Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

PLAGUE OF PYTHONS

THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES

MY LADY GREENSLEEVES

THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD

PYTHIAS

SEARCH THE SKY (written with C. M. Kornbluth)

THE HATED

THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR

SURVIVAL KIT

PREFERRED RISK (written with Lester del Rey)

COPYRIGHT INFO

The 32nd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: Frederik Pohl is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

* * * *

Plague of Pythons was originally published as a two-part serial in Galaxy Magazine, October and December 1962.

“The Day of the Boomer Dukes” was originally published in Future Science Fiction No. 30 (1956).

“My Lady Greensleeves” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1957.

“The Tunnel Under The World” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955.

“Pythias” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1955.

Search the Sky, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth was originally published in 1954.

“The Hated” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.

“The Knights of Arthur” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.

“Survival Kit” was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1957.

Preferred Risk, by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey, was originally published as a 3-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction, June to August 1955.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than seventy-five years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna,” to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012.

From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year’s best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four “year’s best novel” awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science fiction writers, and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first forty years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction. It was a finalist for three other years’ best novel awards.

The Science Fiction Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers.

Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, “The Way the Future Blogs.”

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

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OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK®”)

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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

PLAGUE OF PYTHONS

Originally published as a two-part serial in Galaxy Magazine, October and December 1962.

Because of the crowd they held Chandler’s trial in the all-purpose room of the high school. It smelled of leather and stale sweat. He walked up the three steps to the stage, with the bailiff’s hand on his elbow, and took his place at the defendant’s table.

Chandler’s lawyer looked at him without emotion. He was appointed by the court. He was willing to do his job, but his job didn’t require him to like his client. All he said was, “Stand up. The judge is coming in.”

Chandler got to his feet and leaned on the table while the bailiff chanted his call and the chaplain read some verses from John. He did not listen. The Bible verse came too late to help him, and besides he ached.

When the police arrested him they had not been gentle. There were four of them. They were from the plant’s own security force and carried no guns. They didn’t need any; Chandler had put up no resistance after the first few moments—that is, he stopped as soon as he could stop—but the police hadn’t stopped. He remembered that very clearly. He remembered the nightstick across the side of his head that left his ear squashed and puffy, he remembered the kick in the gut that still made walking painful. He even remembered the series of blows about the skull that had knocked him out.

The bruises along his rib cage and left arm, though, he did not remember getting. Obviously the police had been mad enough to keep right on subduing him after he was already unconscious.

Chandler did not blame them—exactly. He supposed he would have done the same thing.

The judge was having a long mumble with the court stenographer apparently about something which had happened in the Union House the night before. Chandler knew Judge Ellithorp slightly. He did not expect to get a fair trial. The previous December the judge himself, while possessed, had smashed the transmitter of the town’s radio station, which he owned, and set fire to the building it occupied. His son-in-law had been killed in the fire.

Laughing, the judge waved the reporter back to his seat and glanced around the courtroom. His gaze touched Chandler lightly, like the flick of the hanging strands of cord that precede a railroad tunnel. The touch carried the same warning. What lay ahead for Chandler was destruction.

“Read the charge,” ordered Judge Ellithorp. He spoke very loudly. There were more than six hundred persons in the auditorium; the judge didn’t want any of them to miss a word.

The bailiff ordered Chandler to stand and informed him that he was accused of having, on the seventeenth day of June last, committed on the person of Margaret Flershem, a minor, an act of rape—“Louder!” ordered the judge testily.

“Yes, Your Honor,” said the bailiff, and inflated his chest. “An Act of Rape under Threat of Bodily Violence,” he cried; “and Did Further Commit on the Person of Said Margaret Flershem an Act of Aggravated Assault—”

Chandler rubbed his aching side, looking at the ceiling. He remembered the look in Peggy Flershem’s eyes as he forced himself on her. She was only sixteen years old, and at that time he hadn’t even known her name.

The bailiff boomed on: “—and Did Further Commit on that Same Seventeenth Day of June Last on the Person of Ingovar Porter an Act of Assault with Intent to Rape, the Foregoing Being a True Bill Handed Down by the Grand Jury of Sepulpas County in Extraordinary Session Assembled, the Eighteenth Day of June Last.”

Judge Ellithorp looked satisfied as the bailiff sat down, quite winded. While the judge hunted through the papers on his desk the crowd in the auditorium stirred and murmured.

A child began to cry.

* * * *

The judge stood up and pounded his gavel. “What is it? What’s the matter with him? You, Dundon!” The court attendant the judge was looking at hurried over and spoke to the child’s mother, then reported to the judge.

“I dunno, Your Honor. All he says is something scared him.”

The judge was enraged. “Well, that’s just fine! Now we have to take up the time of all these good people, probably for no reason, and hold up the business of this court, just because of a child. Bailiff! I want you to clear this courtroom of all children under—” he hesitated, calculating voting blocks in his head—“all children under the age of six. Dr. Palmer, are you there? Well, you better go ahead with the—prayer.” The judge could not make himself say “the exorcism.”

“I’m sorry, madam,” he added to the mother of the crying two-year-old. “If you have someone to leave the child with, I’ll instruct the attendants to save your place for you.” She was also a voter.

Dr. Palmer rose, very grave, as he was embarrassed. He glared around the all-purpose room, defying anyone to smile, as he chanted: “Domina Pythonis, I command you, leave! Leave, Hel! Leave, Heloym! Leave, Sother and Thetragrammaton, leave, all unclean ones! I command you! In the name of God, in all of His manifestations!” He sat down again, still very grave. He knew that he did not make nearly as fine a showing as Father Lon, with his resonant in nomina Jesu Christi et Sancti Ubaldi and his censer, but the post of exorcist was filled in strict rotation, one month to a denomination, ever since the troubles started. Dr. Palmer was a Unitarian. Exorcisms had not been in the curriculum at the seminary and he had been forced to invent his own.

Chandler’s lawyer tapped him on the shoulder. “Last chance to change your mind,” he said.

“No. I’m not guilty, and that’s the way I want to plead.”

The lawyer shrugged and stood up, waiting for the judge to notice him.

Chandler, for the first time, allowed himself to meet the eyes of the crowd.

He studied the jury first. He knew some of them casually—it was not a big enough town to command a jury of total strangers for any defendant, and Chandler had lived there most of his life. He recognized Pop Matheson, old and very stiff, who ran the railroad station cigar stand. Two of the other men were familiar as faces passed in the street. The forewoman, though, was a stranger. She sat there very composed and frowning, and all he knew about her was that she wore funny hats. Yesterday’s had been red roses when she was selected from the panel; today’s was, of all things, a stuffed bird.

He did not think that any of them were possessed. He was not so sure of the audience.

He saw girls he had dated in high school, long before he met Margot; men he worked with at the plant. They all glanced at him, but he was not sure who was looking out through some of those familiar eyes. The visitors reliably watched all large gatherings, at least momentarily; it would be surprising if none of them were here.

“All right, how do you plead,” said Judge Ellithorp at last.

Chandler’s lawyer straightened up. “Not guilty, Your Honor, by reason of temporary pandemic insanity.”

The judge looked pleased. The crowd murmured, but they were pleased too. They had him dead to rights and it would have been a disappointment if Chandler had pleaded guilty. They wanted to see one of the vilest criminals in contemporary human society caught, exposed, convicted and punished; they did not want to miss a step of the process. Already in the playground behind the school three deputies from the sheriff’s office were loading their rifles, while the school janitor chalked lines around the handball court to mark where the crowd witnessing the execution would be permitted to stand.

* * * *

The prosecution made its case very quickly. Mrs. Porter testified that she worked at McKelvey Bros., the antibiotics plant, where the defendant also worked. Yes, that was him. She had been attracted by the noise from the culture room last—let’s see—“Was it the seventeenth day of June last?” prompted the prosecutor, and Chandler’s attorney instinctively gathered his muscles to rise, hesitated, glanced at his client and shrugged. That was right, it was the seventeenth. Incautiously she went right into the room. She should have known better, she admitted. She should have called the plant police right away, but, well, they hadn’t had any trouble at the plant, you know, and—well, she didn’t. She was a stupid woman, for all that she was rather good-looking, and insatiably curious. She had seen Peggy Flershem on the floor. “She was all blood. And her clothes were—And she was, I mean her—her body was—” With relentless tact the prosecutor allowed her to stammer out her observation that the girl had clearly been raped. And she had seen Chandler laughing and breaking up the place, throwing racks of cultures through the windows, upsetting trays. Of course she had crossed herself and tried a quick exorcism but there was no visible effect; then Chandler had leaped at her. “He was hateful! He was just foul!” But as he began to attack her the plant police came, drawn by her screams.

Chandler’s attorney did not question.

Peggy Flershem’s deposition was introduced without objection from the defense. But she had little to say anyway, having been dazed at first and unconscious later. The plant police testified to having arrested Chandler; a doctor described in chaste medical words the derangements Chandler had worked on Peggy Flershem’s virgin anatomy. There was no question from Chandler’s lawyer—and, for that matter, nothing to question. Chandler did not hope to pretend that he had not ravished and nearly killed one girl, then done his best to repeat the process on another. Sitting there as the doctor testified, Chandler was able to tally every break and bruise against the memory of what his own body had done. He had been a spectator then, too, as remote from the event as he was now; but that was why they had him on trial. That was what they did not believe.

At twelve-thirty the prosecution rested its case, Judge Ellithorp looking very pleased. He recessed the court for one hour for lunch, and the guards took Chandler back to the detention cell in the basement of the school.

Two Swiss cheese sandwiches and a wax-paper carton of chocolate milk were on the desk. They were Chandler’s lunch. As they had been standing, the sandwiches were crusty and the milk lukewarm. He ate them anyway. He knew what the judge looked pleased about. At one-thirty Chandler’s lawyer would put him on the stand, and no one would pay very much attention to what he had to say, and the jury would be out at most twenty minutes, and the verdict would be guilty. The judge was pleased because he would be able to pronounce sentence no later than four o’clock, no matter what. They had formed the habit of holding the executions at sundown. As, at that time of year, sundown was after seven, it would all go very well—for everyone but Chandler. For Chandler it would be the end.

II

The odd thing about Chandler’s dilemma was not merely that he was innocent—in a way, that is—but that many who were guilty (in a way; as guilty as he himself, at any rate) were free and honored citizens. Chandler himself was a widower because his own wife had been murdered. He had seen the murderer leaving the scene of the crime, and the man he had seen was in the courtroom today, watching Chandler’s own trial. Of the six hundred or so in the court, at least fifty were known to have taken part in one or more provable acts of murder, rape, arson, theft, sodomy, vandalism, assault and battery or a dozen other offenses indictable under the laws of the state. Of course, that could be said of almost any community in the world in those years; Chandler’s was not unique. What had put Chandler in the dock was not what his body had been seen to do, but the place in which it had been seen to do it. For everybody knew that medicine and agriculture were never molested by the demons.

Chandler’s own lawyer had pointed that out to him the day before the trial. “If it was anywhere but at the McKelvey plant, all right, but there’s never been any trouble there. You know that. The trouble with you laymen is you think of lawyers in terms of Perry Mason, right? Rabbit out of the hat stuff. Well, I can’t do that. I can only present your case, whatever it is, the best way possible. And the best thing I can do for your case right now is tell you you haven’t got one.” At that time the lawyer was still trying to be fair. He was even casting around for some thought he could use to convince himself that his client was innocent, though he had frankly admitted as soon as he introduced himself that he didn’t have much hope there.

Chandler protested that he didn’t have to commit rape. He’d been a widower for a year, but—

“Wait a minute,” said the lawyer. “Listen. You can’t make an ordinary claim of possession stick, but what about good old-fashioned insanity?” Chandler looked puzzled, so the lawyer explained. Wasn’t it possible that Chandler was—consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously, call it what you will—trying to get revenge for what had happened to his own wife?

No, said Chandler, certainly not! But then he had to stop and think. After all, he had never been possessed before; in fact, he had always retained a certain skepticism about “possession”—it seemed like such a convenient way for anyone to do any illicit thing he chose—until the moment when he looked up to see Peggy Flershem walking into the culture room with a tray of agar disks, and was astonished to find himself striking her with the wrench in his hand and ripping at her absurdly floral-printed slacks. Maybe his case was different. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of possession that struck at random; maybe he was just off his rocker.

Margot, his wife, had been cut up cruelly. He had seen his friend, Jack Souther, leaving his home hurriedly as he approached; and although he had thought that the stains on his clothes looked queerly like blood, nothing in that prepared him for what he found in the rumpus room. It had taken him some time to identify the spread-out dissection on the floor with his wife Margot.… “No,” he told his lawyer, “I was shaken up, of course. The worst time was the next night, when there was a knock on the door and I opened it and it was Jack. He’d come to apologize. I—fell apart; but I got over it. I tell you I was possessed, that’s all.”

“And I tell you that defense will put you right in front of a firing squad,” said his lawyer. “And that’s all.”

* * * *

Five or six others had been executed for hoaxing; Chandler was familiar with the ritual. He even understood it, in a way. The world had gone to pot in the previous two years. The real enemy was out of reach; when any citizen might run wild and, when caught, relapse into his own self, terrified and sick, there was a need to strike back. But the enemy was invisible. The hoaxers were only whipping boys—but they were the only targets vengeance had.

The real enemy had struck the entire world in a single night. One day the people of the world went about their business in the gloomy knowledge that they were likely to make mistakes but with, at least, the comfort that the mistakes would be their own. The next day had no such comfort. The next day anyone, anywhere, was likely to find himself seized, possessed, working evil or whimsy without intention and helplessly.

Chandler stood up, kicked the balled-up wax paper from his sandwiches across the floor and swore violently.

He was beginning to wake from the shock that had gripped him. “Damn fool,” he said to himself. He had no particular reason. Like the world, he needed a whipping boy too, if only himself. “Damn fool, you know they’re going to shoot you!”

He stretched and twisted his body violently, alone in the middle of the room, in silence. He had to wake up. He had to start thinking. In a quarter of an hour or less the court would reconvene, and from then it was only a steady, quick slide to the grave.

It was better to do anything than to do nothing. He examined the windows of his improvised cell. They were above his head and barred; standing on the table, he could see feet walking outside, in the paved play-yard of the school. He discarded the thought of escaping that way; there was no one to smuggle him a file, and there was no time. He studied the door to the hall. It was not impossible that when the guard opened it he could jump him, knock him out, run…run where? The room had been a storage place for athletic equipment at the end of a hall; the hall led only to the stairs and the stairs emerged into the court-room. It was quite likely, he thought, that the hall had another flight of stairs somewhere farther along, or through another room. What had he spent his taxes on these years, if not for schools designed with more than one exit in case of fire? But as he had not thought to mark an escape route when he was brought in, it did him no good.

The guard, however, had a gun. Chandler lifted up an edge of the table and tried to shake one of the legs. They did not shake; that part of his taxes had been well enough spent, he thought wryly. The chair? Could he smash the chair to get a club, which would give him a weapon to get the guard’s gun?…

Before he reached the chair the door opened and his lawyer came in.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said briskly. “Well. As your attorney I have to tell you they’ve presented a damaging case. As I see it—”

“What case?” Chandler demanded. “I never denied the acts. What else did they prove?”

“Oh, God!” said his lawyer, not quite loudly enough to be insulting. “Do we have to go over that again? Your claim of possession would make a defense if it had happened anywhere else. We know that these cases exist, but we also know that they follow a pattern. Some areas seem to be immune—medical establishments, pharmaceutical plants among them. So they proved that all this happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I advise you to plead guilty.”

Chandler sat down on the edge of the table, controlling himself very well, he thought. He only asked: “Would that do me any good at all?”

The lawyer reflected, gazing at the ceiling. “…No. I guess it wouldn’t.”

Chandler nodded. “So what else shall we talk about? Want to compare notes about where you were and I was the night the President went possessed?”

The lawyer was irritated. He kept his mouth shut for a moment until he thought he could keep from showing it. Outside a vendor was hawking amulets: “St. Ann beads! Witch knots! Fresh garlic, local grown, best in town!” The lawyer shook his head.

“All right,” he said, “it’s your life. We’ll do it your way. Anyway, time’s up; Sergeant Grantz will be banging on the door any minute.”

He zipped up his briefcase. Chandler did not move. “They don’t give us much time anyway,” the lawyer added, angry at Chandler and at hoaxers in general but not willing to say so. “Grantz is a stickler for promptness.”

Chandler found a crumb of cheese by his hand and absently ate it. The lawyer watched him and glanced at his watch. “Oh, hell,” he said, picked up his briefcase and kicked the base of the door. “Grantz! What’s the matter with you? You asleep out there?”

* * * *

Chandler was sworn, gave his name, admitted the truth of everything the previous witnesses had said. The faces were still aimed at him, every one. He could not read them at all any more, could not tell if they were friendly or hating, there were too many and they all had eyes. The jurors sat on their funeral-parlor chairs like cadavers, embalmed and propped, the dead witnessing a wake for the living. Only the forewoman in the funny hat showed signs of life, looking alertly at Chandler, at the judge, at the man next to her, around the auditorium. Maybe it was a good sign. At least she did not have the frozen in concrete, guilty-as-hell look of the others.

His attorney asked him the question he had been waiting for: “Tell us, in your own words, what happened.” Chandler opened his mouth, and paused. Curiously, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. He had rehearsed this moment again and again; but all that came out was:

“I didn’t do it. I mean, I did the acts, but I was possessed. That’s all. Others have done worse, under the same circumstances, and been let off. Just as Fisher was acquitted for murdering the Learnards, as Draper got off after what he did to the Cline boy. As Jack Souther over there was let off after he murdered my own wife. They should be. They couldn’t help themselves. Whatever this thing is that takes control, I know it can’t be fought. My God, you can’t even try to fight it!”

He was not getting through. The faces had not changed. The forewoman of the jury was now searching systematically through her pocketbook, taking each item out and examining it, putting it back and taking out another. But between times she looked at him and at least her expression wasn’t hostile. He said, addressing her:

“That’s all there is to it. It wasn’t me running my body. It was someone else. I swear it before all of you, and before God.”

The prosecutor did not bother to question him.

Chandler went back to his seat and sat down and watched the next twenty minutes go by in the wink of an eye, rapid, rapid, they were in a hurry to shoot him. He could hardly believe that Judge Ellithorp could speak so fast, the jurymen rise and file out at a gallop, zip, whisk, and they were back again. Too fast! he cried silently, time had gone into high gear; but he knew that it was only his imagination. The twenty minutes had been a full twelve hundred seconds. And then time, as if to make amends, came to a stop, abrupt, brakes-on. The judge asked the jury for their verdict and it was an eternity before the forewoman arose.

She was beginning to look rather disheveled. Beaming at Chandler—surely the woman was rather odd, it couldn’t be just his imagination—she fumbled in her pocketbook for the slip of paper with the verdict. But she wore an expression of suppressed laughter.

“I knew I had it,” she cried triumphantly and waved the slip above her head. “Now, let’s see.” She held it before her eyes and squinted. “Oh, yes. Judge, we the jury, and so forth and so on—”

She paused to wink at Judge Ellithorp. An uncertain worried murmur welled up in the auditorium. “All that junk, Judge,” she explained, “anyway, we unanimously—but unanimously, love!—find this son of a bitch innocent. Why,” she giggled, “we think he ought to get a medal, you know? I tell you what you do, love, you go right over and give him a big wet kiss and say you’re sorry.” She kept on talking, but no one heard. The murmur became a mass scream.

“Stop, stop her!” bawled the judge, dropping his glasses. “Bailiff!”

The scream became a word, in many voices chorused: Possessed! And beyond doubt the woman was. The men around her hurled themselves away, as from leprosy among them, and then washed back like a lynch mob. she was giggling as they fell on her. “Got a cigarette? No cigarettes in this lousy bag—oh.” She screamed as they touched her, went limp and screamed again.

It was a different note this time, pure hysteria: “I couldn’t stop. Oh, God.”

* * * *

Chandler caught his lawyer by the arm and jerked him away from staring at the scene. All of a sudden he was alive again. “You, damn it. Listen! The jury acquitted me, right?”

The lawyer was startled. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a clear case of—”

“Be a lawyer, man! You live on technicalities, don’t you? Make this one work for me!”

The attorney gave him a queer, thoughtful look, hesitated, shrugged and got to his feet. He had to shout to be heard. “Your honor! I take it my client is free to go.”

He made almost as much of a stir as the sobbing woman, but he outshouted the storm. “The jury’s verdict is on record. Granted there was an apparent case of possession. Nevertheless—”

Judge Ellithorp yelled back: “No nonsense, you! Listen to me, young man—”

The lawyer snapped, “Permission to approach the bench.”

“Granted.”

Chandler sat unable to move, watching the brief, stormy conference. It was painful to be coming back to life. It was agony to hope. At least, he thought detachedly, his lawyer was fighting for him; the prosecutor’s face was a thundercloud.

The lawyer came back, with the expression of a man who has won a victory he did not expect, and did not want. “Your last chance, Chandler. Change your plea to guilty.”

“But—”

“Don’t push your luck, boy! The judge has agreed to accept a plea. They’ll throw you out of town, of course. But you’ll be alive.” Chandler hesitated. “Make up your mind! The best I can do otherwise is a mistrial, and that means you’ll get convicted by another jury next week.”

Chandler said, testing his luck: “You’re sure they’ll keep their end of the bargain?”

The lawyer shook his head, his expression that of a man who smells something unpleasant. “Your honor! I ask you to discharge the jury. My client wishes to change his plea.”

… In the school’s chemistry lab, an hour later, Chandler discovered that the lawyer had left out one little detail. Outside there was a sound of motors idling, the police car that would dump him at the town’s limits; inside was a thin, hollow hiss. It was the sound of a Bunsen burner, and in its blue flame a crudely shaped iron changed slowly from cherry to orange to glowing straw. It had the shape of a letter “H”.

“H” for “hoaxer.” The mark they were about to put on his forehead would be with him wherever he went and as long as he lived, which would probably not be long. “H” for “hoaxer,” so that a glance would show that he had been convicted of the worst offense of all.

No one spoke to him as the sheriff’s man took the iron out of the fire, but three husky policemen held his arms while he screamed.

III

The pain was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished he had a bandage, but he didn’t, and that was that.

He was in a freight car—had hopped it on the run at the yards, daring to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation to trouble.

The railroads were safer—far safer than either cars or air transport, notoriously a lightning-rod attracting possession. Chandler was surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting forward and stopping again.

Then there was silence. It endured.

Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.

It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells—certainly they had not kept him from a brutal rape—but he felt uneasy without them.… The train still was not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.

He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.

The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted uncertainly, then stopped again.

Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.

From Chandler’s car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brakeman running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.

The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.

Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this car with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.

Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.

It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.

By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so—the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.

Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again.

Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw H on his forehead and began to climb the mountain.

* * * *

He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens.

There was a wait. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening.

A man stared at him. “Stranger, what do you want?” He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.

Chandler said glibly: “Good morning. I’m working my way east. I need something to eat and I’m willing to work for it.”

The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thing—a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered:

WELCOME TO ORPHALESE

He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained.

The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tall, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. “Guy, he’s not much to look at,” she said to the pock-marked man. “Meggie, shall I let him in?” he asked. “Guy, you might as well,” she shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy.

“Stranger, come along,” said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two stories high with a ten-foot fireplace.

Chandler’s first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected. “Stranger, go on,” said the man who had let him in, nudging him, “and meet the people of Orphalese.”

Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features. “Stranger, go in,” repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at his head.

* * * *

Chandler sat in the rear of the room, watching. There must be thousands of little colonies like this, he reflected; with the breakdown of long-distance communication the world had been atomized. There was a real fear, well justified, of living in large groups, for they too were lightning rods for possession. The world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a planetary lobotomy had stolen from it its wisdom and plan. If, he reflected dryly, it had ever had any.

But of course things were better in the old days. The world had seemed on the brink of blowing itself up, but at least it was by its own hand. Then came Christmas.

