don’t have it now. So quit needling me.”

Ab started to protest, explain, plead, but Joe wasn’t paying any attention to him. Finally, with a helpless shrug he moved off, looking back over his shoulder with a puzzled expression, at the oblivious Joe Clock, who—after the other man was well out of sight—took a stroll down to the drinking fountain.

He was greeted there by a man with a wart between his eyes. “You get them new power tools for your cellar yet, that you were talking about?” the man asked.

Joe wiped his dripping mouth. “Yeah. Ordered ‘em two weeks ago and they finally came couple a days ago,” he said. “Beautiful stuff. Come on down and have a look some Sundy.”

The man with the wart between his eyes said, thanks, he might do that. “What was Aberdeen doing over at your machine just now?” he asked. “He look like he was gonna bust out crying.”

Joe frowned. “Who? Oh, Aberdeen. Aah, I dunno what he wanted.” He nodded, moved off. In the corner of his mind was a faint recollection of what Aberdeen wanted, but it was too much trouble to remember. Hell with ‘m.

“Did you read in the papers, last month,” Mr. Melchior asked, over the fresh fruit cup, “about a fellow who worked for Atlantic Coast Canning—”

Dr. Colles said that he believed he did. “Shot the foreman and—”

“Not the foreman, no, but that’s the case. They were both in line to become foreman, but only one could get the job, so this man, Grubacher, he invited Kelly—that was his competitor—to take a ride back from work in his car; then he killed him. Might’ve gotten away with it, too, only they traced the gun.”

Atlantic Coast Canning, it seemed, was an affiliate of Melchior Enterprises, and the incident had disturbed Mr. Melchior a good deal. Dr. Colles was a psychologist; did he understand what would make a man, who had seemed perfectly normal—a good employee—a good husband—do something like that? There had to be something wrong with him, didn’t there? (“Obviously,” said Dr. C.) Well, they didn’t want a repetition of the Grubacher case. They wanted Dr. Colles to help them weed out people like that beforehand.

The psychologist smiled. Society as a whole, and not just Mr. Melchior, he pointed out, would be glad to find a way to do that. But his host waved his hand and shook his head, respectfully impatient.

“No, no, Doctor. Don’t be modest,” he said. “These tests which you and Mr. Taylor are going to set up for our personnel department—you said before that what’s wrong with our society is ‘lack of communication,’ yes? Well, these tests communicate, don’t they? They help weed out all kinds of unfit people, don’t they? But they don’t go far enough! A man who thinks he hears voices and tells people that spies from outer space are after him, well, you can tell right away there’s something wrong with him, and we tell him that we’ll keep his name on file; don’t call us, we’ll call you …”

But Grubacher hadn’t been that type. He didn’t have hallucinations, he didn’t mutter. In no way, either from his work record or his family life or from his friends, could the ordinary lay person have foreseen that he would kill a man in cold blood. When he was caught and his alibi broken down and—confronted with the ballistics test results—he confessed, he was asked (oh, most vain of all questions!) if he wasn’t sorry. Grubacher seemed a little surprised. He was sorry he was caught, sure. But for the act itself? A bit surprised, answering what he obviously considered a foolish question, the killer said, no … what was there to be sorry about? It was the only thing to do: Kelly stood in his way.

Dr. Colles tapped his glasses on the tablecloth. He nodded rapidly. “This fellow would seem to be obviously a psychopath,” he said. “An individual with an underdeveloped superego. They don’t go around muttering or bubbling their lips, they don’t often run amuck; generally speaking, they are calm—cool—and collected. They simply lack what we are accustomed to call conscience. To your man, his fellow-worker wasn’t a being with equal rights, he was simply an obstacle. The sensible thing was to remove him.”

A cigar came out of Mr. Melchior’s case. He flicked his gold cigarette lighter. “All right,” he said. “Now that we know what they are—how do we find them out in time?”

With a smile, “The FBI would like to know too, Mr. Melchior.”

“Yes, but the FBI isn’t asking you. Anthony Melchior is asking you. I have been very impressed with everything you’ve told us, and I feel quite confident you can do it.”

“Well, thank you very much. But … let me ask you … why are you interested in weeding out only psychopaths? Why not people with other defects—paranoiacs, let’s say?”

His employer seeming somewhat at a loss to answer this, Edward Taylor stepped almost instantly into the breech. “Mr. Melchior feels that men who suffer from more obvious defects are much more likely to be noticed. It is the man who appears to be all right, who seems to function normally, who is actually more in need of being detected. Once found out, our task would naturally be to see that this man is given the proper help. We see it as a three-fold program: discover him—remove him—help him.” He smiled; his smile was rather charming, but it came and went too quickly.

Melchior nodded vigorously; Colles, more slowly. Was it a matter of time? he was asked. A matter of money? Neither factor should dissuade him: Melchior Enterprises would assist him one hundred percent. Dr. Colles smiled, pursed his lips, shook his head. Then he frowned. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers.

“It would be an interesting project,” he said, “it might be a very fruitful one. I could try … I would promise you nothing in the way of results. But I could try—if I were to take on fewer projects with other corporations, perhaps …”

His host’s thin lips stretched in a brief smile. “Good. Very good. And so now, just for a start—” He took out a gold fountain pen and a checkbook. Dr. Colles looked at the moving hand until the last letter of the signature was done; then—missing Mr. Melchior’s upturned glance by a shaved second—he fixed his look on the wall. The check changed hands.

Dr. Colles told his assistant not to make any more appointments for him until further notice. “I’m going to be working on a private research project which will be taking up a great deal of my time,” he explained. “You’ll have to do some legwork for me … I’ll have a list of books for you to get, and quite a number of articles published in professional journals. Then, too, these men are to be phoned—you see: Dr. Sherwind, of the Department of Correction, and so on—and you ask them if you can drop by and pick up case histories for me, as noted here.”

The assistant was an unmarried and intelligent young woman, who had been (and had looked) a good bit younger when she first came to work for Dr. Colles. He had talked at one time about marriage—not during the past few years, however. Why buy milk if you’re friendly with the cow?

“ ‘The Psychopathic Personality Among Prisoners …’ “ she read aloud from the list, pinching her lip: two unlovely habits she’d developed. It occurred to her employer that it would probably be easier (and wiser) to break himself of the habit of her, than to try to break her of any of her own habits.

He hummed a bit when she had gone. After all, the world was full of cows—He took out his bankbook and regarded with favor both the latest entry and the considerable amount in cash folded neatly inside the little book. He had stopped off at the bank directly after leaving Mr. Melchior. The business baron had seemed quite in earnest, but, still, one never knew …

Dr. Colles was a prudent man.

The test had been going on for most of the day. First one section went down to take it, then another. There had been some apprehension at first, but this vanished, by lunchtime, in a rumble of laughter which ran through the whole plant: “So he hands back the papers when he’s finished, and he says to the guy from Personnel, ‘Hey, Mac, how come they wanna know is my sex-life satisfactory: they plannin’ t’ use me f’ stud purposes?’ “

When Joe Clock finally reached the head of the line, the girl there gave him a sheaf of papers and a pencil. “Take any seat at one of the tables and fill these out, please,” she said.

Joe’s eyes traveled from her to the papers and back again. Her hair, it was obvious, was not naturally red, and her expression was discontented. But she was young, and her figure—”If I had a nickel for every one of these I filled out, I’d be rich,” he said.

For a moment their eyes met. “And if I had a nickel for every guy who said that, I’d be rich, too.” Not too bad a beginning. He rapidly calculated his finances, took a breath, and was about to ask her what she was doing that night. But her eyes went past him, she picked up a sheaf of papers and a pencil, handed them to the man behind him. “Take any seat—” she began.

Joe Clock sighed, sat down at the table and took up the pencil. If they wanted to pay him to play school for an hour instead of running the lathe, it was all right with him. And it was easier on the feet. So now let’s see … I like mechanics magazines. Yes. No. What a question to ask a machinist! Sure he liked them. You knew where you were with a mechanics magazine. It showed you what to do and how to do it. No dopey stories to figure out, why the guy acts so dopey trying to get the girl. There’s an obstruction in the pipe, ream it out. Another guy steps out with the girl, kick him in the crotch. Joe circled the Yes. Next. I have a good appetite. Hell, Yes. Then a real stupid one: I would rather collect stamps than go fishing. Joe put a heavy circle around the No. He relaxed. Collect stamps, for crysake! This was going to be easy. Eskimos live in Europe. Joe almost had to laugh at that one, another No; good thing he didn’t have to say where they did live: Aleutia, or some place like that. Well …

A sensible man takes what he can get in this world. Isn’t that the truth, though! Every damn time, and all you can get, too. Hell, yes. Canada belongs to England. That was right. The damn Canadian money has the King of England’s face on it and you got to be careful because once Joe had got stuck with some of that English money from Canada, only he passed it on damn quick, too. It is important to help a friend. What do they mean, “a friend”? He paused, peered at the next one. It is not so important to help a stranger. He hesitantly put Yes for the first, No for the second. It makes good sense to worry about a stranger. He snorted. The hell it does. Catch a stranger worrying about you! A guy that you, like, want to borrow his car, now—but a stranger?

Henry Ford played a major role in developing … Molasses is made from … A sensible man does what he is paid to do. Of course he does. Yes.

I sleep well and wake up fresh and rested. Sure. Yes. A stranger will risk his life to help you. What a laugh. A guy’d have to be crazy! No!

There are lots worse crimes than murder. Probably … Sure. Lots worse. The average person will do anything for money. Absolutely right they would. Why not, if you can get away with it? Sure. And the same way, that’s why you got to watch out for yourself.

There are worse things than losing your home. What? Catching leprosy?

And then the way to answer the question changed. Now you had to pick out an answer. Like, Most people who hit someone with their car at night would (a) report to the police first (b) give first aid (c) make a getaway if possible. Well, any damn fool would know it was the last. In fact, anyone but a damn fool would do just that. That’s what he did that time. (c)

Now, a dope like Aberdeen: he’d probably stop his car. Stick his nose in someone else’s tough luck. Anybody stupid enough to lend his rent money—

If you saw a man about to jump in the river, would you (a) move his clothes so he wouldn’t trip on them (b) call your friends to watch (c) get something to eat afterwards (d) none of these things.

The important thing with women is (a) have a knife in your pocket (b) make sure your hair is combed (c) drive a red car (d) something else.

Bright lights are a sign of (a) rain (b) foreign domination (c) poisoned drinking water (d) none of these things.

National security means (a) warmer weather than we used to have (b) television programs (c) political influence (d) something else.

The main point in criminal activity is (a) dressing real warm if it’s cold (b) not to get caught (c) keep in your own lane on the highway (d) avoid such activity.

Test was kind of interesting, Joe thought, as he handed in the papers. And now—back to the lathe. Go around the long way, avoid Aberdeen’s machine. Gahdamn pest.

Dr. Colles took a good look around his office. It had never seemed so cramped and grubby before. Once again he found himself wondering if he ought not to get out of test construction and evaluation—way out—into some more lucrative field of psychology. Not many clients paid so well as Melchior Enterprises; in plain fact, none of them had. Not by a long shot. And his work for them was about over now, anyway. A competent personnel man like Taylor could carry on the tests without the constructionist. There was something about Taylor … smooth, knowing … without too much eagerness, he considered asking the young man to send him follow-up reports on how the psychopaths turned up by the special test were responding to treatment. Of course, some of them were bound to reject treatment. And they couldn’t be obliged to accept, either, worse luck. Well, that wasn’t his responsibility. He didn’t even know who was doing the therapy.

Except that they would get the credit. But that was how it went. Therapy, therapy, that was all the public thought about. How many articles in general publications did you ever see about test consctructionists? Let alone movies or TV. “I do the work, others get the credit,” Dr. Colles thought with some bitterness.

Feeling the inevitable postproject let-down, Colles’ eyes wandered over the top of his desk. Mail … He’d checked through the mail: nothing of interest. Idly, he picked up a brochure-like thing on glossy paper. It had failed to attract his preoccupied attention earlier.

Ease-A-Just News Jottings. Published by and for the employees of Ease-A-Just Gear and Tool (a Melchior Enterprise). Oh, yes, he recalled talking to Taylor’s assistant concerning a short piece about the test, for the house organs. He started to lay it aside, then opened it. Might be something about the test in there. Of course, the real reason hadn’t been explained to the employees.

“Old friends of Mabel Quinn (formerly Stoltzfus), of the cafeteria staff, will be glad to learn that she and Patrolman Quinn are now the proud parents of twin boys. Congratulations, Mabel, we knew you had it in you!” Dr. Colles winced, turned a page. “Maintenance Wins Softball Tiff”—well, good for Maintenance … No, nothing here. He started to toss it away once more, but something caught his eye and was gone before he could fix what it had been. This is annoying. With a sigh, he opened the paper again, began a systematic search. He had to find it, or it would haunt him. There: a name.

The box score:

Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of a gentleman who is undoubtedly the farthest-out Professor of Sociology ever to hide his dignity behind a fantasy-barrel. I have yet to see two stories alike from “Mr. Smith”—or one that did not somehow fascinate me.

That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered like a bird gone mad-like a bird imbued with an intellect and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and terrors beyond human understanding. A thousand worlds watched.

Had the ancient calendar continued, this would have been A.D. 13,582. After defeat, after disappointment, after ruin and reconstruction, mankind had leaped among the stars.

Out of the shock of meeting inhuman art, of confronting nonhuman dances, mankind had made a superb aesthetic effort and had leaped upon the stage of all the worlds.

The golden steps reeled. Some eyes that watched had retinas. Some had crystalline cones. Yet all eyes were fixed upon the golden shape which interpreted “The Glory and Affirmation of Man” in the Inter-World Dance Festival of what might have been A.D. 13,582.

Once again mankind was winning the contest. Music and dance were hypnotic beyond the limits of systems, compelling, shocking to human and inhuman eyes. The dance was a triumph of shock-the shock of dynamic beauty.

The golden shape on the golden steps executed shimmering intricacies of meaning. The body was gold and still human. The body was a woman, but more than a woman. On the golden steps, in golden light, she trembled and fluttered like a bird gone mad.

The ministry of State Security had been positively shocked when they found that a Nazi agent, more heroic than prudent, had almost reached N. Rogov. Rogov was worth more to the Soviet armed forces than any two air armies, more than three motorized divisions.

By definition, the only “formula” for science fantasy is no-formula; a genre of speculation and extrapolation can exist only in a state of flux. But even flux, over a period of time, trends to a preferred shape. Against a background of the inevitable ninety per cent of inept or hackster trash, the better stories, as they emerge each year, always show some very definite—and different from the year before—emphasis on one area of speculation or another.

This time the focus is summed up in the title of the editorial reprinted some pages farther on from John W. Campbell Jr.’s erstwhile Astounding, now—take a deep breath— retitled Analog Science Fact and Fiction: “What Do You Mean… Human?”

In a rather different sense, this is of course the query underlying all fiction, and all art. But the stories in this book, almost all, treat the question also in the special science-fiction sense as well—exploring with postulated answers and what if’s the boundaries of distinction by which we define ourselves.

Ray Bradbury, who needs no introduction in or out of the science-fiction field (even Mr. Amis knows his name!) selects a delicate and haunting legendary boundary to explore.

Tom, kneedeep in the waves, a piece of driftwood in his hand, listened.

The house, up toward the coast highway in the late afternoon, was silent. The sounds of closets being rummaged, suitcase locks snapping, vases being smashed, and of a final door crashing shut, all had faded away.

Chico, standing on the pale sand, flourished his wire-strainer to shake out a harvest of lost coins. After a moment, without glancing at Tom, he said, “Let her go.”

So it was every year. For a week, or a month, their house would have music swelling from the windows, there would be new geraniums potted on the porch-rail, new paint on the doors and steps. The clothes on the wire-line changed from harlequin pants to sheath-dresses to hand-made Mexican frocks like white waves breaking behind the house. Inside, the paintings on the walls shifted from imitation Matisse to pseudo-Italian Renaissance. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a woman drying her hair like a bright yellow flag on the wind. Sometimes the flag was black or red. Sometimes the woman was tall, sometimes short, against the sky. But there was never more than one woman at a time. And, at last, a day like today came…

Tom placed his driftwood on the growing pile near where Chico sifted the billion footprints left by people long vanished from their holidays.

“Chico. What are we doing here?”

“Living the life of Reilly, boy!”

“I don’t feel like Reilly, Chico.”

“Work at it, boy!”

Tom saw the house a month from now, the flowerpots blowing dust, the walls hung with empty squares, only sand carpeting the floors. The rooms would echo like shells in the wind. And all night every night, bedded in separate rooms, he and Chico would hear a tide falling away and away down a long shore, leaving no trace.

Tom nodded, imperceptibly. Once a year he himself brought a nice girl here knowing she was right at last and that in no time they would be married. But his women always stole silently away before dawn, feeling they had been mistaken for someone else, not being able to play the part. Chico’s friends left like vacuum cleaners, with a terrific drag, roar, rush, leaving no lint unturned, no clam unprized of its pearl, taking their purses with them like toy dogs which Chico had petted as he opened their jaws to count their teeth.

“That’s four women so far this year.”

“Okay, referee.” Chico grinned. “Show me the way to the showers.”

“Chico—” Tom bit his lower lip, then went on. “I been thinking. Why don’t we split up?”

Chico just looked at him.

“I mean,” said Tom, quickly, “maybe we’d have better luck, alone.”

“Well, I’ll be god-damned,” said Chico, slowly, gripping the strainer in his big fists before him. “Look here, boy, don’t you know the facts? You and me, we’ll be here come the year 2000. A couple of crazy dumb old gooney-birds drying their bones in the sun. Nothing’s ever going to happen to us now, Tom, it’s too late. Get that through your head and shut up.”

Tom swallowed and looked steadily at the other man. “I’m thinking of leaving—next week.”

“Shut up, shut up, and get to work!”

Chico gave the sand an angry showering rake that tilled him forty-three cents in dimes, pennies, and nickels. He stared blindly at the coins shimmering down the wires like a pinball game all afire.

Tom did not move, holding his breath.

They both seemed to be waiting for something.

The something happened.

“Hey… hey… oh, hey… !”

From a long way off down the coast a voice called.

The two men turned slowly.

“Hey… hey… oh, hey… !”

A boy was running, yelling, waving, along the shore two hundred yards away. There was something in his voice that made Tom feel suddenly cold. He held onto his own arms, waiting.

“Hey!”

The boy pulled up, gasping, pointing back along the shore.

“A woman, a funny woman, by the North Rock!”

“A woman!” The words exploded from Chico’s mouth and he began to laugh. “Oh, no, no!”

“What you mean, a ‘funny’ woman?” asked Tom.

“I don’t know,” cried the boy, his eyes wide. “You got to come see! Awfully funny!”

“You mean drowned?”

“Maybe! She came out of the water, she’s lying on the shore, you got to see, yourself… funny…” The boy’s voice died. He gazed off north again. “She’s got a fish’s tail.”

Chico laughed. “Not before supper, thanks.”

“Please,” cried the boy, dancing now. “No lie! Oh, hurry!”

He ran off, sensed he was not followed, and looked back in dismay.

Tom felt his lips move. “Boy wouldn’t run this far for a joke, would he, Chico?”

“People have run further for less.”

Tom started walking. “All right, son.”

“Thanks, mister, oh, thanks!”

The boy ran. Twenty yards up the coast, Tom looked back. Behind him, Chico squinted, shrugged, dusted his hands wearily, and followed.

Every profession has its fringe benefits, and Gordy Dickson is one of science fiction’s. A big rangy ex-Canadian from the tall beer country of Minnesota, he turns up, not quite often enough, at conventions and conferences with his guitar over one shoulder and a sort of shining shield of great good humor over the other. One of these days a bright song publisher will introduce nonconvention-goers to the Dickson-Cogswell-Anderson science-fantasy ballads and blues. Meantime, novels like his explosive Dorsai! in ASF last year, and short stories like this one fill the gap moderately well.

Mr. Wilier is shaving. He uses an old-fashioned straight-edged razor and the mirror above his bathroom washbasin reflects a morning face that not even the fluffy icing of the lather can make very palatable. Above the lather his skin is dark and wrinkled. His eyes are somewhat yellow where they ought to show white and his sloping forehead is embarrassingly short of hair. No matter. Mr. Wilier poises the razor for its first stroke—and instantly freezes in position. For a second he stands immobile. Then his false teeth clack once and he starts to pivot slowly toward the northwest, razor still in hand, quivering like a directional antenna seeking its exact target. This is as it should be. Mr. Wilier, wrinkles, false teeth and all, is a directional antenna. Mr. Wilier turns back to the mirror and goes ahead with his shaving. He shaves skilfully and rapidly, beaming up at a sign over the mirror which proclaims that a stitch in time saves nine. Four minutes later, stitchless and in need of none, he moves out of the bathroom, into his bedroom. Here he dresses rapidly and efficiently, at the last adjusting his four-in-hand before a dresser mirror which has inlaid about its frame the message Handsome is as handsome does. Fully dressed, Mr. Wilier selects a shiny malacca cane from the collection in his hall closet and goes out behind his little house to the garage.

His car, a 1937 model sedan painted a sensible gray, is waiting for him. Mr. Wilier gets in, starts the motor and carefully warms it up for two minutes. He then backs out into the May sunshine. He points the hood ornament of the sedan toward Buena Vista and drives off.

Two hours later he can be seen approaching a small yellow-and-white rambler in Buena Vista’s new development section, at a considerate speed two miles under the local limit. It is 10:30 in the morning. He pulls up in front of the house, sets the handbrake, locks his car and goes up to ring the doorbell beside the yellow front door.

The door opens and a face looks out. It is a very pretty face with blue eyes and marigold-yellow hair above a blue apron not quite the same shade as the eyes. The young lady to which it belongs cannot be much more than in her very early twenties.

“Yes?” says the young lady.

“Mr. Wilier, Mrs. Conalt,” says Mr. Wilier, raising his hat and producing a card. “The Liberty Mutual Insurance agent, to see your husband.”

“Oh!” says the pretty face, somewhat flustered, opening the door and stepping back. “Please come in.” Mr. Wilier enters. Still holding the card, Mrs. Conalt turns and calls across the untenanted small living room toward the bedroom section at the rear of the house, “Hank!”

“Coming!” replies a young baritone. Seconds later a tall, quite thin man about the same age as his wife, with a cheerfully unhandsome face, emerges rapidly into the living room.

“The insurance man, honey,” says the young lady, who has whisked off her apron while Mr. Wilier was turned to face the entrance through which the young man has come. She hands her husband the card.

“Insurance?” says young Mr. Conalt frowning, reading the card. “What insurance? Liberty Mutual? But I don’t— we don’t have any policies with Liberty Mutual. If you’re selling—”

“Not at the moment,” says Mr. Wilier, beaming at them as well as the looseness of his false teeth will permit. “I actually am an insurance agent, but that hasn’t anything to do with this. I only wanted to see you first.”

“First before what?” demands Mr. Conalt, staring hard at him.

“Before revealing myself,” says Mr. Wilier. “You are the two young people who have been broadcasting a call to any other psi-sensitives within range, aren’t you?”

“Oh, Hank!” gasps Mrs. Conalt; but Conalt does not unbend.

“What are you talking about?” he demands.

“Come, come,” replies Mr. Wilier deprecatingly.

“But, Hank—” begins Mrs. Conalt.

“Hush, Edie. I think this guy—”

“Oh, wad the power the Giftie gie us, to see oorselves as ithers see us—more or less, if you young people will pardon the accent.”

“What’s that? That’s Robert Burns, isn’t it,” says Hank. “It goes—it would frae mony an error free us.” He hesitates.

“And foolish notion. Yes,” says Mr. Wilier. “And now that the sign and counter-sign have been given, let us get down to facts. You were broadcasting, both of you, were you not?”

“Were you receiving?” demands Hank.

“Of course,” says Mr. Wilier unperturbed. “How else would I know what quotation to use for a password?” He beams at them again. “May I sit down?”

“Oh, of course!” says Edie hastily. They all sit down. Edie bounces up again. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. —er—” she glances over at the card, still in Hank’s hands —”Wilier?”

“Thank you, no,” replies Mr. Wilier, clacking his teeth. “I have one cup of coffee a day, after dinner. I believe in moderation of diet. But to the point. You are the people I heard.”

“Say we were,” says Hank finally. “You claim to be psi-sensitive yourself, huh?”

“Claim? No doubt about it, my boy. Ash tray?” He lifts his hand. An ash tray on an end table across the room comes sailing on the air like a miniature ceramic UFO to light gently upon his upturned palm. Mr. Wilier sets it down and closes his eyes.

“You have seven dollars in your wallet, Hank. One five-dollar bill and two singles. At this moment you are interrupting your main line of thought to wonder worriedly what happened to the third one-dollar bill, as you had eight dollars in the wallet earlier this morning. Rest easy. You were stopped by the newspaper delivery boy shortly after ten this morning while you were mowing the lawn and paid him eighty cents. The two dimes change are in your right-hand pants pocket.”

He opens his eyes. “Well?”

“All right,” says Hank with a heavy sigh. “You sold me. We can’t do anything like that, Edie and I. We can just read each other’s minds—and other people’s if they’re thinking straight at us.” He stares a little at Mr. Wilier. “You’re pretty good.”

“Tut,” says Mr. Wilier. “Experience, nothing else. I will be a hundred and eighty-four next July 12th. One learns things.”

“A hundred and eighty-four!” gasps Edie.

“And some months, ma’am,” says Mr. Wilier, giving her a little half-bow from his chair. “Sensible living, no extravagances and peace of mind—the three keys to longevity. But to return to the subject, what caused you young people to send out a call?”

“Well, we—” began Edie.

“What we thought,” says Hank, “is that if there were any more like us, we ought to get together and decide what to do about it. Edie and I talked it all over. Until we met each other we never thought there could be anybody else like ourselves in the world. But if there were two of us, then it stood to reason there must be more. And then Edie pointed out that maybe if a bunch of us could get together we could do a lot for people. It was sort of a duty, to see what we could do for the rest of the world.”

“Very commendable,” says Mr. Wilier.

“I mean, we could read the minds of kids that fall in a well and get trapped—and send emergency messages maybe. All sorts of things. There must be a lot more we haven’t thought of.”

“No doubt there are,” says Mr. Wilier.

“Then you’re with us?” says Hank. “Together, I’ll bet we can darn near start a new era in the world.”

“Well, yes,” replies Mr. Wilier. “And no. A hundred and eighty-four years have taught me caution. Moreover, there is more to the story than you young people think.” He clacks his teeth. “Did you think you were the first?”

“The first?” echoes Hank.

“The first to discover you possess unusual abilities. I see by the expression on year faces you have taken just that for granted. I must, I’m afraid, correct that notion. You are not the first any more than I was. There have been many.”

“Many?” asked Edie faintly.

“A great number within my experience,” says Mr. Wilier, rubbing his leathery old hands together.

“But what happened to them?” asked Edie.

“Many things,” replies Mr. Wilier. “Some were burned as witches, some were put in insane asylums. Fifteen years ago one was lynched in a small town called Pashville. Yes, indeed. Many things happen.”

The two others stare at him.

“Yeah?” says Hank. “How come you’re in such good shape, then?”

“Ah, that’s the thing. Look before you leap. I always have. It pays.”

“What—what do you mean?” asks Edie.

“I mean it’s fortunate I was around to hear you when you broadcast.” Mr. Wilier turns to her. “Lucky for you I reached you before you went ahead trying to put this help-the-world plan of yours into effect.”

“I still think it’s a good notion!” says Hank almost fiercely.

“Because you’re young,” replies Mr. Wilier with a slight quaver in his voice. “And idealistic. You wouldn’t want to expose your wife to the sort of thing I’ve mentioned, eh?”

“Anything Hank decides!” says Edie stoutly.

“Well, well,” says Mr. Wilier, shaking his head. “Well, well, welll”

“Look here!” says Hank. “You can’t tell me there’s no way of putting what we’ve got to good use.”

“Well…” says Mr. Wilier.

“Look. If you want out,” says Hank, “you just get in your car—”

Mr. Wilier shakes his head.

“No,” he says. And suddenly his face lights up with a smile. He beams at them. “You’d really let me go?”

“Shove off,” says Hank.

“Goodl” cried Mr. Wilier. He does not move. “Congratulations, both of you. Forgive me for putting you both to the test this way but for the sake of everybody else in the Colony, I had to make sure you were ready to go through with it before I told you anything.”

“Colony?” says Edie.

“Anything?” says Hank.

Nine hours later, just at dusk, a small, gray 1937 sedan in good repair is to be seen approaching the gate of a certain military installation in New Mexico. It stops at the wide gate and two MPs in white helmets approach it. There is a short conversation between them and the driver, and then they march rather stiffly and woodenly back to their small, glassed-in gatehouse. The sedan proceeds on into the interior of the installation.

A little under an hour later, after several more like conversations, the sedan parks. Its three occupants leave it for another gate, another guard, another compound within another area, and finally find themselves standing at the foot of an enormous tall, tapering metallic creation.

There are some half-dozen guards around this creation, but after a short conversation with the oldest of the party they have all stretched out beside their weapons and gone to sleep.

“Here we are,” says the oldest of the party, who is, of course, Mr. Wilier.

The other two are speechless and stare at the enormous ship beside them. They seem rather impressed.

“Will it—” falters Edie, and then her voice fails her.

“Will it take the two of you to Venus? Absolutely,” says Mr. Wilier, fondling the smooth head curve of his malacca walking stick. “I had a long talk with one of the chief men who designed it, just a week ago. You just follow these instructions—” He reaches for an inside pocket of his coat and withdraws a typewritten sheet of paper, which he hands to Hank- “Just run down the list on this, doing everything in order, and off you go.”

Hank takes the paper rather gingerly. “Seems like stealing,” he mumbles.

“Not when you stop to think,” says Mr. Wilier. “It’s for the Colony, for the ultimate good of humanity.” He puts a wrinkled hand confidentially on Hank’s arm. “My boy, this has come so suddenly to both of you as to be quite a severe shock, but you will adjust to it in time. Fate has selected you two young people to be of that dedicated band of psychical pioneers who will one day lift humanity from this slough of fear and pain and uncertainty in which it has wallowed ever since the first man lifted his face to the skies in wonder. Have faith in your own destiny.”

“Yeah,” says Hank, still doubtful. But Edie is gazing with shining eyes at Mr. Wilier.

“Oh!” she says. “Isn’t it wonderful, Hank?”

“Yeah,” says Hank.

“Well, then,” says Mr. Wilier, patting them both on the arm and pushing them gently to the metal ladder of a framework tower that stretches up alongside the ship. “Up you go. Don’t worry about the controls. This is built on a new, secret principle. It’s as easy to drive as a car.”

“Just a minute!” cries a sudden, ringing voice. They all hesitate and turn away from the ship. Approaching rapidly through the air from the northwest is something that can only be described as a scintillant cloud of glory. It swoops in for a landing before them and thins away to reveal a tall, handsome man in a tight sort of coverall of silver mesh.

“Up to your old tricks, again, Wilo, aren’t you?”, he barks at Mr. Wilier. “Can’t keep your hands off? Want everything your own way, don’t you?”

“Fools rush in,” says Mr. Wilier, “where angels fear to tread.”

“What?” demands Hank, looking from one to the other. “What’s all this about? Who’re you?”

“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” says the tall man. “The point is, having psi-talents puts you under my protection. Half a dozen people a year I have to come chasing in and rescue. And all on account of him!” He glares at Mr. Wilier.

“I still don’t—” Hank begins.

“Of course not. How could you? If Wilo here had started leaving things alone as little as a hundred years ago, you humans would have developed into probationary members of Galactic Society by this time. Natural evolution. More psi-talents in every generation. Recognition of such. Alteration of local society. But no, not Wilo. The minute he discovers anyone with psi-talent he points them toward destruction. I have to save them. The only safe way to save them with Wilo around is to take them off the planet. Wilo knows this. So—no progress for humanity.”

Hank blinks a couple of times.

“But how come?” he cries, staring at Mr. Wilier. “He’s one himself! I mean, he can do all sorts of things Edie and I can’t do—”

“Nonsense!” says the tall man. “He’s just sensitive. An antenna, you might say. He can feel when real ones are sending.”

“But—the ash tray…” falters Edie.

“There, there, I scan you perfectly,” soothes the tall man. “Illusion. Nothing more. Even an ordinary intelligence can learn something in a hundred and eighty-four years and some months, after all. Wilo, Master Hypnotist. That’s the way he used to bill himself back in his days on the stage. He hypnotized you, just as he hypnotized these soldiers.”

“With a glance,” mutters Mr. Wilier darkly.

“Unfortunately very true,” says the tall man. He glares at Mr. Wilier again. “If it wasn’t for the fact that we truly advanced civilization members can’t harm anyone—!”

He turns back to Hank and Edie.

“Well,” he sighs heavily, “come along. This world will have to stay stuck in its present stage of development until something happens to Wilo, or he changes his mind.”

Edie stares at the old man.

“Oh, Mr. Wilier!” she says. “Why can’t you let people just go ahead and develop like Hank and I did?”

“Bah!” says Wilier. “Humbug!”

“But the world would be a much better place!”

“Young lady!” snaps Mr. Wilier. “I like it the way it is!” He turns his back on them.

“Come on,” says the tall man.

They take off. Mr. Wilier turns back to look at them as they ascend into the new rays of the just-risen moon and the New Mexico night sky, trailing clouds of glory as they go.

The clouds of glory light up the landscape.

“Bah!” says Mr. Wilier again. With a snap of his fingers he produces some flash paper which, at the touch of flame from a palmed match, flares brightly for a moment. It’s one tiny recalcitrant beacon of.stability and permanence in the whole of the madly whirling, wild and evolving universe.

Once upon a time, little children used to frighten naughty parents at bedtime with a radio program known as “The Shadow.” And out of those dim and dear days comes Bruce Elliott, who used to write the show—before he turned to comic books, mysteries, science fiction, magic, and heaven-knows-how-much-else, only to wind up respectably editing a happily not-too-respectable magazine duo.

For satire, fantasy, wit with spice, and all around fun, Gent and The Dude are giving some stiff competition these days to a magazine which will not be referred to here as Playboy. These excerpts from a still running series of historical frictions (Return of Parvo, Parvo Rides Again, etc.) by Jack Sharkey have been selected as those most appropriate to a family science-fantasy anthology.

The first robot was constructed by Max Roe and Harold Bott, in the year 1653, for exhibition at the World’s Fair at Istanbul (not Constantinople). It was a rather rough construction, consisting mainly of a tin hand to hold cards and a glass eye for viewing them. It had one function: to play poker. Max and Harold taught it everything they knew, taking great pains to root out a distressing habit it had of trying to fill inside straights, and soon it was a better player than either of them. It had a painted mouth which never changed expression, which came in handy when it was only bluffing.

Anyhow, they lugged it down to Istanbul (not Constantinople) for the Fair, and proceeded to set it up in the tent near the center of the exposition. After completing the job, they stepped around the corner to the brewer’s exhibit to sample the wares on display there, and to clean out the little reed pipe which they used to signal the robot to begin its play (alcohol was the perfect cleanser for it). [Hence the phrase, “To wet one’s whistle.”]

While they were gone, however, the paraphernalia of the next tent (that of Omar, the Trussmocker), was delivered to theirs by mistake, and when they returned they were horrified to discover that their robot was laden with barbells and other weights of enormous tonnage.

“Max!” gasped Harold, “we can’t lift up the lid to get at the starting switch!”

“Heavens,” Max groaned, “you’re right!”

“Say,” said a man in the crowd which had come to see the robot, “ain’t that thing gonna play poker for us?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Max, indicating the weighted-down lid. “We can’t get at the starting switch.”

“Can’t you do it by strength alone?” asked the man.

“Nope,” said Harold, sadly. “It’s going to take jacks or better to open.”

As most people know, the first man to fly was called Icarus, who should have had more sense. He and his father escaped from jail on an island (men of Alcatraz take note) by the expedient of attaching feathers to their arms with beeswax (it sounds reckless, I know, but this was before cellophane tape), and flapped away into the skies.

Well, everything was going fine till Icarus, who was a little dopey, decided to take a look at the sun, up close. Naturally, the beeswax began to melt and dribble away, and he began to lose his feathers.

“Say, son,” his father observed, flapping down where it was cooler, “your topside is dripping. You’d better flip over on your back and come lower, so’s the wax’ll get hard again.”

But Icarus said no, and flew still higher, till the wax began running like water, the feathers fluttered away and Icarus plunged down toward the ocean, his right “wing” completely gone.

“Son,” said his father, “are you falling?”

Icarus replied, “It’s a matter of a pinion, Dad.”

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, son,” said his father as Icarus vanished into the sea, “Loop before you leak!”

Moral: He who levitates is washed.

This habit was begun in 1357 by a group of five men who felt that they weren’t getting enough out of their diet, which consisted mainly of turnips.

“Say, men,” said the eldest, named George, “we’re just missing something in our nutrition. How about we go and terrorize the countryside and maybe get us something we can really sink our teeth into?”

The others thought this a fine idea, and soon the near-by villages were getting it in the neck.

“My people,” said the Mayor of the largest village, “it’s about time we stop this leeching. That gang’s been putting the bite on us long enough.”

“So okay, so what do we do?” asked the villagers.

“We go out to the mausoleum where they sleep all day, and we try and touch their hearts by pointing out what we have at stake,” he said.

“We’ll hammer the point home,” the villagers agreed.

So they took five sharpened sticks and went out to where the five men were sleeping. Gus, the blacksmith, had brought his hammer and proceeded to open the first of the five coffins and nailed the vampire before he could fly.

“Hurry, Gus,” said the Mayor, “the other four are going batty.”

But Gus came up to him empty-handed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” he said, “but I got carried away and used up all five stakes on that first guy.”

“Idiot,” said the Mayor, “look what you’ve done! The other four have flipped their lids and flown the crypt!”

“It’s all my fault,” said Gus, “for putting all my pegs in one casket.”

This was discovered in 1944 by two scientists who were working in their lab on something else entirely. Sam, the younger man, came up to Ted, the older man, and said, “Say, Ted, how you getting on with that circular radio-wave of yours?”

“Not so good, Sam,” said Ted, showing him a diagram. “I’ve devised this thing to carry a magnetic current in a circle, but that’s all the farther I am. I call it a cyclotron.”

“What?” said Sam, abused. “Ten years we’ve been working on this project, and all you have is this diagram? Why, it’s nothing but a circle, a plain old cipher.”

“I never took up drafting,” Ted admitted sadly. “Anyhow, that’s the shape it should be.”

“Years of work, and you draw a cipher,” Sam muttered. “I’ll show you what I think of this diagram!”

And with that, he rolled the blueprint into a cylinder and ran it through the pencil-sharpener, leaving the scraps on the floor.

Immediately an angry crowd of janitors gathered, all of them telling the two scientists what they thought of that litter.

Instantly the building vanished in a white-hot blast, followed by a mushroom-shaped cloud.

And to this day, that’s what happens when you get a critical mass at a ground zero.

For the last item, I was going to give the history of Fallout. I had to save it for last because— Well, look for yourself…

That covers everything, doesn’t it?

Daniel Keyes is a reformed science-fiction editor (Marvel, some few years ago) turned high-school English teacher. Either of these dubious professions should be enough to keep a sensible man on the spectator’s side of a byline. If he didn’t write the stuff when he could buy it from himself, one might think the rigors of New York City’s blackboard jungle would prevent him from beginning now.

One way and another, it is difficult to believe that this is Keyes’ second published story—much more difficult after reading it than before.

progris riport 1—martch 5, 1965

The Incredible Mr. Amis singles out John Campbell several times for special notice. This is not unusual; almost anyone writing about modern American science fiction finds himself paying respects to the man under whose sometimes daft but always deft—and vigorous and enthusiastic—guidance, ASF (which you can take as Astounding Science Fiction or the new title. Analog Science Fact and—gasp—Fiction) has been the consistent leader in the field—both as to sales and influence. Mr. A., however, limits his comments about Campbell’s influence to a snidish remark about cranks whose rapid departure would benefit the whole field and a description of the editor as “a deviant figure of marked ferocity.”

I am here to say that I have talked with Campbell, literally and actually—and lived to go back for more. (I don’t want to give the impression that talking with John is easy. But listening is lots of fun too, you know.) But we had lunch together, and both ate spaghetti, and there were no fangs, claws, or horns in evidence.

The following selection is a Campbell editorial from ASF. And now that I think of it, I suppose it is rather ferociously deviant of Mr. Campbell to want to “play robot.”

There are some questions that only small children and very great philosophers are supposed to ask—questions like “What is Death?” and “Where is God?”

And then there are some questions that, apparently, no one is supposed to ask at all; largely, I think, because people have gotten so many wrong answers down through the centuries, that it’s been agreed-by-default not to ask the questions at all.

Science fiction, however, by its very existence, has been asking one question that belongs in the “Let’s agree not to discuss it at all” category—of course, simply by implication, but nevertheless very persistently. To wit: “What do you mean by the term ‘human being’?”

It asks the question in a number of ways; the question of “What is a superman?” requires that we first define the limits of “normal man.” The problem of “What’s a robot?” asks the question in another way.

Some years ago now, Dr. Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics into science fiction:

1.  A robot cannot harm, nor allow harm to come to, a human being.

2.  A robot must obey the orders of human beings.

3.  A robot must, within those limits, protect itself against damage.

The crucial one is, of course, the First Law. The point that science fiction has elided very deftly is… how do you tell a robot what a human being is?

Look … I’ll play robot; you tell me what you mean by “human being.” What is this entity-type that I’m required to leave immune, and defend? How am I, Robot, to distinguish between the following entities: 1. A human idiot. 2. Another robot. 3. A baby. 4. A chimpanzee.

We might, quite legitimately, include a humanoid alien —or even Tregonsee, E. E. Smith’s Rigellian Lensman, and Worsel, the Velantian—which we, as science-fictioneers, have agreed fulfill what we really mean by “human”! But let’s not make the problem that tough just yet.

We do, however, have to consider the brilliant question Dr. W. Ross Ashby raised: If a mechanic with an artificial arm is working on an engine, is the mechanical arm part of the organism struggling with the environment, or part of the environment the organism is struggling with? If I, Robot, am to be instructed properly, we must consider human beings with prosthetic attachments. And, if I am a really functional robot, then that implies a level of technology that could turn up some very fancy prosthetic devices. Henry Kuttner some years back had a story about a man who had, through an accident, been reduced to a brain in a box; the box, however, had plug-in connections whereby it could be coupled to allow the brain in the box to “be” a whole spaceship, or a power-excavator, or any other appropriate machine.

Is this to be regarded as “a robot” or “a human being”? Intuitively we feel that, no matter how many prosthetic devices may be installed as replacements, the human being remains.

The theologians used to have a very handy answer to most of those questions; a human being, unlike animals or machines, has a soul. If that is to be included in the discussion, however, we must also include the associated problems of distinguishing between human beings and incubi, succubi, demons and angels. The problem then takes on certain other aspects … but the problem remains. History indicates that it was just as difficult to distinguish between humans and demons as it is, currently, to distinguish between humans and robots.

Let’s try a little “truth-table” of the order that logicians sometimes use, and that advertisers are becoming fond of. We can try various suggested tests, and check off how the various entities we’re trying to distinguish compare.

You can, of course, continue to extend this, with all the tests you care to think of. I believe you’ll find that you can find no test within the entire scope of permissible-in-our-society-evaluations that will permit a clear distinction between the five entities in the table.

Note, too, that that robot you want to follow the Three Laws is to modify the Second Law—obedience—rather extensively with respect to children and idiots, after you’ve told it how to distinguish between humanoids and chimpanzees.

There have been a good many wars fought over the question “What do you mean… human?” To the Greeks, the peoples of other lands didn’t really speak languages— which meant Greek—but made mumbling noises that sounded like bar-bar-bar, which proved they were barbarians, and not really human.

The law should treat all human beings alike; that’s been held as a concept for a long, long time. The Athenians subscribed to that concept. Of course, barbarians weren’t really human, so the Law didn’t apply to them, and slaves weren’t; in fact only Athenian citizens were.

The easy way to make the law apply equally to all men is to so define “men” that the thing actually works. “Equal Justice for All! (All who are equal, of course.)”

Some years back I got tired of that aching feeling in my head, and resolved never again to pit an opinion of mine against one of John Campbell’s—his are so much stronger.

By now, the habit of responding to Campbellian emphasis only with a) questions, or b) facts, is so ingrained that, lacking a really good question-story …

MAN-LIKE DEVICES USED

IN U. S. TESTS

THEY FEEL HEAT AND COLD, SENSE SHOCK

AND EVEN BREATHE AND BLEED

[Headlines from The New York Times, Jan. 10, 1960.]

My first conscious acquaintance with Cliff Simak was in the body of a Jovian “Loper”—a lizard-sort-of-thing through whose keen senses we—Simak and I, along with the hero of the story, and his dog—were able to perceive for the first time the true grandeur of the giant planet’s beauty.

If this sounds like a travelogue, it’s just because it is. I doubt that anyone who read “Desertion” when it was first published in Astounding, or later as part of the prize-winning book. City, has ever quite forgotten the fresh tingling scent of that ammonia storm… .

Well, that was way back; and that was when I started looking for the Simak label on story titles. Exactly what sort of awareness Mr. Simak has that enables him to understand with a unique clarity the nature of strange beasts, I do not know; nor what specialized talent it is that contrives to communicate this empathy so sharply even to such a human-jingoist as me (as cool a clam as ever you’ve come across when it comes to cats and dogs and canaries, yet, let alone alien entities). All I know is that he is a newspaperman in Milwaukee, which is almost far enough away from Milford, Pa., for me to believe—most anything.

Old Mose Abrams was out hunting cows when he found the alien. He didn’t know it was an alien, but it was alive and it was in a lot of trouble and Old Mose, despite everything the neighbors said about him, was not the kind of man who could bear to leave a sick thing out there in the woods.

It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.

It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn’t made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch.

It was groaning, too, but not too loud - just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind: there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose’s nape.

Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness.

But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn’t leave it there, so he walked up to it, and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out - as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before.

Mose, however, was not finicky. In the neighborhood, he was not well known for fastidity. Ever since his wife had died almost ten years before, he had lived alone on his untidy farm and the housekeeping that he did was the scandal of all the neighbor women. Once a year, if he got around to it, he sort of shoveled out the house, but the rest of the year he just let things accumulate.

So he wasn’t as upset as some might have been with the way the creature smelled. But the sight of it upset him, and it took him quite a while before he could bring himself to touch it. and when he finally did, he was considerably surprised. He had been prepared for it to be either cold or slimy, or maybe even both. But it was neither. It was warm and hard and it had a clean feel to it, and he was reminded of the way a green corn stalk would feel.

He slid his hand beneath the hurt thing and pulled it gently from the clump of hazel brush and turned it over so he could see its face. It hadn’t any face. It had an enlargement at the top of it, like a flower on top of a stalk, although its body wasn’t any stalk, and there was a fringe around this enlargement that wiggled like a can of worms, and it was then that Mose almost turned around and ran.

But he stuck it out.