It had happened at Christmas, and the first sign was on nation-wide television. The old President, balding, grave and plump, was making a special address to the nation, urging good will to men and, please, artificial trees because of the fire danger in the event of H-bomb raids; in the middle of a sentence twenty million viewers had seen him stop, look dazedly around and say, in a breathless mumble, what sounded like: “Disht dvornyet ilgt” He had then picked up the Bible on the desk before him and thrown it at the television camera.

The last the televiewers had seen was the fluttering pages of the Book, growing larger as it crashed against the lens, then a flicker and a blinding shot of the studio lights as the cameraman jumped away and the instrument swiveled to stare mindlessly upward. Twenty minutes later the President was dead, as his Secretary of Health and Welfare, hurrying with him back to the White House, calmly took a hand grenade from a Marine guard at the gate and blew the President’s party to fragments.

For the President’s seizure was only the first and most conspicuous. “Disht dvornyet ilgt.” C.I.A. specialists were playing the tapes of the broadcast feverishly, electronically cleaning the mumble and stir from the studio away from the words to try to learn, first, the language and second what the devil it meant; but the President who ordered it was dead before the first reel spun, and his successor was not quite sworn in when it became his time to die. The ceremony was interrupted for an emergency call from the War Room, where a very nearly hysterical four-star general was trying to explain why he had ordered the immediate firing of every live missile in his command against Washington, D. C.

Over five hundred missiles were involved. In most of the sites the order was disobeyed, but in six of them, unfortunately, unquestioning discipline won out, thus ending not only the swearing in, the general’s weeping explanation, the spinning of tapes, but also some two million lives in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and (through malfunctioning relays on two missiles) Pennsylvania and Vermont. But it was only the beginning.

* * * *

These were the first cases of possession seen by the world in some five hundred years, since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages. A thousand more occurred in the next few days, a hundred in the next hours. The timetable was made up out of scattered reports in the wire-service newsrooms, while they still had facilities for spot coverage in any part of the world. (That lasted almost a week.) They identified 237 cases of possession by noon of the next day. Disregarding the dubious items—the Yankee pitcher who leaped from the Manhattan bridge (he had Bright’s disease), the warden of San Quentin who seated himself in the gas chamber and, literally, kicked the bucket (did he know the Grand Jury was subpoenaing his books?)—disregarding these, the chronology of major cases that evening was:

8:27 PM, E.S.T.: President has attack on television.

8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Prime Minister of England orders bombing raid against Israel, alleging secret plot (order not carried out).

8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Captain of SSN Ethan Allen, surfaced near Montauk Point, orders crash dive and course change, proceeding submerged at flank speed to New York Harbor.

9:10 PM, E.S.T.: Eastern Airlines six-engine jet makes wheels-up landing on roof of Pentagon, breaking some 1500 windows but causing no other major damage (except to the people aboard the jet); record of this incident fragmentary because entire site charred black in fusion attack two hours later.

9:23 PM, E.S.T.: Rosalie Pan, musical-comedy star, jumps off stage, runs up center aisle and vanishes in cab, wearing beaded bra, G-string and $2500 headdress. Her movements are traced to Newark airport where she boards TWA jetliner, which is never seen again.

9:50 PM, E.S.T.: Entire S.A.C. fleet of 1200 jet bombers takes off for rendezvous over Newfoundland, where 72% are compelled to ditch as tankers fail to keep refueling rendezvous. (Orders committing the aircraft originate with S.A.C. commander, found to be a suicide.)

10.14 PM, E.S.T.: Submarine fusion explosion destroys 40% of New York City. Analysis of fallout indicates U.S. Navy Polaris missiles were detonated underwater in bay; by elimination it is deduced that the submarine was the Ethan Allen.

10:50 PM, E.S.T.: President’s party assassinated by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary then dies on bayonet of Marine guard who furnished the grenade.

10:55 PM, E.S.T. Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet.

11:03 PM, E.S.T.: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, 1800 square miles of reclaimed land flooded out.…

And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the C.I.A. had finished the first playthrough of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified Disht dvornyet ilgt as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works!—before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself.

* * * *

Warsaw was ablaze, China pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a U.S. Army nuclear cannon. But the U.S.S.R. had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon.

Within minutes of this discover what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East.

One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two prototype Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had moldered since the cancellation of the British missile program. One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy.

It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were such—hasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panic—that most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was locally murderous but quite spotty.

And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they. There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened.

Was the Secretary of the C.P., U.S.S.R. behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter of a billion lives went into mushroom-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of communications cut them off from their governments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace.

* * * *

This was the sort of peace that was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer surroundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly.

There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist’s chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.

“Stranger, get up there,” said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.

“People of Orphalese,” cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, “we have two more brands to save from the imps!”

The men and women in the audience cackled or shrilled “Save them! Save them!” They all had a look of invisible uniforms, Chandler saw, like baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young around them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of bigots.

The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist’s chair.

“People of Orphalese,” chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, “the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order.” There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.

“Well, people of Orphalese,” Guy went on in his singsong, “the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire’s Mountain.”

(“All saved, all of us saved,” rolled a murmur from the congregation.”) A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.

“People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?”

(“Consent, consent, consent,” rolled the echo.)

“And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls.”

The congregation shouted variously: “Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!”

Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. “Okay, people of Orphalese, let’s get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the et cetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean. Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too.” He stared severely at Chandler. “Boys, keep an eye on him, why don’t you?” he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. “Meggie, you tell about the female one.”

The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, “People of Orph’lese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars.”

“The imps!” cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish.

The girl nodded. “Most prob’ly. Well, I—I mean, people of Orph’lese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chevvy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve—me out of sight, you know—and I rolled the chevvy-freeze out nice and it caught the wheels. Right over!” she cried gleefully. “Off the shoulder, people of Orph’lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn’t give it a chance to burn. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin’ of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh,” she remembered, “and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn’t it, Guy?” The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl’s foot. Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl’s. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding.

Guy patted the foot and let it go. “I didn’t have any more C-clamps, people of Orphalese,” he apologized, “but it looks all right at that. Well, let’s see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guess—no, wait!” He held up his hand as a murmur began. “First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two.”

He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read:

“Some of you say, ‘It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.’

“And I say, Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.

“And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.”

Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. “Well, people of Orphalese,” he said slowly “they’re laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we’ve got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, O people of Orphalese?”

The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out: “Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!”

“Fine,” said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. “Guy, let her go.” He began to release her from the chair. “You, girl stranger, what’s your name?”

The girl said faintly, “Ellen Braisted.”

“‘Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,’” corrected the teen-ager. “Always say the name of the person you’re talkin’ to in Orph’lese, that way we know it’s you talkin’, not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down.” Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. “Oh, and people of Orph’lese,” said Meggie, “the car’s still there if we need it for anything. It didn’t burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow.”

Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. “Okay,” he said. “People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pleasure.” Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn’t quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished. From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash.

* * * *

The room erupted into confusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teenage girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once.

Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The red-headed man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere to go. They might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization.

They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see.

And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.

No. Chandler didn’t find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it. It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it. He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the red-headed man’s ear. The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler’s body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun!

He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting No!

His fingers never pulled the trigger.

He caught a second’s glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler’s head, with a face like an eagle’s, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.

He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl’s face hanging over him; it receded and returned, turned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.

It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.

IV

Chandler yelled hoarsely, jerking his hand away.

She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. “Does it hurt?” she demanded tautly.

Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: “God damn it, yes! What did you expect?”

“I expected it to hurt,” she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning. A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once. “Sorry,” she said. “I had to do that. Please trust me.”

“Why did you have to burn my hand?”

“House rules,” she said. “Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They can’t stand pain.” She took her hand off the knife warily, “it still hurts, doesn’t it?”

“It still does, yes,” nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air. The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumph—and, Chandler noticed for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it “Whopped ’em,” she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.

Ellen Braisted said, “Oh, he—Meggie, I mean, he’s all right.” She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. “All right, Ellen, I guess he’s clean. But you want to burn ’em deeper’n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we’ll have to do something else to ’im tomorrow.”

“The hell you will,” thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.

“Ellen, show him around,” ordered the teen-ager. “I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, cause the white-handed aren’t clean, you know.” She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.

* * * *

The name of the girl in the barbed-wire bracelet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler’s first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home.

Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probable fair game anywhere else. Of course, there was one likely reason for travel.

She didn’t like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teen-ager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another’s will. She had had a dozen sub-machine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire’s Mountain. Chandler said, with some effort, “I must have been—”

“Ellen, I must have been,” she corrected.

“Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun.”

“Of course. First time?”

He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.

“Well, then you know. Look out here, now.”

They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled. “Over there, Chandler.” She was pointing to the railroad bridge.

Wispy gray smoke drifted off southward toward the stream. The freight train Chandler had ridden on had been stopped, all that time, in the middle of the bridge. The explosion that blew out their windows had occurred when another train plowed into it—evidently at high speed. It seemed that one of the trains had carried some sort of chemicals. The bridge was a twisted mess.

“A diversion, Chandler,” said Ellen Braisted. “They wanted us looking that way. Then they attacked from up the mountain.”

“Who?”

Ellen looked surprised. “The men that crashed the trains…if they are men. The ones who possessed me—and you—and the hunters. They don’t like these Orphalese, I think. Maybe they’re a little afraid of them. I think the Orphalese have a pretty good idea of how to fight them.”

Chandler felt a sudden flash of sensation along his nerves. For a moment he thought he had been possessed again, and then he knew it for what it was. It was hope. “Ellen, I never thought of fighting them. I thought that was given up two years ago.”

“So maybe you agree with me? Maybe you think it’s worth while sticking with the Orphalese?”

Chandler allowed himself the contemplation of what hope meant. To find someone in this world who had a plan! Whatever the plan was. Even if it was a bad plan. He didn’t think specifically of himself, or the brand on his forehead or the memory of the body of his wife. What he thought of was the prospect of thwarting—not even defeating, merely hampering or annoying was enough!—the imps, the “flame creatures,” the pythons, devils, incubi or demons who had destroyed a world he had thought very fair.

“If they’ll have me,” he said, “I’ll stick with them, all right! Where do I go to join?”

* * * *

It was not hard to join at all. Meg chattily informed him that he was already practically a member. “Chandler, we got to watch everybody strange, you know. See why, don’t you? Might have a flame spirit in ’em, no fault of theirs, but look how they could mess us up. But now we know you don’t, so—What do you mean, how do we know? Cause you did have one when you busted loose in there. Can’t have two at a time, you know. Think we couldn’t tell the difference?”

The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up and the dead buried. There had been four of the hunters, and even without their sub-machine guns they had succeeded in killing eight Orphalese. But it was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend.

Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his feet, grimacing and patting his leg. “O Orphalese and brothers,” he said, “we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?” The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist’s chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleeding and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched with puzzlement and fear.

“Walter, they’re okay now,” Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. “Oh, wait a minute.” She advanced on Chandler. “Chandler, I’m sorry. You sit down there, hear?”

Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum.

“Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do. Let me read you a little. Let’s see.” He put on his steel-rimmed glasses and read:

“Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.”

He closed the book, looked with satisfaction at Guy and said: “Do you understand that, new friends? They are the words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. For the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul.” There was an antiphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. “People of Orphalese, here we are now. This’s what he says. What is this that has torn our world apart? The Prophet says: “It is life in quest of life, in bodies that fear the grave.” Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, people of Orphalese and friends, ‘It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.’ Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friends—and people of Orphalese—is, we aren’t to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!”

He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room, “Like here,” he said, “people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. ‘The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.’ You see what he’s getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everything—and that means we got to suffer—but we don’t have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over.

“But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese.” His expression became grim. “Our beloved founder, Guy, who’s sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, ‘Your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.’ Ponder on that, people of Orphalese—and friends. No, I mean really ponder,” he explained, glancing at the bound “friends” on the platform. “We always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder.”

* * * *

Chandler shifted uncomfortably, while an old woman crippled by arthritis began fumbling a tune out of an electric organ. The burn Ellen Braisted had given him was beginning to hurt badly. If only these people were not such obvious nuts, he thought, he would feel a lot better about casting his lot in with them. But maybe it took lunatics to do the job. Sane people hadn’t accomplished much.

And anyway he had very little choice.…

“Ada, that’s enough,” ordered the fat youth. “Meg, come on up here. People of Orphalese, now you can listen again while Meg explains to the new folks how all this got started, seeing Guy’s in no condition to do it.”

The teen-ager marched up to the platform and took the parade-rest position learned in some high-school debating society—in the days when there were debating societies and high schools. “Ladies and gentlemen, well, let’s start at the beginning. Guy tells this better’n I do, of course, but I guess I remember it all pretty well too. I ought to. I was in on it and all.” She grimaced and said, “Well, anyway, ladies and gentlemen—people of Orph’lese—the way Guy organized this Orphalese self-protection society was, like Walter says, he was possessed. The only difference between Guy and you and me was that he knew what to do about it, because he read the book, you see. Not that that helped him at first, when he was took over. He was really seized. Yes, people of Orph’lese, he was taken and while his whole soul and brain and body was under the influence of some foul wanderer fiend from hell he did things that, ladies and gentlemen of Orph’lese, I wouldn’t want to tell you. He was a harp in the hand of the mighty, as it says. Couldn’t help it, not however much he tried. Only while he was doing—the things—he happened to catch his hand in a gas flame and, well, you can see it was pretty bad.” With a deprecatory smile Guy held up a twisted hand. “And, do you know, he was free of his imp right then and there! Now, Guy is a scientist, people of Orph’lese, he worked for the telephone company, and he not only had that training in the company school but he had read the book, you see, and he put two and two together. Oh, and he’s my uncle, of course. I’m proud of him. I’ve always loved him, and even when he—when he was not one with himself, you know, when he was doing those terrible things to me, I knew it wasn’t Uncle Guy that was doing them, but something else. I didn’t know what, though. And when he told me he had figured out the Basic Rule, I went along with him every bit. I knew Guy wasn’t wrong, and what he said was from Scripture. Imps fear pain! So we got to love it. That one I know by heart, all right: ‘Could you keep your heart from wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.’ That’s what it says, right? So that’s why we got to hurt ourselves, people of Orph’lese—and new brothers—because the wanderers don’t like it when we hurt and they leave us alone. Simple’s that.

“Well—” the girl’s face stiffened momentarily— “I knew I wasn’t going to be seized. So Guy and I got Else, that’s the other girl he’d been doing things to, and we knew she wasn’t going to be taken either. Not if the imps feared pain like Guy said, because,” she said solemnly, “I want to tell you Guy hurt us pretty bad.

“And then we came out here, and found this place, and ever since then we’ve been adding brothers and sisters. It’s been slow, of course, because not many people come this way any more, and we’ve had to kill a lot. Yes, we have. Sometimes the possessed just can’t be saved, but—”

Abruptly her face changed.

Suddenly alert, her face years older, she glanced around the room. Then she relaxed.…

And screamed.

* * * *

Guy leaped up. Hoarsely, his voice almost inarticulate as he tried to talk with his broken jaw, he cried, “Wha … Wha’s…matter, Meg?

“Uncle Guy!” she wailed. She plunged off the platform and flung herself into his arms, crying hysterically.

“Wha?”

She sobbed, “I could feel it! They took me. Guy, you promised me they couldn’t!”

He shook his head, dazed, staring at her as though she were indeed possessed—still possessed, and telling him some fearful great lie to destroy his hopes. He seemed unable to comprehend what she had said. One of the hunters bellowed in stark fear: “For God’s sake, untie us! Give us a chance, anyway!” Chandler yelled agreement. In one split second everyone in the room had been transmuted by terror into something less than human. No one seemed capable of any action. Slowly the plump youth who had presided moved over to the hunter bound in the dentist’s chair and began to fumble blindly at the knots. Ellen Braisted dropped her head into her hands and began to shake.

The cruelty of the moment was that they had all tasted hope. Chandler writhed wildly against his ropes, his mind racing out of control. The world had become a hell for everyone, but a bearable hell until the promise of a chance to end it gave them a full sight of what their lives had been. Now that that was dashed they were far worse off than before.

Walter finished with the hunter and lethargically began to pick at Chandler’s bonds. His face was slack and unseeing.

Then it, too, changed.

The plump youth stood up sharply, glanced about, and walked off the platform.

Ellen Braisted raised her face from her hands and, her eyes streaming, quietly stood up and followed. The old lady with the arthritis about-faced and limped with them. Chandler stared, puzzled, and then comprehended.

They were marching toward the corner of the room where the rifles were stacked. “Possessed!” Chandler bellowed, the words tasting of acid as they ripped out of his throat. “Stop them! You—Guy—look!” He flailed wildly at his loosened bonds, lunged, tottered and toppled, chair and all, crashingly off the platform.

The three possessed ones did not need to hurry. They had all the time in the world. They were already reaching out for the rifles when Chandler shouted. Economically they turned, raising the butts to their shoulders, and began to fire at the Orphalese. It was a queerly frightening sight to see the arthritic organist, with a face like a relaxed executioner, take quick aim at Guy and, with a thirty-thirty shell, blow his throat out. Three shots, and the nearest three of the congregation were dead. Three more, and others went down, while the remainder turned and tried to run. It was like a slaughter of vermin. They never had a chance.

When every Orphalese except themselves was down on the floor, dead, wounded or, like Chandler, overlooked, the arthritic lady took careful aim at Ellen Braisted and the plump youth and shot them neatly in the temples. They didn’t try to prevent her. With expressions that seemed almost impatient they presented their profiles to her aim.

Then the arthritic lady glanced leisurely about, fired into the stomach of a wounded man who was trying to rise, reloaded her rifle for insurance and began to search the bodies of the nearest dead. She was looking for matches. When she found them, she tugged weakly at the upholstery on a couch, swore and began methodically to rip and crumple pages out of Kahlil Gibran. When she had a heap of loose papers piled against the dais she pitched the remainder of the book out of the window, knelt and ignited the crumpled heap.

She stood watching the fire, her expression angry and impatient, tapping her foot.

The crumpled pages burned briskly. Before they died the wooden dais was beginning to catch. Laboriously the old lady toted folding chairs to pile on the blaze until it was roaring handsomely.

She watched it for several minutes, until it was a great orange pillar of fire sweeping to the ceiling, until the drapes on the wall behind were burning and the platform was a holocaust, until the noise of crackling flame and the beginning of plaster falling from the high ceiling proved that there was no likelihood of the fire going out and, indeed, no way to put it out without a complete fire department arriving on the scene at once.

The old lady’s expression cleared. She nodded to herself. She then put the muzzle of the rifle in her mouth and, with her thumb, pulled the trigger that blew the top of her head off. The body fell into the flames, but it was by then already dead.

* * * *

Chandler had not been shot, but he was very near to roasting. Walter had released one hand and, while the possessed woman’s attention was elsewhere, Chandler had worked on the other knots.

When he saw her commit suicide he redoubled his efforts. It was incredible to him that his life had been saved, and he knew that if he escaped the flames he still had nothing to live for—that blasted brief hope had broken his spirit—but his fingers had a will of their own.

He lay there, struggling, while great black clouds of smoke, orange painted from the flames, gathered under the high ceiling, while the thunder of falling lumps of plaster sounded like a child heaving volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica down a flight of stairs, while the heat and shortage of oxygen made him breathe in violent spasms. Then he cried out sharply and stumbled to his feet. It was only a matter of moments before he was out of the house, but it was very nearly not time enough.

Behind him was a great, sustained crash. He thought it must have been the furniture on the upper floor toppling through the burned-out ceiling of the hall. He turned and looked.

It was dark, and now every window on the side of the house facing him was lighted. It was as though some mad householder had decided to equip his rooms only with orange lights, orange lights that flickered and moved. For a second Chandler thought there were still living people in the rooms—shapes moved and cavorted at the windows, as though they were gathering up possessions or waving wildly for help. But it was only the drapes, aflame, tossed about in the fierce heat.

Chandler sighed and turned away.

Pain was not a sure defense after all. Evidently it was only an annoyance to the possessors…whoever, or whatever, they might be. As soon as they had become suspicious they had exerted themselves and destroyed the Orphalese. He listened and looked about, but no one else moved. He had not expected anyone. He had been sure that he was the only survivor.

He began to walk down the hill toward the wrecked railway bridge, turning only when a roar told him that the roof of the house had fallen in. A tulip of flame a hundred feet tall rose above the standing walls, and above that a shower of floating red-orange sparks, heat-borne, drifting up and away and beginning to settle all over the mountainside. Many were still red when they landed, a few still flaming. It was a distinct risk that the trees would begin to burn, and then he would be in fresh danger. So great was his stupor that he did not even hurry.

By a plowed field he flung himself to the ground.

He could go no farther because he had nowhere to go. He had had two homes and he had been driven from both of them. He had had hope twice, and twice he had been damned.

He lay on his back, with the burning house mumbling and crackling in the distance, and stared up at the orange-lit tops of the trees and, past them, the stars. Over his left shoulder Deneb chased Vega across the sky; toward his feet something moved between the bright rosy dot that was Antares and another, the same brightness and hue—Mars? He spent several moments wondering if Mars were in that part of the heavens. Then he looked again for the tiny moving point that had crossed the claws of the Scorpion, but it was gone. A satellite, maybe. Although there were few of them left that the naked eye could hope to see. And there would never be any more, because the sort of accumulated wealth of nations that threw rockets into the sky was forever spent.

It was probably an airplane, he thought drowsily, and drifted off to sleep without realizing how remote even that possibility had become.… He woke up to find that he was getting to his feet.

Once again an interloper tenanted his brain. He tried to interfere, for he could not help it, although he knew how useless it was, but his own neck muscles turned his head from side to side, his own eyes looked this way and that, his own hand reached down for a dead branch that lay on the ground, then hesitated and withdrew. His body stood motionless for a second, the lips moving, the larynx mumbling to itself. He could almost hear words. Chandler felt like a fly in amber, prisoned in his own brainbox. He was not surprised when his legs moved to carry him back toward the destroyed building, now a fakir’s bed of white-hot coals with brush fires spattered around it. He thought he knew why. It seemed very likely that what possessor had him was a sort of clean-up squad, tidying up the loose ends of the slaughter; he expected that his body’s errand was to destroy itself, and thus him, as all the Orphalese had been destroyed.

V

Chandler’s body carried him rapidly toward the house. Now and then it paused and glanced about. It seemed to be weighing some shortcut in its errand; but always it resumed its climb.

Chandler could sympathize with it, in a way. He still felt every pain from burn, brand and wound; as they neared the embers of the building the heat it threw off intensified them all. He could not be a comfortable body to inhabit for long. He was almost sympathetic because his tenant could not find a convenient weapon with which to fulfill his purpose.

When it seemed they could get no closer without the skin of his face crackling and bursting into flame his body halted.

Chandler could feel his muscles gathering for what would be the final leap into the auto-da-fe. His feet took a short step—and slipped. His body stumbled and recovered itself; his mouth swore thickly in a language he did not know.

Then his body hesitated, glanced at the ground, paused again and bent down. It had tripped on a book. It picked the book up, and Chandler saw that it was the Orphalese copy of Gibran’s The Prophet.

Chandler’s body stood poised for a moment, in an attitude of thought. Then it sat down, in the play of heat from the coals. It was a moment before Chandler realized he was free. He tested his legs; they worked; he got up, turned and began to walk away.

He had traveled no more than a few yards when he stumbled slightly, as though shifting gears, and felt the tenant in his mind again.

He continued to walk away from the building, down toward the road. Once his arm raised the book he still carried and his eyes glanced down, as if for reassurance that it was the same book. That was the only clue he was given as to what had happened and it was not much. It was as though his occupying power, whatever it was, had gone—somewhere—to think things over, perhaps to ask a question of an unimaginable companion, and then returned with an altered purpose. As time passed, Chandler began to receive additional clues, but he was in little shape to fit them together, for his body was near exhaustion.

He walked to the road, and waited, rigid, until a panel truck came bouncing along. He hailed it, his arms making a sign he did not understand, and when it stopped he addressed the driver in a language he did not speak. “Shto,” said the driver, a somber-faced Mexican in dungarees. “Ja nie jestem Ruska. Czego pragniesh?”

“Czy ty jedziesz to Los Angeles?” asked Chandler’s mouth.

“Nyet. Acapulco.”

Chandler’s voice argued, “Wes na Los Angeles.”