He squatted there, staring at the no-face with the fringe of worms, and he got cold all over and his stomach doubled up on him and he was stiff with fright - and the fright got worse when it seemed to him that the keening of the thing was coming from the worms.

Mose was a stubborn man. One had to be stubborn to run a runty farm like this. Stubborn and insensitive in a lot of ways. But not insensitive, of course, to a thing in pain.

Finally he was able to pick it up and hold it in his arms and there was nothing to it, for it didn’t weigh much. Less that a half-grown shoat, he figured.

He went up the woods path with it, heading back for home, and it seemed to him the smell of it was less. He was hardly scared at all and he was warm again and not cold all over.

For the thing was quieter now and keening just a little. And although he could not be sure of it, there were times when it seemed as if the thing were snuggling up to him, the way a scared and hungry baby will snuggle to any grown person that comes and picks it up.

Old Mose reached the buildings and he stood out in the yard a minute, wondering whether he should take it to the barn or house. The barn, of course, was the natural place for it, for it wasn’t human - it wasn’t even as close to human as a dog or cat or sick lamb would be.

He didn’t hesitate too long, however. He took it into the house and laid it on what he called a bed, next to the kitchen stove. He got it straightened out all neat and orderly and pulled a dirty blanket over it, and then went to the stove and stirred up the fire until there was some flame.

Then he pulled up a chair beside the bed and had a good, hard, wondering look at this thing he had brought home. It had quieted down a lot and seemed more comfortable than it had out in the woods. He tucked the blanket snug around it with a tenderness that surprised himself. He wondered what he had that it might eat, and even if he knew, how he’d manage feeding it, for it seemed to have no mouth.

‘But you don’t need to worry none,’ he told it. ‘Now that I got you under a roof, you’ll be all right. I don’t know too much about it, but I’ll take care of you the best I can.’

By now it was getting on toward evening, and he looked out the window and saw that the cows he had been hunting had come home by themselves.

‘I got to go get the milking done and other chores,’ he told the thing lying on the bed, ‘but it won’t take me long. I’ll be right back.’

Old Mose loaded up the stove so the kitchen would stay warm and he tucked the thing in once again, then got his milk pails and went down to the barn.

He fed the sheep and pigs and horses and he milked the cows. He hunted eggs and shut the chicken house. He pumped a tank of water.

Then he went back to the house.

It was dark now and he lit the oil lamp on the table, for he was against electricity. He’d refused to sign up when REA had run out the line and a lot of the neighbors had gotten sore at him for being uncooperative. Not that he cared, of course.

He had a look at the thing upon the bed. It didn’t seem to be any better, or any worse, for that matter. If it had been a sick lamb or an ailing calf, he could have known right off how it was getting on, but this thing was different. There was no way to tell.

He fixed himself some supper and ate it and wished he knew how to feed the thing. And he wished, too, that he knew how to help it. He’d got it under shelter and be had it warm, but was that right or wrong for something like this? He had no idea.

He wondered if he should try to get some help, then felt squeamish about asking help when he couldn’t say exactly what had to be helped. But then he wondered how he would feel himself if he were in a far, strange country, all played out and sick, and no one to get him any help because they didn’t know exactly what he was.

That made up his mind for him and he walked over to the phone. But should he call a doctor or a veterinarian? He decided to call the doctor because the thing was in the house. If it had been in the barn, he would have called the veterinarian.

He was on a rural line and the hearing wasn’t good and he was halfway deaf, so he didn’t use the phone too often. He had told himself at times it was nothing but another aggravation and there had been a dozen times he had threatened to have it taken out. But now he was glad he hadn’t.

The operator got old Dr. Benson and they couldn’t hear one another too well, but Mose finally made the doctor understand who was calling and that he needed him and the doctor said he’d come.

With some relief, Mose hung up the phone and was just standing there, not doing anything, when he was struck by the thought that there might be others of these things down there in the woods. He had no idea what they were or what they might be doing or where they might be going, but it was pretty evident that the one upon the bed was some sort of stranger from a very distant place. It stood to reason that there might be more than one of them, for far traveling was a lonely business and anyone - or anything - would like to have some company along.

He got the lantern down off the peg and lit it and went stumping out the door. The night was as black as a stack of cats and the lantern light was feeble, but that made not a bit of difference, for Mose knew this farm of his like the back of his hand.

The first definite and absolutely unchangeable selection I made for this edition of SF was Fritz Leiber’s story, “The Silver Eggheads,” from Fantasy and Science Fiction.

That was in January of ‘59. For some sixteen months since, F&SF has remained incurably readable. In the same period of time, Leiber has been turning out stories, and yet better stories, at such a rate that Fantastic broke every rule in the business and published one complete all-Leiber issue last November.

The arithmetic of anthology selection, in such a case, is evident, and so is the usual lady’s prerogative. But I mourn for the “Eggheads,” and urge you all to storm your back-number magazine stores for it.

And one more thing (that’s the other prerogative, no?)— We’re all going to have to slop saying scornfully, “I mean good science fiction—not that Buck Rogers stuff!” Leiber it writing the Buck Rogers comic strip now… .

Mariana had been living in the big villa and hating the tall pine trees around it for what seemed like an eternity when she found the secret panel in the master control panel of the house.

The secret panel was simply a narrow blank of aluminum—she’d thought of it as room for more switches if they ever needed any, perish the thought!—between the air-conditioning controls and the gravity controls. Above the switches for the three-dimensional TV but below those for the robot butler and maids.

Jonathan had told her not to fool with the master control panel while he was in the city, because she would wreck anything electrical, so when the secret panel came loose under her aimlessly questing fingers and fell to the solid rock floor of the patio with a musical twing her first reaction was fear.

Then she saw it was only a small blank oblong of sheet aluminum that had fallen and that in the space it had covered was a column of six little switches. Only the top one was identified. Tiny glowing letters beside it spelled trees and it was on.

When Jonathan got home from the city that evening she gathered her courage and told him about it. He was neither particularly angry nor impressed.

“Of course there’s a switch for the trees,” he informed her deflatingly, motioning the robot butler to cut his steak. “Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow in this rock anyway. A station in the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.” ‘

After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”

“Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”

She ventured one more question: “Why did they have the tree switch covered up?”

“So you wouldn’t monkey with it—same as the fine controls on the TV. And so you wouldn’t get ideas and start changing the trees. It would unsettle me, let me tell you, to come home to oaks one day and birches the next. I like consistency and I like pines.” He looked at them out of the dining-room picture window and grunted with satisfaction.

She had been meaning to tell him about hating the pines, but that discouraged her and she dropped the topic.

About noon the next day, however, she went to the secret panel and switched off the pine trees and quickly turned around to watch them.

At first nothing happened and she was beginning to think that Jonathan was wrong again, as he so often was though would never admit, but then they began to waver and specks of pale green light churned across them and then they faded and were gone, leaving behind only an intolerably bright single point of light—just as when the TV is switched off. The star hovered motionless for what seemed a long time, then backed away and raced off toward the horizon.

Now that the pine trees were out of the way Mariana could see the real landscape. It was flat gray rock, endless miles of it, exactly the same as the rock on which the house was set and which formed the floor of the patio. It was the same in every direction. One black two-lane road drove straight across it—nothing more.

She disliked the view almost at once—it was dreadfully lonely and depressing. She switched the gravity to moon-normal and danced about dreamily, floating over the middle-of-the-room bookshelves and the grand piano and even having the robot maids dance with her, but it did not cheer her. About two o’clock she went to switch on the pine trees again, as she had intended to do in any case before Jonathan came home and was furious.

However, she found there had been changes in the column of six little switches. The trees switch no longer had its glowing name. She remembered that it had been the top one, but the top one would not turn on again. She tried to force it from “off” to “on” but it would not move.

All the rest of the afternoon she sat on the steps outside the front door watching the black two-lane road. Never a car or a person came into view until Jonathan’s tan roadster appeared, seeming at first to hang motionless in the distance and then to move only like a microscopic snail although she knew he always drove at top speed—it was one of the reasons she would never get in the car with him.

Jonathan was not as furious as she had feared. “Your own damn fault for meddling with it,” he said curtly. “Now we’ll have to get a man out here. Dammit, I hate to eat supper looking at nothing but those rocks! Bad enough driving through them twice a day.”

She asked him haltingly about the barrenness of the landscape and the absence of neighbors.

“Well, you wanted to live way out,” he told her. “You wouldn’t ever have known about it if you hadn’t turned off the trees.”

“There’s one other thing I’ve got to bother you with, Jonathan,” she said. “Now the second switch—the one next below—has got a name that glows. It just says house. It’s turned on—I haven’t touched it! Do you suppose…”

“I want to look at this,” he said, bounding up from the couch and slamming his martini-on-the-rocks tumbler down on the tray of the robot maid so that she rattled. “I bought this house as solid, but there are swindles. Ordinarily I’d spot a broadcast style in a flash, but they just might have slipped me a job relayed from some other planet or solar system. Fine thing if me and fifty other multi-megabuck men were spotted around in identical houses, each thinking his was unique.”

“But if the house is based on rock like it is…”

“That would just make it easier for them to pull the trick, you dumb bunny!”

They reached the master control panel. “There it is,” she said helpfully, jabbing out a finger… and hit the house switch.

For a moment nothing happened, then a white churning ran across the ceiling, the walls and furniture started to swell and bubble like cold lava, and then they were alone on a rock table big as three tennis courts. Even the master control panel was gone. The only thing that was left was a slender rod coming out of the gray stone at their feet and bearing at the top, like some mechanistic fruit, a small block with the six switches—that and an intolerably bright star hanging in the air where the master bedroom had been.

Mariana pushed frantically at the house switch, but it was unlabeled now and locked in the “off” position, although she threw her weight at it stiff-armed.

The upstairs star sped off like an incendiary bullet, but its last flashbulb glare showed her Jonathan’s face set in lines of fury. He lifted his hands like talons.

“You little idiot!” he screamed, coming at her.

“No, Jonathan, no!” she wailed, backing off, but he kept coming.

She realized that the block of switches had broken off in her hands. The third switch had a glowing name now: Jonathan. She flipped it.

As his fingers dug into her bare shoulders they seemed to turn to foam rubber, then to air. His face and gray flannel suit seethed iridescently, like a leprous ghost’s, then melted and ran. His star, smaller than that of the house but much closer, seared her eyes. When she opened them again there was nothing at all left of the star or Jonathan but a dancing dark after-image like a black tennis ball.

She was alone on an infinite flat rock plain under the cloudless, star-specked sky.

The fourth switch had its glowing name now: stars.

It was almost dawn by her radium-dialed wristwatch and she was thoroughly chilled, when she finally decided to switch off the stars. She did not want to do it—in their slow wheeling across the sky they were the last sign of orderly reality—but it seemed the only move she could make.

She wondered what the fifth switch would say. rocks? air? Or even… ?

She switched off the stars.

The Milky Way, arching in all its unalterable glory, began to churn, its component stars darting about like midges. Soon only one remained, brighter even than Sirius or Venus —until it jerked back, fading, and darted to infinity.

The fifth switch said doctor and it was not on but off.

An inexplicable terror welled up in Mariana. She did not even want to touch the fifth switch. She set the block of switches down on the rock and backed away from it.

But she dared not go far in the starless dark. She huddled down and waited for dawn. From time to time she looked at her watch dial and at the night-light glow of the switch-label a dozen yards away.

It seemed to be growing much colder.

She read her watch dial. It was two hours past sunrise. She remembered they had taught her in third grade that the sun was just one more star.

She went back and sat down beside the block of switches and picked it up with a shudder and flipped the fifth switch.

The rock grew soft and crisply fragrant under her and lapped up over her legs and then slowly turned white.

She was sitting in a hospital bed in a small blue room with a white pin-stripe.

A sweet, mechanical voice came out of the wall, saying, “You have interrupted the wish-fulfillment therapy by your own decision. If you now recognize your sick depression and are willing to accept help, the doctor will come to you. If not, you are at liberty to return to the wish-fulfillment therapy and pursue it to its ultimate conclusion.”

Mariana looked down. She still had the block of switches in her hands and the fifth switch still read doctor.

The wall said, “I assume from your silence that you will accept treatment. The doctor will be with you immediately.”

The inexplicable terror returned to Mariana with compulsive intensity.

She switched off the doctor.

She was back in the starless dark. The rocks had grown very much colder. She could feel icy feathers falling on her face—snow.

She lifted the block of switches and saw, to her unutterable relief, that the sixth and last switch now read, in tiny glowing letters: Mariana.

This is not a droodle.

Anyhow, I don’t think it is…

In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned about the tendency on the part of Western Man [Bret Maverick, to name but one.] to make a cult of conservatism and orthodoxy. New Ideas, except in the field of tax-evasion, are viewed with suspicion and, in most instances, hostility. This is unhealthy. Science has taught us that we must constantly re-examine our basic premises and consider any innovation in the light of today’s knowledge and accept or reject it on its own merits.

Fortunately Washington is not unaware of this situation and certain elements there are attempting to create a more favorable atmosphere for fresh, original thinking—in spite of the opposition of intrenched conservatives such as Admiral Rickover (who recently refused even to consider a revolutionary plan submitted by a high-ranking Pentagon official to install steam power in submarines).

These more progressive elements, represented mostly by alert southern and mid-western Congressmen, have just sponsored a New Movement which I have become interested in.

This Group call themselves the “Flat Earthers” and they don’t believe in all those old-fashioned, 17th century theories about the earth being a round ball which spins around the sun at a speed of 19,000 miles per hour. You must admit they have a point there because if the Earth were spinning that fast we would feel a constant breeze. Also if the earth were globular it is difficult to understand—from a purely pragmatic point of view—why the oceans and lakes do not slop over and inundate the land masses located beneath them (i. e. Australia, Brazil, Illinois, etc).

This Movement may turn out to be idealistic and premature but nevertheless I believe it should have “its day in court.” We must remember that people once laughed at men whose names are now household words as familiar to us as our own; men such as Oliver and Wilmer Write, Eli Fulton and Thomas Steamboat [Inventor of the Steamboat.]. The Flat Earthers are quite progressive in all of their ideas and they plan to get national publicity for their Movement next New Year’s Day by pushing a number of people off the edge. Their only difficulty so far has been in obtaining volunteers [If you have anyone you would like to see used in this capacity don’t write to me; I have my own list.].

Of course, the Flat Earthers have run into a certain amount of opposition, mostly from a rival group composed of reactionaries, alleged scientists and people like that (you know the type) who call themselves the “Round Earthers” and still cling to the antique notion that the earth is spherical. These Round Earthers are ineffectual however because of internal bickering within their own membership. One extremist faction wants to do away with the Flat Earthers altogether by pushing them over the edge. But cooler heads have pointed out that this could be interpreted by some as positive evidence of Pro-Flatearthism. It presents an interesting problem.

The first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference was held in 1956. Among those invited were a number of artists, agents, editors, and publishers in the field. So artist Ed “Emsh” came up for the week—with his family.

Carol Emshwiller had then published two or three stories; but she didn’t know she was a writer, and the bated-breath humility with which she asked if she possibly might be allowed to sit in on workshop meetings has come back to haunt us Older Hands each summer since. Each summer, I mean, when Carol pops out of the playpen-and-baby-bottle laden car, an infant (at least figuratively) under one arm, and her newest manuscript under the other. (Ed carries two kids and his brushes in his teeth—nothing to it when you get the knack.)

The first time I read Day at the Beach was in one of these workshop sessions. After that, I just waited for someone to print it first, so I could next….

“It’s Saturday,” the absolutely hairless woman said, and she pulled at her frayed, green kerchief to make sure it covered her head. “I sometimes forget to keep track of the days, but I marked three more off on the calender because I think that’s how many I forgot, so this must be Saturday.”

Her name was Myra and she had neither eyebrows nor lashes nor even a faint, transparent down along her cheeks. Once she had had long, black hair, but now, looking at her pink, bare face, one would guess she had been a redhead.

Her equally hairless husband, Ben, sprawled at the kitchen table waiting for breakfast. He wore red plaid Bermuda shorts, rather faded, and a tee shirt with a large hole under the arm. His skull curved above his staring eyes more naked-seeming than hers because he wore no kerchief or hat.

“We used to always go out on Saturdays,” she said, and she put a bowl of oatmeal at the side of the table in front of a youth chair.

Then she put the biggest bowl between her husband’s elbows.

“I have to mow the lawn this morning,” he said. “All the more so if it’s Saturday.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “A day like today we’d go to the beach. I forget a lot of things, but I remember that.”

“If I were you, I just wouldn’t think about it.” Ben’s empty eyes finally focused on the youth chair and he turned then to the open window behind him and yelled, “Littleboy, Littleboy,” making the sound run together all L’s and Y. “Hey, it’s breakfast, Boy,” and under his breath he said, “He won’t come.”

“But I do think about it. I remember hot dogs and clam chowder and how cool it was days like this. I don’t suppose I even have a bathing suit around any more.”

“It wouldn’t be like it used to be.”

“Oh, the sea’s the same. That’s one thing sure. I wonder if the boardwalk’s still there.”

“Hah,” he said. “I don’t have to see it to know it’s all gone for firewood. It’s been four winters now.”

She sat down, put her elbows on the table and stared at her bowl. “Oatmeal,” she said, putting in that one word everything she felt about the beach and wanting to go there.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do better for you,” Ben said. He touched her arm with the tips of his fingers for just a moment. “I wish I could. And I wish I could have hung on to that corned beef hash last time, but it was heavy and I had to run and there was a fight on the train and I lost the sugar too. I wonder which bastard has it now.”

“I know how hard you try, Ben. I do. It’s just sometimes everything comes on you at once, especially when it’s a Saturday like this. Having to get water way down the block and that only when there’s electricity to run the pump, and this oatmeal; sometimes it’s just once too often, and then, most of all, you commuting in all that danger to get food.”

“I make out. I’m not the smallest one on that train.”

“God, I think that everyday. Thank God, I say to myself, or where would we be now. Dead of starvation that’s where.”

She watched him leaning low over his bowl, pushing his lips out and making a sucking sound. Even now she was still surprised to see how long and naked his skull arched, and she had an impulse, seeing it there so bare and ugly and thinking of the commuting, to cover it gently with her two hands, to cup it and make her hands do for his hair; but she only smoothed at her kerchief again to make sure it covered her own baldness.

“Is it living, though? Is it living, staying home all the time, hiding like, in this house? Maybe it’s the rest of them, the dead ones, that are lucky. It’s pretty sad when a person can’t even go to the beach on a Saturday.”

She was thinking the one thing she didn’t want to do most of all was to hurt him. No, she told herself inside, sternly. Stop it right now. Be silent for once and eat, and, like Ben says, don’t think; but she was caught up in it somehow and she said, “You know, Littleboy never did go to the beach yet, not even once, and it’s only nine miles down,” and she knew it would hurt him.

“Where is Littleboy?” he said and yelled again out the window. “He just roams.”

“It isn’t as if there were cars to worry about any more, and have you seen how fast he is and how he climbs so good for three and a half? Besides, what can you do when he gets up so early.”

He was finished eating now and he got up and dipped a cup of water from the large pan on the stove and drank it. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “He won’t come when you call.”

She began to eat finally, watching him out the kitchen window and listening to him calling. Seeing him hunched forward and squinting because he had worn glasses before and his last pair had been broken a year ago. Not in a fight, because he was careful not to wear them commuting even then, when it wasn’t quite so bad. It was Littleboy who had done it, climbed up and got them himself from the very top drawer, and he was a whole year younger. Next thing she knew they were on the floor, broken.

Ben disappeared out of range of the window and Little-boy came darting in as though he had been huddling by the door behind the arbor vitae all the time.

He was the opposite of his big, pink and hairless parents, with thick and fine black hair growing low over his forehead and extending down the back of his neck so far that she always wondered if it ended where hair used to end before, or whether it grew too far down. He was thin and small for his age, but strong-looking and wiry with long arms and legs. He had a pale, olive skin, wide, blunt features and a wary stare, and he looked at her now, waiting to see what she would do.

She only sighed, lifted him and put him in his youth chair and kissed his firm, warm cheek, thinking, what beautiful hair, and wishing she knew how to cut it better so he would look neat.

“We don’t have any more sugar,” she said, “but I saved you some raisins,” and she took down a box and sprinkled some on his cereal.

Then she went to the door and called, “He’s here, Ben. He’s here.” And in a softer voice she said, “The pixy.” She heard Ben answer with a whistle and she turned back to the kitchen to find Littleboy’s oatmeal on the floor in a lopsided oval lump, and him, still looking at her with wise and wary brown eyes.

She knelt down first, and spooned most of it back into the bowl. Then she picked him up rather roughly, but there was gentleness to the roughness, too. She pulled at the elastic topped jeans and gave him two hard, satisfying slaps on bare buttocks. “It isn’t as if we had food to waste,” she said, noticing the down that grew along his backbone and wondering if that was the way the three year olds had been before.

He made an Aaa, Aaa, sound, but didn’t cry, and after that she picked him up and held him so that he nuzzled into her neck in the way she liked. “Aaa,” he said again, more softly, and bit her just above the collar bone.

She dropped him down, letting him kind of slide with her arms still around him. It hurt and she could see there was a shallow, half-inch piece bitten right out.

“He bit me again,” she shouted, hearing Ben at the door. “He bit me. A real piece out even, and look, he has it in his mouth still.”

“God, what a…”

“Don’t hurt him. I already slapped him good for the floor and three is a hard age.” She pulled at Ben’s arm. “It says so in the books. Three is hard, it says.” But she remembered it really said that three was a beginning to be cooperative age.

He let go and Littleboy ran out of the kitchen back toward the bedrooms.

She took a deep breath. “I’ve just got to get out of this house. I mean really away.”

She sat down and let him wash the place and cross two bandaids over it. “Do you think we could go? Do you think we could go just one more time with a blanket and a picnic lunch? I’ve just got to do something.”

“All right. All right. You wear the wrench in your belt and I’ll wear the hammer, and we’ll risk taking the car.”

She spent twenty minutes looking for bathing suits and not finding them, and then she stopped because she knew it didn’t really matter, there probably wouldn’t be anyone there.

The picnic was simple enough. She gathered it together in five minutes, a precious can of tuna fish and hard, homemade biscuits baked the evening before when the electricity had come on for a while, and shriveled, worm-eaten apples, picked from neighboring trees and hoarded all winter in another house that had a cellar.

She heard Ben banging about in the garage, measuring out gas from his cache of cans, ten miles’ worth to put in the car and ten miles’ worth in a can to carry along and hide someplace for the trip back.

Now that he had decided they would go, her mind began to be full of what-ifs. Still, she thought, she would not change her mind. Surely once in four years was not too often to risk going to the beach. She had thought about it all last year too, and now she was going and she would enjoy it.

She gave Littleboy an apple to keep him busy and she packed the lunch in the basket, all the time pressing her lips tight together, and she said to herself that she was not going to think of any more what-ifs, and she was going to have a good time.

Ben had switched after the war from the big-finned Dodge to a small and rattly European car. They fitted into it cozily, the lunch in back with the army blanket and a pail and shovel for playing in the sand, and Littleboy in front on her lap, his hair brushing her cheek as he turned, looking out.

They started out on the empty road. “Remember how it was before on a weekend?” she said, and laughed. “Bumper to bumper, they called it. We didn’t like it then.”

A little way down they passed an old person on a bicycle, in jeans and a bright shirt with the tail out. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but the person smiled and they waved and called, “Aaa.”

The sun was hot, but as they neared the beach there began to be a breeze and she could smell the sea. She began to feel as she had the very first time she had seen it. She had been born in Ohio and she was twelve before she had taken a trip and come out on the wide, flat, sunny sands and smelled this smell.