“Nyet.” The voices droned on. Chandler lost interest in the argument and was only relieved when it seemed somehow to be settled and he was herded into the back of the truck. The somber Mexican locked him in; he felt the truck begin to move; his tenant left him, and he was at once asleep.

He woke long enough to find himself standing in the mist of early dawn at a crossroads. In a few minutes another car came by, and his voice talked earnestly with the driver for a moment. Chandler got in, was released, slept again and woke to find himself free and abandoned, sprawled across the back seat of the car, which was parked in front of a building marked Los Angeles International Airport.

* * * *

Chandler got out of the car and strolled around, stretching. He realized he was very hungry.

No one was in sight. The field showed clear signs of having been through the same sort of destruction that had visited every major communications facility in the world. Part of the building before him was smashed flat and showed signs of having been burned. He saw projecting aluminum members, twisted and scorched but still visibly aircraft parts. Apparently a transport had crashed into the building. Burned-out cars littered the parking lot and what had once been a green lawn. They seemed to have been bulldozed out of the way, but not an inch farther than was necessary to clear the approach roads.

To his right, as he stared out onto the field, was a strange-looking construction on three legs, several stories high. It did not seem to serve any useful purpose. Perhaps it had been a sort of luxury restaurant at one time, like the Space Needle from the old Seattle Fair, but now it too was burned out and glassless in its windows. The field itself was swept bare except for two or three parked planes in the bays, but he could see wrecked transports lining the approach strips. All in all, Los Angeles International Airport appeared to be serviceable, but only just.

He wondered where all the people were.

Distant truck noises answered part of the question. An Army six by six came bumping across a bridge that led from the takeoff strips to this parking area of the airport. Five men got out next to one of the ships. They glanced at him but did not speak as they began loading crates of some sort of goods from the truck into the aircraft, a four-engine, swept-wing jet of what looked to Chandler like an obsolete model. Perhaps it was one of the early Boeings. There hadn’t been many of those in use at the time the troubles began, too big and fast for short hops, too slow to compete over long distances with the rockets. But, of course, with all the destruction, and with no new aircraft being built anywhere in the world any more, no doubt they were as good as could be found.

The truckmen did not seem to be possessed; they worked with the normal amount of grunting and swearing, pausing to wipe sweat away or to scratch an itch. They showed neither the intense malevolent concentration nor the wide-eyed idiot curiosity of those whose bodies were no longer their own. Chandler settled the woolen cap over the brand on his forehead, to avoid unpleasantness, and drifted over toward them.

They stopped work and regarded him. One of them said something to another, who nodded and walked toward Chandler. “What do you want?” he demanded warily.

“I don’t know. I was going to ask you the same question, I guess.”

The man scowled. “Didn’t your exec tell you what to do?”

“My what?”

The man paused, scratched and shook his head. “Well, stay away from us. This is an important shipment, see? I guess you’re all right or you couldn’t’ve got past the guards, but I don’t want you messing us up. Got enough trouble already. I don’t know why,” he said in the tones of an old grievance, “we can’t get the execs to let us know when they’re going to bring somebody in. It wouldn’t hurt them! Now here we got to load and fuel this ship and, for all I know, you’ve got half a ton of junk around somewhere that you’re going to load onto it. How do I know how much fuel it’ll take? No weather, naturally. So if there’s headwinds it’ll take full tanks, but if there’s extra cargo I—”

“The only cargo I brought with me that I can think of is a book,” said Chandler. “Weighs maybe a pound. You think I’m supposed to get on that plane?”

The man grunted non-committally.

“All right, suit yourself. Listen, is there any place I can get something to eat?”

The man considered. “Well, I guess we can spare you a sandwich. But you wait here. I’ll bring it to you.”

He went back to the truck. A moment later one of the others brought Chandler two cold hamburgers wrapped in waxed paper, but would answer no questions.

* * * *

Chandler ate every crumb, sought and found a washroom in the wrecked building, came out again and sat in the sun, watching the loading crew. He had become quite a fatalist. It did not seem that it was intended he should die immediately, so he might as well live.

There were large gaps in his understanding, but it seemed clear to Chandler that these men, though not possessed, were in some way working for the possessors. It was a distasteful concept; but on second thought it had reassuring elements. It was evidence that whatever the “execs” were, they were very possibly human beings—or, if not precisely human, at least shared the human trait of working by some sort of organized effort toward some sort of a goal. It was the first non-random phenomenon he had seen in connection with the possessors, barring the short-term tactical matters of mass slaughter and destruction. It made him feel—what he tried at once to suppress, for he feared another destroying frustration—a touch of hope.

The men finished their work but did not leave. Nor did they approach Chandler, but sat in the shade of their truck, waiting for something. He drowsed and was awakened by a distant sputter of a single-engined Aerocoupe that hopped across the building behind him, turned sharply and came down with a brisk little run in the parking bay itself.

From one side the pilot climbed down and from the other two men lifted, with great care, a wooden crate, small but apparently heavy. They stowed it in the jet while the pilot stood watching; then the pilot and one of the other men got into the crew compartment. Chandler could not be sure, but he had the impression that the truckman who entered the plane was no longer his own master. His movements seemed more sure and confident, but above all it was the mute, angry eyes with which his fellows regarded him that gave Chandler grounds for suspicion. He had no time to worry about that; for in the same breath he felt himself occupied once more.

He did not rise. His own voice said to him, “You. Votever you name, you fellow vit de book! You go get de book verever you pud it and get on dat ship dere, you see?” His eyes turned toward the waiting aircraft. “And don’t forget de book!”

He was released. “I won’t,” he said automatically, and then realized that there was no longer anyone there to hear his answer.

When he retrieved the Gibran volume from the car and approached the plane the loading crew said nothing. Evidently they knew what he was doing—either because they too had been given instructions, or because they were used to such things. He paused at the wheeled stairs. “Listen,” he said, “can you at least tell me where I’m going?”

The four remaining men looked at him silently, with the same angry, worried expression he had seen on their faces before. They did not answer, but after a moment one of them raised his arm and pointed.

West. Out toward the Pacific. Out toward some ten million square miles of nearly empty sea.

* * * *

Long before they reached their destination Chandler had reasoned what it must be. He was correct: It was the islands of Hawaii.

Chandler knew that the pilot and his coopted partner were up forward, in the crew compartment, but the door was locked and he never saw them again. Apart from them he was the only living person on the plane.

The plane was lightly loaded with cargo of unidentifiable sorts. In the rear section, where once tourist-class passengers had eaten their complimentary tray meals and planned their vacations, the seats had been removed and a thin scatter of crates and boxes were strapped to the floor. In the luxury of the forward section Chandler sat, stared at the water and drowsed. He seemed to be always sleepy. Perhaps it was the consequence of his exertions; more likely it was a psychological phenomenon. He was beyond worry. He had reached that point in emotional fatigue when the sudden rattle of cannonfire or the enemy’s banzai charge can no longer flood the blood with adrenalin. The glands are dry. The emotions have been triggered too often. Battle fatigue takes men in many different ways, but in Chandler it was only apathy. He not only could not worry, he could not even rouse himself to feel hunger, although the pricking of habit made him get up and search the flight kitchen, unsuccessfully, for food.

He had no idea how much time had passed when the hiss of the jets changed key.

The horizon dipped below the wingtip and straightened again, and he beheld land. He never saw the airfield, only water, then beach, then water again, then a few buildings. Then there was a roar of jets, with their clamshells deflecting their thrust forward to brake their speed, and then the wheels were on the ground. As the plane stopped he felt himself once more possessed. It was no longer terrifying—though Chandler was sure he was doomed.

Without knowing where he was going or why he picked up the ripped book, opened the cabin exit and stepped down onto the rolling steps that had immediately been brought into place. He was conscious of a horde of men swarming around the plane, stripping it of its cargo, and wondered briefly at the rush; but he could not stop to watch them, his legs carried him swiftly across a paved strip to where a police car was cruising.

Chandler cringed inside, instinctively, but his body did not falter as it stepped into the path of the car and raised its hand.

The police car jammed on its brakes. The policeman at the wheel, Chandler thought inside himself, looked startled, but he also looked resigned. “To de South Gate, qvickly,” said Chandler’s lips, and he felt his legs carry him around to the door on the other side.

There was another policeman on the seat next to the driver. He leaped like a hare to get the door open and get out before Chandler’s body got there. He made it with nothing to spare. “Jack, you go on, I’ll tell Headquarters,” he said hurriedly. The driver nodded without speaking. His lips were white. He reached over Chandler to close the door and made a sharp U-turn.

As soon as the car was moving Chandler felt himself able to move his lips again.

“I—” he said. “I don’t know—”

“Friend,” said the policeman, “kindly keep your mouth shut. ‘South Gate,’ the exec said, and South Gate is where I’m going.”

Chandler shrugged and looked out the window…just in time to see the jet that had brought him to the islands once more lumbering into life. It crept, wobbling its wingtips, over the ground, picked up speed, roared across taxi strips and over rough ground and at last piled up against an ungainly looking foreign airplane, a Russian jet by its markings, in a thunderous crash and ball of flame as its fuel exploded. No one got out.

It seemed that traffic to Hawaii was all one way.

VI

They roared through downtown Honolulu with the siren blaring and cars scattering out of the way. At seventy miles an hour they raced down a road by the sea. Chandler caught a glimpse of a sign that said “Hilo,” but where or what “Hilo” might be he had no idea. Soon there were fewer cars; then there were none but their own.

The road was a surburban highway lined with housing development, shopping centers, palm groves and the occasional center of a small municipality, scattering helterskelter together. There was a road like this extending in every direction from every city in the United States, Chandler thought; but this one was somewhat altered. Something had been there before them. About a mile outside Honolulu’s outer fringe, life was cut off as with a knife. There were no people on foot, and the only cars were rusted wrecks lining the roads. The lawns were ragged stands of weeds in front of the ranch-type homes.

It was evidently not allowed to live here.

Chandler craned his neck. His curiosity was becoming almost unbearable. He opened his mouth, but, “I said, ‘Shut up.’” rumbled the cop without looking at him. There was a note in the policeman’s voice that impressed Chandler. He did not quite know what it was, but it made him obey. They drove for another fifteen minutes in silence, then drew up before a barricade across the road.

Chandler got out The policeman slammed the door behind him, ripping rubber off his tires with the speed of his U-turn and acceleration back toward Honolulu. He did not look at Chandler.

Chandler stood staring off after him, in bright warm sunlight with a reek of hibiscus and rotting palms in his nostril. It was very quiet there, except for a soft scratchy sound of footsteps on gravel. As Chandler turned to face the man who was coming toward him, he realized he had learned one fact from the policeman after all. The cop was scared clear through.

Chandler said, “Hello,” to the man who was approaching.

He too wore a uniform, but not that of the Honolulu city police. It was like U.S. Army suntans, but without insignia. Behind him were half a dozen others in the same dress, smoking, chatting, leaning against whatever was handy. The barricades themselves were impressively thorough. Barbed wire ran down the beach and out into the ocean; on the other side of the road, barbed wire ran clear out of sight along the middle of a side road. The gate itself was bracketed with machine-gun emplacements.

The guard waited until he was close to Chandler before speaking. “What do you want?” he asked without greeting. Chandler shrugged. “All right, just wait here,” said the guard, and began to walk away again.

“Wait a minute! What am I waiting for?” The guard shook his head without stopping or turning. He did not seem very interested, and he certainly was not helpful.

Chandler put down the copy of The Prophet which he had carried so far and sat on the ground, but again he had no long time to wait. One of the guards came toward him, with the purposeful movements Chandler had learned to recognize. Without speaking the guard dug into a pocket. Chandler jumped up instinctively, but it was only a set of car keys.

As Chandler took them the look in the guard’s eyes showed the quick release of tension that meant he was free again; and in that same moment Chandler’s own body was occupied once more.

He reached down and picked up the book. Quickly, but a little clumsily, his fingers selected a key, and his legs carried him toward a little French car parked just the other side of the barrier.

* * * *

Chandler was learning at last the skills of allowing his body to have its own way. He couldn’t help it in any event, so he was consciously disciplining himself to withdraw his attention from his muscles and senses. It involved queerly vertiginous problems. A hundred times a minute there was some unexpected body sway or movement of the hand, and his lagging, imprisoned mind would wrench at its unresponsive nerves to put out the elbow that would brace him or to catch itself with a step. He had learned to ignore these things. The mind that inhabited his body had ways not his own of maintaining balance and reaching an objective, but they were equally sure.

He watched his own hands shifting the gears of the car. It was a make he had never driven, with a clutchless drive he did not understand, but the mind in his brain evidently understood it well enough. They picked up speed in great, gasoline-wasting surges.

Chandler began to form a picture of that mind. It belonged to an older man, from the hesitancy of its walk, and a testy one, from the heedless crash of the gears as it shifted. It drove with careless slapdash speed. Chandler’s mind yelled and flinched in his brain as they rounded blind curves, where any casual other motorist would have been a catastrophe; but the hand on the wheel and the foot on the accelerator did not hesitate.

Beyond the South Gate the island of Oahu became abruptly wild.

There were beautiful homes, but there were also great, gap-toothed spaces where homes had once been and were no longer. It seemed that some monstrous Zoning Commissar had stalked through the island with an eraser, rubbing out the small homes, the cheap ones, the old ones; rubbing out the stores, rubbing out the factories. This whole section of the island had been turned into an exclusive residential park.

It was not uninhabited. Chandler thought he glimpsed a few people, though since the direction of his eyes was not his to control it was hard to be sure. And then the Renault turned into a lane, paved but narrow. Hardwood trees with some sort of blossoms, Chandler could not tell what, overhung it on both sides.

It meandered for a mile or so, turned and opened into a great vacant parking lot. The Renault stopped with a squeal of brakes in front of a door that was flanked by bronze plaques: TWA Flight Message Center.

Chandler caught sight of a skeletal towering form overhead, like a radio transmitter antenna, as his body marched him inside, up a motionless escalator, along a hall and into a room.

His muscles relaxed.

He glanced around and, from a huge couch beside a desk, a huge soft body stirred and, gasping, sat up. It was a very fat old man, almost bald, wearing a coronet of silvery spikes.

He looked at Chandler without much interest. “Vot’s your name?” he wheezed. He had a heavy, ineradicable accent, like a Hapsburg or a Russian diplomat. Chandler recognized it readily. He had heard it often enough, from his own lips.

* * * *

The man’s name was Koitska, he said in his accented wheeze. If he had another name he did not waste it on Chandler. He took as few words as possible to order Chandler to be seated and to be still.

Koitska squinted at the copy of Gibran’s The Prophet. He did not glance at Chandler, but Chandler felt himself propelled out of his seat, to hand the book to Koitska, then returning. Koitska turned its remaining pages with an expression of bored repugnance, like a man picking off his arm. He seemed to be waiting for something.

A door closed on the floor below, and in a moment a girl came into the room.

She was tall, dark and not quite young. Chandler, struck by her beauty, was sure that he had seen her, somewhere, but could not place her face. She wore a coronet like the fat man’s, intertwined in a complicated hairdo, and she got right down to business. “Chandler, is it? All right, love, what we want to know is what this is all about.” She indicated the book.

A relief that was like pain crossed Chandler’s mind. So that was why he was here! Whoever these people were, however they managed to rule men’s minds, they were not quite certain of their perfect power. To them the sad, futile Orphalese represented a sort of annoyance—not important enough to be a threat—but something which had proved inconvenient at one time and therefore needed investigating. As Chandler was the only survivor they had deemed it worth their godlike whiles to transport him four thousand miles so that he might satisfy their curiosity.

Chandler did not hesitate in telling them all about the people of Orphalese. There was nothing worth concealing, he was quite sure. No debts are owed to the dead; and the Orphalese had proved on their own heads, at the last, that their ritual of pain was only an annoyance to the possessors, not a tactic that could long be used against them.

It took hardly five minutes to say everything that needed saying about Guy, Meggie and the other doomed and suffering inhabitants of the old house on the mountain.

Koitska hardly spoke. The girl was his interrogator, and sometimes translator as well, when his English was not sufficient to comprehend a point. With patient detachment she kept the story moving until Koitska with a bored shrug indicated he was through.

Then she smiled at Chandler and said, “Thanks, love. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“I don’t know. I thought the same thing about you.”

“Oh, everybody’s seen me. Lots of me. But—well, no matter. Good luck, love. Be nice to Koitska and perhaps he’ll do as much for you.” And she was gone.

Koitska lay unmoving on his couch for a few moments, rubbing a fat nose with a plump finger. “Hah,” he said at last. Then, abruptly, “And now, de qvestion is, vot to do vit you, eh? I do not t’ink you can cook, eh?”

* * * *

With unexpected clarity Chandler realized he was on trial for his life. “Cook? No, I’m afraid not. I mean, I can boil eggs,” he said. “Nothing fancy.”

“Hah,” grumbled Koitska. “Vel. Ve need a couple, three doctors, but I do not t’ink you vould do.”

Chandler shook his head. “I’m an electrical engineer,” he said. “Or was.”

“Vas?”

“I haven’t had much practice. There has not been a great deal of call for engineers, the last year or two.”

“Hah.” Koitska seemed to consider. “Vel,” he said, “it could be…yes, it could be dat ve have a job for you. You go back downstairs and—no, vait.” The fat man closed his eyes and Chandler felt himself seized and propelled down the stairs to what had once been a bay of a built-in garage. Now it was fitted up with workbenches and the gear of a radio ham’s dreams.

Chandler walked woodenly to one of the benches. His own voice spoke to him. “Ve got here someplace—da, here is cirguit diagrams and de specs for a sqvare-vave generator. You know vot dat is? Write down de answer.” Chandler, released with a pencil in his hand and a pad before him, wrote Yes. “Okay. Den you build vun for me. I areddy got vun but I vant another. You do dis in de city, not here. Go to Tripler, dey tells you dere vere you can work, vere to get parts, all dat. Couple days you come out here again, I see if I like how you build.”

Clutching the thick sheaf of diagrams, Chandler felt himself propelled outside and back into the little car. The interview was over.

He wondered if he would be able to find his way back to Honolulu, but that problem was then postponed as he discovered he could not start the car. His own hands had already done so, of course, but it had been so quick and sure that he had not paid attention; now he found that the ignition key was marked only in French, which he could not speak. After trial and error he discovered the combination that would start the engine and unlock the steering wheel, and then gingerly he toured the perimeter of the lot until he found an exit road.

It was close to midnight, he judged. Stars were shining overhead; there was a rising moon. He then remembered, somewhat tardily, that he should not be seeing stars. The lane he had come in on had been overhung on both sides with trees.

A few minutes later he realized he was quite lost.

Chandler stopped the car, swore feelingly, got out and looked around.

There was nothing much to see. The roads bore no markers that made sense to him. He shrugged and rummaged through the glove compartment on the chance of a map; there was none, but he did find what he had almost forgotten, a half-empty pack of cigarettes. It had been—he counted—nearly a week since he had smoked. He lit up.

* * * *

It was a pleasant evening, too. He felt almost relaxed. He stood there, wondering just what might be about to happen next—with curiosity more than fear—and then he felt a light touch at his mind.

It was nothing, really. Or nothing that he could quite identify. It was though he had been nudged. It seemed that someone was about to usurp his body again, but that did not develop.

As he had about decided to forget it and get back in the car he saw headlights approaching.

A low, lean sports car slowed as it came near, stopping beside him, and a girl leaned out, almost invisible in the darkness. “There you are, love,” she said cheerfully. “Thought I spotted someone. Lost?”

She had a coronet, and Chandler recognized her. It was the girl who had interrogated him. “I guess I am,” he admitted.

The girl leaned forward. “Come in, dear. Oh, that thing? Leave it here, the silly little bug.” She giggled as they drove away from the Renault. “Koitska wouldn’t like you wandering around. I guess he decided to give you a job?”

“How did you know?”

She said softly, “Well, love, you’re here, you know. Otherwise—never mind. What are you supposed to be doing?”

“Going to Tripler, whatever that is. In Honolulu, I guess. Then I have to build some radio equipment.”

“Tripler’s actually on the other side of the city. I’ll take you to the gate; then you tell them where you want to go. They’ll take care of it.”

“I don’t have any money for fare.”

She laughed. After a moment she said, “Koitska’s not the worst. But I’d mind my step if I were you, love. Do what he says, the best you can. You never know. You might find yourself very fortunate.…

“I already think that. I’m alive.”

“Why, love, that point of view will take you far.” The sports car slid smoothly to a stop at the barricade and, in the floodlights above the machine-gun nests, she looked more closely at Chandler. “What’s that on your forehead, dear?”

Somehow the woolen cap had been lost. “A brand,” he said shortly. “‘H’ for ‘hoaxer.’ I did something when one of you people had me, and they thought I’d done it on my own.”

“Why—why, this is wonderful!” the girl said excitedly. “No wonder I thought I’d seen you before. Don’t you remember? I was in the forewoman at your trial!”

VII

A pink and silver bus let Chandler off at Fort Street in downtown Honolulu and he walked a few blocks to the address he had been given. The name of the place was Parts ’n Plenty. He found it easily enough. It was a radio parts store; by the size of it, it had once been a big, well-stocked one; but now the counters were almost bare.

A thin-faced man with khaki-colored skin looked up and nodded. Chandler nodded back. He fingered a bin of tuning knobs, hefted a coil of two-strand antenna wire and said, “A fellow at Tripler told me to come here to pick up equipment, but I’m damned if I know what I’m supposed to do when I locate it. I don’t have any money.”

The dark-skinned man got up and came over to him. “Figured you for a mainlander. No sweat. Have you got a list?”

“I can make one.”

“All right. Catalogues on the table behind you, if you want them.” He offered Chandler a cigarette and sat against the edge of the counter, reading over Chandler’s shoulder. “Ho,” he said suddenly. “Koitska’s square-wave generator again, right?” Chandler admitted it, and the man grinned. “Every couple months he sends somebody along. He doesn’t really need the generator, you know. He just wants to see how much you know about building it, Mr.—?”

“Chandler.”

“Glad to know you. I’m John Hsi. But don’t go easy on the job just because it’s a waste of time, Chandler; it could be pretty important to you.”

Chandler absorbed the information silently and handed over his list. The man did not look at it. “Come back in about an hour,” he said.

“I won’t have any money in an hour, either.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll put it on Koitska’s bill.”

Chandler said frankly, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. Suppose I came in and picked up a thousand dollars worth of stuff, would you put that on the bill, too?”

“Certainly,” said Hsi optimistically. “You thinking about stealing them? What would you do with them?”

“Well… Chandler puffed on his cigarette. “Well, I could—”

“No, you couldn’t. Also, it wouldn’t pay, believe me,” Hsi said seriously. “If there is one thing that doesn’t pay, it is cheating on the Exec.”

“Now, that’s another good question,” said Chandler. “Who is the Exec?”

Hsi shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t know you, Chandler.”

“You mean you’re afraid even to answer a question?”

“You’re damned well told I am. Probably nobody would mind what I might tell you…but ‘probably’ isn’t good enough.”

Exasperated, Chandler said, “How the devil am I supposed to know what to do next? So I take all this junk back to my room at Tripler and solder up the generator—then what?”

“Then Koitska will get in touch with you,” Hsi said, not unkindly. “Play it as it comes to you, Chandler, that’s the best advice I can offer.” He hesitated. “Koitska’s not the worst of them,” he said; and then, daringly, “and maybe he’s not the best, either. Just do whatever he told you. Keep on doing it until he tells you to do something else. That’s all. I mean, that’s all the advice I can give you. Whether it’s going to be enough to satisfy Koitska is something else again.”

* * * *

There is not much to do in a strange town when you have no money. Chandler’s room at what once had been Tripler General Hospital was free; the bus was free; evidently all the radio parts he could want were also free. But he did not have the price of a cup of coffee or a haircut in the pockets of the suntan slacks the desk man at Tripler had issued him. He wandered around the streets of Honolulu, waiting for the hour to be up.

At Tripler a doctor had also examined his scar and it was now concealed under a neat white bandage; he had been fed; he had bathed; he had been given new clothes. Tripler was a teeming metropolis in itself, a main building some ten stories high, a scattering of outbuildings connected to it by covered passages, with thousands of men and women busy about it. Chandler had spoken to a good many of them in the hour after waking up and before boarding the bus to Honolulu, and none of them had been free with information either.

Honolulu had not suffered greatly under the rule of the Exec. Remembering the shattered stateside cities, Chandler thought that this one had been spared nearly all the suffering of the rule of the world by the Exec, whoever they were. Dawdling down King Street, in the aromatic reek of the fish markets, Chandler could have thought himself in any port city before the grisly events of that Christmas when the planet went possessed. Crabs waved sluggishly at him from bins. Great pink-scaled fish rested on nests of ice, waiting to be sold. Smells of frying food came from half a dozen restaurants. It was only the people who were different. There was a solid sprinkling of those who, like himself, were dressed in insigneless former Army uniforms—obviously conscripts on Exec errands—and a surprising minority who, from overheard snatches of conversation, had come from countries other than the U.S.A. Russian mostly, Chandler guessed; but Russian or U.S., wearing suntans or aloha shirts, everyone he saw was marked by the visible signs of strain. There was no laughter.

Chandler saw a clock within the door of a restaurant; half an hour still to kill. He turned and wandered up, away from the water, toward the visible bulk of the hills; and in a moment he saw what made Honolulu’s collective face wear its careworn frown.

It was an open square—perhaps it had once been a war memorial—and in the center of it was a fenced-off paved area where people seemed to be resting. It struck Chandler as curious that so many persons should have decided to take a nap on what surely was an uncomfortable bed of flat concrete; he approached and saw that they were not resting. Not only his eyes but his ears conveyed the message—and his nose, too, for the mild air was fetid with blood and rot.

These were not sleeping men and women. Some were dead; some were unconscious; all were maimed. The pavement was slimed with their blood. None had the strength to scream, but several were moaning and even some of the unconscious ones gasped like the breathing of a man in diabetic coma. Passersby walked briskly around the metal fence, and if their glances were curious it was at Chandler they looked, not at the tortured wrecks before them. He understood that the sight of the dying men and women was familiar—was painful—and thus was ignored; it was himself who was the curiosity, for staring at them. He turned and fled, trying not to vomit.

* * * *

He was still shaken when he returned to Parts ’n Plenty. The hour was up but Hsi shook his head. “Not yet. You can sit down over there if you like.” Chandler slumped into the indicated swivel chair and stared blankly at the wall. This was far worse than anything he had seen stateside. The random terror of murders and bombs was at least a momentary thing, and when it was done it was done. This was sustained torture. He buried his head in his hands and did not look up until he heard the sound of a door opening.

Hsi, his face somehow different, was manipulating a lever on the outside of a door while a man inside, becoming visible as the door opened, was doing the same from within. It looked as though the lock on the door would not work unless both levers operated; and the man on the inside, whom Chandler had not seen before, was dressed, oddly, only in bathing trunks. His face wore the same expression as Hsi’s. Chandler guessed (with practice it was becoming easy!) that both were possessed.

The man inside wheeled out two shopping carts loaded with electronic equipment of varying kinds, wordlessly received some empty ones from Hsi; and the door closed on him again.

Hsi tugged the lever down, turned, blinked and said, “All right, Chandler. Your stuff’s here.”

Chandler approached. “What was that all about?”

“Go to hell!” Hsi said with sudden violence. “I—Oh never mind. Sorry. But I told you already, ask somebody else your questions, not me.” He gloomily began to pack the items on Chandler’s list into a cardboard carton. Then he glanced at Chandler and said, apologetically, “These are tough times, buddy. I guess there’s no harm in answering some questions. You want to know why most of my stock’s locked behind an armor-plate door? Well, you ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, anyway. The Exec doesn’t like to have people playing with radios. Bert stays in the stockroom; I stay out here; twice a day the bosses open the door and we fill whatever orders they’ve approved. A little rough on Bert, of course. It’s a ten-hour day in the stockroom for him, and nothing to do. But it could be worse. Oh, that’s for sure, friend: It could be worse.”

“Why the bathing suit? Hot in there?”

“Hot for Bert if they think he’s smuggling stuff out,” said Hsi. “You been here long enough to see the Monument yet?”

Chandler shook his head, then grimaced. “You mean up about three blocks that way? Where the people—?”

“That’s right,” said Hsi admiringly, “three blocks mauka from here, where the people—Where the people are serving as a very good object lesson to you and me. About a dozen there, right? Small for this time of year, Chandler. Usually there are more. Notice anything special about them?”

“They were butchered! Some of them looked like their legs had been burned right off. Their eyes gouged out, their faces—” Chandler brought up sharply. It had been bad enough looking at those wretched, writhing semi-cadavers; he did not want to talk about them.

The parts man nodded seriously. “Sometimes there are more, and sometimes they’re worse hurt than that. Have you got any idea how they get that way? They do it to themselves, that’s how. My own brother was out there for a week, last Statehood Day. He jumped feet first into a concrete mixer, and it took him seven days to die after I put him on my shoulder and carried him out there. I didn’t like it, of course, but I didn’t exactly have any choice; I wasn’t running my own body at the time. Neither was he when he jumped. He was made to do it, because he used to have Bert’s job and he thought he’d take a little short-wave set home. Like I said, you don’t want to cheat on the Exec because it doesn’t pay.”

“But what the devil am I supposed to—”

Hsi held up his hand. “Don’t ask me how to keep out of that Monument bunch, Chandler. I don’t know. Do what you’re told and don’t do anything you aren’t told to do; that is the whole of the law. Now do me a favor and get out of here so I can pack up these other orders.” He turned his back on Chandler.

VIII

By the morning of the fourth day on the island of Oahu Chandler had learned enough of the ropes to have signed a money-chit at the Tripler currency office against Koitska’s account.

That was about all he had learned, except for a few practical matters like where meals were served and the location of the fresh-water swimming pool at the back of the grounds. He was killing time using the pool when, in the middle of a jackknife from the ten-foot board, he felt himself seized. He sprawled into the water with a hard splashing slap, threshed about and, as he came to the surface, found himself giggling.

“Sorry, dear,” he apologized to himself, “but we don’t carry our weight in the same places, you know. Get that square-what’sit thingamajig, like an angel, and meet me in front by the flagpole in twenty minutes.”

He recognized the voice, even if his own vocal chords had made it. It was the girl who had driven him back from the interview with Koitska, the one who had casually announced she had saved his life at his hoaxing trial. Chandler swam to the side of the pool and toweled as he trotted toward his quarters. She was from Koitska now, of course; which meant that his “test” was about to be graded.

Quickly though he dressed, she was there before him, standing beside a low-slung sports car and chatting with one of the groundskeepers. An armful of leis dangled beside her, and although she wore the coronet which was evidence of her status the gardener did not seem to fear her. “Come along, love,” she called to Chandler. “Koitska wants your thingummy. Chuck it in the trunk if it’ll fit, and we’ll head waikiki wikiwiki. Don’t I say that nicely? But I only fool the malihinis, like you.”

She chattered away as the little car dug its rear wheels into the drive and leaped around the green and out the gate.

The wind howled by them, the sun was bright, the sky was piercingly blue. Riding next to this beautiful girl, it was hard for Chandler to remember that she was one of those who had destroyed his world. It was a terrible thing to have so much hatred and to feel it so diluted. Not even Koitska seemed a terrible enough enemy to accept such a load of detestation; it was hate without an object, and it recoiled on the hater, leaving him turgid and constrained. If he could not hate his onetime friend Jack Souther for defiling and destroying his wife, it was almost as hard to hate Souther’s anonymous possessor. It could even have been Koitska. It could even have been this girl by his side. In the strange, cruel fantasies with which the Execs indulged themselves it was likely enough that they would sometimes assume the body, and the role, of the opposite sex. Why not? Strange, ruthless morality; it was impossible to evaluate it by any human standards.

It was also impossible to think of hatred with her beside him. They soared around Honolulu on a broad expressway and paralleled the beach toward Waikiki. “Look, dear. Diamond Head! Mustn’t ignore it—very bad form—like not going to see the night-blooming cereus at the Punahou School. You haven’t missed that, have you?”

“I’m afraid I have—”

“Rosalie. Call me Rosalie, dear.”

“I’m afraid I have, Rosalie.” For some reason the name sounded familiar.

“Shame, oh, shame! They say it was wonderful night before last. Looks like cactus to me, but—”

Chandler’s mental processes had worked to a conclusion. “Rosalie Pan!” he said. “Now I know!”

“Know what? You mean—” she swerved around a motionless Buick, parked arrogantly five feet from the curb—“you mean you didn’t know who I was? And to think I used to pay five thousand a year for publicity.”

Chandler said, smiling, and almost relaxed, “I’m sorry, but musical comedies weren’t my strong point. I did see you once, though, on television. Then, let’s see, wasn’t there something about you disappearing—”

She nodded, glancing at him. “There sure was, dear. I almost froze to death getting out to that airport. Of course, it was worth it, I found out later. If I hadn’t been took, as they say, I would’ve been dead, because you remember what happened to New York about an hour later.”

“You must have had some friends,” Chandler began, and let it trail off. So did the girl. After a moment she began to talk about the scenery again, pointing out the brick-red and purple bougainvillea, describing how the shoreline had looked before they’d “cleaned it up.” “Oh, thousands and thousands of the homeliest little houses. You’d have hated it. So we have done at least a few good things, anyway,” she said complacently, and began gently to probe into his life story. But as they stopped before the TWA message center, a few moments later, she said, “Well, love, it’s been fun. Go on in; Koitska’s expecting you. I’ll see you later.” And her eyes added gently: I hope.

* * * *

Chandler got out of the car, turned…and felt himself taken. His voice said briskly, “Zdrastvoi, Rosie. Gd’yeh Koitska?”

Unsurprised the girl pointed to the building. “Kto govorit?”

Chandler’s voice answered in English, with a faint Oxford accent: “It is I, Rosie, Kalman. Where’s Koitska’s tinkertoy? Oh, all right, thanks; I’ll just pick it up and take it in. Hope it’s all right. I must say one wearies of breaking in these new fellows.”

Chandler’s body ambled around to the trunk of the car, took out the square-wave generator on its breadboard base and slouched into the building. It called ahead in the same language and was answered wheezily from above: Koitska. “Zdrastvoi. Iditye suda ko mneh. Kto, Kalman?”

“Konyekhno!” cried Chandler’s voice and he was carried in and up to where the fat man lounged in a leather-upholstered wheelchair. There was a conversation, long minutes of it, while the two men poked at the generator. Chandler did not understand a word until he spoke to himself: “You—what’s your name.”

“Chandler,” Koitska filled in.

“You, Chandler. D’you know anything at all about submillimeter microwaves? Tell Koitska.” Briefly Chandler felt himself free—long enough to nod; then he was possessed again, and Koitska repeated the nod. “Good, then. Tell Koitska what experience you’ve had.”

Again free, Chandler said, “Not a great deal of actual experience. I worked with a group at Caltech on spectroscopic measurements in the million megacycle range. I didn’t design any of the equipment, though I helped put it together.” He recited his degrees until Koitska raised a languid hand.

“Shto, I don’t care. If ve gave you diagrams you could build?”

“Certainly, if I had the equipment. I suppose I’d need—”

But Koitska stopped him again. “I know vot you need,” he said damply. “Enough. Ve see.” In a moment Chandler was taken again, and his voice and Koitska’s debated the matter for a while, until Koitska shrugged, turned his head and seemed to go to sleep.

Chandler marched himself out of the room and out into the driveway before his voice said to him: “You’ve secured a position, then. Go back to Tripler until we send for you. It’ll be a few days, I expect.”

And Chandler was free again.

He was also alone. The girl in the Porsche was gone. The door of the TWA building had latched itself behind him. He stared around him, swore, shrugged and circled the building to the parking lot at back, on the chance that a car might be there for him to borrow.

Luckily, there was. There were four, in fact, all with keys in them. He selected a Ford, puzzled out the likeliest road back to Honolulu and turned the key in the starter.

It was fortunate, he thought, that there had been several cars; if there had been only one he would not have dared to take it, for fear of stranding Koitska or some other exec who might easily blot him out in annoyance. He did not wish to join the wretches at the Monument.

It was astonishing how readily fear had become a part of his life.

The trouble with this position he had somehow secured—one of the troubles—was that there was no union delegate to settle employee grievances. Like no transportation. Like no clear idea of working hours, or duties. Like no mention at all—of course—of wages. Chandler had no idea what his rights were, if any at all, or of what the penalties would be if he overstepped them.

The maimed victims at the Monument supplied a clue, of course. He could not really believe that that sort of punishment would be applied for minor infractions. Death was so much less trouble. Even death was not really likely, he thought, for a simple lapse.

He thought.

He could not be sure, of course. He could be sure of only one thing: He was now a slave, completely a slave, a slave until the day he died. Back on the mainland there was the statistical likelihood of occasional slavery-by-possession, but there it was only the body that was enslaved, and only for moments. Here, in the shadow of the execs, it was all of him, forever, until death or a miracle turned him loose.

* * * *

On the second day following he returned to his room at Tripler after breakfast, and found a Honolulu city policeman sitting hollow-eyed on the edge of his bed. The man stood up as Chandler came in. “So,” he grumbled, “you take so long! Here. Is diagrams, specs, parts lists, all. You get everything three days from now, then we begin.”

The policeman, no longer Koitska, shook himself, glanced stolidly at Chandler and walked out, leaving a thick manila envelope on the pillow. On it was written, in a crabbed hand: All secret! Do not show diagrams!

Chandler opened the envelope and spilled its contents on the bed.

An hour later he realized that sixty minutes had passed in which he had not been afraid. It was good to be working again, he thought, and then that thought faded away again as he returned to studying the sheaves of circuit diagrams and closely typed pages of specifications. It was not only work, it was hard work, and absorbing. Chandler knew enough about the very short wavelength radio spectrum to know that the device he was supposed to build was no proficiency test; this was for real. The more he puzzled over it the less he could understand of its purpose. There was a transmitter and there was a receiver. Astonishingly, neither was directional: that ruled out radar, for example. He rejected immediately the thought that the radiation was for spectrum analysis, as in the Caltech project—unfortunate, because that was the only application with which he had first-hand familiarity; but impossible. The thing was too complicated. Nor could it be a simple message transmitter—no, perhaps it could, assuming there was a reason for using the submillimeter bands instead of the conventional, far simpler shortwave spectrum. Could it? The submillimeter waves were line-of-sight, of course, but would ionosphere scatter make it possible for them to cover great distances? He could not remember. Or was that irrelevant, since perhaps they needed only to cover the distances between islands in their own archipelago? But then, why all the power? And in any case, what about this fantastic switching panel, hundreds of square feet of it even though it was transistorized and subminiaturized and involving at least a dozen sophisticated technical refinements he hadn’t the training quite to understand? AT&T could have handled every phone call in the United States with less switching than this—in the days when telephone systems spanned a nation instead of a fraction of a city. He pushed the papers together in a pile and sat back, smoking a cigarette, trying to remember what he could of the theory behind submillimeter radiation.

At half a million megacycles and up, the domain of quantum theory began to be invaded. Rotating gas molecules, constricted to a few energy states, responded directly to the radio waves. Chandler remembered late-night bull sessions in Pasadena during which it had been pointed out that the possibilities in the field were enormous—although only possibilities, for there was no engineering way to reach them, and no clear theory to point the way—suggesting such strange ultimate practical applications as the receiverless radio, for example. Was that what he had here?

He gave up. It was a question that would burn at him until he found the answer, but just now he had work to do, and he’d better be doing it.

Skipping lunch entirely, he carefully checked the components lists, made a copy of what he would need, checked the original envelope and its contents with the man at the main receiving desk for his safe, and caught the bus to Honolulu.

At the Parts ’n Plenty store, Hsi read the list with a faint frown that turned into a puzzled scowl. When he put it down he looked at Chandler for a few moments without speaking.

“Well, Hsi? Can you get all this for me?” The parts man shrugged and nodded. “Koitska said in three days.”

Hsi looked startled, then resigned. “That puts it right up to me, doesn’t it? All right. Wait a moment.”

He disappeared in the back of the store, where Chandler heard him talking on what was evidently an intercom system. He came back in a few minutes and slipped Chandler’s list into a slit in the locked door. “Tough for Bert,” he said. “He’ll be working all night, getting started—but I can take it easy till tomorrow. By then he’ll know what we don’t have, and I’ll find some way to get it.” He shrugged again, but his face was lined. Chandler wondered how one went about finding, for example, a thirty megawatt klystron tube; but it was Hsi’s problem. He said:

“All right, I’ll see you Monday.”

“Wait a minute, Chandler.” Hsi eyed him. “You don’t have anything special to do, do you? Well, come have dinner with me. Maybe I can get to know you. Then maybe I can answer some of your questions, if you like.”

* * * *

They took a bus out Kapiolani Boulevard, then got out and walked a few blocks to a restaurant named Mother Chee’s. Hsi was well known there, it seemed. He led Chandler to a booth at the back, nodded to the waiter, ordered without looking at the menu and sat back. “You malihinis don’t know much about food,” he said, humorously patronizing. “I think you’ll like it. It’s all fish, anyway.”

The man was annoying. Chandler was moved to say, “Too bad, I was hoping for duck in orange sauce, perhaps some snow peas—”

Hsi shook his head. “There’s meat, all right, but not here. You’ll only find it in the places where the execs sometimes go.… Tell me something, Chandler. What’s that scar on your forehead.”

Chandler touched it, almost with surprise. Since the medics had treated it he had almost forgotten it was there. He began to explain, then paused, looking at Hsi, and changed his mind. “What’s the score? You testing me, too? Want to see if I’ll lie about it?”

Hsi grinned. “Sorry. I guess that’s what I was doing. I do know what an ‘H’ stands for; we’ve seen them before. Not many. The ones that do get this far usually don’t last long. Unless, of course, they are working for somebody whom it wouldn’t do to offend,” he explained.

“So what you want to know, then, is whether I was really hoaxing or not. Does it make any difference?”

“Damn right it does, man! We’re slaves, but we’re not animals!” Chandler had gotten to him; the parts man looked startled, then sallow, as he observed his own vehemence.

“Sorry, Hsi. It makes a difference to me, too. Well, I wasn’t hoaxing. I was possessed, just like any other everyday rapist-murderer, only I couldn’t prove it. And it didn’t look too good for me, because the damn thing happened in a pharmaceuticals plant. That was supposed to be about the only place in town where you could be sure you wouldn’t be possessed, or so everybody thought. Including me. Up to the time I went ape.”

Hsi nodded. The waiter approached with their drinks. Hsi looked at him appraisingly, then did a curious thing. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, quickly, then released it again. The waiter did not appear to notice. Expertly he served the drinks, folded small pink floral napkins, dumped and wiped their ashtray in one motion—and then, so quickly that Chandler was not quite sure he had seen it, caught Hsi’s wrist in the same fleeting gesture just before he turned and walked away.

Without comment Hsi turned back to Chandler. He said, “I believe you. Would you like to know why it happened? Because I think I can tell you. The execs have all the antibiotics they need now.”

“You mean—” Chandler hesitated.

“That’s right. They did leave some areas alone, as long as they weren’t fully stocked on everything they might want for the foreseeable future. Wouldn’t you?”

“I might,” Chandler said cautiously, “if I knew what I was—being an exec.”

Hsi said, “Eat your dinner. I’ll take a chance and tell you what I know.” He swallowed his whiskey-on-the-rocks with a quick backward jerk of the head. “They’re mostly Russians—you must know that much for yourself. The whole thing started in Russia.”

Chandler said, “Well, that’s pretty obvious. But Russia was smashed up as much as anywhere else. The whole Russian government was killed—wasn’t it?”

Hsi nodded. “They’re not the government. Not the exec. Communism doesn’t mean any more to them than the Declaration of Independence does—which is nothing. It’s very simple, Chandler: they’re a project that got out of hand.”

* * * *

Back four years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the Neo-Krushchevists took over power in the January Push.

The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. The “mystery wrapped in a riddle surrounded by an enigma” had become queerer and even more opaque after Kruschchev’s death and the revival of such fine old Soviet institutions as the Gay Pay Oo. That was the development called the Freeze, when the Stalinites seized control in the name of the sacred Generalissimo of the Soviet Fatherland, a mighty-missile party, dedicated to bringing about the world revolution by force of sputnik. The neo-Krushchevists, on the other hand, believed that honey caught more flies than vinegar; and, although there were few visible adherents to that philosophy during the purges of the Freeze, they were not all dead. Then, out of the Donbas Electrical Workshop, came sudden support for their point of view.

It was a weapon. It was more than a weapon, an irresistible tool—more than that, the way to end all disputes forever. It was a simple radio transmitter (Hsi said)—or so it seemed, but its frequencies were on an unusual band and its effects were remarkable. It controlled the minds of men. The “receiver” was the human brain. Through this little portable transmitter, surgically patch-wired to the brain of the person operating it, his entire personality was transmitted in a pattern of very short waves which could invade and modulate the personality of any other human being in the world. For that matter, of any animal, as long as the creature had enough “mind” to seize—

“What’s the matter?” Hsi interrupted himself, staring at Chandler. Chandler had stopped eating, his hand frozen midway to his mouth. He shook his head.

“Nothing. Go on.” Hsi shrugged and continued.

While the Western World was celebrating Christmas—the Christmas before the first outbreak of possession in the outside world—the man who invented the machine was secretly demonstrating it to another man. Both of them were now dead. The inventor had been a Pole, the other man a former Party leader who, four years before, had rescued the inventor’s dying father from a Siberian work camp. The Party leader had reason to congratulate himself on that loaf cast on the water. There were only three working models of the transmitter—what ultimately was refined into the coronet Chandler had seen on the heads of Koitska and the girl—but that was enough for the January push.

The Stalinites were out. The neo-Krushchevists were in.

A whole factory in the Donbas was converted to manufacturing these little mental controllers as fast as they could be produced—and that was fast, for they were simple in design to begin with and were quickly refined to a few circuits. Even the surgical wiring to the brain became unnecessary as induction coils tapped the encephalic rhythms. Only the great amplifying hookup was really complicated. Only one of those was necessary, for a single amplifier could serve as rebroadcaster—modulator for thousands of the headsets.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Hsi demanded.

Chandler put down his fork, lit a cigarette and beckoned to the waiter. “I’m all right. I just want another drink.”

He needed the drink. For now he knew what he was building for Koitska.

* * * *

The waiter brought two more drinks and carried away the uneaten food. “We don’t know exactly who did what after that,” Hsi said, “but somehow or other it got out of hand. I think it was the technical crew of the factory that took over. I suppose it was an inevitable danger.” He grinned savagely. “I can just imagine the Party workers in the factory,” he said, “trying to figure out how to keep them in line—bribe them or terrify them? Give them dachas or send a quota to Siberia? Neither would work, of course, because there isn’t any bribe you can give to a man who only has to stretch out his hand to take over the world, and you can’t frighten a man who can make you slit your own throat. Anyway, the next thing that happened—the following Christmas—was when they took over the world. It wasn’t a Party movement at all any more. A lot of the workers were Czechs and Hungarians and Poles, and the first thing they wanted to was to even a few scores.

“So here they are! Before they let the whole world go bang they got out of range. They got themselves out of Russia on two Red Navy cruisers, about a thousand of them; then they systematically triggered off every ballistic missile they could find…and they could find all of them, sooner or later, it was just a matter of looking. As soon as it was safe they moved in here. Best place in the world for them.

“There are only a thousand or so of them here on the Islands, and nobody outside the Islands even knows where they are. If they did, what good would it do them? They can kill anyone, anywhere. They kill for fun, but sometimes they kill for a reason too. When one of them goes wandering for kicks he makes it a point to mess up all the transport and communications facilities he comes across—especially now, since they’ve stockpiled everything they’re likely to need for the next twenty years. We don’t know what they’re planning to do when the twenty years are up. Maybe they don’t care. Would you?”

Chandler drained his drink and shook his head. “One question,” he said. “Who’s ‘we’?”

Hsi carefully unwrapped a package of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. He looked at it as though he were not enjoying it; cigarettes had a way of tasting stale these days. As they were. “Just a minute,” he said.