She held Littleboy tight though it made him squirm, and she leaned against Ben’s shoulder. “Oh, it’s going to be fun!” she said. “Littleboy, you’re going to see the sea. Look, darling, keep watching, and smell. It’s delicious.” And Littleboy squirmed until she let go again.

Then, at last, there was the sea, and it was exactly as it had always been, huge and sparkling and making a sound like… no, drowning out the noises of wars. Like the black sky with stars, or the cold and stolid moon, it dwarfed even what had happened.

Theypassed the long, brick bathhouses, looking about as they always had, but the boardwalks between were gone, as Ben had said, not a stick left of them.

“Let’s stop at the main bathhouse.”

“No,” Ben said. “We better keep away from those places. You can’t tell who’s in there. I’m going way down beyond.”

She was glad, really, especially because at the last bathhouse she thought she saw a dark figure duck behind the wall.

They went down another mile or so, then drove the car off behind some stunted trees and bushes.

“Nothing’s going to spoil this Saturday,” she said, pulling out the picnic things, “just nothing. Come, Littleboy.” She kicked off her shoes and started running for the beach, the basket bouncing against her knee.

Littleboy slipped out of his roomy sneakers easily and scampered after her. “You can take your clothes off,” she told him. “There’s nobody here at all.”

When Ben came, later, after hiding the gas, she was settled, flat on the blanket in old red shorts and a halter, and still the same green kerchief, and Littleboy, brown and naked, splashed with his pail in the shallow water, the wetness bringing out the hairs along his back.

“Look,” she said, “nobody as far as you can see and you can see so far. It gives you a different feeling from home. You know there are people here and there in the houses, but here, it’s like we were the only ones, and here it doesn’t even matter. Like Adam and Eve, we are, just you and me and our baby.”

He lay on his stomach next to her. “Nice breeze,” he said.

Shoulder to shoulder they watched the waves and the gulls and Littleboy, and later they splashed in the surf and then ate the lunch and lay watching again, lazy, on their stomachs. And after a while she turned on her back to see his face. “With the sea it doesn’t matter at all,” she said and she put her arm across his shoulder. “And we’re just part of everything, the wind and the earth and the sea too, my Adam.”

“Eve,” he said and smiled and kissed her and it was a longer kiss than they had meant. “Myra. Myra.”

“There’s nobody but us.”

She sat up. “I don’t even know a doctor since Press Smith was killed by those robbing kids and I’d be scared.”

“We’ll find one. Besides, you didn’t have any trouble. It’s been so damn long.” She pulled away from his arm. “And I love you. And Littleboy, he’ll be way over four by the time we’d have another one.”

She stood up and stretched and then looked down the beach and Ben put a hand around her ankle. She looked down the other way. “Somebody’s coming,” she said, and then he got up too.

Far down, walking in a business-like way on the hard, damp part of the sand, three men were coming toward them.

“You got your wrench?” Ben asked. “Put it just under the blanket and sit down by it, but keep your knees under you.”

He put his tee shirt back on, leaving it hanging out, and he hooked the hammer under his belt in back, the top covered by the shirt. Then he stood and waited for them to come.

They were all three bald and shirtless. Two wore jeans cut off at the knees and thick belts, and the other had checked shorts and a red leather cap and a pistol stuck in his belt in the middle of the front at the buckle. He was older. The others looked like kids and they held back as they neared and let the older one come up alone. He was a small man, but looked tough. “You got gas,” he said, a flat-voiced statement of fact.

“Just enough to get home.”

“I don’t mean right here. You got gas at home is what I mean.”

Myra sat stiffly, her hand on the blanket on top of where the wrench was. Ben was a little in front of her and she could see his curving, forward-sloping shoulders and the lump of the hammer-head at the small of his back. If he stood up straight, she thought, and held his shoulders like they ought to be, he would look broad and even taller and he would show that little man, but the other had the pistol. Her eyes kept coming back to its shining black.

Ben took a step forward. “Don’t move,” the little man said. He shifted his weight to one leg, looking relaxed, and put his hand on his hip near the pistol. “Where you got the gas to get you home? Maybe we’ll come with you and you might lend us a little of that gas you got there at your house. Where’d you hide the stuff to get you back, or I’ll let my boys play a bit with your little one and you might not like it.”

Littleboy, she saw, had edged down, away from them, and he crouched now, watching with his wide-eyed stare. She could see the tense, stringy muscles along his arms and legs and he reminded her of gibbons she had seen at the zoo long ago. His poor little face looks old, she thought, too old for three years. Her fingers closed over the blanket-covered wrench. They’d better not hurt Littleboy.

She heard her husband say, “I don’t know.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “oh, Ben.”

The man made a motion and the two youths started out, but Littleboy had started first, she saw. She pulled at her wrench and then had to stop and fumble with the blanket, and it took a long time because she kept her eyes on Littleboy and the two others chasing.

She heard a shout and a grunt beside her. “Oh, Ben,” she said again, and turned, but it was Ben on top attacking the other, and the small man was trying to use his pistol as a club but he had hold of the wrong end for that, and Ben had the hammer and he was much bigger.

He was finished in a minute. She watched, empty-eyed, the whole of it, holding the wrench in a white-knuckled hand in case he needed her.

Afterward, he moved from the body into a crouching run, hammer in one hand and pistbl, by the barrel, in the other. “You stay here,” he shouted back.

She looked at the sea a few minutes, and listened to it, but her own feelings seemed more important than the stoic sea now. She turned and followed, walking along the marks where the feet had swept at the soft sand.

Where the bushes began she saw him loping back. “What happened?”

“They ran off when they saw me after them with the other guy’s gun. No bullets though. You’ll have to help look now.”

“He’s lost!”

“He won’t come when you call. We’ll just have to look. He could be way out. I’ll try that and you stay close and look here. The gas is buried under that bush there, if you need it.”

“We’ve got to find him, Ben. He doesn’t know his way home from here.”

He came to her and kissed her and held her firmly across the shoulders with one arm. She could feel his muscles bunch into her neck as hard almost as the head of his hammer that pressed against her arm. She remembered a time four years ago when his embrace had been soft and comfortable. He had had hair then, but he had been quite fat, and now he was hard and bald, having gained something and lost something.

He turned and started off, but looked back and she smiled and nodded to show him she felt better from his arm around her and the kiss.

I would die if anything happened and we would lose Littleboy, she thought, but mostly I would hate to lose Ben. Then the world would really be lost altogether, and everything would be ended.

She looked, calling in a whisper, knowing she had to peer under each bush and watch behind and ahead for scampering things. He’s so small when he huddles into a ball and he can sit so still. Sometimes I wish there was another three-year-old around to judge him by. I forget so much about how it used to be, before. Sometimes I just wonder about him.

“Littleboy, Littleboy. Mommy wants you,” she called softly. “Come. There’s still time to play in the sand and there are apples left.” She leaned forward, and her hand reached to touch the bushes.

Later the breeze began to cool and a few clouds gathered. She shivered in just her shorts and halter, but it was mostly an inner coldness. She felt she had circled, hunting, for well over an hour, but she had no watch, and at a time like this she wasn’t sure of her judgment. Still, the sun seemed low. They should go home soon. She kept watching now, too, for silhouettes of people who might not be Ben or Littleboy, and she probed the bushes with her wrench with less care. Every now and then she went back to look at the blanket and the basket and the pail and shovel, lying alone and far from the water, and the body there, with the red leather cap beside it.

And then, when she came back another time to see if all the things were still there, undisturbed, she saw a tall, two-headed seeming monster walking briskly down the beach, and one head, bouncing directly over the other one, had hair and was Littleboy’s.

The sunset was just beginning. The rosy glow deepened as they neared her and changed the colors of everything. The red plaid of Ben’s shorts seemed more emphatic. The sand turned orangeish. She ran to meet them, laughing and splashing her feet in the shallow water, and she came up and held Ben tight around the waist and Littleboy said, “Aaa.”

“We’ll be home before dark,” she said. “There’s even time for one last splash.”

They packed up finally while Littleboy circled the body by the blanket, touching it sometimes until Ben slapped him for it and he went off and sat down and made little cat sounds to himself.

He fell asleep in her lap on the way home, lying forward against her with his head at her neck the way she liked. The sunset was deep, with reds and purples.

She leaned against Ben. “The beach always makes you tired,” she said. “I remember that from before too. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

They drove silently along the wide empty parkway. The car had no lights, but that didn’t matter.

“We did have a good day after all,” she said. “I feel renewed.”

“Good,” he said.

It was just dark as they drove up to the house. Ben stopped the car and they sat a moment and held hands before moving to get the things out.

“We had a good day,” she said again. “And Littleboy saw the sea.” She put her hand on the sleeping boy’s hair, gently so as not to disturb him and then she yawned. “I wonder if it really was Saturday.”

What is human? How different can it be, and still seem “one of us”? How much can one of us change, and not be one of them? (And who are they? Or are they what?

Earlier selections here have approached the line of definition in a variety of ways. Mr. Langart, an author new to science fiction (so far as I have been able to determine from his tight-lipped agents), here presents an exceptionally thoughtful and convincing examination of one of the potentialities for human development.

There is no lie so totally convincing as something the other fellow already knows-for-sure is the truth. And no cover-story so convincing…

The building itself was unprepossessive enough. It was an old-fashioned, six-floor, brick structure that had, over the years, served first as a private home, then as an apartment building, and finally as the headquarters for the organization it presently housed.

It stood among others of its kind in a lower-middle-class district of Arlington, Virginia, within howitzer range of the capitol of the United States, and even closer to the Pentagon. The main door was five steps up from the sidewalk, and the steps were flanked by curving balustrades of ornamental ironwork. The entrance itself was closed by a double door with glass panes, beyond which could be seen a small foyer. On both doors, an identical message was blocked out in neat gold letters: The Society For Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc.

It is possible that no more nearly perfect cover, no more misleading front for a secret organization ever existed in the history of man. It possessed two qualities which most other cover-up titles do not have. One, it was so obviously crackpot that no one paid any attention to it except crackpots, and, two, it was perfectly, literally true.

Spencer Candron had seen the building so often that the functional beauty of the whole setup no longer impressed him as it had several years before. Just as a professional actor is not impressed by being allowed backstage, or as a multimillionaire considers expensive luxuries as commonplace, so Spencer Candron thought of nothing more than his own personal work as he climbed the five steps and pushed open the glass-paned doors.

Perhaps, too, his matter-of-fact attitude was caused partially by the analogical resemblance between himself and the organization. Physically, Candron, too, was unprepossessing. He was a shade less than five eight, and his weight fluctuated between a hundred and forty and a hundred and forty-five, depending on the season and his state of mind. His face consisted of a well-formed snub nose, a pair of introspective gray eyes, a rather wide, thin-lipped mouth that tended to smile even when relaxed, a high, smooth forehead, and a firm cleft chin, plus the rest of the normal equipment that normally goes to make up a face. The skin was slightly tanned, but it was the tan of a man who goes to the beach on summer weekends, not that of an outdoorsman. His hands were strong and wide and rather large; the palms were uncalloused and the fingernails were clean and neatly trimmed. His hair was straight and light brown, with a pronounced widow’s peak, and he wore it combed back and rather long to conceal the fact that a thin spot had appeared on the top rear of his scalp. His clothing was conservative and a little out of style, having been bought in 1981, and thus three years past being up-to-date.

Physically, then, Spencer Candron, was a fine analog of the Society. He looked unimportant. On the outside, he was just another average man whom no one would bother to look twice at.

The analogy between himself and the S.M.M.R. was completed by the fact that his interior resources were vastly greater than anything that showed on the outside.

The doors swung shut behind him, and he walked into the foyer, then turned left into the receptionist’s office. The woman behind the desk smiled her eager smile and said, “Good morning, Mr. Candron!”

Candron smiled back. He liked the woman, in spite of her semifanatic overeagerness, which made her every declarative sentence seem to end with an exclamation point.

“Morning, Mrs. Jesser,” he said, pausing at the desk for a moment. “How have things been?”

Mrs. Jesser was a stout matron in her early forties who would have been perfectly happy to work for the Society for nothing, as a hobby. That she was paid a reasonable salary made her job almost heaven for her.

“Oh, just fine, Mr. Candron!” she said. “Just fine!” Then her voice lowered, and her face took on a serious, half conspiratorial expression. “Do you know what?”

“No,” said Candron, imitating her manner. “What?”

“We have a gentleman … he came in yesterday … a very nice man … and very intelligent, too. And, you know what?”

Candron shook his head. “No,” he repeated. “What?”

Mrs. Jesser’s face took on the self-pleased look of one who has important inside knowledge to impart. “He has actual photographs … three-D, full-color photographs … of the control room of a flying saucer! And one of the Saucerites, too!”

“Really?” Candron’s expression was that of a man who was both impressed and interested. “What did Mr. Balfour say?”

“Well—” Mrs. Jesser looked rather miffed. “I don’t really know! But the gentleman is supposed to be back tomorrow! With some more pictures!”

“Well,” said Candron. “Well. That’s really fine. I hope he has something. Is Mr. Taggert in?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Candron! He said you should go on up!” She waved a plump hand toward the stairway. It made Mrs. Jesser happy to think that she was the sole controller of the only way, except for the fire escape, that anyone could get to the upper floors of the building. And as long as she thought that, among other things, she was useful to the Society. Someone had to handle the crackpots and lunatic-fringe fanatics that came to the Society, and one of their own kind could do the job better than anyone else. As long as Mrs. Jesser and Mr. Balfour were on duty, the Society’s camouflage would remain intact.

Spencer Candron gave Mrs. Jesser a friendly gesture with one hand and then headed up the stairs. He would rather not have bothered to take the stairway all the way up to the fifth floor, but Mrs. Jesser had sharp ears, and she might wonder why his foot-steps were not heard all the way up. Nothing—but nothing—must ever be done to make Mrs. Jesser wonder about anything that went on here.

There seems to be some doubt as to whether this was the first, second, or third story of three bought and published by three different magazines almost simultaneously. It marks, in any case, one-third of the debut of yet another striking new talent in the s-f field. Unlike Mr. Keyes, who has a long background in publishing, or Mr. Langart, who has written—I understand—in other fields, Mr. Worthington has turned to writing after years of experience in government work. There is a freshness of language and vigor of thought in all the stories of his I have seen which are rarely equaled by the more experienced writers in the field.

“Why can’t we go home now, Daddy?” asked Mike, the youngest, and the small tanned face I saw there in the skimpy shade of the olive tree was mostly a matter of eyes —all else, hair, cheeks, thumb-sized mouth, jelly-bean body and usually flailing arms and legs, were mere accessories to the round, blue, endlessly wondering eyes. (“The Wells of ‘Why’”… It would make a poem, I thought, if a poem were needed, and if I wasn’t so damned tired. And I also thought, “Oh, God! It begins. Five years old. No, not quite. Four.”)

“Because Daddy has to finish weeding this row of beans,” I said. “We’ll go back to the house in a little while.”

I would go back to the house and then I would follow the path around the rocks to the hot springs, and there I would peel off what was left of my clothes and I would soak myself in the clear but pungent water that came bubbling—perfect—from a cleft in the rocks to form a pool in the hollow of a pothole—also perfect. And while I steeped in the mineral water I could think about the fish which was soon to be broiling on the fire, and I could think of Sue turning it, poking at it and sprinkling herbs over it as though it was the first or perhaps the last fish that would ever be broiled and eaten by human creatures. She would perform that office with the same total and unreserved dedication with which, since sun-up, she had scraped deerskin, picked worms from new cabbage-leaves, gathered firewood, caulked the walls of the cabin where the old chinking had fallen away or been chewed or knocked away by other hungry or merely curious creatures, and otherwise filled in the numberless gaps in the world—trivial things mostly which would not be noticed and could not become great things in a man’s eyes unless she were to go away or cease to be. I don’t think of this because, for all immediate purposes—there are no others—she is the first Woman in the world and quite possibly—the last.

“Why don’t we live in the Old House in the valley, Daddy?”

It is All-Eyes again. Make no mistake about it; there is a kind of connectedness between the seemingly random questions of very small kids. These are the problems posed by an Ur-logic which is much closer to the pulse of reality than are any of the pretentious, involuted systems and the mincing nihilations and category-juggling of adults. It is we who are confused and half-blinded with the varieties of special knowledge. But how explain? What good is my experience to him?

“There are too many old things in the Old House which don’t work,” I say, even as I know that I merely open the floodgates of further questions.

“Don’t the funny men work, Daddy? I want to see the funny men! Daddy, I want …”

The boy means the robots. I took him down to see the Old House in the valley once before. He rode on top of my haversack and hung on to my hair with his small fingers. It was all a lark for him. I had gone to fetch some books— gambling that there might be a bagful of worthwhile ones that had not been completely eaten by bugs and mice; and if the jaunt turned out depressing for me, it was my fault, which is to say the fault of memory and the habit of comparing what has been with what is—natural, inevitable, unavoidable, but oh, God, just the same … The robots which still stood on their size-thirty metal feet looked like grinning Mexican mummies. They gave me a bad turn even though I knew what they were, and should have known what changes to expect after a long, long absence from that house, but to the kid they were a delight. Never mind transphenomenality of rusted surfaces and uselessly dangling wires; never mind the history of a senile generation. They were the funny men. I wish I could leave it at that, but of course I can’t. I hide my hoe in the twigs of the olive tree and pick up Mike. This stops the questions for a while.

“Let’s go home to Mummy,” I say; and also, hoping to hold back the questions about the Old House long enough to think of some real answers, “Now aren’t you glad we live up here where we can see the ocean and eagles and hot springs?”

“Yeth,” says Mike firmly by way of making a querulous and ineffectual old man feel better about his decision. What a comfort to me the little one is!

I see smoke coming from the chimney, and when we round the last turn in the path we see the cabin. Sue waves from the door. She has worked like a squaw since dawn, and she smiles and waves. I can remember when women would exhaust themselves talking over the phone and eating bonbons all day and then fear to smile when their beat husbands came home from their respective nothing-foundries lest they crack the layers of phony “youthful glow” on their faces. Not like Sue. Here is Sue with smudges of charcoal on her face and fish-scales on her leather pants. Her scent is of woodsmoke and of sweat. There is no artificial scent like this—none more endearing nor more completely “correct.” There was a time when the odor of perspiration would have been more of a social disaster for a woman than the gummata of tertiary pox. Even men were touched by this strange phobia.

Sue sees the question on my face and she knows why my smile is a little perfunctory and strained.

“Chris … ?” I start to ask finally.

“No. He took his bow and his sleeping-bag. Muttered something about an eight-point buck.”

We do not need the venison. If anything has been made exhaustively and exaustingly clear to the boy it is that our blessings consist in large part of what we do not need. But this is not the point, and I know it is not the point.

“Do you think he’ll ever talk to me again, Sue?”

“Of course he will.” She pulls off my sweaty shirt and hands me a towel. “You know how twelve is. Everything in technicolor and with the throbbiest possible background music. Everything drags or jumps or swings or everything is Endsville or something else which it actually isn’t. If it can’t be turned into a drama it doesn’t exist. He’ll get over it.”

I can think of no apt comment. Sue starts to busy herself with the fire, then turns back to me.

“You did the best thing. You did what you had to do, that’s all. Go take your bath. I’m getting hungry.”

I make my way up the path to the hot springs and I am wearing only the towel and the soles of an ancient pair of sneakers held on with thongs. I am thinking that the hot water will somehow dissolve the layers of sickly thought that obscure all the colors of the world from my mind, just as it will rid me of the day’s accretion of grime, but at once I know that I am yielding to a vain and superstitious hope. I can take no real pleasure in the anticipation of my bath.

When I emerge from the underbrush and come in sight of the outcroppings of rock where the springs are, I can see Sato, our nearest neighbor and my oldest friend, making his way along the path from his valley on the other side of the mountain. I wave at him, but he does not wave back. I tell myself that he is concentrating on his feet and simply does not see me, but myself answers back in much harsher terms. Sato knows what happened when I took my older son to the City, and he knows why my son has not spoken more than a dozen coherent words since returning. He knows what I have done, and while it is not in the man’s nature to rebuke another or set himself above another or mouth moral platitudes, there are limits.

Sato is some kind of a Buddhist. Only vaguely and imperfectly do I understand what this implies; not being unnecessarily explicit about itself is certainly a part of that doctrine. But there is also the injunction against killing. And I am— notwithstanding every meretricious attempt of my own mind to convert that fact into something more comfortable —a killer. And so … I may now contemplate what it will mean not merely to have lost my older son, but also the priceless, undemanding and yet immeasurably rewarding friendship of the family in the next valley.

“It was not intentional,” I tell myself as I lower my griminess and weariness into the hot water. “It was necessary. How else explain why we chose… ?” But it isn’t worth a damn. I might as well mumble Tantric formulae. The water feels lukewarm—used.

I go on flaying myself in this manner. I return to the house and sit down to supper. The food I had looked forward to so eagerly tastes like raw fungus or my old sneakers. Nothing Sue says helps, and I even find myself wishing she would go to hell with her vitamin-enriched cheerfulness.

On our slope of the mountain the darkness comes as it must come to a lizard which is suddenly immured in a cigar box. Still no sign of Chris and so, of course, the pumas are more vocal than they have been all year. I itemize and savor every disaster that roars, rumbles, creeps, slithers, stings, crushes or bites: everything from rattlers to avalanches, and I am sure that one or all of these dire things will befall Chris before the night is over. I go outside every time I hear a sound—which is often—and I squint at the top of the ridge and into the valley below. No Chris.

Sue, from her bunk, says, “If you don’t stop torturing yourself, you’ll be in no condition to do anything if it does become necessary.” She is right, of course, which makes me mad as hell on top of everything else. I lie on my bunk and for the ten-millionth time reconstruct the whole experience.

We had been hacking at elder bushes, Chris and I. It had been a wet winter and clearing even enough land for garden truck out of the encroaching vegetation began to seem like trying to hold back the sea with trowels. This problem and the gloomy knowledge that we had about one hatful of beans left in the cabin had conspired to produce a mood in which nothing but hemlock could grow. And I’d about had it with the questions. Chris had started the “Why” routine at about the same age as little Mike, but the questions, instead of leveling off as the boy began to exercise his own powers of observation and deduction, merely became more involved and challenging.

The worst thing about this was that I could not abdicate: other parents in other times could fluff off the questions of their kids with such hopeless and worthless judgments as “Well, that’s how things are,” thereby implying that both the questioner and the questioned are standing passively at the dead end of a chain of historical cause, or are existentially trapped in the eye of a storm of supernal origin, or are at the nexus of a flock of processes arising out of the choices of too many other agencies to pinpoint and blame definitively…our life, on the other hand, was clearly and in every significant particular our own baby. It did not merely proceed out of one particular historical choice, complete with foreseeable contingencies, but was an entire fabric of choices—ours. Here was total responsibility, complete with crowding elder bushes, cold rain, chiggers, rattlers, bone-weariness and mud. I had elected to live it—even to impose it upon my progeny—and I was prepared for its hardships, but what galled me was having to justify it.

“The people in the City don’t have to do this, do they?” (“This” is grubbing out elder bushes, and he is right. The people in the City do not have to do This. They do not have to hunt, fish, gather or raise their own food. They do not have to build their own cabins, carry their own water from springs or fashion their own clothes from the skins of beautiful, murdered—by me—animals. They do not have to perspire. One of these days I will have to explain that they do not even have to sleep with their own wives. That of itself should be the answer of answers, but twelve is not yet ready; twelve cares about things with wheels, things which spin, roar, roll, fly, explode, exude noise and stench. Would that twelve were fourteen!)

In the meantime it is dig—hack—heave; dig—hack— heave! “ Come on, Chris! It isn’t sundown yet.”