Tardily Chandler remembered the quick grasp of the waiter’s fingers on Hsi’s wrist, and that the waiter had been hovering, inconspicuously close, all through their meal. Hsi was waiting for the man to return.

In a moment the waiter was back, looking directly at Chandler. He looped his own wrist with his fingers and nodded. Hsi said softly, “‘We’” is the Society of Slaves. That’s all of us—slaves—but only a few of us belong to the Society. We—”

There was a crash of glass. The waiter had dropped their tray.

Across the table from Chandler, Hsi looked suddenly changed. His left hand lay on the table before him, his right hand poised over it. Apparently he had been about to show Chandler again the sign he had made.

But he could not do it. His hand paused and fluttered, like a captured bird. Captured it was. Hsi was captured. Out of Hsi’s mouth, with Hsi’s voice, came the light, tonal rhythms of Rosalie Pan. “This is an unexpected pleasure, love! I never expected to see you here. Enjoying your meal?”

IX

Chandler had his empty glass halfway to his lips, automatically, before he realized there was nothing in it to brace him. He said hoarsely, “Yes, thanks. Do you come here often?” It was like the banal talk of a language guide, wildly inappropriate to what had been going on a moment before. He was shaken.

“Oh, I love it,” cooed Hsi, investigating the dishes before him. “All finished, I see. Too bad. Your friend doesn’t feel like he ate much, either.”

“I guess he wasn’t hungry,” Chandler managed.

“Well, I am.” Hsi cocked his head and smiled like a female impersonator. “I know! Are you doing anything special right now, love? I know you’ve eaten, but—well, I’ve been a good girl and I guess I can eat a real meal, I mean not with somebody else’s teeth, and still keep the calories in line. Suppose I meet you down at the Beach? There’s a place there where the luau is divine. I can be there in half an hour.”

Chandler’s breathing was back to normal. Why not? “I’ll be delighted.”

“Luigi the Wharf Rat, that’s the name of it. They won’t let you in, though, unless you tell them you’re with me. It’s special.” Hsi’s eye closed in Rosalie Pan’s wink. “Half an hour,” Hsi said, and was again himself. He began to shake.

The waiter brought him straight whiskey and, pretense abandoned, stood by while Hsi drank it. After a moment he said, “Scares you. But—I guess we’re all right. She couldn’t have heard much. You’d better go, Chandler. I’ll talk to you again some other time.”

Chandler stood up. But he couldn’t leave Hsi like that. “Are you all right?”

Hsi almost managed control. “Oh—I think so. Not the first time it’s come close, you know. Sooner or later it’ll come closer still, and that will be the end, but—yes, I’m all right for now.”

Chandler tarried. “You were saying something about the Society of Slaves.”

“Damn it, go!” Hsi barked. “She’ll be waiting for you.… Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. But go.” As Chandler turned, he said more quietly, “Come around to the store tomorrow. Maybe we can finish our talk then.”

* * * *

Luigi the Wharf Rat’s was not actually on the beach but on the bank of a body of water called the Ala Wai Canal. Across the water were the snowtopped hills. A maitre-de escorted Chandler personally to a table on a balcony, and there he waited. Rosalie’s “half-hour” was nearly two; but then he heard her calling him from across the room, in the voice which had reached a thousand second balconies, and he rose as she came near.

She said lightly, “Sorry. You ought to be flattered, though. It’s a twenty-minute drive—and an hour and a half to put on my face, so you won’t be ashamed to be seen with me. Well, it’s good to be out in my own skin for a change. Let’s eat!”

The talk with Hsi had left a mark on Chandler that not even this girl’s pretty face could obscure. It was a pretty face, though, and she was obviously exerting herself to make him enjoy himself. He could not help responding to her mood.

She talked of her life on the stage, the excitement of a performance, the entertainers she had known. Her conversation was one long name-drop, but it was not pretense: the world of the famous was the world she had lived in. It was not a world that Chandler had ever visited, but he recognized the names. Rosie had been married once to an English actor whose movies Chandler had made a point of watching on television. It was interesting, in a way, to know that the man snored and lived principally on vitamin pills. But it was a view of the man that Chandler had not sought.

The restaurant drew its clientele mostly from the execs, young ones or young-acting ones, like the girl. The coronets were all over. There had been a sign on the door:

KAPU, WALIHINI!

to mark it off limits to anyone not an exec or a collaborator. Still, Chandler thought, who on the island was not a collaborator? The only effective resistance a man could make would be to kill everyone within reach and then himself, thus depriving them of slaves—and that was, after all, only what the execs themselves had done in other places often enough. It would inconvenience them only slightly. The next few planeloads or shiploads of possessed warm bodies from the mainland would be permitted to live, instead of being required to dash themselves to destruction, like the crew of the airplane that had carried Chandler. Thus the domestic stocks would be replenished.

An annoying feature of dining with Rosalie in the flesh, Chandler found, was that half a dozen times while they were talking he found himself taken, speaking words to Rosie that were not his own, usually in a language he did not understand. She took it as a matter of course. It was merely a friend, across the room or across the island, using Chandler as the casual convenience of a telephone. “Sorry,” she apologized blithely after it happened for the third time, and then stopped. “You don’t like that, love, do you?”

“Can you blame me?” He stopped himself from saying more; he was astonished even so at his tone.

She said it for him. “I know. It takes away your manhood, I suppose. Please don’t let it do that to you, love. We’re not so bad. Even—” She hesitated, and did not go on. “You know,” she said, “I came here the same way you did. Kidnaped off the stage of the Winter Garden. Of course, the difference was the one who kidnaped me was an old friend. Though I didn’t know it at the time and it scared me half to death.”

Chandler must have looked startled. She nodded. “You’ve been thinking of us as another race, haven’t you? Like the Neanderthals or—well, worse than that, maybe.” She smiled. “We’re not. About half of us came from Russia in the first place, but the others are from all over. You’d be astonished, really.” She mentioned several names, world-famous scientists, musicians, writers. “Of course, not everybody can qualify for the club, love. Wouldn’t be exclusive otherwise. The chief rule is loyalty. I’m loyal,” she added gently after a moment, “and don’t you forget it. Have to be. Whoever becomes an exec has to be with us, all the way. There are tests. It has to be that way—not only for our protection. For the world’s.”

Chandler was genuinely startled at that. Rosie nodded seriously. “If one exec should give away something he’s not supposed to it would upset the whole applecart. There are only a thousand of us, and I guess probably two billion of you, or nearly. The result would be complete destruction.”

Of the Executive Committee, Chandler thought she meant at first, but then he thought again. No. Of the world. For the thousand execs, outnumbered though they were two million to one, could not fail to triumph. The contest would not be in doubt. If the whole thousand execs at once began systematically to kill and destroy, instead of merely playing at it as the spirit moved them, they could all but end the human race overnight. A man could be made to slash his throat in a quarter of a minute. An exec, killing, killing, killing without pause, could destroy his own two million enemies in an eight-hour day.

And there were surer, faster ways. Chandler did not have to imagine them, he had seen them. The massacre of the Orphalese, the victims at the Monument—they were only crumbs of destruction. What had happened to New York City showed what mass-production methods could do. No doubt there were bombs left, even if only chemical ones. Shoot, stab, crash, blow up; swallow poison, leap from window, slit throat. Every man a murderer, at the touch of a mind from Hawaii; and if no one else was near to murder, surely each man could find a victim in himself. In one ravaging day mankind would cease to exist as a major force. In a week the only survivors would be those in such faroff and hopelessly impotent places that they were not worth the trouble of tracking down.

* * * *

“You hate us, don’t you?”

Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was not either belligerent or mocking. She was only sympathetically trying to reach his point of view. He shook his head silently.

“Not meaning ‘no’—meaning ‘no comment? Well, I don’t blame you, love. But do you see that we’re not altogether a bad thing? It’s bad that there should be so much violence. In a way. Hasn’t there always been violence? And what were the alternatives? Until we came along the world was getting ready to kill itself anyway.”

“There’s a difference,” Chandler mumbled. He was thinking of his wife. He and Margot had loved each other as married couples do—without any very great, searing compulsion; but with affection, with habit and with sporadic passion. Chandler had not given much thought to the whole, though he was aware of the parts, during the last years of his marriage. It was only after Margot’s murder that he had come to know that the sum of those parts was a quite irreplaceable love.

But Rosie was shaking her head. “The difference is all on our side. Suppose Koitska’s boss had never discovered the coronets. At any moment one country might have got nervous and touched off the whole thing—not carefully, the way we did it, with most of the really dirty missiles fused safe and others landing where they were supposed to go. I mean, touched off a war. The end, love. The bloody finis. The ones that were killed at once would have been the lucky ones. No, love,” she said, in dead earnest, “we aren’t the worst things that ever happened to the world. Once the—well, the bad part—is over, people will understand what we really are.”

“And what’s that, exactly?”

She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, “We’re gods.”

It took Chandler’s breath away—not because it was untrue, but because it had never occurred to him that gods were aware of their deity.

“We’re gods, love, with the privilege of electing mortals to the club. Don’t judge us by anything that has gone before. Don’t judge us by anything. We are a New Thing. We don’t have to conform to precedent because we upset all precedents. From now on, to the end of time, the rules will grow from us.”

She patted her lips briskly with a napkin and said, “Would you like to see something? Let’s take a little walk.”

She took him by the hand and led him across the room, out to a sundeck on the other side of the restaurant. They were looking down on what had once been a garden. There were people in it; Chandler was conscious of sounds coming from them, and he was able to see that there were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, and that they all seemed to be wearing suntans like his own.

“From Tripler?” he guessed.

“No, love. They pick out those clothes themselves. Stand there a minute.”

The girl in the coronet walked out to the rail of the sundeck, where pink and amber spotlights were playing on nothing. As she came into the colored lights there was a sigh from the people in the garden. A man walked forward with an armload of leis and deposited them on the ground below the rail.

They were adoring her.

Rosalie stood gravely for a moment, then nodded and returned to Chandler.

“They began doing that about a year ago,” she whispered to him, as a murmur of disappointment came up from the crowd. “Their own idea. We didn’t know what they wanted at first, but they weren’t doing any harm. You see, love,” she said softly, “we can make them do anything we like. But we don’t make them do that.”

* * * *

Hours later, Chandler was not sure just how, they were in a light plane flying high over the Pacific, clear out of sight of land. The moon was gold above them, the ocean black beneath.

Chandler stared down as the girl circled the plane, slipping lower toward the water, silent and perplexed. But he was not afraid. He was almost content. Rosie was good company—gay, cheerful—and she had treasures to share. It had been an impulse of hers, a long drive in her sports car and a quick, comfortable flight over the ocean to cap the evening. It had been a pleasant impulse. He reflected gravely that he could understand now how generations of country maidens had been dazzled and despoiled. A touch of luxury was a great seducer.

The coronet on the girl’s body could catch his body at any moment. She had only to think herself into his mind, and her will, flashed to a relay station like the one he was building for Koitska, at loose in infinity, could sweep into him and make him a puppet. If she chose, he would open that door beside him and step out into a thousand feet of air and a meal for the sharks.

But he did not think she would do it. He did not think anyone would, really, though with his own eyes he had seen some anyones do things as bad as that and sickeningly worse. There was no corrupt whim of the most diseased mind in history that some torpid exec had not visited on a helpless man, woman or child in the past years. Even as they flew here, Chandler knew, the gross bodies that lay in luxury in the island’s villas were surging restlessly around the world; and death and horror remained where they had passed. It was a paradox too great to be reconciled, this girl and this vileness. He could not forget it, but he could not feel it in his glands. She was pretty. She was gay. He began to think thoughts that had left him alone for a long time.

The dark bulk of the island showed ahead and they were sinking toward a landing.

The girl landed skillfully on a runway that sprang into light as she approached—electronic wizardry, or the coronet and some tethered serf at a switch? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered very greatly at that moment to Chandler.

“Thank you, love,” she said, laughing. “I liked that. It’s all very well to use someone else’s body for this sort of thing, but every now and then I want to keep my own in practice.”

She linked arms with him as they left the plane. “When I was first given the coronet here,” she reminisced, amusement in her voice, “I got the habit real bad. I spent six awful months—really, six months in bed! And by myself at that. Oh, I was all over the world, and skin-diving on the Barrier Reef and skiing in Norway and—well,” she said, squeezing his arm, “never mind what all. And then one day I got on the scales, just out of habit. Do you know what I weighed?” She closed her eyes in mock horror, but they were smiling when she opened them again. “I won’t do that again, love. Of course, a lot of us do let ourselves go. Even Koitska. Especially Koitska. And some of the women—But just between us, the ones who do really didn’t have much to keep in shape in the first place.”

She led the way into a villa that smelled of jasmine and gardenias, snapped her fingers and subdued lights came on. “Like it? Oh, we’ve nothing but the best. What would you like to drink?”

She fixed them both tall, cold glasses and vetoed Chandler’s choice of a sprawling wicker chair to sit on. “Over here, love.” She patted the couch beside her. She drew up her legs, leaning against him, very soft, warm and fragrant, and said dreamily, “Let me see. What’s nice? What do you like in music, love?”

“Oh…anything.”

“No, no! You’re supposed to say, ‘Why, the original-cast album from Hi There.’ Or anything else I starred in.” She shook her head reprovingly, and the points of her coronet caught golden reflections from the lights. “But since you’re obviously a man of low taste I’ll have to do the whole bit myself.” She touched switches at a remote-control set by her end of the couch, and in a moment dreamy strings began to come from tri-aural speakers hidden around the room. It was not Hi There. “That’s better,” she said drowsily, and in a moment, “Wasn’t it nice in the plane?”

“It was fine,” Chandler said. Gently—but firmly—he sat up and reached automatically into his pocket.

The girl sighed and straightened. “Cigarette? They’re on the table beside you. Hope you like the brand. They only keep one big factory going, not to count those terrible Russian things that’re all air and no smoke.” She touched his forehead with cool fingers. “You never told me about that, love.”

It was like an electric shock—the touch of her fingers and the touch of reality at once. Chandler said stiffly, “My brand. But I thought you were there at the trial.”

“Oh, only now and then. I missed all the naughty parts—though, to tell the truth, that’s why I was hanging around. I do like to hear a little naughtiness now and then…but all I heard was that stupid lawyer and that stupid judge. Made me mad.” She giggled. “Lucky for you. I was so irritated I decided to spoil their fun too.”

* * * *

Chandler sat up and took a long pull at his drink. Curiously, it seemed to sober him. He said: “It’s nothing. I happened to rape and kill a young girl. Happens every day. Of course, it was one of your friends that was doing it for me, but I didn’t miss any of what was going on, I can give you a blow-by-blow description if you like. The people in the town where I lived, at that time, thought I was doing it on my own, though, and they didn’t approve. Hoaxing—you know? They thought I was so perverse and cruel that I would do that sort of thing under my own power, instead of with some exec—or, as they would have put it, being ignorant, some imp, or devil, or demon—pulling the strings.”

He was shaking. He waited for what she had to say; but she only whispered, “I’m sorry, love,” and looked so contrite and honest that, as rapidly as it had come upon him, his anger passed.

He opened his mouth to say something to her. He didn’t get it said. She was sitting there, looking at him, alone and soft and inviting. He kissed her; and as she returned the kiss, he kissed her again, and again.

But less than an hour later he was in her Porsche, cold sober, raging, frustrated, miserable. He slammed it through the unfamiliar gears as he sped back to the city.

She had left him. They had kissed with increasing passion, his hands playing about her, her body surging toward him, and then, just then, she whispered, “No, love.” He held her tighter and without another word she opened her eyes and looked at him.

He knew what mind it was that caught him then. It was her mind. Stiffly, like wood, he released her, stood up, walked to the door and locked it behind him.

The lights in the villa went out. He stood there, boiling, looking into the shadows through the great, wide, empty window. He could see her lying there on the couch, and as he watched he saw her body toss and stir; and as surely as he had ever known anything before he knew that somewhere in the world some woman—or some man!—lay locked with a lover, violent in love, and was unable to tell the other that a third party had invaded their bed.

Chandler did not know it until he saw something glistening on his wrist, but he was weeping on the wild ride back to Honolulu in the car. Her car. Would there be trouble for his taking it? God, let there be trouble! He was in a mood for trouble. He was sick and wild with revulsion.

Worse than her use of him, a casual stimulant, an aphrodisiac touch, was that she thought what she did was right. Chandler thought of the worshipping dozens under the sundeck of the exec restaurant, and Rosalie’s gracious benediction as they made her their floral offerings. Blind, pathetic fools!

Not only the deluded men and women in the garden were worshippers trapped in a vile religion, he thought. It was worse. The gods and goddesses worshipped at their own divinity as well!

X

Three days later Koitska’s voice, coming from Chandler’s lips, summoned him out to the TWA shack again.

Wise now in the ways of this world, Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up.

He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up. He was fully dressed—more or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red, short-sleeve shirt, with rope sandals. He said, “You fly a gilikopter? No? No difference. Help me.” An arm like a mountain went over Chandler’s shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the room and touched a button.

A door opened.

Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building. That was one of the things the exec did not consider important for his slaves to know. It lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a “gangster’s car,” waited in a private parking bay.

Chandler followed Koitska’s directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglas-nosed helicopter waited. More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot’s seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it. His face blanked out—he was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then.

In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall.

After a moment he wheezed. “Sit down. At de controls.” He breathed noisily for a while. Then, “It von’t pay you to be interested in Rosalie,” he said.

Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska’s back. “I’m not! Or anyway—” But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested.

After a moment Koitska stirred, settled himself more comfortably, and Chandler felt himself taken. He turned to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals and watched himself work the controls. It was an admirable performance. Whoever Chandler was just then—he could not guess—he was a first-class helicopter pilot.

* * * *

They crossed a wide body of ocean and approached another island; from one quick glance at a navigation map that his eyes had taken, Chandler guessed it to be Hilo. He landed the craft expertly on the margin of a small airstrip, where two DC-3s were already parked and being unloaded, and felt himself free again.

Two husky young men, apparently native Hawaiians by their size, rolled up a ramp and assisted Koitska down it and into a building. Chandler was left to his own devices. The building was rundown but sound. Around it stalky grass clumped, long uncut, and a few mauve and scarlet blossoms, almost hidden, showed where someone had once tended beds of bougainvillea and poinsettias. He could not guess what the building had been doing there, looking like a small office-factory combination out in the remote wilds, until he caught sight of a sign the winds had blown against a wall: Dole. Apparently this had been headquarters for one of the plantations. Now it was stripped almost clean inside, a welter of desks and rusted machines piled heedlessly where there once had been a parking lot. New equipment was being loaded into it from the cargo planes. Chandler recognized some of it as from the list he had given the parts man, Hsi. There also seemed to be a gasoline-driven generator—a large one—but what the other things were he could not guess.

Besides Koitska, there were at least five coronet-wearing execs visible around the place. Chandler was not surprised. It would have to be something big to winkle these torpid slugs out of their shells, but he knew what it was, and that it was big enough to them indeed; in fact, it was their lives. He deduced that Koitska’s plans for his future comfort required a standby transmitter to service the coronets, in case something went wrong. And clearly it was this that they were to put together here.

For ten hours, while the afternoon became dark night, they worked at a furious pace. When the sun set one of the execs gestured and the generator was started, rocking on its rubber-tired wheels as its rotors spun and fumes chugged out, and they worked on by strings of incandescent lights. It was pick-and-shovel work for Chandler, no engineering, just unloading and roughly grouping the equipment where it was ready to be assembled. The execs did not take part in the work. Nor were they idle. They busied themselves in one room of the building with some small device—Chandler could not see what—and when he looked again it was gone. He did not see them take it away and did not know where it was taken. Toward midnight he suddenly realized that it was likely some essential part which they would not permit anyone but themselves to handle, and that, no doubt, was why they had come in person, instead of working through proxies.

Just before they left Koitska and two or three of the other execs quizzed him briefly. He was too tired to think beyond the questions, but they seemed to be trying to find out if he was able to do the simpler parts of the construction without supervision, and they seemed satisfied with the answers. He flew the helicopter home, with someone else guilding his arms and legs, but he was half asleep as he did it, and he never quite remembered how he managed to get back to his room at Tripler.

* * * *

The next morning he went back to Parts ’n Plenty with an additional list, covering replacement of some parts that had been damaged. Hsi glanced at it quickly and nodded. “All this stuff I have. You can pick it up this afternoon if you like.”

Chandler offered him a cigarette out of a stale pack. “About the other night—”

Hsi began to perspire, but he said, casually enough, “Interested in baseball?”

“Baseball?”

Hsi said, as though there had been nothing incongruous about the question, “There’ll be a Little League game this afternoon. Back of the school on Punahou and Wilder. I thought I might stop by, then we can come back and pick up the rest of your gear. Two o’clock. Hope I’ll see you.”

Chandler walked away thoughtfully. He had no real intention of going there, but something in Hsi’s attitude suggested more than a ball game; after a quick and poor lunch he decided to go.

The field was a dirty playground, scuffed out of what had probably once been an attractive campus. The players were ten-year-olds, of the mixture of hair colors and complexions typical of the islands. Chandler was puzzled. Surely even the wildest baseball rooter wouldn’t go far out of his way for this, and yet there was an audience of at least fifty adults watching the game. And none seemed to be related to the ballplayers. The Little Leaguers played grave, careful ball, and the audience watched them without a word of parental encouragement or joy.

Hsi approached him from the shadow of the school building. “Glad you could make it, Chandler. No, no questions. Just watch.”

In the fifth inning, with the score aggregating around thirty, there was an interruption. A tall, red-headed man glanced at his watch, licked his lips, took a deep breath and walked out onto the diamond. He glanced at the crowd, while the kids suspended play without surprise. Then the red-headed man nodded to the umpire and stepped off the field. The ballplayers resumed their game, but now the whole attention of the audience was on the red-headed man.

Suspicion crossed Chandler’s mind. In a moment it was confirmed, as the red-headed man raised his hands waist high and clasped his right hand around his left wrist—only for a moment, but that was enough.

The ball game was a cover. Chandler was present at a meeting of what Hsi had called The Society of Slaves, the underground that dared to pit itself against the execs.

Hsi cleared his throat and said, “This is the one. I vouch for him.” And that was startling too, Chandler thought, because all these wrist-circled men and women were looking at him.

* * * *

“All right,” said the red-headed man nervously, “let’s get started then. First thing, anybody got any weapons? Sure? Take a look—we don’t want any slipups. Turn out your pockets.”

There was a flurry and a woman near Chandler held up a key ring with a tiny knife on it “Penknife? Hell, yes; get rid of it Throw it in the outfield. You can pick it up after the meeting.” A hundred eyes watched the pearly object fly. “We ought to be all right here,” said the red-headed man. “The kids have been playing every day this week and nobody looked in. But watch your neighbor. See anything suspicious, don’t wait. Don’t take a chance. Holler ‘Kill the umpire!’ or anything you like, but holler. Good and loud.” He paused, breathing hard. “All right, Hsi. Introduce him.”

The parts man took Chandler firmly by the shoulder. “This fellow has something for us,” he said. “He’s working for the exec Koitska, building what can’t be anything else but a duplicate of the machine that they use to control us. He—”

“Wait a minute!” A bearded man came forward and peered furiously into Chandler’s face. “Look at his head! Don’t you see he’s branded?”

Chandler touched his scar as the man with the beard hissed, “Damned hoaxer! This is the lowest species of life on the face of the earth—someone who pretended to be possessed in order to do some damned dirty act What was it, hoaxer? Murder? Burning babies alive?”

Hsi economically let go of Chandler’s shoulder, half turned the bearded man with one hand and swung with the other. “Shut up, Linton. Wait till you hear what he’s got for us.”

The bearded man, sprawling and groggy, slowly rose as Hsi explained tersely what he had guessed of Chandler’s work—as much as Chandler himself knew, it seemed. “Maybe this is only a duplicate. Maybe it won’t be used. But maybe it will—and Chandler’s the man who can sabotage it! How would you like that? The execs switching over to this equipment while the other one is down for maintenance—and their headsets don’t work!”

There was a terrible silence, except for the sounds of the children playing ball. Two runs had just scored. Chandler recognized the silence. It was hope.