“Why couldn’t we bring an old tractor up here in pieces and put it together and fix it up and find oil and …” (I try to explain for the fifty-millionth time that you do not simply “fix up” something which is the outgrowth of an enormous Organization of interdependent Organizations, the fruit of a dead tree, as it were. The wheel will not be turned back. The kid distrusts abstractions and generalities, and I don’t blame him, but God I’m tired!) “Let’s just clear off this corner by the olive tree, Chris, and then we’ll knock off for the day.”

“Are we better than the City-People?”

(This one hit a nerve. “Better” is a judgment made by people after the fact of their own decisions. Or there isn’t any “Better.” As for the Recalcitrants, of which vague class of living creatures we are members, they were and are certainly both more and less something than the others were —the City people—the ones who elected to Go Along with the Organization. Of all the original Recalcitrant families, I would guess that not ten per cent are now alive. I would if I had any use for statistics. If these people had something in common, you would have to go light-years away to find a name for it. I think it was a common lack of something—a disease perhaps. Future generations will take credit for it and refer to their origins as Fine Old Stock. I think most of them were crazy. I am glad they were, but most of them were just weird. Southern California. I have told Chris about the Peters family. They were going to make it on nothing but papaya juice and stewed grass augmented by East Indian breathing exercises. Poor squittered-out souls! Their corpses were like balsa wood. Better? What is Better? Grandfather was going to live on stellar emanations and devote his energies to whittling statues out of fallen redwoods. Thank Nature his stomach had other ideas! And God I’m tired and fed up!)

“Dammit, boy! Tomorrow I’ll take you to the City and let you answer your own questions!”

And I did. Sue protested and old Sato just gave me that look which said, “I’m not saying anything,” but I did.

The journey to the City is necessarily one which goes from bad to worse. As a deer and a man in the wilderness look for downward paths and lush places if they would find a river, the signs which lead to the centers of human civilization are equally recognizable.

You look for ugliness and senselessness. It is that simple. Look for places which have been overlaid with mortar so that nothing can grow or change at its will. Look for things which have been fashioned at great expense of time and energy and then discarded. Look for tin and peeling paint, for rusted metal, broken neon tubing, drifts and drifts of discarded containers—cans, bottles, papers. Look for flies and let your nose lead you where it would rather not go.

What is the difference between the burrow of a fox and a huge sheet-metal hand which bears the legend, in peeling, garish paint: THIS WAY TO PERPETUAL PARMENIDEAN PALACES … ? I do not know why one is better than the other, or if it is. I know that present purposes— purposes of intellect—lead one way, and intuition leads the other. So we resist intuition, and the path of greatest resistance leads us from one vast, crumbling, frequently stinking artifact or monument to another.

Chris is alternately nauseated and thrilled. He wants to stay in the palatial abandoned houses in the outskirts, but I say “no.” For one thing, the rats look like Doberman Pinschers and for another … well, never mind what it is that repels me.

Much of the city looks grand until we come close enough to see where cement and plaster, paint and plastic have sloughed away to reveal ruptured tubes and wires which gleam where their insulation has rotted away, and which are connected to nothing with any life in it. We follow a monorail track which is a silver thread seen from a distance, but which has a continuous ridge of rust and bird droppings along its upper surface as far as the eye can see. We see more of the signs which point to the PERPETUAL PARMENIDEAN PALACES, and we follow them, giving our tormented intuition a rest even while for our eyes and our spirits there is no relief.

When we first encounter life we are not sure that it is life.

“They look like huge grapes!” exclaims Chris when we find them, clustered about a central tower in a huge sunken place like a stadium. The P. P. Palaces are indeed like huge grapes—reddish, semitransparent, about fifteen feet in diameter, or perhaps twenty. I am not used to measuring spaces in such terms any more. The globes are connected to the central tower, or stem, by means of thick cables … their umbilicals. A high, wire-mesh fence surrounds the area, but here and there the rust has done its work in spite of zinc coating on the wire. With the corn-knife I have brought to defend us from the rats and God knows what, I open a place in the fence. We are trespassing, and we know this, but we have come this far.

“Where are the people?” asks Chris, and I see that he looks pale. He has asked the question reluctantly, as though preferring no answer. I give none. We come close to one of the spheres, feeling that we do the wrong thing and doing it anyway. I see our objective and I point. It is a family of them, dimly visible like floating plants in an un-cleaned aquarium. It is their frightened eyes we first see.

I do not know very much about the spheres except from hearsay and dim memory. The contents, including the occupants, are seen only dimly, I know, because the outer skins of the thing are filled with a self-replenishing liquid nutrient which requires the action of the sun and is augmented by the waste-products of the occupants. We look closer, moving so that the sun is directly behind the sphere, revealing its contents in sharper outline.

“Those are not real people,” says Chris. Now he looks a little sick. “What are all those tubes and wires for if they’re real people? Are they robots or dolls or what?”

I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.

My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes.

I have never sprung such abstractions as “Dignity” upon the boy. What good are such absolutes on a mountainside? If there is Dignity in grubbing out weeds and planting beans, those pursuits must be more dignified than something, because, like all words, it is a meaningless wisp of lint once removed from its relativistic fabric. The word does not exist until he invents it himself. The hoe and the rocky soil or the nutrient enema and the electronic ecstasy: He must judge for himself. That is why I have brought him here.

“Let’s get away from here,” he says. “Let’s go home!”

“Good,” I say, but even as I say it I can see that the largest of the pallid creatures inside the “grape” is doing something—I cannot tell what—and to my surprise it seems capable of enough awareness of us to become alarmed. What frightening creatures we must be—dirty, leather clothes with patches of dried animal blood on them, my beard and the small-boy grime of Chris! Removed as I am from these helpless aquarium creatures, I cannot blame them. But my compassion was a short-lived thing. Chris screamed.

I turned in time to see what can only be described as a huge metal scorpion rushing at Chris with its tail lashing, its fore-claws snapping like pruning shears and red lights flashing angrily where its eyes should have been. A guard robot, of course. Why I had not foreseen such a thing I will never know. I supposed at the time that the creature inside the sphere had alerted it.

The tin scorpion may have been a match for the reactions and the muscles of less primitive, more “civilized” men than ourselves, or the creators of the Perpetual Parmenidean Palaces had simply not foreseen barbarians with heavy corn-knives. I knocked Chris out of the way and dispatched the tin bug, snipping off its tail-stinger with a lucky slash of the corn-knife and jumping up and down on its thorax until all its appendages were still.

When the reaction set in, I had to attack something else. I offer no other justification for what I did. We were the intruders—the invading barbarians. All the creatures in the spheres wanted was their security. The man in the sphere set the scorpion on us, but he was protecting his family. I can see it that way now. I wish I couldn’t. I wish I was one of those people who can always contrive to have been Right.

I saw the frightened eyes of the things inside the sphere, and I reacted to it as a predatory animal reacts to the scent of urea in the sweat of a lesser animal. And they had menaced my son with a hideous machine in order to be absolutely secure! If I reasoned at all, it was along this line.

The corn-knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!” … but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.

The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.

I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.

The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as People) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.

Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it.

“Wake up! We have company, old man!”

It is Sue shaking me. Somehow I did sleep—in spite of Chris and in spite of the persistent memory. It must be midmorning. I swing my feet down and scrub at my gritty eyes. Voices outside. Cheerful. How cheerful?

It is Sato and he has his old horse hitched to a crude travois of willow poles. It is Sato and his wife and three kids and my son Chris. There trussed up on the travois is the biggest buck I have seen in ten years, its neck transfixed with an arrow. A perfect shot and one that could not have been scored without the most careful and skillful stalking. I remember teaching him that only a bad hunter … a heedless and cruel one … would risk a distant shot with a bow.

Chris is grinning and looking sheepish. Sato’s daughter is there, which accounts for the look of benign idiocy. I was wondering when he would notice. Then he sees me standing in the door of the cabin and his face takes on about ten years of gravity and thought, but this is not for the benefit of the teen-age female. Little Mike is clawing at Chris and asking why he went away like that and why he went hunting without Daddy, and several other whys which Chris ignores. His answer is for his old man:

“I’m sorry, Dad. I wasn’t mad at you … just sort of crazy. Had to do … this… .” He points at the deer. “Anyhow, I’m back.”

“And I’m glad,” I managed.

“Dad, those elder bushes …”

“To hell with them,” say I. “Wednesday is soon enough.”

Sato moves in grinning, and just in time to relieve the awkwardness. “Dressed out this buck and carried it down the mountain by himself.” I think of mountain lions. “He was about pooped when I found him in a pasture.”

Sue holds open the cabin door and the Satos file in. Himself first, carrying a jug of wine, then Mrs. Sato, grinning greetings. She has never mastered English. It has not been necessary.

I drag up what pass for chairs. Made them myself. We begin talking about weeds and beans, and weather, bugs and the condition of fruit trees. It is Sato who has steered the conversation into these familiar ways, bless his knowing heart. He uncorks the wine. Sue and Mrs. Sato, meanwhile, are carrying on one of their lively conversations. Someday I will listen to them, but I doubt that I will ever learn how they communicate … or what. Women.

I can hear Chris outside talking to Yuki, Sato’s daughter. He is not boasting about the deer; he is telling her about the fight with the tin scorpion and the grape-people.

“Are they blind … the grape-people?” the girl asks.

“Heck no,” says Chris. “At least one of them wasn’t. One of them sicced the robot bug on us. They were going to kill us. And so, Dad did what he had to do… .”

I don’t hear the details over the interjections of Yuki and little Mike, but I can imagine they are as pungent as the teen-age powers of physiological description allow. I hear Yuki exclaim, “Oh how utterly germy!” and another language problem occurs to me. How can kids who have never hung around a drugstore still manage to evolve languages of their own … characteristically adolescent dialects? It is one more mystery which I shall never solve. I hear little Mike asking for reasons and causes with his favorite word. “Why, Chris?”

“I’ll explain it when you get older,” says Chris, and oddly it doesn’t sound ridiculous.

Sato pours a giant-size dollop of wine in each tumbler.

“What’s the occasion?” I ask.

Sato studies the wine critically, holding the glass so the light from the door shines through.

“It’s Tuesday,” he says.

“… But science,” they’re still telling us, “has caught up with science fiction….” Or: “What are you guys gonna write about now you got space flight?”

Obviously, not about space flight. Not one of the eighteen selections preceding this has been concerned with rocketry or astrogation or planet-hopping, except as an occasional incidental background touch.

Science—at least nuclear physics and space-flight technology—have caught up with us enough so that the speculative gleanings in these fields are sparse indeed. We are migrating to the less well-harvested neo-scientific fertile acreage of the “humanic studies.”

I say, “migrate,” and I do mean like a flock of birds. Thing now is to figure out whether Solo Sturgeon stayed behind on this one—or went way out, reconnoitering the next flight.

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later…forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did…. Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.

Look what you’ve done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort costs him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been, seasick, and the formula for that is to keep, your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he’d better get busy—now; for there’s one place especially not to be seasick in, and that’s locked up in a pressure suit. Now!

So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth flat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-flat, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.

Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute—wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)

Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That’ll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.

But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?—that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.

Out and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this, To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutting corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that … that … Why, it moves. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement—

As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod evening, watching Sputnik’s steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression—without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)

Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measure the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by 8—think why, now: horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter— and you will then know this satellite’s period. You know all the periods—ninety minutes, two, two-and-a-half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you’ll find out which one it is.

But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn’t jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he’s thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.

He has minutes to wait now—ten?… thirty?.. . twentythree?—while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that’s too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must not swim near that great invisible ameba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.

Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid any more, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable ameba. You know all about it—listen, you want to yell at him, don’t let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that’s all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:

Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with face-plate and breathing-tube all in one, and new blue flippers on your feet, and a new blue spear-gun—all this new because you’d only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You’d been out in a boat, you were coming back, you’d just reached the mouth of the little bay, you’d taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You’d said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.

Not far to go at all, but then beginners find wet distances deceiving. For the first five minutes or so it was only delightful, the sun hot on your back and the water so warm it seemed not to have any temperature at all and you were flying. With your face under the water, your mask was not so much attached as part of you, your wide blue flippers trod away yards, yout gun rode all but weightless in your hand, the taut rubber sling making an occasional hum as your passage plucked it in the sunlit green. In your ears crooned the breathy monotone of the snorkel tube, and through the invisible disk of plate glass you saw wonders. The bay was shallow—ten, twelve feet or so—and sandy, with great growths of brain-, bone-, and fire-coral, intricate waving sea-fans, and fish—such fish! Scarlet and green and aching azure, gold and rose and slate-color studded with sparks of enamel-blue, pink and peach and silver. And that thing got into you, that… monster.

There were enemies in this otherworld: the sand-colored spotted sea-snake with his big ugly head and turned-down mouth, who would not retreat but lay watching the intruder pass; and the mottled moray with jaws like bolt-cutters; and somewhere around, certainly, the barracuda with his undershot face and teeth turned in-ward so that he must take away whatever he might strike. There were urchins—the plump white sea-egg with its thick fur of sharp quills and the black ones with the long slender spines that would break off in unwary flesh and fester there for weeks; and file-fish and stone-fish with their poisoned barbs and lethal meat; and the stingray who could drive his spike through a leg bone. Yet these were not monsters, and could not matter to you, the invader churning along above them all. For you were above them in so many ways—armed, rational, comforted by the close shore (ahead the beach, the rocks on each side) and by the presence of the boat not too far behind. Yet you were… attacked.

At first it was uneasiness, not pressing, but pervasive, a contact quite as intimate as that of the sea; you were sheathed in it. And also there was the touch—the cold in-ward contact. Aware of it at last, you laughed: for Pete’s sake, what’s there to be scared of?

The monster, the ameba.

You raised your head and looked back in air. The boat had edged in to the cliff at the right; someone was giving a last poke around for lobster. You waved at the boat; it was your gun you waved, and emerging from the water it gained its latent ounces so that you sank a bit, and as if you had no snorkle on, you tipped your head back to get a breath. But tipping your head back plunged the end of the tube under water; the valve closed; you drew in a hard lungful of nothing at all. You dropped your face under; up came the tube; you got your air, and along with it a bullet of seawater which struck you somewhere inside the throat. You coughed it out and floundered, sobbing as you sucked in air, inflating your chest until it hurt, and the air you got seemed no good, no good at all, a worthless devitalized inert gas.

You clenched your teeth and headed for the beach, kicking strongly and knowing it was the right thing to do; and then below and to the right you saw a great bulk mounding up out of the sand floor of the sea. You knew it was only the reef, rocks and coral and weed, but the sight of it made you scream; you didn’t care what you knew. You turned hard left to avoid it, fought by as if it would reach for you, and you couldn’t get air, couldn’t get air, for all the unobstructed hooting of your snorkel tube. You couldn’t bear the mask, suddenly, not for another second, so you shoved it upward clear of your mouth and rolled over, floating on your back and opening your mouth to the sky and breathing with a quacking noise.

It was then and there that the monster well and truly engulfed you, mantling you round and about within itself— formless, borderless, the illimitible ameba. The beach, mere yards away, and the rocky arms of the bay, and the not-too-distant boat—these you could identify but no longer distinguish, for they were all one and the same thing , the thing called unreachable.

You fought that way for a time, on your back, dangling the gun under and behind you and straining to get enough warm sun-stained air into your chest. And in time some particles of sanity began to swirl in the roil of your mind, and to dissolve and tint it. The air pumping in and out of your square-grinned frightened mouth began to be meaningful at last, and the monster relaxed away from you.

You took stock, saw surf, beach, a leaning tree. You felt the new scend of your body as the rollers humped to become breakers. Only a dozen firm kicks brought you to where you could roll over and double up; your shin struck coral with a lovely agony and you stood in foam and waded ashore. You gained the wet sand, hard sand, and ultimately with two more paces powered by bravado, you crossed high-water mark and lay in the dry sand, unable to move.

You lay in the sand, and before you were able to move or to think, you were able to feel a triumph—a triumph because you were alive and knew that much without thinking at all.

When you were able to think, your first thought was of the gun, and the first move you were able to make was to let go at last of the thing. You had nearly died because you had not let it go before; without it you would not have been burdened and you would not have panicked. You had (you began to understand) kept it because someone else would have had to retrieve it—easily enough—and you could not have stood the laughter. You had almost died because They might laugh at you.

This was the beginning of the dissection, analysis, study of the monster. It began then; it had never finished. Some of what you had learned from it was merely important; some of the rest—vital.

You had learned, for example, never to swim farther with a snorkel than you could swim back without one. You learned never to burden yourself with the unnecessary in an emergency: even a hand or a foot might be as expendable as a gun; pride was expendable, dignity was. You learned never to dive alone, even if They laugh at you, even if you have to shoot a fish yourself and say afterward “we” shot it. Most of all, you learned that fear has many fingers, and one of them a simple one, made of too great a concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood, as from too rapid breathing in and out of the same tube—is not really fear at all but feels like fear, and can turn into panic and kill you.

Listen, you want to say, listen, there isn’t anything wrong with such an experience or with all the study it leads to, because a man who can learn enough from it could become fit enough, cautious enough, foresighted, unafraid, modest, teachable enough to be chosen, to be qualified for— You lose the thought, or turn it away, because the sick man feels that cold touch deep inside, feels it right now, feels it beyond ignoring, above and beyond anything that you, with all your experience and certainty, could explain to him even if he would listen, which he won’t. Make him, then; tell him the cold touch is some simple explainable thing like anoxia, like gladness even: some triumph that he will be able to appreciate when his head is working — right again.

Triumph? Here he’s alive after … whatever it is, and that doesn’t seem to be triumph enough, though it was in the Grenadines, and that other time, when he got the bends, saved his own life, saved two other lives. Now, somehow, it’s not the same: there seems to be a reason why just being alive afterward isn’t a triumph.

Why not triumph? Because not twelve, not twenty, not even thirty minutes is it taking the satellite to complete its eighth-of-an-orbit: fifty minutes are gone, and still there’s a slice of shadow yonder. It is this, this which is placing the cold finger upon his heart, and he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t know why, he will not know why; he is afraid he shall when his head is working again.

Oh, where’s the kid? Where is any way to busy the mind, apply it to something, anything else but the watchhand which outruns the moon? Here, kid: come over here—what you got there?

If you were the kid, then you’d forgive everything and hunker down with your new model, not a toy, not a helicopter or a rocket-plane, but the big one, the one that looks like an overgrown cartridge. It’s so big, even as a model, that even an angry sick man wouldn’t call it a toy. A giant cartridge, but watch: the lower four-fifths is Alpha—all muscle—over a million pounds thrust. (Snap it off, throw it away.) Half the rest is Beta—all brains—it puts you on your way. (Snap it off, throw it away.) And now look at the polished fraction which is left. Touch a control somewhere and see—see? it has wings—wide triangular wings. This is Gamma, the one with wings, and on its back is a small sausage; it is a moth with a sausage on its back. The sausage (click! it comes free) is Delta. Delta is the last, the smallest: Delta is the way home.

What will they think of next? Quite a toy. Quite a toy. Beat it, kid. The satellite is almost overhead, the sliver of shadow going—going—almost gone and … gone.

Check: 0459. Fifty-nine minutes? give or take a few. Times eight… 472 … is, uh, 7 hours 52 minutes.

Seven hours fifty-two minutes? Why, there isn’t a satellite round earth with a period like that. In all the solar system there’s only—

The cold finger turns fierce, implacable.

The east is paling and the sick man turns to it, wanting the light, the sun, an end to questions whose answers couldn’t be looked upon. The sea stretches endlessly out to the growing light, and endlessly, somewhere out of sight, the surf roars. The paling east bleaches the sandy hilltops and throws the line of footprints into aching relief. That would be the buddy, the sick man knows, gone for help. He cannot at the moment recall who the buddy is, but in time he will, and meanwhile the footprints make him less alone.

The sun’s upper rim thrusts itself above the horizon with a flash of green, instantly gone. There is no dawn, just the green flash and then a clear white blast of unequivocal sunup. The sea could not be whiter, more still, if it were frozen and snow-blanketed. In the west, stars still blaze, and overhead the crinkled satellite is scarcely abashed by the growing light. A formless jumble in the valley below begins to resolve itself into a sort of tent-city, or installation of some kind, with tubelike and saillike buildings. This would have meaning for the sick man if his head were working right. Soon, it would. Will. (Oh…)

The sea, out on the horizon just under the rising sun, is behaving strangely, for in that place where properly belongs a pool of unbearable brightness, there is instead a notch of brown. It is as if the white fire of the sun is drinking dry the sea—for look, look! the notch becomes a bow and the bow a crescent, racing ahead of the sunlight, white sea ahead of it and behind it a cocoa-dry stain spreading across and down toward where he watches.

Beside the finger of fear which lies on him, another finger places itself, and another, making ready for that clutch, that grip, that ultimate insane squeeze of panic. Yet beyond that again, past that squeeze when it comes, to be savored if the squeeze is only fear and not panic, lies triumph—triumph, and a glory. It is perhaps this which constitutes his whole battle: to fit himself, prepare himself to bear the utmost that fear could do, for if he can do that, there is a triumph on the other side. But … not yet. Please, not yet awhile.

Something flies (or flew, or will fly—he is a little confused on this point) toward him, from the far right where the stars still shine. It is not a bird and it is unlike any aircraft on earth, for the aerodynamics are wrong. Wings so wide and so fragile would be useless, would melt and tear away in any of earth’s atmosphere but the outer fringes. He sees then (because he prefers to see it so) that it is the kid’s model, or part of it, and for a toy, it does very well indeed.

It is the part called Gamma, and it glides in, balancing, parallels the sand and holds away, holds away slowing, then settles, all in slow motion, throwing up graceful sheet-fountains of fine sand from its skids. And it runs along the ground for an impossible distance, letting down its weight by the ounce and stingily the ounce, until look out until a skid look out fits itself into a bridged crevasse look out, look out! and still moving on, it settles down to the struts. Gamma then, tired, digs her wide left wingtip carefully into the racing sand, digs it in hard; and as the wing breaks off, Gamma slews, sidles, slides slowly, pointing her other triangular tentlike wing at the sky, and broadside crushes into the rocks at the valley’s end.

As she rolls smashing over, there breaks from her broad back the sausage, the little Delta, which somersaults away to break its back upon the rocks, and through the broken hull, spill smashed shards of graphite from the moderator of her power-pile. Look out! Look out! and at the same instant from the finally checked mass of Gamma there explodes a doll, which slides and tumbles into the sand, into the rocks and smashed hot graphite from the wreck of Delta.

The sick man numbly watches this toy destroy itself: what will they think of next?—and with a gelid horror prays at the doll lying in the raging rubble of the atomic pile: don’t stay there, man—get away! get away! that’s hot, you know? But it seems like a night and a day and half another night before the doll staggers to its feet and, clumsy in its pressure-suit, runs away up the valleyside, climbs a sand-topped outcrop, slips, falls, lies under a slow cascade of cold ancient sand until, but for an arm and the helmet, it is buried.

The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun’s disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent-city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.)

And from it stretches the line of footprints, to and by the sick man, above to the bluff, and gone with the sand-slide which had buried him there. Whose footprints?

He knows whose, whether or not he knows that he knows, or wants to or not. He knows what satellite has (give or take a bit) a period like that (want it exactly?—it’s 7.66 hours). He knows what world has such a night, and such a frosty giare by day. He knows these things as he knows how spilled radioactives will pour the crash and mutter of surf into a man’s earphones.

Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.

The truth, then, is that the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead. The cold hand ready to squeeze and still your heart is not anoxia at even fear, it is death. Now, if there is something more important than this, now is the time for it to show itself.

The sick man looks at the line of his own footprints, which testify that he is alone, and at the wreckage below, which states that there is no way back, and at the white east and the mottled west and the paling flecklike satellite above. Surf sounds in his ears. He hears his pumps. He hears what is left of his breathing. The cold clamps down and folds him round past measuring, past all limit.

Then he speaks, cries out: then with joy he takes his triumph at the other side of death, as one takes a great fish, as one completes a skilled and mighty task, rebalances at the end of some great daring leap; and as he used to say “we shot a fish” he uses no “I”:

“God,” he cries, dying on Mars, ‘God, we made it!”

A special feature of your enterprising annual anthologists the self-help do-it-yourself diagnostic puzzle, as provided in all the best general magazines.

Your problem is to make your mind up, sometime before you hit the final paragraph, about which human is the human here?

The first Althean said, “Well, the tower is completed.”

The second Althean smiled. “Good. It is all ready for the prisoner, then?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure he’ll be quite comfortable? He won’t languish and die in such a state?”

“No,” said the first Althean. “He’ll be all right. It’s taken a long time to build the tower, and I’ve had ample opportunity to study the creature. We’ve made his habitat as ideal for him as possible.”

“I suppose so.” The second Althean shuddered slightly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it’s nothing more than projection on my part, but the mere thought of a prison…” He broke off and shuddered again.

“I know,” said the other, sympathetically. “It’s something none of us have ever had to conceive of before. The whole notion of locking up a fellow-being is an abominable one, I’ll admit But for that matter, consider the creature itself!”

“It wouldn’t do for him to be loose.”

“Wouldn’t do! Why, it would be quite impossible. He actually murders. He killed three of our fellow-beings before we were able to subdue him.”

The second Althean shuddered more violently than before, and it appeared for a moment as though he was about to become physically ill. “But why? What type of being is he, for goodness sake? Where does he come from? What’s he doing here?”

“Ah,” said the first, “now you’ve hit upon it. You see, there’s no way of knowing any of those answers. One morning he was discovered by a party of ten. They attempted to speak to him, and what do you think his rejoinder was?”

“He struck out at them, the way I heard it.”

“Precisely! Utterly unprovoked assault, with three of their number dead as a result. The first case of murder on record here in thirty generations. Incredible!”

“And since then …”

“He’s been a prisoner. No communication, no new insights, nothing. He eats whatever we feed him—he sleeps when the darkness comes and wakes when it goes. We have learned nothing about him, but I can tell you this for a fact. He is dangerous.”

“Yes,” said the second Althean.

“Very dangerous. He must be kept locked up. Of course, we wish him no harm—so we’ve made his prison as secure as possible, while keeping it as comfortable as possible. I daresay we’ve done a good job.”

“Look,” said the second, “perhaps I’m squeamish. I don’t know. But are you sure he can never escape?”

“Positive.”

“How can you be sure?”

The first Althean sighed. “The tower is one hundred thirty feet high. A drop from that distance is obviously fatal. Right?”

“Right.”

“The prisoner’s quarters are at the top of the tower, and the top is wider than the base—that is, the sides slope inward. And the sides are very, very smooth—so climbing down is quite impossible.”

“Couldn’t he come down the same way he’ll go up? It only stands to reason.”

“Again, quite impossible. He’ll be placed in his quarters by means of a pneumatic tube, and the same tube will be used to send him his food. The entire tower is so designed that it can be entered via the tube, and can only be left by leaping from the top. The food that he doesn’t eat, as well as any articles which he tires of, may be thrown over the side.”

The second Althean hesitated. “It seems safe.”

“It should. It is safe.”

“I suppose so. I suppose it’s safe, and I suppose it’s not cruel, but somehow…Well, when will the prisoner be placed in the tower? Is it all ready for his occupancy?”

“It’s ready, all right. And, as a matter of fact, we’re taking him there in just a few minutes. Would you care to come along?”

“It might be interesting, at that.”

“Then come along.”

The two walked in silence to the first Althean’s motor car and drove in silence to the tower. The tower was, indeed, a striking structure, both in terms of size and of design. They stepped out of the motor car and waited, and a large motor truck drew up shortly, pulling to a stop at the base of the tower. Three Althean guards stepped out of the truck, followed by the prisoner. His limbs were securely shackled.

“See?” demanded the first Althean. “He’ll be placed in the tube like that, and he’ll discover the key to his shackles in his quarters.”

“Clever.”

“We’ve worked it out carefully,” the first explained. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but we’ve figured out all the angles.”

The prisoner was placed in the tube, the aperture of which was located at the very base of the tower. Once inside, it was closed securely and bolted shut. The three Althean guards hesitated for several moments until a red light at the base indicated that the prisoner had entered his quarters. Then they returned to the motor truck and drove off down the road.

“We could go now,” said the first. “I’d like to wait and see if he’ll throw down the shackles, though. If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’m rather interested now, you know. It’s not something you see every day.”

They waited. After several minutes, a pair of shackles plummeted through the air and dropped to the ground about twenty yards from the two Altheans.

“Ah,” said the first. “He’s found the key.”

Moments later, the second pair of shackles followed the first, and the key followed soon thereafter. Then the prisoner walked to the edge of the tower and leaned over the railing, gazing down at them.

“Awesome,” said the second Althean. “I’m glad he can’t escape.”

The prisoner regarded them thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he mounted the railing, flapped his wings, and soared off into the sky.

It is just about ten years now, since Mark Clifton hit the science fiction world like a cloudburst, pouring out a seemingly inexhaustible flood of provocative, exciting, irritating, and informative thinking. I know of no contemporary author, with the possible exception of Robert Heinlein ten years earlier, who has exercised so much developmental influence, not just on the readers, but in the basic thinking of other writers in the field. There was a short spell, I recall, when some disgruntled souls referred to Astounding (now, Analog) as The Clifton House Organ.

For the past almost five years, other work has kept him too busy to leave much time for s-f. Now it would seem the spring floods are back, or so one hopes, on the basis of this story and the new Doubleday novel, Eight Keys to Eden.

The mystery of what made the goonie tick tormented me for twenty years.

Why, when that first party of big game hunters came to Libo, why didn’t the goonies run away and hide, or fight back? Why did they instantly, immediately, almost seem to say, “You want us to die, Man? For you we will do it gladly!” Didn’t they have any sense of survival at all? How could a species survive if it lacked that sense?

“Even when one of the hunters, furious at being denied the thrill of the chase, turned a machine gun on the drove of them,” I said to Paul Tyler, “they just stood there and let him mow them down.”

Paul started to say something in quick protest, then simply looked sick.

“Oh, yes,” I assured him. “One of them did just that. There was a hassle over it. Somebody reminded him that the machine gun was designed just to kill human beings, that it wasn’t sporting to turn it on game. The hassle sort of took the edge off their fun, so they piled into their space yacht and took off for some other place where they could count on a chase before the kill.”

I felt his sharp stare, but I pretended to be engrossed in measuring the height of Libo’s second sun above the mountain range in the west. Down below us, from where we sat and smoked on Sentinel Rock, down in my valley and along the sides of the river, we could see the goonie herds gathering under their groves of pal trees before night fell.

Paul didn’t take issue, or feed me that line about harvesting the game like crops, or this time even kid me about my contempt for Earthers. He was beginning to realize that all the old-timer Liboans felt as I did, and that there was reasonable justification for doing so. In fact, Paul was fast becoming Liboan himself. I probably wouldn’t have told him the yarn about that first hunting party if I hadn’t sensed it, seen the way he handled his own goonies, the affection he felt for them.

“Why were our animals ever called goonies, Jim?” he asked. “They’re … Well, you know the goonie.”

I smiled to myself at his use of the possessive pronoun, but I didn’t comment on it.

“That too,” I said, and knocked the dottle out of my pipe. “That came out of the first hunting party.” I stood up and stretched to get a kink out of my left leg, and looked back toward the house to see if my wife had sent a goonie to call us in to dinner. It was a little early, but I stood a moment to watch Paul’s team of goonies up in the yard, still folding their harness beside his rickshaw. I’d sold them to him, as yearlings, a couple of years before, as soon as their second pelt showed they’d be a matched pair. Now they were mature young males, and as handsome a team as could be found anywhere on Libo.

I shook my head and marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn’t seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn’t mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn’t tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid.

I turned from watching the team which, by now, had finished folding their harness into neat little piles and had stretched out on the ground to rest beside the rickshaw. I sat back down and packed my pipe again with a Libo weed we called tobacco.

“Why do we call them goonies?” I repeated Paul’s question. “There’s a big bird on Earth. Inhabits some of the South Sea islands, millions of them crowd together to nest. Most stupid creature on Earth, seems like, the way they behave on their nesting grounds. A man can hardly walk among them; they don’t seem to know enough to move out of the way, and don’t try to protect themselves or their nests. Some reason I don’t know, it’s called the Goonie Bird. Guess the way these animals on Libo behaved when that hunting party came and shot them down, didn’t run away, hide, or fight, reminded somebody of that bird. The name stuck.”

Paul didn’t say anything for a while. Then he surprised me.

“It’s called the Goonie Bird when it’s on the ground,” he said slowly. “But in the air it’s the most magnificent flying creature known to man. In the air, it’s called the albatross.”

I felt a chill. I knew the legend, of course, the old-time sailor superstition. Kill an albatross and bad luck will haunt you, dog you all the rest of your days. But either Paul didn’t know The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or was too tactful a young man to make it plainer. I supplied the Libo colony with its fresh meat. The only edible animal on the planet was the goonie.

Carson’s Hill comes into the yarn I have to tell—in a way is responsible. Sooner or later almost every young tenderfoot finds it, and in his mind it is linked with anguish, bitterness, emotional violence, suppressed fury.

It is a knoll, the highest point in the low range of hills that separates my valley from the smaller cup which shelters Libo City. Hal Carson, a buddy of mine in the charter colony, discovered it. Flat on top, it is a kind of granite table surrounded by giant trees, which make of it a natural amphitheater, almost like a cathedral in feeling. A young man can climb up there and be alone to have it out with his soul.

At one time or another, most do. “Go out to the stars, young man, and grow up with the universe!” the posters say all over Earth. It has its appeal for the strongest, the brightest, the best. Only the dull-eyed breeders are content to stay at home.

In the Company recruiting offices they didn’t take just anybody, no matter what his attitude was—no indeed. Anybody, for example, who started asking questions about how and when he might get back home—with the fortune he would make—was coldly told that if he was already worrying about getting back he shouldn’t be going.

Somehow, the young man was never quite sure how, it became a challenge to his bravery, his daring, his resourcefulness. It was a bait which a young fellow, anxious to prove his masculinity, the most important issue of his life, couldn’t resist. The burden of proof shifted from the Company to the applicant, so that where he had started out cautiously inquiring to see if this offer might suit him, he wound up anxiously trying to prove he was the one they wanted.

Some wag in the barracks scuttlebutt once said, “They make you so afraid they won’t take you, it never occurs to you that you’d be better off if they didn’t.”

“A fine mess,” somebody else exclaimed, and let a little of his secret despair show through. “To prove you are a man, you lose the reason for being one.”

That was the rub, of course.

Back when man was first learning how to misuse atomic power, everybody got all excited about the effects of radiation on germ plasm. Yet nobody seemed much concerned over the effects of unshielded radiation in space on that germ plasm—out from under the protecting blanket of Earth’s atmosphere, away from the natural conditions where man had evolved.

There could be no normal colony of man here on Libo— no children. Yet the goonies, so unspeakably resembling man, could breed and bear. It gave the tenderfoot a smoldering resentment against the goonie which a psychologist could have explained; that wild, unreasoning fury man must feel when frustration is tied in with prime sex—submerged and festering because simple reason told the tenderfoot that the goonie was not to blame.

The tide of bitterness would swell up to choke the young tenderfoot there alone on Carson’s Hill. No point to thinking of home, now. No point to dreaming of his triumphant return—space-burnt, strong, virile, remote with the vastness of space in his eyes—ever.

Unfair to the girl he had left behind that he should hold her with promises of loyalty, the girl, with ignorance equal to his own, who had urged him on. Better to let her think he had changed, grown cold, lost his love of her—so that she could fulfill her function, turn to someone else, some damned Company reject—but a reject who could still father children.

Let them. Let them strain themselves to populate the universe!

At this point the angry bitterness would often spill over into unmanly tears (somebody in the barracks had once said that Carson’s Hill should be renamed Crying Hill, or Tenderfoot’s Lament). And the tortured boy, despising himself, would gaze out over my valley and long for home, long for the impossible undoing of what had been done to him.

Yes, if there hadn’t been a Carson’s Hill there wouldn’t be a yarn to tell. But then, almost every place has a Carson’s Hill, in one form or another, and Earthers remain Earthers for quite a while. They can go out to the stars in a few days or weeks, but it takes a little longer before they begin to grow up with the universe.

Quite a little longer, I was to find. Still ahead of me, I was to have my own bitter session there again, alone—an irony because I’d thought I’d come to terms with myself up there some twenty years ago.

It is the young man who is assumed to be in conflict with his society, who questions its moral and ethical structures, and yet I wonder. Or did I come of age late, very late? Still, when I look back, it was the normal thing to accept things as we found them, to be so concerned with things in their relationship to us that we had no time for wonder about relationships not connected with us. Only later, as man matures, has time to reflect—has something left over from the effort to survive …

When I first came to Libo, I accepted the goonie as an animal, a mere source of food. It was Company policy not to attempt a colony where there was no chance for self-support. Space shipping-rates made it impossible to supply a colony with food for more than a short time while it was being established. Those same shipping-rates make it uneconomical to ship much in the way of machinery, to say nothing of luxuries. A colony has to have an indigenous source of food and materials, and if any of that can also be turned into labor, all the better. I knew that. I accepted it as a matter of course.

And even as I learned about my own dead seed, I learned that the same genetic principles applied to other Earth life, that neither animal nor plant could be expected to propagate away from Earth. No, the local ecology had to be favorable to man’s survival, else no colony. I accepted that, it was reasonable.

The colony of Libo was completely dependent on the goonie as the main source of its food. The goonie was an animal to be used for food, as is the chicken, the cow, the rabbit, on Earth. The goonie is beautiful, but so is the gazelle, which is delicious. The goonie is vaguely shaped like a human, but so is the monkey which was once the prime source of protein food for a big part of Earth’s population. I accepted all that, without question.

Perhaps it was easy for me. I was raised on a farm, where slaughtering of animals for food was commonplace. I had the average farm boy’s contempt for the dainty young lady in the fashionable city restaurant who, without thought, lifts a bite of rare steak, dripping with blood, to her pearly teeth; but who would turn pale and retch at the very thought of killing an animal. Where did she think that steak came from?

At first we killed the goonies around our encampment which was to become Libo City; went out and shot them as we needed them, precisely as hunters do on Earth. In time we had to go farther and farther in our search for them, so I began to study them, in hope I could domesticate them. I learned one of their peculiarities—they were completely dependent upon the fruit of the pal tree, an ever-bearing tree. Each goonie had its own pal tree, and we learned by experiment that they would starve before they would eat the fruit from any other pal tree.

There was another peculiarity which we don’t yet understand, and yet we see it in rudimentary form on Earth where game breeds heartily during seasons of plentiful food, and sparsely in bad years. Here, the goonie did not bear young unless there were unclaimed pal trees available, and did bear young up to a limit of such trees.

My future was clear, then. Obtain the land and plant the pal trees to insure a constant supply of meat for the colony. It was the farm boy coming out in me, no doubt, but no different from any farm boy who grows up and wants to own his own farm, his own cattle ranch.

I was a young man trying to build a secure future for himself. There was no thought of the goonie except as a meat supply. I accepted that as a matter of course. And as Libo City grew, I continued to increase my planting of pal trees in my valley, and my herds of goonies.

It was only later, much later, that I found the goonie could also be trained for work of various kinds. I accepted this, too, in the same spirit we trained colts on the farm to ride, to pull the plow, to work.

Perhaps it was this training, only for the crudest tasks at first, then later, calling for more and more skill, that proved my undoing. On the farm we separated our pet animals from the rest; we gave our pets names, but we never gave names to those destined for slaughter, nor formed any affection for them. This was taboo. I found myself carrying out the same procedures here. I separated those goonies I trained from the meat herds. Then I separated the common labor goonies from the skilled labor.

I should have stopped there—at least there. But when man’s curiosity is aroused … Can we say to the research scientist, “You may ask this question, but you are forbidden to ask that one. You may take this step, but you must not take a second, to see what lies beyond.” Can we say that to the human mind? I did not say it to myself.

I taught certain goonies to speak, to read, to write.

The goonies accepted this training in the same joyful exuberance they accepted everything else from man. I never understood it, not until now. Their whole behavior, their whole being seemed the same as greeted the first hunting party. “You want us to die, man? For you, we will do it gladly.”

Whatever man wanted, the goonie gave, to the limit of his capacity. And I had not found that limit.

I took one step too many. I know that now.

And yet, should I not have taken that last step—teaching them to speak, to read, to write? The capacity was in them for learning it all the time. Was it finding it out that made the difference? But what kind of moral and ethic structure is it that depends on ignorance for its support?

Miriam Wellman comes into the yarn, too. She was the catalyst. My destruction was not her fault. It would have come about anyway. She merely hastened it. She had a job to do, she did it well. It worked out as she planned, a cauterizing kind of thing, burning out a sore that was beginning to fester on Libo—to leave us hurting a little, but clean.

Important though she was, she still remains a little hazy to me, a little unreal. Perhaps I was already so deep into my quandary, without knowing it, that both people and things were a little hazy, and the problem deep within me my only reality.

I was in Libo City the day she landed from the tender that serviced the planets from the mother ship orbiting out in space. I saw her briefly from the barbershop across the street when she came out of the warehouse and walked down our short main street to the Company Administration Building. She was a dark-haired little thing, sharp-eyed, neither young nor old—a crisp, efficient career gal, she seemed to me. I didn’t see any of the men on the street make a pass at her. She had the looks, all right, but not the look.

There weren’t more than a dozen women on the whole planet, childless women who had forgone having children, who had raked up the exorbitant space fare and come on out to join their man anyhow; and the men should have been falling all over Miriam Wellman—but they weren’t. They just looked, and then looked at each other. Nobody whistled.

I got a little more of what had happened from the head warehouseman, who was a friend of mine. He smelled something wrong, he said, the minute the tender cut its blasts and settled down. Usually there’s joshing, not always friendly, between the tender crew and the warehouse crew —the contempt of the spaceman for the landbound; the scorn of the landbound for the glamor-boy spacemen who think their sweat is wine.

Not today. The pilot didn’t come out of his cabin at all to stretch his legs; he sat there looking straight ahead, and the ship’s crew started hustling the dock loaders almost before the hatches opened for unloading a few supplies and loading our packages of libolines—the jewel stone which is cur excuse for being.

She came down the gangplank, he said, gave a crisp, careless flick of her hand toward the pilot, who must have caught it out of the corner of his eye for he nodded briefly, formally, and froze. Later we learned he was not supposed to tell us who she really was, but he did his best. Only we didn’t catch it.

She came across the yard with all the human warehousemen staring, but not stepping toward her. Only the goonies seemed unaware. In their fashion, laughing and playing, and still turning out more work than humans could, they were already cleaning out the holds and trucking the supplies over to the loading dock.

She came up the little flight of stairs at the end of the dock and approached Hal, the head warehouseman, who, he said, was by that time bug-eyed.

“Do you always let those creatures go around stark naked?” she asked in a low, curious voice. She waved toward the gangs of goonies.

He managed to get his jaw unhinged enough to stammer.

“Why, ma’am,” he says he said, “they’re only animals.”

Nowadays, when he tells it, he claims he saw a twinkle of laughter in her eyes. I don’t believe it. She was too skilled in the part she was playing.

She looked at him, she looked back at the goonies, and she looked at him again. By then he said he was blushing all over, and sweating as if the dry air of Libo was a steam room. It wasn’t any trick to see how she was comparing, what she was thinking. And every stranger was warned, before he landed, that the one thing the easy-going Liboan wouldn’t tolerate was comparison of goonie with man. Beside them we looked raw, unfinished, poorly done by an amateur. There was only one way we could bear it—there could be no comparison.

He says he knows he turned purple, but before he could think of anything else to say, she swept on past him, through the main aisle of the warehouse, and out the front door. All he could do was stand there and try to think of some excuse for living, he said.

She had that effect on people—she cut them down to bedrock with a word, a glance. She did it deliberately. Yes, she came as a Mass Psychology Therapist, a branch of pseudo-science currently epidemic on Earth which believed in the value of emotional purges whipped up into frenzies. She came as a prime trouble-maker, as far as we could see at the time. She came to see that the dear, fresh boys who were swarming out to conquer the universe didn’t fall into the evil temptations of space.

She came at the critical time. Libo City had always been a small frontier spaceport, a lot like the old frontier towns of primitive Earth—a street of warehouses, commissaries, an Administration building, couple of saloons, a meeting hall, the barracks, a handful of cottages for the men with wives, a few more cottages built by pairs of young men who wanted to shake free of barracks life for a while, but usually went back to it. Maybe there should have been another kind of House, also, but Earth was having another of its periodic moral spasms, and the old women of the male sex who comprised the Company’s Board of Directors threw up their hands in hypocritical horror at the idea of sex where there was no profit to be made from the sale of diapers and cribs and pap.

Now it was all changing. Libo City was mushrooming. The Company had made it into a shipping terminal to serve the network of planets still out beyond as the Company extended its areas of exploitation. More barracks and more executive cottages were going up as fast as goonie labor could build them. Hundreds of tenderfoot Earthers were being shipped in to handle the clerical work of the terminal. Hundreds of Earthers, all at once, to bring with them their tensions, their callousness, swaggering, boasting, cruelties and sadisms which were natural products of life on Earth— and all out of place here where we’d been able to assimilate a couple or so at a time, when there hadn’t been enough to clique up among themselves; they’d had to learn a life of calmness and reason if they wanted to stay.

Perhaps Miriam Wellman was a necessity. The dear, fresh boys filled the meeting hall, overflowed it, moved the nightly meetings to the open ground of the landing field. She used every emotional trick of the rabble-rouser to whip them up into frenzies, made them drunk on emotion, created a scene of back-pounding, shouting, jittering maniacs. It was a good lesson for anybody who might believe in the progress of the human race toward reason, intelligence.

I had my doubts about the value of what she was doing, but for what it was, she was good. She knew her business.

Paul Tyler put the next part of the pattern into motion. I hadn’t seen him since our talk about the first hunting party, but when we settled down in our living-room chairs with our pipes and our tall cool glasses, it was apparent he’d been doing some thinking. He started off obliquely.

“About three years ago,” he said, as he set his glass back down on the table, “just before I came out here from Earth, I read a book by an Australian hunter of kangaroos.”

The tone of his voice made it more than idle comment. I waited.

“This fellow told the reader, every page or so, how stupid the kangaroo is. But everything he said showed how intelligent it is, how perfectly it adapts to its natural environment, takes every advantage. Even a kind of rough tribal organization in the herds, a recognized tribal ownership of lands, battles between tribes or individuals that try to poach, an organized initiation of a stray before it can be adopted into a tribe.”

“Then how did he justify calling it stupid?” I asked.

“Maybe the real question is ‘Why?’ “

“You answer it,” I said.

“The economy of Australia is based on sheep,” he said. “And sheep, unaided, can’t compete with kangaroos. The kangaroo’s teeth are wedge-shaped to bite clumps, and they can grow fat on new growth while sheep are still down into the heart of grass unable to get anything to eat. The kangaroo’s jump takes him from clump to sparse clump where the sheep will walk himself to death trying to stave off starvation. So the kangaroo has to go, because it interferes with man’s desires.”

“Does that answer ‘Why?’ “ I asked.