Linton broke it, his blue eyes gleaming above the beard. “No! Better than that. Why wait? We can use this fellow’s machine. Set it up, get us some headsets—and we can control the execs themselves!”

* * * *

The silence was even longer; then there was a babble of discussion, but Chandler did not take part in it. He was thinking. It was a tremendous thought.

Suppose a man like himself were actually able to do what they wanted of him. Never mind the practical difficulties—learning how it worked, getting a headset, bypassing the traps Koitska would surely have set to prevent just that. Never mind the penalties for failure. Suppose he could make it work, and find fifty headsets, and fit them to the fifty men and women here in this clandestine meeting of the Society of Slaves.…

Would there, after all, be any change worth mentioning in the state of the world?

Or was Lord Acton, always and everywhere, right? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power locked in the coronets of the exec was more than flesh and blood could stand; he could almost sense the rot in those near him at the mere thought.

But Hsi was throwing cold water on the idea. “Sorry, but I know that much: One exec can’t control another. The headpieces insulate against control. Well.” He glanced at his watch. “We agreed on twenty minutes maximum for this meeting,” he reminded the red-headed man, who nodded.

“You’re right.” He glanced around the group. “I’ll make the rest of it fast. News: You all know they got some more of us last week. Have you all been by the Monument? Three of our comrades were still there this morning. But I don’t think they know we’re organized, they think it’s only individual acts of sabotage. In case any of you don’t know, the execs can’t read our minds. Not even when they’re controlling us. Proof is we’re all still alive. Hanrahan knew practically every one of us, and he’s been lying out there for a week with a broken back, ever since they caught him trying to blow up the guard pits at East Gate. They had plenty of chance to pump him if they could. They can’t. Next thing. No more individual attacks on one exec. Not unless it’s a matter of life and death, and even then you’re wasting your time unless you’ve got a gun. They can grab your mind faster than you can cut a throat. Third thing: Don’t get the idea there are good execs and bad execs. Once they put that thing on their heads they’re all the same. Fourth thing. You can’t make deals. They aren’t that worried. So if anybody’s thinking of selling out—I’m not saying anyone is—forget it.” He looked around. “Anything else?”

“What about germ warfare in the water supply?” somebody ventured.

“Still looking into it. No report yet. All right, that’s enough for now. Meeting’s adjourned. Watch the ball game for a while, then drift away. One at a time.”

Hsi was the first to go, then a couple of women together, then a sprinkling of other men. Chandler was in no particular hurry, although it seemed time to leave anyway, because the ball game appeared to be over. A ten-year-old with freckles on his face was at the plate, but he was leaning on his bat, staring at Chandler with wide, serious eyes.

Chandler felt a sudden chill.

He turned, began to walk away—and felt himself seized.

* * * *

He walked slowly into the schoolhouse, unable to look around. Behind him he heard a confused sob, tears and a child’s voice trying to blubber through: “Something funny happened.”

If the child had been an adult it might have been warning enough. But the child had never experienced possession before, was not sure enough, was clear into the schoolhouse before the remaining members of the Society of Slaves awoke to their danger. He heard a quick cry of “They got him!” Then Chandler’s legs stopped walking and he addressed himself savagely. A few yards away a stout Chinese lady was mopping the tiles; she looked up at him, startled, but no more startled than Chandler was himself. “You idiot!” Chandler blazed. “Why do you have to get mixed up in this? Don’t you know it’s wrong, love? Stay here!” Chandler commanded himself. “Don’t you dare leave this building!”

And he was free again, but there was a sudden burst of screams from outside.

Bewildered, Chandler stood for a moment, as little able to move as though the girl still had him under control. Then he leaped through a classroom to a window, staring. Outside in the playground there was wild confusion. Half the spectators were on the ground, trying to rise. As he watched, a teen-age boy hurled himself at an elderly lady, the two of them falling. Another man flung himself to the ground. A woman swung her pocketbook into the face of the man next to her. One of the fallen ones rose, only to trip himself again. It was a mad spectacle, but Chandler understood it: What he was watching was a single member of the exec trying to keep a group of twenty ordinary, unarmed human beings in line. The exec was leaping from mind to mind; even so, the crowd was beginning to scatter.

Without thought Chandler started to leap out to help them; but the possessor had anticipated that. He was caught at the door. He whirled and ran toward the woman with the mop; as he was released, the woman flung herself upon him, knocking him down.

By the time he was able to get up again it was far too late to help…if there ever had been a time when he could have been of any real help.

He heard shots. Two policeman had come running into the playground, with guns drawn.

The exec who had looked at him out of the boy’s eyes, who had penetrated this nest of enemies and extricated Chandler from it, had taken first things first. Help had been summoned. Quick as the coronets worked, it was no time at all until the nearest persons with weapons were located, commandeered and in action.

Two minutes later there no longer was resistance.

Obviously more execs had come to help, attracted by the commotion perhaps, or summoned at some stolen moment after the meeting had first been invaded. There were only five survivors on the field. Each was clearly controlled. They rose and stood patiently while the two police shot them, shot them, paused to reload and shot again. The last to die was the bearded man, Linton, and as he fell his eyes brushed Chandler’s.

Chandler leaned against a wall.

It had been a terrible sight. The nearness of his own death had been almost the least of it.

He had no doubt of the identity of the exec who had saved him and destroyed the others. Though he had heard the voice only as it came from his own mouth, he could not miss it. It was Rosalie Pan.

He looked out at the red-headed man, sprawled across the foul line behind third base, and remembered what he had said. There weren’t any good execs or bad execs. There were only execs.

XI

Whatever Chandler’s life might be worth, he knew he had given it away and the girl had given it back to him.

He did not see her for several days, but the morning after the massacre he woke to find a note beside his bed table. No one had been in the room. It was his own sleeping hand that had written it, though the girl’s mind had moved his fingers:

If you get mixed up in anything like that again I won’t be able to help you. So don’t! Those people are just using you, you know. Don’t throw away your chances. Do you like surfboarding?

Rosie

But by then there was no time for surfboarding, or for anything else but work. The construction job on Hilo had begun, and it was a nightmare. He was flown to the island with the last load of parts. No execs were present in the flesh, but in the first day Chandler lost count of how many different minds possessed his own. He began to be able to recognize them by a limp as he walked, by tags of German as he spoke, by a stutter, a distinctive gesture of annoyance, an expletive. As he was a trained engineer he was left to labor by himself for hours on end. It was worse for the others. There seemed to be a dozen execs hovering invisible around all the time; no sooner was a worker released by one than he was seized by another. The work progressed rapidly, but at the cost of utter exhaustion. By the end of the fourth day Chandler had eaten only two meals and could not remember when he had slept last. He found himself staggering when free, and furious with the fatigue-clumsiness of his own body when possessed. At sundown on the fourth day he found himself free for a moment and, incredibly, without work of his own to do just then, until someone else completed a job of patchwiring. He stumbled out into the open air and had time only to gaze around for a moment before his eyes began to close. This must once have been a lovely island. Even unkempt as it was, the trees were tall and beautiful. Beyond them a wisp of smoke was pale against the dark-blue evening sky; the breeze was scented.… He woke and found he was already back in the building, reaching for his soldering gun.

There came a point at which even the will of the execs was unable to drive the flogged bodies farther, and then they were permitted to sleep for a few hours. At daybreak they were awake again. The sleep was not enough. The bodies were slow and inaccurate. Two of the Hawaiians, straining a hundred-pound component into place, staggered, slipped—and dropped it.

Appalled, Chandler waited for them to kill themselves.

But it seemed that the execs were tiring too. One of the Hawaiians said irritably, with an accent Chandler did not recognize: “That’s pau. All right, you morons, you’ve won yourselves a vacation; we’ll have to fly you in replacements. Take the day off.” And incredibly all eleven of the haggard wrecks stumbling around the building were free at once.

The first thought of every man was to eat, to relieve himself, to remove a shoe and ease a blistered foot—to do any of the things they had not been permitted to do. The second thought was sleep.

Chandler dropped off at once, but he was overtired; he slept fitfully, and after an hour or two of turning on the hard ground sat up, blinking red-eyed around. He had been slow. The cushioned seats in the aircraft and cars were already taken. He stood up, stretched, scratched himself and wondered what to do next, and he remembered the thread of smoke he had seen—when? three nights ago?—against the evening sky.

In all those hours he had not had time to think one obvious thought: There should have been no smoke there! The island was supposed to be deserted.

He stood up, looked around to get his bearings, and started off in the direction he remembered.

* * * *

It was good to own his body again, in poor condition as it was. It was delicious to be allowed to think consecutive thoughts.

The chemistry of the human animal is such that it heals whatever thrusts it may receive from the outside world. Short of death, its only incapacitating wound comes from itself; from the outside it can survive astonishing blows, rise again and flourish. Chandler was not flourishing, but he had begun to rise.

Time had been so compressed and blurred in the days since the slaughter at the Punahou School that he had not had time to grieve over the deaths of his briefly-met friends, or even to think of their quixotic plans against the execs. Now he began to wonder.

He understood with what thrill of hope he had been received—a man like themselves, not an exec, whose touch was at the very center of the exec power. But how firm was that touch? Was there really anything he could do?

It seemed not. He barely understood the mechanics of what he was doing, far less the theory behind it. Conceivably knowing where this installation was he could somehow get back to it when it was completed. In theory it might be that there was a way to dispense with the headsets and exert power from the big board itself.

A Cro-Magnard at the controls of a nuclear-laden jet bomber could destroy a city. Nothing stopped him. Nothing but his own invincible ignorance. Chandler was that Cro-Magnard; certainly power was here to grasp, but he had no way of knowing how to pick it up.

Still—where there was life there was hope. He decided he was wasting time that would not come again. He had been wandering along a road that led into a small town, quite deserted, but this was no time for wandering. His place was back at the installation, studying, scheming, trying to understand all he could. He began to turn, and stopped.

“Great God,” he said softly, looking at what he had just seen. The town was deserted of life, but not of death.

* * * *

There were bodies everywhere.

They were long dead, perhaps years. They seemed natural and right as they lay there. It was not surprising they had escaped his notice at first. Little was left but bones and an occasional desiccated leathery rag that might have been a face. The clothing was faded and rotted away; but enough was left of the bodies and the clothes to make it clear that none of these people had died natural deaths. A rusted blade in a chest cage showed where a knife had pierced a heart; a small skull near his feet (with a scrap of faded blue rompers near it) was shattered. On a flagstone terrace a family group of bones lay radiating outward, like a rosette. Something had exploded there and caught them all as they turned to flee. There was a woman’s face, grained like oak and eyeless, visible between the fender of a truck and a crushed-in wall.

Like exhumed Pompeii, the tragedy was so ancient that it aroused only wonder. The whole town had been blotted out.

The execs did not take chances; apparently they had sterilized the whole island—probably had sterilized all of them except Oahu itself, to make certain that their isolation was complete, except for the captive stock allowed to breed and serve them in and around Honolulu.

Chandler prowled the town for a quarter of an hour, but one street was like another. The bodies did not seem to have been disturbed even by animals, but perhaps there were none big enough to show traces of such work.

Something moved in a doorway.

Chandler thought at once of the smoke he had seen, but no one answered his call and, though he searched, he could neither see nor hear anything alive.

The search was a waste of time. It also wasted his best chance to study the thing he was building. As he returned to the cinder-block structure at the end of the airstrip he heard motors and looked up to see a plane circling in for a landing.

He knew that he had only a few minutes. He spent those minutes as thriftily as he could, but long before he could even grasp the circuitry of the parts he had not himself worked on he felt a touch at his mind. The plane was rolling to a stop. He and all of them hurried over to begin unloading it.

The plane was stopped with one wingtip almost touching the building, heading directly into it—convenient for unloading, but a foolish nuisance when it came time to turn it and take off again, Chandler’s mind thought while his body lugged cartons out of the plane.

But he knew the answer to that. Takeoff would be no problem, any more than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the strip.

These planes were not going to return, ever.

* * * *

The work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a careful check of line voltages and a balancing of biases. Chandler could help only up to a point, and then two execs, working through the bodies of one of the Hawaiians and the pilot of a Piper Tri-Pacer who had flown in some last-minute test equipment—and remained as part of the labor pool—laboriously worked on the final tests.

Spent, the other men flopped to the ground, waiting.

They were far gone. All of them, Chandler as much as the others. But one of them rolled over, grinned tightly at Chandler and said, “It’s been fun. My name’s Bradley. I always think people ought to know each other’s names in cases like this. Imagine sharing a grave with some utter stranger!”

“Grave?”

Bradley nodded. “Like Pharaoh’s slaves. The pyramid is just about finished, friend. You don’t know what I’m talking about?” He sat up, plucked a blade of stemmy grass and put it between his teeth. “I guess you haven’t seen the corpses in the woods.”

Chandler said, “I found a town half a mile or so over there, nothing in it but skeletons.”

“No, heavens, nothing that ancient. These are nice fresh corpses, out behind the junkheap there. Well, not fresh. They’re a couple of weeks old. I thought it was neat of the execs to dispose of the used-up labor out of sight of the rest of us. So much better for morale…until Juan Simoa and I went back looking for a plain, simple electrical extension cord and found them.”

With icy calm Chandler realized that the man was talking sense. Used-up labor: the men who had unloaded the first planes, no doubt—worked until they dropped, then efficiently disposed of, as they were so cheap a commodity that they were not worth the trouble of hauling back to Honolulu for salvage. “I see,” he said. “Besides, dead men tell no tales.”

“And spread no disease. Probably that’s why they did their killing back in the tall trees. Always the chance some exec might have to come down here to inspect in person. Rotting corpses just aren’t sanitary.” Bradley grinned again. “I used to be a doctor at Molokai.”

“Lep—” began Chandler, but the doctor shook his head.

“No, no, never say ‘leprosy.’ It’s ‘Hansen’s disease.’ Whatever it is, the execs were sure scared of it. They wiped out every patient we had, except a couple who got away by swimming; then for good measure they wiped out most of the medical staff too, except for a couple like me who were off-island and had the sense to keep quiet about where they’d worked. I used,” he said, rolling over his back and putting his hands behind his head, “in the old days to work on pest-control for the Public Health Service. We sure knocked off a lot of rats and fleas. I never thought I’d be one of them.” He was silent.

Chandler admired his courage very much. The man had fallen asleep.

Chandler looked at the others. “You going to let them kill us without a struggle?” he demanded.

The remaining Hawaiian was the only one to answer. He said, “You just don’t know how much pilikia you’re in. It isn’t what we let them do.”

“We’ll see,” Chandler promised grimly. “They’re only human. I haven’t given up yet.”

* * * *

But in the end he could not save himself; it was the girl who saved him. That night Chandler tossed in troubled sleep, and woke to find himself standing, walking toward the Tri-Pacer. The sun was just beginning to pink the sky and no one else was moving. “Sorry, love,” he apologized to himself. “You probably need to bathe and shave, but I don’t know how. Shave, I mean.” He giggled. “Anyway, you’ll find everything you need at my house.”

He climbed into the plane. “Ever fly before?” he asked himself. “Well, you’ll love it. Here we go. Close the door…snap the belt…turn the switch.” He admired the practiced ease with which his body started the motor, raced it with a critical eye on the instruments, turned the plane and lifted it off, up, into the rising sun.

“Oh, dear. You do need a bath,” he told himself, wrinkling his nose humorously. “No harm. I’ve the nicest tub—pink, deep—and nine kinds of bath salts. But I wish you weren’t so tired, love, because it’s a long flight and you’re wearing me out.” He was silent as he bent to the correct compass heading and cranked a handle over his head to adjust the trim. “Koitska’s going to be so huhu,” he said, smiling. “Never fear, love, I can calm him down. But it’s easier to do with you in one piece, you know, the other way’s too late.”

He was silent for a long time, and then his voice began to sing.

They were songs from Rosalie’s own musical comedies. Even with so poor an instrument as Chandler’s voice to work with, she sang well enough to keep both of them entertained while his body brought the plane in for a landing; and so Chandler went to live in the villa that belonged to Rosalie Pan.

XII

“Love,” she said, “there are worse things in the world than keeping me amused when I’m not busy. We’ll go to the beach again one day soon, I promise.” And she was gone again.

* * * *

Chandler was a concubine—not even that; he was a male geisha, convenient to play gin rummy with, or for company on the surfboards, or to make a drink.

He did not quite know what to make of himself. In bad times one hopes for survival. He had hoped; and now he had survival, perfumed and cushioned, but on what mad terms! Rosalie was a pretty girl, and a good-humored one. She was right. There were worse things in the world than being her companion; but Chandler could not adjust himself to the role.

It angered him when she got up from the garden swing and locked herself in her room—for he knew that she was not sleeping as she lay there, though her eyes were closed and she was motionless. It infuriated him when she casually usurped his body to bring an ashtray to her side, or to stop him when his hands presumed. And it drove him nearly wild to be a puppet with her friends working his strings.

He was that most of all. One exec who wished to communicate with another cast about for an available human proxy near-by. Chandler was that for Rosie Pan: her telephone, her social secretary, and on occasion he was the garment her dates put on. For Rosalie was one of the few execs who cared to conduct any major part of her life in her own skin. She liked dancing. She enjoyed dining out. It was her pleasure to display herself to the worshippers at Luigi the Wharf Rat’s and to speed down the long combers on a surfboard. When another exec chose to accompany her it was Chandler’s body which gave the remote “date” flesh.

He ate very well indeed—in surprising variety. He drank heavily sometimes and abstained others. Once, in the person of a Moroccan exec, he smoked an opium pipe; once he dined on roasted puppy. He saw many interesting things and, when Rosalie was occupied without him, he had the run of her house, her music library, her pantry and her books. He was not mistreated. He was pampered and praised, and every night she kissed him before she retired to her own room with the snap-lock on the door.

He was miserable.

He prowled the house in the nights after she had left him, unable to sleep. It had been bad enough on Hilo, under the hanging threat of death. But then, though he was only a slave, he was working at something that used his skill and training.

Now? Now a Pekingese could do nearly all she wanted of him. He despised in himself the knowledge that with a Pekingese’s cunning he was contriving to make himself indispensable to her—her slippers fetched in his teeth, his silky mane by her hand to stroke—if not these things in actuality, then their very near equivalents.

But what else was there for him?

There was nothing. She had spared his life from Koitska, and if he offended her Koitska’s sentence would be carried out.

Even dying might be better than this, he thought.

Indeed, it might be better even to go back to Honolulu and life.

* * * *

In the morning he woke to find himself climbing the wide, carpeted steps to her room. She was not asleep; it was her mind that was guiding him.

He opened the door. She lay with a feathery coverlet pulled up to her chin, eyes open, head propped on three pillows; as she looked at him he was free. “Something the matter, love? You fell asleep sitting up.”

“Sorry.” She would not be put off. She made him tell her his resentments. She was very understanding and very sure as she said, “You’re not a dog, love. I won’t have you thinking that way. You’re my friend. Don’t you think I need a friend?” She leaned forward. Her nightgown was very sheer; but Chandler had tasted that trap before and he averted his eyes. “You think it’s all fun for us. I understand. Tell me, if you thought I was doing important work—oh, crucial work, love—would you feel a little easier? Because I am. We’ve got the whole work of the island to do, and I do my share. We’ve got our plans to make and our future to provide for. There are so few of us. A single H-bomb could kill us all. Do you think it isn’t work, keeping that bomb from ever coming here? There’s all Honolulu to monitor, for they know about us there. We can’t like some disgusting nitwits like your Society of Slaves destroy us. There’s the problems of the world to see to. Why,” she said with pride, “we’ve solved the whole Indian-Pakistani population problem in the last two months. They’ll not have to worry about famine again for a dozen generations! We’re working on China now; next Japan; next—oh, all the world. We’ll have three-quarters of the lumps gone soon, and the rest will have space to breathe in. It’s work!”

She saw his expression and said earnestly, “No, don’t think that! You call it murder. It is, of course. But it’s the surgeon’s knife. We’re quicker and less painful than starvation, love…and if some of us enjoy the work of weeding out the unfit, does that change anything? It does not! I admit some of us are, well, mean. But not all. And we’re improving. The new people we take in are better than the old.”

She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.

Then she shook her head. “Never mind,” she said—apparently to herself. “Forget it, love. Go like an angel and fetch us both some coffee.”

* * * *

Like an angel he went…not, he thought bitterly, like a man.

She was keeping something from him, and he was too stubborn to let her tease him out of his mood. “Everything’s a secret,” he complained, and she patted his cheek.

“It has to be that way.” She was quite serious. “This is the biggest thing in the world. I’m fond of you, love, but I can’t let that interfere with my duty.”

“Shto, Rosie?” said Chandler’s mouth thickly.

“Oh, there you are, Andrei,” she said, and spoke quickly in Russian.

Chandler’s brows knotted in a scowl and he barked: “Nyeh mozhet bit!”

“Andrei … she said gently. “Ya vas sprashnivayoo.…

“Nyet!”

“No Andrei.…

Rumble, grumble; Chandler’s body twitched and fumed. He heard his own name in the argument, but what the subject matter was he could not tell. Rosalie was coaxing; Koitska was refusing. But he was weakening. After minutes Chandler’s shoulders shrugged; he nodded; and he was free.

“Have some more coffee, love,” said Rosalie Pan with an air of triumph.

Chandler waited. He did not understand what was going on. It was up to her to enlighten him, and finally she smiled and said: “Perhaps you can join us, love. Don’t say yes or no. It isn’t up to you…and besides you can’t know whether you want it or not until you try. So be patient a moment.”

Chandler frowned; then felt his body taken. His lips barked: “Khorashaw!” His body got up and walked to the wall of Rosalie’s room. A picture on the wall moved aside and there was a safe. Flick, flick, Chandler’s own fingers dialed a combination so rapidly that he could not follow it. The door of the safe opened.

And Chandler was free, and Rosalie excitedly leaping out of the bed behind him, careless of the wisp of nylon that was her only garment, crowding softly, warmly past him to reach inside the safe. She lifted out a coronet very like her own.

She paused and looked at Chandler.

“You can’t do anything to harm us with this one, love,” she warned. “Do you understand that? I mean, don’t get the idea that you can tell anyone anything. Or do something violent. You can’t. I’ll be right with you, and Koitska will be monitoring the transmitter.” She handed him the coronet. “Now, when you see something interesting, you move right in. You’ll see how. It’s the easiest thing in the world, and—Oh, here. Put it on.”

Chandler swallowed with difficulty.

She was offering him the tool that had given the execs the world. A blunter, weaker tool than her own, no doubt. But still it was power beyond his imagining. He stood there frozen as she slipped it on his head. Sprung electrodes pressed gently against his temples and behind his ears. She touched something.…

Chandler stood motionless for a moment and then, without effort, floated free of his own body.

* * * *

Floating. Floating; a jellyfish floating. Trailing tentacles that whipped and curled, floating over the sandbound claws and chitin that clashed beneath, floating over the world’s people, and them not even knowing, not even seeing.…

Chandler floated.

He was up, out and away. He was drifting. Around him was no-color. He saw nothing of space or size, he only saw, or did not see but felt-smelled-tasted, people. They were the sandbound. They were the creatures that crawled and struggled below, and his tentacles lashed out at them.

Beside him floated another. The girl? It had a shape, but not a human shape—a pair of great projecting spheres, a cinctured area-rule shape. Female. Yes, undoubtedly the girl. It waved a member at him and he understood he was beckoned. He followed.

Two of sandbound ones were ahead.

The female shape slipped into one, he into the other. It was as easy to invest this form with his own will as it was to command the muscles of his hand. They looked at each other out of sandbound eyes. “You’re a boy!” Chandler laughed. The girl laughed: “You’re an old washerwoman!” They were in a kitchen where fish simmered on an electric stove. The boy-Rosie wrinkled his-her nose, blinked and was empty. Only the small almond-eyed boy was left, and he began to cry convulsively. Chandler understood. He floated out after her.

This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris, Chandler thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men’s eyes, could not find her, hesitated and—floated. She was hovering impatiently. This way!

He followed, and followed.

They were a hundred people doing a hundred things. They lingered a few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and…it all went out…the scene disappeared…he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own flesh.