“Doesn’t it?” he countered. “They have to keep it killed off, if man is to prosper. So they have to deprecate it, to keep their conscience clear. If we granted the goonie equal intelligence with man, could we use it for food? Enslave it for labor?”

I was quick with a denial.

“The goonie was tested for intelligence,” I said sharply. “Only a few months after the colony was founded. The Department of Extraterrestrial Psychology sent out a team of testers. Their work was exhaustive, and their findings unequivocal.”

“This was before you trained goonies for work?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” I conceded. “But as I understood it, their findings ran deeper than just breaking an animal to do some work patterns. It had to do with super-ego, conscience. You know, we’ve never seen any evidence of tribal organization, any of the customs of the primitive man, no sense of awe, fear, worship. Even their mating seems to be casual, without sense of pairing, permanence. Hardly even herd instinct, except that they grouped where pal trees clustered. But on their own, undirected, nobody ever saw them plant the pal tree. The psychologists were thorough. They just didn’t find evidence to justify calling the goonie intelligent.”

“That was twenty years ago,” he said. “Now they understand our language, complicated instruction. You’ve taught them to speak, read, and write.”

I raised my brows. I didn’t think anyone knew about that except Ruth, my wife.

“Ruth let the cat out of the bag,” he said with a smile. “But I already knew about the speaking. As you say, the goonie has no fear, no conscience, no sense of concealment. They speak around anybody. You can’t keep it concealed, Jim.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“Which brings me to the point. Have you gone a step farther? Have you trained any to do clerical work?”

“Matter of fact,” I admitted, “I have. The Company has sharp pencils. If I didn’t keep up my records, they’d take the fillings out of my teeth before I knew what was happening. I didn’t have humans, so I trained goonies to do the job. Under detailed instruction, of course,” I added.

“I need such a clerk, myself,” he said. “There’s a new office manager, fellow by the name of Carl Hest. A—well, maybe you know the kind. He’s taken a particular dislike to me for some reason—well, all right, I know the reason. I caught him abusing his rickshaw goonie, and told him off before I knew who he was. Now he’s getting back at me through my reports. I spend more time making corrected reports, trying to please him, than I do in mining libolines. It’s rough. I’ve got to do something, or he’ll accumulate enough evidence to get me shipped back to Earth. My reports didn’t matter before, so long as I brought in my quota of libolines—the clerks in Libo City fixed up my reports for me. But now I’ve got to do both, with every T crossed and I dotted. It’s driving me nuts.”

“I had a super like that when I was a Company man,” I said, with sympathy. “It’s part of the nature of the breed.”

“You train goonies and sell them for all other kinds of work,” he said, at last. “I couldn’t afford to buy an animal trained that far, but could you rent me one? At least while I get over this hump?”

I was reluctant, but then, why not? As Paul said, I trained goonies for all other kinds of work, why not make a profit on my clerks? What was the difference? And, it wouldn’t be too hard to replace a clerk. They may have no intelligence, as the psychologists defined it, but they learned fast, needed to be shown only once.

“About those kangaroos,” I said curiously. “How did that author justify calling them stupid?”

Paul looked at me with a little frown.

“Oh,” he said, “various ways. For example, a rancher puts up a fence, and a chased kangaroo will beat himself to death trying to jump over it or go through it. Doesn’t seem to get the idea of going around it. Things like that.”

“Does seem pretty stupid,” I commented.

“An artificial, man-made barrier,” he said. “Not a part of its natural environment, so it can’t cope with it.”

“Isn’t that the essence of intelligence?” I asked. “To analyze new situations, and master them?”

“Looking at it from man’s definition of intelligence, I guess,” he admitted.

“What other definition do we have?” I asked….

I went back to the rental of the goonie, then, and we came to a mutually satisfactory figure. I was still a little reluctant, but I couldn’t have explained why. There was something about the speaking, reading, writing, clerical work—I was reluctant to let it get out of my own hands, but reason kept asking me why. Pulling a rickshaw, or cooking, or serving the table, or building a house, or writing figures into a ledger and adding them up—what difference?

In the days that followed, I couldn’t seem to get Paul’s conversation out of my mind. It wasn’t only that I’d rented him a clerk against my feelings of reluctance. It was something he’d said, something about the kangaroos. I went back over the conversation, reconstructed it sentence by sentence, until I pinned it down.

“Looking at it from man’s definition of intelligence,” he had said.

“What other definition do we have?” I had asked.

What about the goonie’s definition? That was a silly question. As far as I knew, goonies never defined anything. They seemed to live only for the moment. Perhaps the unfailing supply of fruit from their pal tree, the lack of any natural enemy, had never taught them a sense of want, or fear. And therefore, of conscience? There was no violence in their nature, no resistance to anything. How, then, could man ever hope to understand the goonie? All right, perhaps a resemblance in physical shape, but a mental life so totally alien …

Part of the answer came to me then.

Animal psychology tests, I reasoned, to some degree must be based on how man, himself, would react in a given situation. The animal’s intelligence is measured largely in terms of how close it comes to the behavior of man. A man would discover, after a few tries, that he must go around the fence; but the kangaroo couldn’t figure that out—it was too far removed from anything in a past experience which included no fences, no barriers.

Alien beings are not man, and do not, cannot, react in the same way as man. Man’s tests, therefore, based solely on his own standards, will never prove any other intelligence in the universe equal to man’s own!

The tests were as rigged as a crooked slot machine.

But the goonie did learn to go around the fence. On his own? No, I couldn’t say that. He had the capacity for doing what was shown him, and repeating it when told. But he never did anything on his own, never initiated anything, never created anything. He followed complicated instructions by rote, but only by rote. Never as if he understood the meanings, the abstract meanings. He made sense when he did speak, did not just jabber like a parrot, but he spoke only in direct monosyllables—the words, themselves, a part of the mechanical pattern. I gave it up. Perhaps the psychologists were right, after all.

A couple of weeks went by before the next part of the pattern fell into place. Paul brought back the goonie clerk.

“What happened?” I asked, when we were settled in the living room with drinks and pipes. “Couldn’t he do the work?”

“Nothing wrong with the goonie,” he said, a little sullenly. “I don’t deserve a smart goonie. I don’t deserve to associate with grown men. I’m still a kid with no sense.”

“Well, now,” I said with a grin. “Far be it from me to disagree with a man’s own opinion of himself. What happened?”

“I told you about this Carl Hest? The office manager?”

I nodded.

“This morning my monthly reports were due. I took them into Libo City with my libolines. I wasn’t content just to leave them with the receiving clerk, as usual. Oh, no! I took them right on in to Mr. High-and-mighty Hest, himself. I slapped them down on his desk and I said, ‘All right, bud, see what you can find wrong with them this time.’”

Paul began scraping the dottle out of his pipe and looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.

I grinned more broadly.

“I can understand,” I said. “I was a Company man once, myself.”

“This guy Hest,” Paul continued, “raised his eyebrows, picked up the reports as if they’d dirty his hands, flicked through them to find my dozens of mistakes at a glance. Then he went back over them—slowly. Finally, after about ten minutes, he laid them down on his desk. ‘Well, Mr. Tyler,’ he said in that nasty voice of his. ‘What happened to you? Come down with an attack of intelligence?’

“I should have quit when my cup was full,” Paul said, after I’d had my laugh. “But oh, no. I had to keep pouring and mess up the works—I wasn’t thinking about anything but wiping that sneer off his face. ‘Those reports you think are so intelligent,’ I said, ‘were done by a goonie.’ Then I said, real loud because the whole office was dead silent, ‘How does it feel to know that a goonie can do this work as well as your own suck-up goons—as well as you could, probably, and maybe better?’

“I walked out while his mouth was still hanging open. You know how the tenderfeet are. They pick up the attitude that the goonie is an inferior animal, and they ride it for all it’s worth; they take easily to having something they can push around. You know, Jim, you can call a man a dirty name with a smile, and he’ll sort of take it; maybe not quite happy about it but he’ll take it because you said it right. But here on Libo you don’t compare a man with a goonie—not anytime, no how, no matter how you say it.”

“So then what happened?” I’d lost my grin suddenly.

“It all happened in front of his office staff. He’s got a lot of those suck-ups that enjoy his humor when he tongue-skins us stupid bastards from out in the field. Their ears were all flapping. They heard the works. I went on about my business around town, and it wasn’t more than an hour before I knew I was an untouchable. The word had spread. It grew with the telling. Maybe an outsider wouldn’t get the full force of it, but here in Libo, well, you know what it would mean to tell a man he could be replaced by a goonie.”

“I know,” I said around the stem of my pipe, while I watched his face. Something had grabbed my tailbone and was twisting it with that tingling feeling we get in the face of danger. I wondered if Paul even yet, had fully realized what he’d done.

“Hell! All right, Jim, goddamn it!” he exploded. “Suppose a goonie could do their work better? That’s not going to throw them out of a job. There’s plenty of work, plenty of planets besides this one—even if the Company heard about it and put in goonies at the desks.”

“It’s not just that,” I said slowly. “No matter how low down a man is, he’s got to have something he thinks is still lower before he can be happy. The more inferior he is, the more he needs it. Take it away from him and you’ve started something.”

“I guess,” Paul agreed, but I could see he had his reserve of doubt. Well, he was young, and he’d been fed that scout-master line about how noble mankind is. He’d learn.

“Anyhow,” he said. “Friend of mine, better friend than most, I’ve found out, tipped me off. Said I’d better get rid of that goonie clerk, and quick, if I knew which side was up. I’m still a Company man, Jim. I’m like the rest of these poor bastards out here, still indentured for my space fare, and wouldn’t know how to keep alive if the Company kicked me out and left me stranded. That’s what could happen. Those guys can cut my feet out from under me every step I take. You know it. What can I do but knuckle under? So—I brought the goonie back.”

I nodded.

“Too bad you didn’t keep it under your hat, the way I have,” I said. “But it’s done now.”

I sat and thought about it. I wasn’t worried about my part in it—I had a part because everybody would know I’d trained the goonie, that Paul had got him from me. It wasn’t likely a little two-bit office manager could hurt me with the Company. They needed me too much. I could raise and train, or butcher, goonies and deliver them cheaper than they could do it themselves. As long as you don’t step on their personal egos, the big boys in business don’t mind slapping down their underlings and telling them to behave themselves, if there’s a buck to be made out of it.

Besides, I was damn good advertising, a real shill for their recruiting offices. “See?” they’d say. “Look at Jim MacPherson. Just twenty years ago he signed up with the Company to go out to the stars. Today he’s a rich man, independent, free enterprise. What he did, you can do.” Or they’d make it seem that way. And they were right. I could go on being an independent operator so long as I kept off the toes of the big boys.

But Paul was a different matter.

“Look,” I said. “You go back to Libo City and tell it around that it was just a training experiment I was trying. That it was a failure. That you exaggerated, even lied, to jolt Hest. Maybe that’ll get you out from under. Maybe we won’t hear any more about it.”

He looked at me, his face stricken. But he could still try to joke about it, after a fashion.

“You said everybody finds something inferior to himself,” he said. “I can’t think of anything lower than I am. I just can’t.”

I laughed.

“Fine,” I said with more heartiness than I really felt. “At one time or another most of us have to get clear down to rock bottom before we can begin to grow up.”

I didn’t know then that there was a depth beyond rock bottom, a hole one could get into, with no way out. But I was to learn.

I was wrong in telling Paul we wouldn’t hear anything more about it. I heard, the very next day. I was down in the south valley, taking care of the last planting in the new orchard, when I saw a caller coming down the dirt lane between the groves of pal trees. His rickshaw was being pulled by a single goonie, and even at a distance I could see the animal was abused with overwork, if not worse.

Yes, worse, because as they came nearer I could see whip welts across the pelt covering the goonie’s back and shoulders. I began a slow boil inside at the needless cruelty, needless because anybody knows the goonie will kill himself with overwork if the master simply asks for it. So my caller was one of the new Earthers, one of the petty little squirts who had to demonstrate his power over the inferior animal.

Apparently Ruth had had the same opinion for instead of treating the caller as an honored guest and sending a goonie to fetch me, as was Libo custom, she’d sent him on down to the orchard. I wondered if he had enough sense to know he’d been insulted. I hoped he did.

Even if I hadn’t been scorched to a simmering rage by the time the goonie halted at the edge of the orchard—and sank down on the ground without even unbuckling his harness— I wouldn’t have liked the caller. The important way he climbed down out of the rickshaw, the pompous stride he affected as he strode toward me, marked him as some petty Company official.

I wondered how he had managed to get past Personnel. Usually they picked the fine, upstanding, cleancut hero type—a little short on brains, maybe, but full of noble derring-do, and so anxious to be admired they never made any trouble. It must have been Personnel’s off day when this one got through—or maybe he had an uncle.

“Afternoon,” I greeted him, without friendliness, as he came up.

“I see you’re busy,” he said briskly. “I am, too. My time is valuable, so I’ll come right to the point. My name is Mr. Hest. I’m an executive. You’re MacPherson?”

“Mister MacPherson,” I answered dryly.

He ignored it.

“I hear you’ve got a goonie trained to bookkeeping. You leased it to Tyler on a thousand-dollar evaluation. An outrageous price, but I’ll buy it. I hear Tyler turned it back.”

I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes, or his loose, fat-lipped mouth. Not at all.

“The goonie is unsatisfactory,” I said. “The experiment didn’t work, and he’s not for sale.”

“You can’t kid me, MacPherson,” he said. “Tyler never made up those reports. He hasn’t the capacity. I’m an accountant. If you can train a goonie that far, I can train him on into real accounting. The Company could save millions if goonies could take the place of humans in office work.”

I knew there were guys who’d sell their own mothers into a two-bit dive if they thought it would impress the boss, but I didn’t believe this one had that motive. There was something else, something in the way his avid little eyes looked me over, the way he licked his lips, the way he came out with an explanation that a smart man would have kept to himself.

“Maybe you’re a pretty smart accountant,” I said in my best hayseed drawl, “but you don’t know anything at all about training goonies.” I gestured with my head. “How come you’re overworking your animal that way, beating him to make him run up those steep hills on those rough roads? Can’t you afford a team?”

“He’s my property,” he said.

“You’re not fit to own him,” I said, as abruptly. “I wouldn’t sell you a goonie of any kind, for any price.”

Either the man had the hide of a rhinoceros, or he was driven by a passion I couldn’t understand.

“Fifteen hundred,” he bid. “Not a penny more.”

“Not at any price. Good day, Mr. Hest.”

He looked at me sharply, as if he couldn’t believe I’d refuse such a profit, as if it were a new experience for him to find a man without a price. He started to say something, then shut his mouth with a snap. He turned abruptly and strode back to his rickshaw. Before he reached it, he was shouting angrily to his goonie to get up out of that dirt and look alive.

I took an angry step toward them and changed my mind. Whatever I did, Hest would later take it out on the goonie. He was that kind of man. I was stopped, too, by the old Liboan custom of never meddling in another man’s affairs. There weren’t any laws about handling goonies. We hadn’t needed them. Disapproval had been enough to bring tenderfeet into line, before. And I hated to see laws like that come to Libo, morals-meddling laws—because it was men like Hest who had the compulsion to get in control of making and enforcing them, who hid behind the badge so they could get their kicks without fear of reprisal.

I didn’t know what to do. I went back to planting the orchard and worked until the first sun had set and the second was close behind. Then I knocked off, sent the goonies to their pal groves, and went on up to the house.

Ruth’s first question, when I came through the kitchen door, flared my rage up again.

“Jim,” she said curiously, and a little angry, “why did you sell that clerk to a man like Hest?”

“But I didn’t,” I said.

“Here’s the thousand, cash, he left with me,” she said and pointed to the corner of the kitchen table. “He said it was the price you agreed on. He had me make out a bill of sale. I thought it peculiar because you always take care of business, but he said you wanted to go on working.”

“He pulled a fast one, Ruth,” I said, my anger rising.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Right after supper I’m going into Libo City. Bill of sale, or not, I’m going to get that goonie back.”

“Jim,” she said, “be careful.” There was worry in her eyes. “You’re not a violent man—and you’re not as young as you used to be.”

That was something a man would rather not be reminded of, not even by his wife—especially not by his wife.

Inquiry in Libo City led me to Hest’s private cottage, but it was dark. I couldn’t arouse any response, not even a goonie. I tried the men’s dormitories to get a line on him. Most of the young Earthers seemed to think it was a lark, and their idea of good sportsmanship kept them from telling me where to find him. From some of them I sensed a deeper, more turgid undercurrent where good, clean fun might not be either so good or so clean.

In one of the crowded saloons there was a booth of older men, men who’d been here longer, and kept a disdainful distance away from the new Earthers.

“There’s something going on, Jim,” one of them said. “I don’t know just what. Try that hell-raisin’, snortin’ female. Hest’s always hanging around her.”

I looked around the booth. They were all grinning a little. So the story of how Hest had outfoxed me had spread, and they could enjoy that part of it. I didn’t blame them. But I could tell they didn’t sense there was anything more to it than that. They told me where to locate Miriam Wellman’s cottage, and added as I started to leave, “You need any help, Jim, you know where to look.” Part of it was to say that in a showdown against the Earthers they were on my side, but most of it was a bid to get in on a little fun, break the monotony.

I found the woman’s cottage without trouble, and she answered the door in person. I told her who I was, and she invited me in without any coy implications about what the neighbors might think. The cottage was standard, furnished with goonie-made furniture of native materials.

“I’ll come right to the point, Miss Wellman,” I said.

“Good,” she answered crisply. “The boys will be gathering for their meeting, and I like to be prompt.”

I started to tell her what I thought of her meetings, how much damage she was doing, how far she was setting Libo back. I decided there wouldn’t be any use. People who do that kind of thing, her kind of thing, get their kicks out of the ego-bloating effect of their power over audiences and don’t give a good goddamn about how much damage they do.

“I’m looking for Carl Hest,” I said. “I understand he’s one of your apple-polishers.”

She was wearing standard coverall fatigues, but she made a gesture as if she were gathering up folds of a voluminous skirt to show me there was nothing behind them. “I am not hiding Carl Hest,” she said scornfully.

“Then you know he is hiding.” I paused, and added, “And you probably know he conned my wife out of a valuable goonie. You probably know what he’s got in mind to do.”

“I do, Mr. MacPherson,” she said crisply. “I know very well.”

I looked at her, and felt a deep discouragement. I couldn’t see any way to get past that shell of hers, that armor of self-righteousness— No, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t quoting fanatic, meaningless phrases at me, clouding the issue with junk. She was a crisp business woman who had a situation well in hand.

“Then you know more than I do,” I said. “But I can guess some things. I don’t like what I can guess. I trained that goonie, I’m responsible. I’m not going to have it— well, whatever they plan to do with it—just because I trained it to a work that Hest and his toadies don’t approve.”

‘“Very commendable sentiments, Mr. MacPherson,” she said dryly. “But suppose you keep out of an affair that’s none of your business. I understood that was Liboan custom, not to meddle in other people’s doings.”

“That was the custom,” I said.

She stood up suddenly and walked with quick, short strides across the room to a closet door. She turned around and looked at me, as if she had made up her mind to something.

“It’s still a good custom,” she said. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to preserve it.”

I looked at her dumfounded.

“By letting things happen, whatever’s going to happen to that goonie?” I asked incredulously. “By coming out here and whipping up the emotions of these boys, stirring up who knows what in them?”

She opened the door of the closet and I could see she was taking out a robe, an iridescent, shimmering thing.

“I know precisely what I’m stirring up,” she said. “That’s my business. That’s what I’m here for.”

I couldn’t believe it. To whip up the emotions of a mob just for the kicks of being able to do it was one thing. But to do it deliberately, knowing the effect of arousing primitive savagery…

She turned around and began slipping into the garment. She zipped up the front of it with a crisp motion, and it transformed her. In darkness, under the proper spotlights, the ethereal softness completely masked her calculating efficiency.

“Why?” I demanded. “If you know, if you really do know, why?”

“My work here is about finished,” she said, as she came over to her chair and sat down again. “It will do no harm to tell you why. You’re not a Company man, and your reputation is one of discretion…The point is, in mass hiring for jobs in such places as Libo, we make mistakes in Personnel. Our tests are not perfect.”

“We?” I asked.

“I’m a trouble-shooter for Company Personnel,” she said.

“All this mumbo-jumbo,” I said. “Getting out there and whipping these boys up into frenzies …”

“You know about medical inoculation, vaccination,” she said. “Under proper controls, it can be psychologically applied. A little virus, a little fever, and from there on, most people are immune. Some aren’t. With some, it goes into a full-stage disease. We don’t know which is which without test. We have to test. Those who can’t pass the test, Mr. MacPherson, are shipped back to Earth. This way we find out quickly, instead of letting some Typhoid Marys gradually infect a whole colony.”

“Hest,” I said.

“Hest is valuable,” she said. “He thinks he is transferred often because we need him to set up procedures and routines. Actually it’s because he is a natural focal point for the wrong ones to gather round. Birds of a feather. Sending him out a couple months in advance of a trouble-shooter saves us a lot of time. We already know where to look when we get there.”

“He doesn’t catch on?” I asked.

“People get blinded by their own self-importance,” she said. “He can’t see beyond himself. And,” she added, “we vary our techniques.”

I sat there and thought about it for a few minutes. I could see the sense in it, and I could see, in the long run, how Libo would be a better, saner place for the inoculation that would make the better-balanced Earthers so sick of this kind of thing they’d never want any more of it. But it was damned cold-blooded. These scientists! And it was aside from the issue of my goonie clerk.

“All right,” I said. “I guess you know what you’re doing. But it happens I’m more interested in that goonie clerk.”

“That goonie clerk is another focal point,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for some such incident.”

“You might have waited a long time,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “There’s always an incident. We wait for a particularly effective one.”

I stood up.

“You’d sacrifice the goonie to the job you’re doing,” I said.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “If it were necessary,” she added.

“You can find some other incident, then,” I said. “I don’t intend to see that goonie mistreated, maybe worse, just to get a result for you.”

She stood up quickly, a flash of shimmering light.

“You will keep your hands entirely off it, Mr. MacPherson,” she said crisply. “I do not intend to have my work spoiled by amateur meddling. I’m a professional. This kind of thing is my business. I know how to handle it. Keep off, Mr. MacPherson. You don’t realize how much damage you could do at this point.”

“I’m not a Company man, Miss Wellman,” I said hotly. “You can’t order me.”

I turned around and stalked out of her door and went back to the main street of town. It was nearly deserted now. Only a few of the older hands were sitting around in the saloons, a few so disgusted with the frenetic meetings they wouldn’t go even to break the monotony.

I went over to the main warehouse and through the gate to the landing field. The crowd was there, sitting around, standing around, moving around, waiting for the show to start. At the far end there was a platform, all lighted up with floods. It was bare except for a simple lectern at the center. Very effective. Miss Wellman hadn’t arrived.

Maybe I could spot Hest somewhere up near the platform.

I threaded my way through the crowd, through knots of young Earthers who were shooting the breeze about happenings of the day, the usual endless gossip over trivialities. For a while I couldn’t pin it down, the something that was lacking. Then I realized that the rapt, trancelike hypnotism I expected to see just wasn’t there. The magic was wearing off. It was at this stage of the game that a smart rabble-rouser would move on, would sense the satiation and leave while he was still ahead, before everybody began to realize how temporary, pointless and empty the whole emotional binge had been. As Miss Wellman had said, her work here was about finished.

But I didn’t spot Hest anywhere. I moved on up near the platform. There was a group of five at one corner of the platform.

“Where could I find Mr. Hest?” I asked them casually.

They gave me the big eye, the innocent face, the don’t-know shake of the head. They didn’t know. I turned away and heard a snicker. I whirled back around and saw only wooden faces, the sudden poker face an amateur puts on when he gets a good hand—later he wonders why everybody dropped out of the pot.