He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie’s bedroom.

He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed.

In a moment she opened her eyes.

“Well, love?”

He said hoarsely, “What made it stop?”

She shrugged. “Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expect—it’s been an hour. I’m surprised his patience lasted this long.”

She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had happened even to see the white grace of her body. “Did you like it, love? Would you like to have it forever?”

XIII

For nine days Chandler’s status remained in limbo. He spent that day in a state of numb bemusement, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated. He did not see Rosalie again that day, she kept to her room and he locked out. He was still a lapdog, but a lapdog with a dream dangling before him. He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might become a god, and he had eight days left.

The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. They explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier in the bodies of two sick, starving hermits and wandered arm in arm near the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. He had seven days left.

They passed like a dream. He saw a great deal of the inner workings of the exec, more than before. He had privileges. He was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him. He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their persons, and a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese through the mouth of the beach boy who came to tend Rosalie’s garden. He thought they liked him and was pleased that he penetrated where he had not been allowed before…until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat. They allowed him this contact so that they could look him over. If they rejected him they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much. But by then a week had passed, and another day, and though he did not know it he had only one day left. Rosalie did what she could to make the days of waiting easy for him.

“Embarrassing, isn’t it? I went through it myself, love. Come have a drink.”

“When will I know?” he demanded fretfully.

“Well.” She hesitated. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you, love, under the circumstances—”

He knew what the circumstances were.

“I guess I can tell you. You need just over seven hundred votes to come in. You’ve got—” Her eyes glazed for a moment. She was looking through some clerk’s eyes, somewhere on the island. “You’ve got about a hundred and fifty so far. Takes time, doesn’t it? But it’s worth it in the end.”

“How many ‘no’ votes?”

‘None.” She said gently, “You’ll never have but one, love, because that’s all it takes.”

He stared. The girl gook took up his hand and kissed it lightly. “One blackball’s enough, yes, but never fear. Rosie’s on your side.”

* * * *

Restlessly Chandler stood up and made himself another drink. His head was beginning to buzz. They had been drinking on her sun terrace since early afternoon.

Rosalie came up beside him soothingly. “I know how you feel. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?”

“Sure,” he said, stirring the ice around in the glass and drinking it down. He made another drink absently, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.

“Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins.” He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. “I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when—” her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the god-like ones—“when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll booth I screamed but my—friend—let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control.… We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way.”

She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself slicing a lime for her drink. Now she was talking about her friend. “I hadn’t seen him in six years. I was just a kid, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these.” She touched her coronet. “So,” she said brightly, “he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It’s all very simple, except the waiting.”

Chandler pulled her down on the couch beside him and made a toast. “Your friend.”

“He’s a nice guy,” she said moodily, sipping her drink. “You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It’s partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, only—well, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could get through the coronet a lot more. He got fat. A lot of them are awfully fat, love,” she said seriously. “That’s why they need people like me. And you. Replacements. Heart trouble, liver trouble, what can they expect when they lie in bed day in and day out, taking their lives through other people’s bodies? I won’t let myself go that way.… It’s a temptation. You know, almost every day I find some poor woman on a diet and spend a solid hour eating creampuffs and gravies. How they must hate me!”

She grinned, leaned back and kissed him.

Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding. The drink made him reckless; the last two weeks made him doubtful; he was torn. He could tell that there was no resistance in her body, but the coronet made it in doubt; she could fling him away from her with one touch of the mind. Yet she didn’t do it—

“Vi myenya zvali?” his own voice demanded, harsh and mocking.

* * * *

The girl tried to push him away. Her eyes were bright and huge, staring at him. “Andrei!”

“Da, Andrei! Kok eto dosadno!”

“Andrei, please. I know that you are—”

“Filthy!” screamed Chandler’s voice. “How can you? I do not allow this carrion to touch you so—not vot is mine—I do not allow him to live!” And Chandler dropped her and leaped to his feet. He fought. He struggled; but only in his mind, and helplessly; his body carried him out of the room, running and stumbling, out into the drive, into her waiting car and away.

He drove like a madman on roads he had never seen before. The car’s gears bellowed pain at their abuse, the tires screamed.

Chandler, prisoned inside himself, recognized that touch. Koitska! He knew who Rosalie Pan’s lover had been. If he had been in doubt his own voice, raucous and hysterical with rage, told him the truth. All that long drive it screamed threats and obscenities at him, in Russian and tortured English.

The car stopped in front of the TWA facility and, still prisoned, his body hurried in, bruising itself deliberately against every doorpost and stick of furniture. “I could have smashed you in the car!” his voice screamed hoarsely. “It is too merciful. I could have thrown you into the sea! It is not painful enough.”

In the garage his body stopped and looked wildly around. “Knives, torches,” his lips chanted. “Shall I gouge out eyes? Slit throat?”

A jar of battery acid stood on a shelf, “Da, da!” screamed Chandler, stumbling toward it. “One drink eh? And I von’t even stay vith you to feel it, the pain—just a moment—then it eats the gut, the long slow dying.… And all the time the body that was Chandler’s was clawing the cap off the jar, tilting it—

He dropped the jar, and leaped aside instinctively as it splintered at his feet.

He was free!

Before he could move he was seized again, stumbled, crashed into a wall—

And was free again.

He stood waiting for a moment, unable to believe it; but he was still free. The alien invader did not seize his mind. There was no sound. No one moved. No gun fired at him, no danger threatened.

He was free; he took a step, turned, shook his head and proved it.

He was free and, in a moment, realized that he was in the building with the fat bloated body of the man who wanted to murder him, the body that in its own strength could scarcely stand erect.

It was suicide to attempt to harm an exec. He would certainly lose his life—except—that was gone already anyhow; he had lost it. He had nothing left to lose.

XIV

Chandler loped silently up the stairs to Koitska’s suite.

Halfway up he tripped and sprawled, half stunning himself against the stair rail. It had not been his own clumsiness, he was sure. Koitska had caught at his mind again, but only feebly. Chandler did not wait. Whatever was interfering with Koitska’s control, some distraction or malfunction of the coronet or whatever, Chandler could not bank on its lasting.

The door was locked.

He found a heavy mahogany chair, with a back of solid carved wood. He flung it onto his shoulders, grunting, and ran with it into the door, a bull driven frantic, lunging out of its querencia to batter the wall of the arena. The door splintered.

Chandler was gashed with long slivers of wood, but he was through the door.

Koitska lay sprawled along his couch, eyes staring.

Alive or dead? Chandler did not wait to find out but sprang at him hands outstreched. The staring eyes flickered; Chandler felt the pull at his mind. But Koitska’s strength was almost gone. The eyes glazed, and Chandler was upon him. He ripped the coronet off and flung it aside, and the huge bulk of Koitska swung paralytically off the couch and fell to the floor.

The man was helpless. He lay breathing like a steam engine, one eye pressed shut against the leg of a coffee table, the other looking up at Chandler.

Chandler was panting almost as hard as the helpless mass at his feet. He was safe for a moment. At the most for a moment, for at any time one of the other execs might dart down out of the mind-world into the real, looking at the scene through Chandler’s eyes and surely deducing what would be no more to his favor than the truth. He had to get away from there. If he seemed busy in another room perhaps they would go away again. Chandler turned his back on the paralyzed monster to flee. It would be even better to try to lose himself in Honolulu—if he could get that far—he did not in his own flesh know how to fly the helicopter that was parked in the yard or he would try to get farther still.

But as he turned he was caught.

* * * *

Chandler turned to see Koitska lying there, and screamed.

His eyes were staring at Koitska. It was too late. He was possessed by someone, he did not know whom. Though it made little enough difference, he thought, watching his own hands reach out to touch the staring face.

His body straightened, his eyes looked around the room, he went to the desk. “Love,” he cried to himself, “what’s the matter with Koitska? Write, for God’s sake!” And he took a pencil in his hand and was free.

He hesitated, then scribbled: I don’t know. I think he had a stroke. Who are you?

The other mind slipped tentatively into his, scanning the paper. “Rosie, you idiot, who did you think?” he said furiously. “What have you done?”

Nothing, he began instinctively, then scratched the word out. Briskly and exactly he wrote: He was going to kill me, but he had some kind of an attack. I took his coronet away. I was going to run.

“Oh, you fool,” he told himself shrilly a moment later. Chandler’s body knelt beside the wheezing fat lump, taking its pulse. The faint, fitful throb meant nothing to Chandler; probably meant nothing to Rosie either, for his body stood up, hesitated, shook its head. “You’ve done it now,” he sobbed, and was surprised to find he was weeping real tears. “Oh, love, why? I could have taken care of Koitska—somehow—No, maybe I couldn’t,” he said frantically, breaking down. “I don’t know what to do. Do you have any ideas—outside of running?”

It took him several seconds to write the one word, but it was really all he could find to write. No.

His lips twisted as his eyes read the word. “Well,” he said practically, “I guess that’s the end, love. I mean, I give up.”

He got up, turned around the room. “I don’t know,” he told himself worriedly. “There might be a chance—if we could hush this up. I’d better get a doctor. He’ll have to use your body, so don’t be surprised if there’s someone and it isn’t me. Maybe he can pull Andrei through. Maybe Andrei’ll forgive you then—Or if he dies,” Chandler’s voice schemed as his eyes stared at the rasping motionless hulk, “we can say you broke down the door to help him. Only you’ll have to put his coronet back on, so it won’t look suspicious. Besides that will keep anyone from occupying him. Do that, love. Hurry.” And he was free.

Gingerly Chandler crossed the floor.

He did not like to touch the dying animal that wheezed before him, liked even less to give it back the weapon that, if it had only a few moments of sentience again, it would use to kill him. But the girl was right. Without the helmet any wandering curious exec might possess Koitska himself. The helmet would shield him from—

Would shield anyone from—

Would shield Chandler himself from possession if he used it!

He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray, luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath.

* * * *

He did not hesitate then either.

He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned every step, in long detail, over many years. Chandler for at least a few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground, the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world would know well how to use.

Chandler also knew. He was a weapon. He might die—but it was not a great thing to die, millions had done it for nothing under the rule of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill them.

He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation. It had had to be there.

It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.

He had only to pull one switch—that one there—and power would cease to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only humans. In five minutes he could destroy enough parts so that it would be at least a week’s work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in Honolulu—somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of their chance—could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.

Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to build.

He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for starting that up by remote control.

He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks of transistors, and paused to think.

He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this installation—not yet—not until he had used it. He remembered to sit down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.

There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned to his own long enough to barricade the door—it had a strong-looking lock, but he shouldered furniture against it too—and then he went up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water, under a mind-controlled plane, to the island of Hilo.

There had to be someone near the stand-by installation.

He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was desperate; he became frantic; he was on the point of giving up, and then he found—someone? But it was a personality feebler than stricken Koitska’s, a bare swampfire glow.

No matter. He entered it.

* * * *

At once he screamed silently and left it again. He had never known such pain. A terrifying fire in the belly, a thunder past any migraine in the head, a thousand lesser aches and woes in every member. He could not imagine what person lived in such distress; but grimly he forced himself to enter again.

Moaning—it was astonishing how thick and animal-like the man’s voice was—Chandler forced his borrowed body stumbling through the jungle. Time was growing very short. He drove it gasping at an awkward run across the airfield, dodged around one wrecked plane and blundered through the door. The pain was intolerable. He was hardly able to maintain control.

Chandler stretched out the borrowed hand to pick up a heavy wrench even while he thought. But the hand would not grasp. He brought it to the weak, watering eyes. The hand had no fingers. It ended in a ball of scar tissue. The left hand was nearly as misshapen.

Panicked, Chandler retreated from the body in a flash, back to his own; and then he began to think.

It was, it had to be, the creature he had seen in the village of the dead. A leper. One of the few who escaped from the colony at Molokai. Chandler drove himself back to that body and, though it could not work well, he could make it turn a frequency dial, using its clubbed hands like sticks. He could make it throw a switch. He then caused it to place the toothed edge of a rusting saw on the ground and strike at it with its throat in a sort of reverse guillotine. Chandler could not see that he had a choice; he dared not have that creature left where it might be seized the moment he quit its body. It was better dead.

After that it all became easy.

In his own body he destroyed the installation in Oahu. A few minutes at Koitska’s work bench, and he had changed the frequency on his own coronet to transmit on the new band the leper’s touch had given the Hilo equipment.

He worked rapidly and without errors, one ear cocked for the sound of someone coming to threaten what he was doing (the sound never came), impatient to get the job done.

He was very impatient, for when he was done he would be the only exec.

And the execs would be only slaves.

XV

Chandler strolled out of the TWA building, very tired.

It was dawn. His job was done. He carried the coronet, the only working coronet in the world, in his hand. He had spent the night killing, killing, killing, and blood had washed away his passions; he was spent. He had killed every exec he could find, in widening circles from the building where his body lay. He had slit his dozen throats and fired bullets into his hundred hearts and hundred brains; he had entered bodies only long enough to feel for a coronet, and if it was there the body was doomed; and he stopped only when it occurred to him he wasn’t even doing that much any more. He had probably killed some dozens of slaves, as well as all the execs in reach. And when he stopped the orgy of killing he had made one last search of the nearer portions of the island and found no one alive, and he had then realized that one of the closest execs had been Rosalie Pan.

He knew that in a while he would feel very badly for having killed that girl (which could she have been? The one with the shotgun in the mouth? The one whose intestines he had spilled with a silver letteropener in a whim of hara-kiri?), but just now he was too worn.

He was Chandler the giant killer, who had destroyed the creatures who had destroyed a world, but he was all tired out. He poked at the filigree of the coronet absently, as a man might caress the pretty rug which once had been the skin of a tiger that almost killed him. It was all that was left of the exec power. Who held this single coronet still held the world.

Of course, said a sly and treasonable voice in a corner of his mind, the job was not really done.

Not quite. Not all.

The job would not be done until it was impossible for anyone to find enough of the installations to be able to reconstruct them.

And then, said the voice, while Chandler stared at the dawn, listening, what about the good things the exec had done? Would he not be foolish to throw away so casually this one, unique chance to right every imaginable wrong the world might do him?

Chandler went back into the building and brewed some strong black coffee. While it was bubbling on the stove he slipped the coronet back atop his head. Only for a while, he promised. A very little while. He pledged himself solemnly that it would be just long enough to clean up all loose ends—not a moment longer, he pledged. And knew that he was lying.

THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES

Originally published in Future Science Fiction No. 30 (1956).

I

Foraminifera 9

Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz—Excuse me. I mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring, tedious.…

No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give you acts and facts.

First you must know how I am called. My “name” is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I am prepared to fight.) Once the—the tediety of life, as you might say, had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the remaining alternative was flight.

Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety was what I found.

* * * *

I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could be—happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon. And that was, I decreed, the trouble; I could spend my life staring into the viewer, and yet never discover the time that was right for me. There were simply too many eras to choose from. It was like an enormous library in which there must, there had to be, contained the one fact I was looking for—that, lacking an index, I might wear my life away and never find.

“Index!”

I said the word aloud! For, to be sure, it was the answer. I had the freedom of the Learning Lodge, and the index in the reading room could easily find for me just what I wanted.

Splendid, splendid! I almost felt cheerful. I quickly returned the viewer I had been using to the keeper, and received my deposit back. I hurried to the Learning Lodge and fed my specifications into the index, as follows, that is to say: Find me a time in recent past where there is adventure and excitement, where there is a secret, colorful band of desperadoes with whom I can ally myself. I then added two specifications—second, that it should be before the time of the high radiation levels; and first, that it should be after the discovery of anesthesia, in case of accident—and retired to a desk in the reading room to await results.

It took only a few moments, which I occupied in making a list of the gear I wished to take with me. Then there was a hiss and a crackle, and in the receiver of the desk a book appeared. I unzipped the case, took it out, and opened it to the pages marked on the attached reading tape.

I had found my wonderland of adventure!

* * * *

Ah, hours and days of exciting preparation! What a round of packing and buying; what a filling out of forms and a stamping of visas; what an orgy of injections and inoculations and preventive therapy! Merely getting ready for the trip made my pulse race faster and my adrenalin balance rise to the very point of paranoia; it was like being given a true blue new chance to live.

At last I was ready. I stepped into the transmission capsule; set the dials; unlocked the door, stepped out; collapsed the capsule and stored it away in my carry-all; and looked about at my new home.

Pyew! Kwel smell of staleness, of sourness, above all of coldness! It was a close matter then if I would be able to keep from a violent eructative stenosis, as you say. I closed my eyes and remembered warm violets for a moment, and then it was all right.

The coldness was not merely a smell; it was a physical fact. There was a damp grayish substance underfoot which I recognized as snow; and in a hard-surfaced roadway there were a number of wheeled vehicles moving, which caused the liquefying snow to splash about me. I adjusted my coat controls for warmth and deflection, but that was the best I could do. The reek of stale decay remained. Then there were also the buildings, painfully almost vertical. I believe it would not have disturbed me if they had been truly vertical; but many of them were minutes of arc from a true perpendicular, all of them covered with a carbonaceous material which I instantly perceived was an inadvertent deposit from the air. It was a bad beginning!

However, I was not bored.

* * * *

I made my way down the “street,” as you say, toward where a group of young men were walking toward me, five abreast. As I came near, they looked at me with interest and kwel respect, conversing with each other in whispers.

I addressed them: “Sirs, please direct me to the nearest recruiting office, as you call it, for the dread Camorra.”

They stopped and pressed about me, looking at me intently. They were handsomely, though crudely dressed in coats of a striking orange color, and long trousers of an extremely dark material.

I decreed that I might not have made them understand me—it is always probable, it is understood, that a quicknik course in dialects of the past may not give one instant command of spoken communication in the field. I spoke again: “I wish to encounter a representative of the Camorra, in other words the Black Hand, in other words the cruel and sinister Sicilian terrorists named the Mafia. Do you know where these can be found?”

One of them said, “Nay. What’s that jive?”

I puzzled over what he had said for a moment, but in the end decreed that his message was sensefree. As I was about to speak, however, he said suddenly: “Let’s rove, man.” And all five of them walked quickly away a few “yards.” It was quite disappointing. I observed them conferring among themselves, glancing at me, and for a time proposed terminating my venture, for I then believed that it would be better to return “home,” as you say, in order to more adequately research the matter.

* * * *

However, the five young men came toward me again. The one who had spoken before, who I now detected was somewhat taller and fatter than the others, spoke as follows: “You’re wanting the Mafia?” I agreed. He looked at me for a moment. “Are you holding?”

He was inordinately hard to understand. I said, slowly and with patience, “Keska that ‘holding’ say?”

“Money, man. You going to slip us something to help you find these cats?”

“Certainly, money. I have a great quantity of money instantly available,” I rejoined him. This appeared to relieve his mind.

There was a short pause, directly after which this first of the young men spoke: “You’re on, man. Yeah, come with us. What’s to call you?” I queried this last statement, and he expanded: “The name. What’s the name?”

“You may call me Foraminifera 9,” I directed, since I wished to be incognito, as you put it, and we proceeded along the “street.” All five of the young men indicated a desire to serve me, offering indeed to take my carry-all. I rejected this, politely.

I looked about me with lively interest, as you may well believe. Kwel dirt, kwel dinginess, kwel cold! And yet there was a certain charm which I can determine no way of expressing in this language. Acts and facts, of course. I shall not attempt to capture the subjectivity which is the charm, only to transcribe the physical datum—perhaps even data, who knows? My companions, for example: They were in appearance overwrought, looking about them continually, stopping entirely and drawing me with them into the shelter of a “door” when another man, this one wearing blue clothing and a visored hat appeared. Yet they were clearly devoted to me, at that moment, since they had put aside their own projects in order to escort me without delay to the Mafia.

Mafia! Fortunate that I had found them to lead me to the Mafia! For it had been clear in the historical work I had consulted that it was not ultimately easy to gain access to the Mafia. Indeed, so secret were they that I had detected no trace of their existence in other histories of the period. Had I relied only on the conventional work, I might never have known of their great underground struggle against what you term society. It was only in the actual contemporary volume itself, the curiosity titled U.S.A. Confidential by one Lait and one Mortimer, that I had descried that, throughout the world, this great revolutionary organization flexed its tentacles, the plexus within a short distance of where I now stood, battling courageously. With me to help them, what heights might we not attain! Kwel dramatic delight!

My meditations were interrupted. “Boomers!” asserted one of my five escorts in a loud, frightened tone. “Let’s cut, man!” he continued, leading me with them into another entrance. It appeared, as well as I could decree, that the cause of his ejaculative outcry was the discovery of perhaps three, perhaps four, other young men, in coats of the same shiny material as my escorts. The difference was that they were of a different color, being blue.

* * * *

We hastened along a lengthy chamber which was quite dark, immediately after which the large, heavy one opened a way to a serrated incline leading downward. It was extremely dark, I should say. There was also an extreme smell, quite like that of the outer air, but enormously intensified; one would suspect that there was an incomplete combustion of, perhaps, wood or coal, as well as a certain quantity of general decay. At any rate, we reached the bottom of the incline, and my escort behaved quite badly. One of them said to the other four, in these words: “Them jumpers follow us sure. Yeah, there’s much trouble. What’s to prime this guy now and split?”

Instantly they fell upon me with violence. I had fortunately become rather alarmed at their visible emotion of fear, and already had taken from my carry-all a Stollgratz 16, so that I quickly turned it on them. I started to replace the Stollgratz 16 as they fell to the floor, yet I realized that there might be an additional element of danger. Instead of putting the Stollgratz 16 in with the other trade goods, which I had brought to assist me in negotiating with the Mafia, I transferred it to my jacket. It had become clear to me that the five young men of my escort had intended to abduct and rob me—indeed had intended it all along, perhaps having never intended to convoy me to the office of the Mafia. And the other young men, those who wore the blue jackets in place of the orange, were already descending the incline toward me, quite rapidly.

“Stop,” I directed them. “I shall not entrust myself to you until you have given me evidence that you entirely deserve such trust.”

They all halted, regarding me and the Stollgratz 16. I detected that one of them said to another: “That cat’s got a zip.”

The other denied this, saying: “That no zip, man. Yeah, look at them Leopards. Say, you bust them flunkies with that thing?”

I perceived his meaning quite quickly. “You are ‘correct’,” I rejoined. “Are you associated in friendship with them flunkies?”

“Hell, no. Yeah, they’re Leopards and we’re Boomer Dukes. You cool them, you do us much good.” I received this information as indicating that the two socio-economic units were inimical, and unfortunately lapsed into an example of the Bivalent Error. Since p implied not-q, I sloppily assumed that not-q implied r (with, you understand, r being taken as the class of phenomena pertinently favorable to me). This was a very poor construction, and of course resulted in certain difficulties. Qued, after all. I stated:

“Them flunkies offered to conduct me to a recruiting office, as you say, of the Mafia, but instead tried to take from me the much money I am holding.” I then went on to describe to them my desire to attain contact with the said Mafia; meanwhile they descended further and grouped about me in the very little light, examining curiously the motionless figures of the Leopards.

They seemed to be greatly impressed; and at the same time, very much puzzled. Naturally. They looked at the Leopards, and then at me.

They gave every evidence of wishing to help me; but of course if I had not forgotten that one cannot assume from the statements “not-Leopard implies Boomer Duke” and “not-Leopard implies Foraminifera 9” that, qued, “Boomer Duke implies Foraminifera 9”…if I had not forgotten this, I say, I should not have been “deceived.” For in practice they were as little favorable to me as the Leopards. A certain member of their party reached a position behind me.

I quickly perceived that his intention was not favorable, and attempted to turn around in order to discharge at him with the Stollgratz 16, but he was very rapid. He had a metallic cylinder, and with it struck my head, knocking “me” unconscious.

II

Shield 8805

This candy store is called Chris’s. There must be ten thousand like it in the city. A marble counter with perhaps five stools, a display case of cigars and a bigger one of candy, a few dozen girlie magazines hanging by clothespin-sort-of things from wire ropes along the wall. It has a couple of very small glass-topped tables under the magazines. And a juke—I can’t imagine a place like Chris’s without a juke.