I wandered around some more. I stood on the outside of little knots of men and eavesdropped. I didn’t hear anything of value for a while.

It wasn’t until there was a buzz in the crowd, and a spotlight swept over to the gate to highlight Miss Wellman’s entrance that I heard a snatch of phrase. Maybe it was the excitement that raised that voice just enough for me to hear.

“… Carson’s Hill tonight…”

“Shut up, you fool!”

There was a deep silence as the crowd watched Miss Wellman in her shimmering robe; she swept down the path that opened in front of her as if she were floating. But I had the feeling it was an appreciation of good showmanship they felt. I wondered what it had been like a couple of weeks back.

But I wasn’t waiting here for anything more. I’d got my answer. Carson’s Hill, of course! If Hest and his gang were staging another kind of show, a private one for their own enjoyment, Carson’s Hill would be the place. It fitted—the gang of juvenile delinquents who are compelled to burn down the school, desecrate the chapel, stab to death the mother image in some innocent old woman who just happened to walk by at the wrong moment—wild destruction of a place or symbol that represented inner travail.

I was moving quickly through the crowd, the silent crowd. There was only a low grumble as I pushed somebody aside so I could get through. Near the edge I heard her voice come through the speakers, low and thrilling, dulcet sweet.

“My children,” she began, “tonight’s meeting must be brief. This is farewell, and I must not burden you with my grief at leaving you …”

I made the yard gate and ran down the street to where my goonie team still waited beside the rickshaw.

“Let’s get out to Carson’s Hill as fast as we can,” I said to the team. In the darkness I caught the answering flash of their eyes, and heard the soft sound of harness being slipped over pelt. By the time I was seated, they were away in a smart mile-covering trot.

Miriam Wellman had been damned sure of herself, burning her bridges behind her while Hest and his rowdies were still on the loose, probably up there on Carson’s Hill, torturing that goonie for their own amusement. I wondered how in hell she thought that was taking care of anything.

The road that led toward home was smooth enough for a while, but it got rough as soon as the goonies took the trail that branched off toward Carson’s Hill. It was a balmy night, warm and sweet with the fragrance of pal-tree blossoms. The sky was full of stars, still close, not yet faded in the light of the first moon that was now rising in the East. It was a world of beauty, and the only flaw in it was Man.

In the starlight, and now the increasing moonlight, Carson’s Hill began to stand forth, blocking off the stars to the west. In the blackness of that silhouette, near its crest, I seemed to catch a hint of reddish glow—a fire had been built in the amphitheater.

Farther along, where the steep climb began, I spoke softly to the team, had them pull off the path into a small grove of pal trees. From here on the path wound around and took forever to get to the top. I could make better time with a stiff climb on foot. Avoid sentries, too—assuming they’d had enough sense to post any.

The team seemed uneasy, as if they sensed my tenseness, or knew what was happening up there on top. We understood them so little, how could we know what the goonie sensed? But as always they were obedient, anxious to please man, only to please him, whatever he wanted. I told them to conceal themselves and wait for me. They would.

I left the path and struck off in a straight line toward the top. The going wasn’t too bad at first. Wide patches of no trees, no undergrowth, open to the moonlight. I worried about it a little. To anyone watching from above I would be a dark spot moving against the light-colored grass. But I gambled they would be too intent with their pleasures, or would be watching only the path, which entered the grove from the other side of the hill.

Now I was high enough to look off to the southeast where Libo City lay. I saw the lights of the main street, tiny as a relief map. I did not see the bright spot of the platform on the landing field. Too far away to distinguish, something blocking my view at that point … or was the meeting already over and the landing field dark?

I plunged into a thicket of vines and brush. The advantage of concealment was offset by slower climbing. But I had no fear of losing my way so long as I climbed. The glow of light was my beacon, but not a friendly one. It grew stronger as I climbed, and once there was a shower of sparks wafting upward as though somebody had disturbed the fire. Disturbed it, in what way?

I realized I was almost running up the hill and gasping for breath. The sound of my feet was a loud rustle of leaves, and I tried to go more slowly, more quietly as I neared the top.

At my first sight of flickering raw flame through the trunks of trees, I stopped.

I had no plan in mind. I wasn’t fool enough to think I could plow in there and fight a whole gang of crazed sadists. A fictional hero would do it, of course—and win without mussing his pretty hair. I was no such hero, and nobody knew it better than I.

What would I do then? Try it anyway? At my age? Already panting for breath from my climb, from excitement? Maybe from a fear that I wouldn’t admit? Or would I simply watch, horror-stricken, as witnesses on Earth had watched crazed mobs from time immemorial? Surely man could have found some way to leave his barbarisms back on Earth, where they were normal.

I didn’t know. I felt compelled to steal closer, to see what was happening. Was this, too, a part of the human pattern? The horror-stricken witness, powerless to turn away, powerless to intervene, appalled at seeing the human being in the raw? To carry the scar of it in his mind all the rest of his days?

Was this, too, a form of participation? And from it a kind of inverse satisfaction of superiority to the mob?

What the hell. I pushed my way on through the last thickets, on toward the flames. I didn’t know I was sobbing deep, wracking coughs, until I choked on a hiccup. Careful MacPherson! You’re just asking for it. How would you like to join the goonie?

As it was, I almost missed the climax. Five minutes more and I would have found only an empty glade, a fire starting to burn lower for lack of wood, trampled grass between the crevices of flat granite stones.

Now from where I hid I saw human silhouettes limned against the flames, moving in random patterns. I drew closer and closer, dodging from tree to tree. Softly and carefully I crept closer, until the blackness of silhouette gave way to the color-tones of firelight on flesh. I could hear the hoarseness of their passion-drunk voices, and crept still closer until I could distinguish words.

Yet in this, as in the equally barbaric meeting I’d left, something was missing. There wasn’t an experienced lyncher among them. At least Personnel had had the foresight to refuse the applications from areas where lynching was an endemic pleasure. The right words, at the right time, would have jelled thought and action into ultimate sadism, but as it was, the men here milled about uncertainly—driven by the desire, the urge, but not knowing quite how to go about it… the adolescent in his first sex attempt.

“Well, let’s do something,” one voice came clearly. “If hanging’s too good for a goonie that tries to be a man, how about burning?”

“Let’s skin him alive and auction off the pelt. Teach these goonies a lesson.”

I saw the goonie then, spreadeagled on the ground. He did not struggle. He had not fought, nor tried to run away. Naturally; he was a goonie. I felt a wave of relief, so strong it was a sickness. That, too. If he had fought or tried to run away, they wouldn’t have needed an experienced lyncher to tell them what to do. The opposition would have been enough to turn them into a raving mob, all acting in one accord.

And then I knew. I knew the answer to the puzzle that had tortured me for twenty years.

But I was not to think about it further then, for the incredible happened. She must have left only moments after I did, and I must have been hesitating there, hiding longer than I’d realized. In any event, Miriam Wellman, in her shimmering robe, walking as calmly as if she were out for an evening stroll, now came into the circle of firelight.

“Boys! Boys!” she said commandingly, chiding, sorrowfully, and without the slightest tremor of uncertainty in her voice. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Teasing that poor animal that way? Cutting up the minute my back is turned? And I trusted you, too!”

I gasped at the complete inadequacy, the unbelievable stupidity of the woman, unprotected, walking into the middle of it and speaking as if to a roomful of kindergarten kids. But these were not kids! They were grown human males in a frenzy of lust for killing. Neither fire hoses, nor tear gas, nor machine-gun bullets had stopped such mobs on Earth.

But she had stopped them. I realized they were standing there, shock still, agape with consternation. For a tense ten seconds they stood there frozen in tableau, while Miss Wellman clucked her tongue and looked about with exasperation. Slowly the tableau began to melt, almost imperceptibly at first—the droop of a shoulder, the eyes that stared at the ground, one sheepish, foolish grin, a toe that made little circles on the rock. One, on the outskirts, tried to melt back into the darkness.

“Oh, no, you don’t, Peter Blackburn!” Miss Wellman snapped at him, as if he were four years old. “You come right back here and untie this poor goonie. Shame on you. You, too, Carl Hest. The very idea!”

One by one she called them by name, whipped them with phrases used on small children—but never on grown men.

She was a professional, she knew what she was doing. And she had been right in what she had told me—if I’d butted in, there might have been incalculable damage done.

Force would not have stopped them. It would have egged them on, increased the passion. They would have gloried in resisting it. It would have given meaning to a meaningless thing. The resistance would have been a part, a needed part, and given them the triumph of rape instead of the frustration of encountering motionless, indifferent acceptance.

But she had shocked them out of it, by not recognizing their grown maleness, their lustful dangerousness. She saw them as no more than naughty children—and they became that, in their own eyes.

I watched them in a kind of daze, while, in their own daze, they untied the goonie, lifted him carefully as if to be sure they didn’t hurt him. The goonie looked at them from his great glowing green eyes without fear, without wonder. He seemed only to say that whatever man needed of him, man could have.

With complete casualness, Miss Wellman stepped forward and took the goonie’s hand. She led it to her own rickshaw at the edge of the grove. She spoke to her team, and without a backward look she drove away.

Even in this she had shown her complete mastery of technique. With no show of hurry, she had driven away before they had time to remember they were determined, angry men.

They stared after her into the darkness. Then meekly, tamely, without looking at one another, gradually even as if repelled by the presence of one another, they moved out of the grove toward their own rickshaws on the other side of the grove near the path.

The party was over.

For those who find violent action a sufficient end in itself, the yarn is over. The goonie was rescued and would be returned to me. The emotional Typhoid Marys had been isolated and would be shipped back to Earth where the disease was endemic and would not be noticed. Paul Tyler would be acceptable again in the company of men. Miriam Wellman would soon be on her way to her next assignment of trouble-shooting, a different situation calling for techniques which would be different but equally effective. The Company was saved some trouble that could have become unprofitable. Libo would return to sanity and reason, the tenderfeet would gradually become Liboans, insured against the spread of disease by their inoculation… . The mob unrest and disorders were finished.

But the yarn was not over for me. What purpose to action if, beyond giving some release to the manic-depressive, it has no meaning? In the middle of it all, the answer to the goonie puzzle had hit me. But the answer solved nothing; it served only to raise much larger questions.

At home that night I slept badly, so fitfully that Ruth grew worried and asked if there was anything she could do.

“The goonie,” I blurted out as I lay and stared into the darkness. “That first hunting party. If the goonie had run away, they would have given those hunters, man, the chase he needed for sport. After a satisfactory chase, man would have caught and killed the goonie down to the last one. If it had hid, it would have furnished another kind of chase, the challenge of finding it, until one by one all would have been found out, and killed. If it had fought, it would have given man his thrill of battle, and the end would have been the goonie’s death.”

Ruth lay there beside me, saying nothing, but I knew she was not asleep.

“I’ve always thought the goonie had no sense of survival,” I said. “But it took the only possible means of surviving. Only by the most complete compliance with man’s wishes could it survive. Only by giving no resistance in any form. How did it know, Ruth? How did it know? First contact, no experience with man. Yet it knew. Not just some old wise ones knew, but all knew instantly, down to the tiniest cub. What kind of intelligence—?”

“Try to sleep, dear,” Ruth said tenderly. “Try to sleep now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You need your rest. …”

We did not talk about it the next day. The bigger questions it opened up for me had begun to take form. I couldn’t talk about them. I went about my work in a daze, and in the later afternoon, compelled, drawn irresistibly, I asked the goonie team to take me again to Carson’s Hill. I knew that there I would be alone.

The glade was empty, the grasses were already lifting themselves upright again. The fixe had left a patch of ashes and blackened rock. It would be a long time before that scar was gone, but it would go eventually. The afternoon suns sent shafts of light down through the trees, and I found the spot that had been my favorite twenty years ago when I had looked out over a valley and resolved somehow to own it.

I sat down and looked out over my valley and should have felt a sense of achievement, of satisfaction that I had managed to do well. But my valley was like the ashes of the burned-out fire. For what had I really achieved?

Survival? What had I proved, except that I could do it? In going out to the stars, in conquering the universe, what was man proving, except that he could do it? What was he proving that the primitive tribesman on Earth hadn’t already proved when he conquered the jungle enough to eat without being eaten?

Was survival the end, and all? What about all these noble aspirations of man? How quickly he discarded them when his survival was threatened. What were they then but luxuries of a self-adulation which he practiced only when he could safely afford it?

How was man superior to the goonie? Because he conquered it? Had he conquered it? Through my ranching, there were many more goonies on Libo now than when man had first arrived. The goonie did our work, we slaughtered it for our meat. But it multiplied and throve.

The satisfactions of pushing other life-forms around? We could do it. But wasn’t it a pretty childish sort of satisfaction? Nobody knew where the goonie came from, there was no evolutionary chain to account for him here on Libo; and the pal tree on which he depended was unlike any other kind of tree on Libo. Those were important reasons for thinking I was right. Had the goonie once conquered the universe, too? Had it, too, found it good to push other life-forms around? Had it grown up with the universe, out of its childish satisfactions, and run up against the basic question: Is there really anything beyond survival, itself, and if so, what? Had it found an answer, an answer so magnificent that it simply didn’t matter that man worked it, slaughtered it, as long as he multiplied it?

And would man, someday, too, submit willingly to a new, arrogant, brash young life-form—in the knowledge that it really didn’t matter? But what was the end result of knowing nothing mattered except static survival?

To hell with the problems of man, let him solve them. What about yourself, MacPherson? What are you trying to avoid? What won’t you face?

To the rest of man the goonie is an unintelligent animal, fit only for labor and food. But not to me. If I am right, the rest of man is wrong—and I must believe I am right. I know.

And tomorrow is slaughtering day.

I can forgive the psychologist his estimation of the goonie. He’s trapped in his own rigged slot machine. I can forgive the Institute, for it is, must be, dedicated to the survival, the superiority, of man. I can forgive the Company— it must show a profit to its stockholders or go out of business. All survival, all survival. I can forgive man, because there’s nothing wrong with wanting to survive, to prove that you can do it.

And it would be a long time before man had solved enough of his whole survival problem to look beyond it.

But I had looked beyond it. Had the goonie, the alien goonie, looked beyond it? And seen what? What had it seen that made anything we did to it not matter?

We could, in clear conscience, continue to use it for food only so long as we judged it by man’s own definitions, and thereby found it unintelligent. But I knew now that there was something beyond man’s definition.

All right. I’ve made my little pile. l can retire, go away. Would that solve anything? Someone else would simply take my place. Would I become anything more than the dainty young thing who lifts a bloody dripping bite of steak to her lips, but shudders at the thought of killing anything?

Suppose I started all over, on some other planet, forgot the goonie, wiped it out of my mind, as humans do when they find reality unpleasant. Would that solve anything? If there are definitions of intelligence beyond man’s own, would I not merely be starting all over with new scenes, new creatures, to reach the same end?

Suppose I deadened my thought to reality, as man is wont to do? Could that be done? Could the question once asked, and never answered, be forgotten? Surely other men have asked the question: What is the purpose of survival if there is no purpose beyond survival?

Have any of the philosophies ever answered it? Yes, we’ve speculated on the survival of the ego after the flesh, that ego so overpoweringly precious to us that we cannot contemplate its end—but survival of ego to what purpose?

Was this the fence across our path? The fence so alien that we tore ourselves to pieces trying to get over it, go through it?

Had the goonies found a way around it, an answer so alien to our kind of mind that what we did to them, how we used them, didn’t matter—so long as we did not destroy them all? I had said they did not initiate, did not create, had no conscience—not by man’s standards. But by their own? How could I know? How could I know?

Go out to the stars, young man, and grow up with the universe!

All right! We’re out there!

What now, little man?

Me

I should not like to have it thought, from my earlier comments, that I take exception to everything Kingsley Amis says. On one point at least I am very much in agreement with him, and that is the urgent need for a new name for this field.

Not to carry the sweetness and light too far—his feeling that “ ‘Science fiction’ is every day losing some of its appropriateness as a name for science fiction,” seems to me typical of his failure to understand what science fiction is— but for quite different reasons, I do share his conclusions.

The Sunday Herald Tribune, a few weeks ago, published a longish and most favorable review which began:

“This is a curious and original and very serious book, and it will be so satisfactory to the right reader that I think a warning is in order: though the action takes place in the future, and though a space ship takes off on the final page, this should not be confused with what is usually called science fiction…What he has really written is a highly imaginative, and basically joyous, celebration of humankind’s instinct to keep going.”

The book under discussion was Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz (Lippincott, 1959), the work of a skilled, experienced, popular s-f author, first published as a series of long novelettes in Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Now “science-fiction” books by science-fiction authors are simply not reviewed seriously in the major critical outlets. (These days, they are rarely reviewed at all.) But the canny jacketeers at Lippincott have gotten around this taboo several times now by the simple expedient of not labeling their books as s-f. In this case they went a step further: the jacket flap biography explains that Mr. Miller “compromised between art and engineering by writing science-fiction, until this, his first novel.” (My italics—J.M.)

Then they took care to plaster the jacket with quotes from “respectable literary” names—all clearly “non-science-fiction” people, except the acceptable exception, Bradbury— saying, “It falls into no genre, certainly not science fiction,” and “It is not, really, a ‘futuristic’ novel.” (Plus one from old friend Amis, who says, “… a serious and imaginative novel….”)

Thus freed of the Curse of the Tag, an excellent novel became eligible for consideration on the level on which it was written—instead of the usual fast paragraph at the space-opera stand.

Well, if this is what it takes to persuade “literary” folk to read a good book and enjoy it—down with “science fiction,” sez I. Let’s have a new label. Or none at all. Who knows? That way, Sturgeon might outsell Pat Frank.

I should confess here, also, that I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Amis. The wildly improbable circulation figures he quotes in his book led me to get down to a long-postponed job of research on the cross-the-counter condition of health of what we still do call science fiction—and I emerged unexpectedly reassured.

Last year I reported here that the number of magazine titles in the combined fantasy and s-f fields had dropped from twenty-one to ten. As of the start of 1960, we are down two more, to eight titles—less than at any time since before the big boom of the early fifties—since 1946, to be exact. But—

Of these eight titles, six are monthlies, and two bimonthly. In 1945-46, with eight titles, there was an average of four magazines a month issued; now there are seven. In 1949, when there were also seven magazines a month on the stands, they comprised 17 titles. In the peak year for s-f magazine publishing, 1953, there were four times as many titles as now—but only twice as many magazines.

It would be easy—and gratifying—to adduce from this that the publications surviving today are the solid, sound, worthy ones: to some degree it must even be true. But to generalize from that to the notion that “science fiction is maturing” (which I keep hearing, hopefully) would be inaccurate. The reason for all these healthy-looking regular monthly magazines has virtually nothing to do with either publishers or buyers; it is the work of the distributors, who last year began putting pressure on the publishers to go monthly or quit. Two who tried to make twelve books a year pay off, failed; two others “suspended” indefinitely without trying.

There is then less cause for alarm than one might think, but small cause for joy either, in the condition of the specialty magazines. In two other fields, however, s-f is thriving: paperback books, and general fiction magazines.

For the past five years the number of paperback books in the combined fantasy and science-fiction fields has held to a remarkably steady all-time high of 70 to 80 per year. From the looks of things, it will rise sharply this year. In short, we may expect more individual paperback books than issues of magazines this year—but the fact is that for the past two or three years, p-bs have been outselling magazines in total quantity. 60,000 copies is an exceptionally good circulation for an s-f magazine these days, I understand; but very few book publishers will issue a p-b without being able to sell at least that many. The average paperback sale is probably somewhere between 90 and 100 thousand.

In the first volume of S-F, reporting on 1955, I pointed out with some pride that as many as 50 or 60 s-f stories had appeared in “slick,” quality, and other non-s-f magazines. Last year more than that number was accounted for in the “Playboy-type” magazines alone. With what appeared in the slick and quality magazines, there were, I should estimate, upward of 200 stories (fantasy and s-f) published in non-s-f periodicals in 1959—equal to the contents of at least three more full digest-size magazines, but with circulations (in many cases) in the hundreds, instead of tens, of thousands.

Granted that most of this non-specialty material is of low quality—so far. So was most of the stuff in Amazing and Wonder in the early ‘thirties. It’s being bought by editors who don’t know the field, and often as not from writers not much better informed. (As witness: Jack Kerouac’s pretentious “City,” in Nugget.)

But it is being bought and printed. S-f—or whatever we don’t call it—is being read and enjoyed more widely than ever before.

The new popular interest in what is still best described as “science-fiction thinking” is evidenced, again, in the really enormous quantity of speculative non-fiction appearing on all sides. As with the fiction in the unfamiliar media, much of this wordage is only by courtesy of subject matter “speculative,” and when a generally thoughtful or imaginative piece does appear, it is immediately rehashed in a dozen other publications till the last drop of new-think has been squeezed out of it. But the titles alone indicate the latent interest on the part of the mass readership:

“This Is Living in 2000,” appeared in Newsweek a few months ago. The title approximates Gernsback’s old series in the Air Wonder of the ‘twenties, and the subject matter (subheadings—”Ersatz Coffee,” “Climate Control,” and “Mining the Ocean Floor”) was not much fresher to hardened old readers of s-f. To Newsweek readers it was ahead of the news. About the same time (the turn of the decade) The New York Times Magazine published “Brave World of the Year 2000,” and This Week produced a pushbutton-happy two pages called “Get Set for the Happy New Decade.” And Esquire, in its fat gold Christmas issue for 1959, included an article by David Schoenbrun called “1960: Birth of a Century,” which was as thoughtful and comprehensive a piece of extrapolative writing as one would wish to see these days.

Then there were the “Adventures of the Mind” series in The Saturday Evening Post; the series of articles on ESP, space travel, and chemical warfare, in Harper’s; and the increasingly fruitful “SR/Research—Science and Humanity” monthly section in the Saturday Review.

People—the general public—are getting used to the idea that hurt so hard when the first Sputnik blew the roof off: that there is precious little we know, and precious much to be learned; and that science is a method—not an authority.

Because the academicians, politicians, and spokesmen in general always learn more slowly (being already so stuffed with knowledge), it may seem that this kind of “s-f thinking” is making slow headway; but watch the cartoons in your newspaper or weekly magazine—listen to the new gags— check the number of fantasy or s-f themes in TV shows—in pop songs—

That mass readership is going to be ready for good (but don’t call it) science fiction sooner than most of us have believed.

The changes in this year’s S-F are obvious—or some of them are. The title, date of publication, size, and price, you’ll have noticed by now; also the dropping of the controversial special non-fiction section. There will be more changes next year, I hope; this year, the change in publishing arrangements came too late to do much about adding some of the material I hope to use hereafter.

Special mentions for 1959, besides those regularly included in the short-story honor roll, should be given:

For verse and poetry: to F&SF, especially the contributions by Hilbert Schenck, Jr., and Gordon Dickson; and to Prof. Theodore R. Cogswell and his confrères in the Publications of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies.

For novels in the magazines: to Gordon Dickson’s explosive “Dorsai!” (Ast, May-July), Everett E. Cole’s “The Best Made Plans,” (Ast, Nov.-Dec.); and the magazine version of Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon” (Good Housekeeping, March).

For novels in book form: to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (Dell); John Brunner’s Echo In the Skull (Ace); and Theodore Sturgeon’s Cosmic Rape (Dell).

For the short story reprints in the Kornbluth Marching Morons (Ballantine); Sturgeon’s Aliens 4 (Avon); and Anthony Boucher’s giant two-volume anthology, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction (Doubleday).

And above all, for well-worded clear thinking about the troubles, needs, and satisfactions of the (science fiction?) field, the volume, The Science Fiction Novel (Advent), edited by Basil Davenport, and with papers by Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Robert Bloch.

—J. M.