I had been sitting around Chris’s for a couple of hours, and I was beginning to get edgy. The reason I was sitting around Chris’s was not that I liked Cokes particularly, but that it was one of the hanging-out places of a juvenile gang called The Leopards, with whom I had been trying to work for nearly a year; and the reason I was becoming edgy was that I didn’t see any of them there.

The boy behind the counter—he had the same first name as I, Walter in both cases, though my last name is Hutner and his is, I believe, something Puerto Rican—the boy behind the counter was dummying up, too. I tried to talk to him, on and off, when he wasn’t busy. He wasn’t busy most of the time; it was too cold for sodas. But he just didn’t want to talk. Now, these kids love to talk. A lot of what they say doesn’t make sense—either bullying, or bragging, or purposeless swearing—but talk is their normal state; when they quiet down it means trouble. For instance, if you ever find yourself walking down Thirty-Fifth Street and a couple of kids pass you, talking, you don’t have to bother looking around; but if they stop talking, turn quickly. You’re about to be mugged. Not that Walt was a mugger—as far as I know; but that’s the pattern of the enclave.

* * * *

So his being quiet was a bad sign. It might mean that a rumble was brewing—and that meant that my work so far had been pretty nearly a failure. Even worse, it might mean that somehow the Leopards had discovered that I had at last passed my examinations and been appointed to the New York City Police Force as a rookie patrolman, Shield 8805.

Trying to work with these kids is hard enough at best. They don’t like outsiders. But they particularly hate cops, and I had been trying for some weeks to decide how I could break the news to them.

The door opened. Hawk stood there. He didn’t look at me, which was a bad sign. Hawk was one of the youngest in the Leopards, a skinny, very dark kid who had been reasonably friendly to me. He stood in the open door, with snow blowing in past him. “Walt. Out here, man.”

It wasn’t me he meant—they call me “Champ,” I suppose because I beat them all shooting eight-ball pool. Walt put down the comic he had been reading and walked out, also without looking at me. They closed the door.

* * * *

Time passed. I saw them through the window, talking to each other, looking at me. It was something, all right. They were scared. That’s bad, because these kids are like wild animals; if you scare them, they hit first—it’s the only way they know to defend themselves. But on the other hand, a rumble wouldn’t scare them—not where they would show it; and finding out about the shield in my pocket wouldn’t scare them, either. They hated cops, as I say; but cops were a part of their environment. It was strange, and baffling.

Walt came back in, and Hawk walked rapidly away. Walt went behind the counter, lit a cigaret, wiped at the marble top, picked up his comic, put it down again and finally looked at me. He said: “Some punk busted Fayo and a couple of the boys. It’s real trouble.”

I didn’t say anything.

He took a puff on his cigaret. “They’re chilled, Champ. Five of them.”

“Chilled? Dead?” It sounded bad; there hadn’t been a real rumble in months, not with a killing.

He shook his head. “Not dead. You’re wanting to see, you go down Gomez’s cellar. Yeah, they’re all stiff but they’re breathing. I be along soon as the old man comes back in the store.”

He looked pretty sick. I left it at that and hurried down the block to the tenement where the Gomez family lived, and then I found out why.

* * * *

They were sprawled on the filthy floor of the cellar like winoes in an alley. Fayo, who ran the gang; Jap; Baker; two others I didn’t know as well. They were breathing, as Walt had said, but you just couldn’t wake them up.

Hawk and his twin brother, Yogi, were there with them, looking scared. I couldn’t blame them. The kids looked perfectly all right, but it was obvious that they weren’t. I bent down and smelled, but there was no trace of liquor or anything else on their breath.

I stood up. “We’d better get a doctor.”

“Nay. You call the meat wagon, and a cop comes right with it, man,” Yogi said, and his brother nodded.

I laid off that for a moment. “What happened?”

Hawk said, “You know that witch Gloria, goes with one of the Boomer Dukes? She opened her big mouth to my girl. Yeah, opened her mouth and much bad talk came out. Said Fayo primed some jumper with a zip and the punk cooled him, and then a couple of the Boomers moved in real cool. Now they got the punk with the zip and much other stuff, real stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Hawk looked worried. He finally admitted that he didn’t know what kind of stuff, but it was something dangerous in the way of weapons. It had been the “zip” that had knocked out the five Leopards.

I sent Hawk out to the drug-store for smelling salts and containers of hot black coffee—not that I knew what I was doing, of course, but they were dead set against calling an ambulance. And the boys didn’t seem to be in any particular danger, only sleep.

However, even then I knew that this kind of trouble was something I couldn’t handle alone. It was a toss-up what to do—the smart thing was to call the precinct right then and there; but I couldn’t help feeling that that would make the Leopards clam up hopelessly. The six months I had spent trying to work with them had not been too successful—a lot of the other neighborhood workers had made a lot more progress than I—but at least they were willing to talk to me; and they wouldn’t talk to uniformed police.

Besides, as soon as I had been sworn in, the day before, I had begun the practice of carrying my .38 at all times, as the regulations say. It was in my coat. There was no reason for me to feel I needed it. But I did. If there was any truth to the story of a “zip” knocking out the boys—and I had all five of them right there for evidence—I had the unpleasant conviction that there was real trouble circulating around East Harlem that afternoon.

“Champ. They all waking up!”

I turned around, and Hawk was right. The five Leopards, all of a sudden, were stirring and opening their eyes. Maybe the smelling salts had something to do with it, but I rather think not.

We fed them some of the black coffee, still reasonably hot. They were scared; they were more scared than anything I had ever seen in those kids before. They could hardly talk at first, and when finally they came around enough to tell me what had happened I could hardly believe them. This man had been small and peculiar, and he had been looking for, of all things, the “Mafia,” which he had read about in history books—old history books.

Well, it didn’t make sense, unless you were prepared to make a certain assumption that I refused to make. Man from Mars? Nonsense. Or from the future? Equally ridiculous.…

* * * *

Then the five Leopards, reviving, began to walk around. The cellar was dark and dirty, and packed with the accumulation of generations in the way of old furniture and rat-inhabited mattresses and piles of newspapers; it wasn’t surprising that we hadn’t noticed the little gleaming thing that had apparently rolled under an abandoned potbelly stove.

Jap picked it up, squalled, dropped it and yelled for me.

I touched it cautiously, and it tingled. It wasn’t painful, but it was an odd, unexpected feeling—perhaps you’ve come across the “buzzers” that novelty stores sell which, concealed in the palm, give a sudden, surprising tingle when the owner shakes hands with an unsuspecting friend. It was like that, like a mild electric shock. I picked it up and held it. It gleamed brightly, with a light of its own; it was round; it made a faint droning sound; I turned it over, and it spoke to me. It said in a friendly, feminine whisper: Warning, this portatron attuned only to Bailey’s Beam percepts. Remain quiescent until the Adjuster comes.

That settled it. Any time a lit-up cue ball talks to me, I refer the matter to higher authority. I decided on the spot that I was heading for the precinct house, no matter what the Leopards thought.

But when I turned and headed for the stairs, I couldn’t move. My feet simply would not lift off the ground. I twisted, and stumbled, and fell in a heap; I yelled for help, but it didn’t do any good. The Leopards couldn’t move either.

We were stuck there in Gomez’s cellar, as though we had been nailed to the filthy floor.

III

Cow

When I see what this flunky has done to them Leopards, I call him a cool cat right away. But then we jump him and he ain’t so cool. Angel and Tiny grab him under the arms and I’m grabbing the stuff he’s carrying. Yeah, we get out of there.

There’s bulls on the street, so we cut through the back and over the fences. Tiny don’t like that. He tells me, “Cow. What’s to leave this cat here? He must weigh eighteen tons.” “You’re bringing him,” I tell him, so he shuts up. That’s how it is in the Boomer Dukes. When Cow talks, them other flunkies shut up fast.

We get him in the loft over the R. and I. Social Club. Damn, but it’s cold up there. I can hear the pool balls clicking down below so I pass the word to keep quiet. Then I give this guy the foot and pretty soon he wakes up.

As soon as I talk to him a little bit I figure we had luck riding with us when we see them Leopards. This cat’s got real bad stuff. Yeah, I never hear of anything like it. But what it takes to make a fight he’s got. I take my old pistol and give it to Tiny. Hell, it makes him happy and what’s it cost me? Because what this cat’s got makes that pistol look like something for babies.

* * * *

First he don’t want to talk. “Stomp him,” I tell Angel, but he’s scared. He says, “Nay. This is a real weird cat, Cow. I’m for cutting out of here.”

“Stomp him,” I tell him again, pretty quiet, but he does it. He don’t have to tell me this cat’s weird, but when the cat gets the foot a couple of times he’s willing to talk. Yeah, he talks real funny, but that don’t matter to me. We take all the loot out of his bag, and I make this cat tell me what it’s to do. Damn, I don’t know what he’s talking about one time out of six, but I know enough. Even Tiny catches on after a while, because I see him put down that funky old pistol I gave him that he’s been loving up.

I’m feeling pretty good. I wish a couple of them chicken Leopards would turn up so I could show them what they missed out on. Yeah, I’ll take on them, and the Black Dogs, and all the cops in the world all at once—that’s how good I’m feeling. I feel so good that I don’t even like it when Angel lets out a yell and comes up with a wad of loot. It’s like I want to prime the U.S. Mint for chickenfeed, I don’t want it to come so easy.

But money’s on hand, so I take it off Angel and count it. This cat was really loaded; there must be a thousand dollars here.

I take a handful of it and hand it over to Angel real cool. “Get us some charge,” I tell him. “There’s much to do and I’m feeling ready for some charge to do it with.”

“How many sticks you want me to get?” he asks, holding on to that money like he never saw any before.

I tell him: “Sticks? Nay. I’m for real stuff tonight. You find Four-Eye and get us some horse.” Yeah, he digs me then. He looks like he’s pretty scared and I know he is, because this punk hasn’t had anything bigger than reefers in his life. But I’m for busting a couple of caps of H, and what I do he’s going to do. He takes off to find Four-Eye and the rest of us get busy on this cat with the funny artillery until he gets back.

* * * *

It’s like I’m a million miles down Dream Street. Hell, I don’t want to wake up.

But the H is wearing off and I’m feeling mean. Damn, I’ll stomp my mother if she talks big to me right then.

I’m the first one on my feet and I’m looking for trouble. The whole place is full now. Angel must have passed the word to everybody in the Dukes, but I don’t even remember them coming in. There’s eight or ten cats lying around on the floor now, not even moving. This won’t do, I decide.

If I’m on my feet, they’re all going to be on their feet. I start to give them the foot and they begin to move. Even the weirdie must’ve had some H. I’m guessing that somebody slipped him some to see what would happen, because he’s off on Cloud Number Nine. Yeah, they’re feeling real mean when they wake up, but I handle them cool. Even that little flunky Sailor starts to go up against me but I look at him cool and he chickens. Angel and Pete are real sick, with the shakes and the heaves, but I ain’t waiting for them to feel good. “Give me that loot,” I tell Tiny, and he hands over the stuff we took off the weirdie. I start to pass out the stuff.

“What’s to do with this stuff?” Tiny asks me, looking at what I’m giving him.

I tell him, “Point it and shoot it.” He isn’t listening when the weirdie’s telling me what the stuff is. He wants to know what it does, but I don’t know that. I just tell him, “Point it and shoot it, man.” I’ve sent one of the cats out for drinks and smokes and he’s back by then, and we’re all beginning to feel a little better, only still pretty mean. They begin to dig me.

“Yeah, it sounds like a rumble,” one of them says, after a while.

I give him the nod, cool. “You’re calling it,” I tell him. “There’s much fighting tonight. The Boomer Dukes is taking on the world!”

IV

Sandy Van Pelt

The front office thought the radio car would give us a break in spot news coverage, and I guessed as wrong as they did. I had been covering City Hall long enough, and that’s no place to build a career—the Press Association is very tight there, there’s not much chance of getting any kind of exclusive story because of the sharing agreements. So I put in for the radio car. It meant taking the night shift, but I got it.

I suppose the front office got their money’s worth, because they played up every lousy auto smash the radio car covered as though it were the story of the Second Coming, and maybe it helped circulation. But I had been on it for four months and, wouldn’t you know it, there wasn’t a decent murder, or sewer explosion, or running gun fight between six P.M. and six A.M. any night I was on duty in those whole four months. What made it worse, the kid they gave me as photographer—Sol Detweiler, his name was—couldn’t drive worth a damn, so I was stuck with chauffeuring us around.

We had just been out to LaGuardia to see if it was true that Marilyn Monroe was sneaking into town with Aly Khan on a night plane—it wasn’t—and we were coming across the Triborough Bridge, heading south toward the East River Drive, when the office called. I pulled over and parked and answered the radiophone.

It was Harrison, the night City Editor. “Listen, Sandy, there’s a gang fight in East Harlem. Where are you now?”

It didn’t sound like much to me, I admit. “There’s always a gang fight in East Harlem, Harrison. I’m cold and I’m on my way down to Night Court, where there may or may not be a story; but at least I can get my feet warm.”

“Where are you now?” Harrison wasn’t fooling. I looked at Sol, on the seat next to me; I thought I had heard him snicker. He began to fiddle with his camera without looking at me. I pushed the “talk” button and told Harrison where I was. It pleased him very much; I wasn’t more than six blocks from where this big rumble was going on, he told me, and he made it very clear that I was to get on over there immediately.

I pulled away from the curb, wondering why I had ever wanted to be a newspaperman; I could have made five times as much money for half as much work in an ad agency. To make it worse, I heard Sol chuckle again. The reason he was so amused was that when we first teamed up I made the mistake of telling him what a hot reporter I was, and I had been visibly cooling off before his eyes for a better than four straight months.

Believe me, I was at the very bottom of my career that night. For five cents cash I would have parked the car, thrown the keys in the East River, and taken the first bus out of town. I was absolutely positive that the story would be a bust and all I would get out of it would be a bad cold from walking around in the snow.

And if that doesn’t show you what a hot newspaperman I really am, nothing will.

* * * *

Sol began to act interested as we reached the corner Harrison had told us to go to. “That’s Chris’s,” he said, pointing at a little candy store. “And that must be the pool hall where the Leopards hang out.”

“You know this place?”

He nodded. “I know a man named Walter Hutner. He and I went to school together, until he dropped out, couple weeks ago. He quit college to go to the Police Academy. He wanted to be a cop.”

I looked at him. “You’re going to college?”

“Sure, Mr. Van Pelt. Wally Hutner was a sociology major—I’m journalism—but we had a couple of classes together. He had a part-time job with a neighborhood council up here, acting as a sort of adult adviser for one of the gangs.”

“They need advice on how to be gangs?”

“No, that’s not it, Mr. Van Pelt. The councils try to get their workers accepted enough to bring the kids in to the social centers, that’s all. They try to get them off the streets. Wally was working with a bunch called the Leopards.”

I shut him up. “Tell me about it later!” I stopped the car and rolled down a window, listening.

Yes, there was something going on all right. Not at the corner Harrison had mentioned—there wasn’t a soul in sight in any direction. But I could hear what sounded like gunfire and yelling, and, my God, even bombs going off! And it wasn’t too far away. There were sirens, too—squad cars, no doubt.

“It’s over that way!” Sol yelled, pointing. He looked as though he was having the time of his life, all keyed up and delighted. He didn’t have to tell me where the noise was coming from, I could hear for myself. It sounded like D-Day at Normandy, and I didn’t like the sound of it.

I made a quick decision and slammed on the brakes, then backed the car back the way we had come. Sol looked at me. “What—”

“Local color,” I explained quickly. “This the place you were talking about? Chris’s? Let’s go in and see if we can find some of these hoodlums.”

“But, Mr. Van Pelt, all the pictures are over where the fight’s going on!”

“Pictures, shmictures! Come on!” I got out in front of the candy store, and the only thing he could do was follow me.

Whatever they were doing, they were making the devil’s own racket about it. Now that I looked a little more closely I could see that they must have come this way; the candy store’s windows were broken; every other street light was smashed; and what had at first looked like a flight of steps in front of a tenement across the street wasn’t anything of the kind—it was a pile of bricks and stone from the false-front cornice on the roof! How in the world they had managed to knock that down I had no idea; but it sort of convinced me that, after all, Harrison had been right about this being a big fight. Over where the noise was coming from there were queer flashing lights in the clouds overhead—reflecting exploding flares, I thought.

* * * *

No, I didn’t want to go over where the pictures were. I like living. If it had been a normal Harlem rumble with broken bottles and knives, or maybe even home-made zip guns—I might have taken a chance on it, but this was for real.

“Come on,” I yelled to Sol, and we pushed the door open to the candy store.

At first there didn’t seem to be anyone in, but after we called a couple times a kid of about sixteen, coffee-colored and scared-looking, stuck his head up above the counter.

“You. What’s going on here?” I demanded. He looked at me as if I was some kind of a two-headed monster. “Come on, kid. Tell us what happened.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Van Pelt.” Sol cut in ahead of me and began talking to the kid in Spanish. It got a rise out of him; at least Sol got an answer. My Spanish is only a little bit better than my Swahili, so I missed what was going on, except for an occasional word. But Sol was getting it all. He reported: “He knows Walt; that’s what’s bothering him. He says Walt and some of the Leopards are in a basement down the street, and there’s something wrong with them. I can’t exactly figure out what, but—”

“The hell with them. What about that?”

“You mean the fight? Oh, it’s a big one all right, Mr. Van Pelt. It’s a gang called the Boomer Dukes. They’ve got hold of some real guns somewhere—I can’t exactly understand what kind of guns he means, but it sounds like something serious. He says they shot that parapet down across the street. Gosh, Mr. Van Pelt, you’d think it’d take a cannon for something like that. But it has something to do with Walt Hutner and all the Leopards, too.”

I said enthusiastically, “Very good, Sol. That’s fine. Find out where the cellar is, and we’ll go interview Hutner.”

“But Mr. Van Pelt, the pictures—”

“Sorry. I have to call the office.” I turned my back on him and headed for the car.

* * * *

The noise was louder, and the flashes in the sky brighter—it looked as though they were moving this way. Well, I didn’t have any money tied up in the car, so I wasn’t worried about leaving it in the street. And somebody’s cellar seemed like a very good place to be. I called the office and started to tell Harrison what we’d found out; but he stopped me short. “Sandy, where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to call you for—Listen, we got a call from Fordham. They’ve detected radiation coming from the East Side—it’s got to be what’s going on up there! Radiation, do you hear me? That means atomic weapons! Now, you get th—”

Silence.

“Hello?” I cried, and then remembered to push the talk button. “Hello? Harrison, you there?”

Silence. The two-way radio was dead.

I got out of the car; and maybe I understood what had happened to the radio and maybe I didn’t. Anyway, there was something new shining in the sky. It hung below the clouds in parts, and I could see it through the bottom of the clouds in the middle; it was a silvery teacup upside down, a hemisphere over everything.

It hadn’t been there two minutes before.

* * * *

I heard firing coming closer and closer. Around a corner a bunch of cops came, running, turning, firing; running, turning and firing again. It was like the retreat from Caporetto in miniature. And what was chasing them? In a minute I saw. Coming around the corner was a kid with a lightning-blue satin jacket and two funny-looking guns in his hand; there was a silvery aura around him, the same color as the lights in the sky; and I swear I saw those cops’ guns hit him twenty times in twenty seconds, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Sol and the kid from the candy store were right beside me. We took another look at the one-man army that was coming down the street toward us, laughing and prancing and firing those odd-looking guns. And then the three of us got out of there, heading for the cellar. Any cellar.

V

Priam’s Maw

My occupation was “short-order cook”, as it is called. I practiced it in a locus entitled “The White Heaven,” established at Fifth Avenue, Newyork, between 1949 and 1962 C.E. I had created rapport with several of the aboriginals, who addressed me as Bessie, and presumed to approve the manner in which I heated specimens of minced ruminant quadruped flesh (deceased to be sure). It was a satisfactory guise, although tiring.

Using approved techniques, I was compiling anthropometric data while “I” was, as they say, “brewing coffee.” I deem the probability nearly conclusive that it was the double duty, plus the datum that, as stated, “I” was physically tired, which caused me to overlook the first signal from my portatron. Indeed, I might have overlooked the second as well except that the aboriginal named Lester stated: “Hey, Bessie. Ya got an alarm clock in ya pocketbook?” He had related the annunciator signal of the portatron to the only significant datum in his own experience which it resembled, the ringing of a bell.

I annotated his dossier to provide for his removal in case it eventuated that he had made an undesirable intuit (this proved unnecessary) and retired to the back of the “store” with my carry-all. On identifying myself to the portatron, I received information that it was attuned to a Bailey’s Beam, identified as Foraminifera 9-Hart, who had refused treatment for systemic weltschmerz and instead sought to relieve his boredom by adventuring into this era.

I thereupon compiled two recommendations which are attached: 2, a proposal for reprimand to the Keeper of the Learning Lodge for failure to properly annotate a volume entitled U.S.A. Confidential and, 1, a proposal for reprimand to the Transport Executive, for permitting Bailey’s Beam-class personnel access to temporal transport. Meanwhile, I left the “store” by a rear exit and directed myself toward the locus of the transmitting portatron.

* * * *

I had proximately left when I received an additional information, namely that developed weapons were being employed in the area toward which I was directing. This provoked that I abandon guise entirely. I went transparent and quickly examined all aboriginals within view, to determine if any required removal; but none had observed this. I rose to perhaps seventy-five meters and sped at full atmospheric driving speed toward the source of the alarm. As I crossed a “park” I detected the drive of another Adjuster, whom I determined to be Alephplex Priam’s Maw—that is, my father. He bespoke me as follows: “Hurry, Besplex Priam’s Maw. That crazy Foraminifera has been captured by aboriginals and they have taken his weapons away from him.” “Weapons?” I inquired. “Yes, weapons,” he stated, “for Foraminifera 9-Hart brought with him more than forty-three kilograms of weapons, ranging up to and including electronic.”

I recorded this datum and we landed, went opaque in the shelter of a doorway and examined our percepts. “Quarantine?” asked my father, and I had to agree. “Quarantine,” I voted, and he opened his carry-all and set-up a quarantine shield on the console. At once appeared the silvery quarantine dome, and the first step of our adjustment was completed. Now to isolate, remove, replace.

Queried Alephplex: “An Adjuster?” I observed the phenomenon to which he was referring. A young, dark aboriginal was coming toward us on the “street,” driving a group of police aboriginals before him. He was armed, it appeared, with a fission-throwing weapon in one hand and some sort of tranquilizer—I deem it to have been a Stollgratz 16—in the other; moreover, he wore an invulnerability belt. The police aboriginals were attempting to strike him with missile weapons, which the belt deflected. I neutralized his shield, collapsed him and stored him in my carry-all. “Not an Adjuster,” I asserted my father, but he had already perceived that this was so. I left him to neutralize and collapse the police aboriginals while I zeroed in on the portatron. I did not envy him his job with the police aboriginals, for many of them were “dead,” as they say. It required the most delicate adjustments.

* * * *

The portatron developed to be in a “cellar” and with it were some nine or eleven aboriginals which it had immobilized pending my arrival. One spoke to me thus: “Young lady, please call the cops! We’re stuck here, and—” I did not wait to hear what he wished to say further, but neutralized and collapsed him with the other aboriginals. The portatron apologized for having caused me inconvenience; but of course it was not its fault, so I did not neutralize it. Using it for d-f, I quickly located the culprit, Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, nearby. He spoke despairingly in the dialect of the locus, “Besplex Priam’s Maw, for God’s sake get me out of this!” “Out!” I spoke to him, “you’ll wish you never were ‘born,’ as they say!” I neutralized but did not collapse him, pending instructions from the Central Authority. The aboriginals who were with him, however, I did collapse.

Presently arrived Alephplex, along with four other Adjusters who had arrived before the quarantine shield made it not possible for anyone else to enter the disturbed area. Each one of us had had to abandon guise, so that this locus of Newyork 1939-1986 must require new Adjusters to replace us—a matter to be charged against the guilt of Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey’s Beam, I deem.

* * * *

This concluded Steps 3 and 2 of our Adjustment, the removal and the isolation of the disturbed specimens. We are transmitting same disturbed specimens to you under separate cover herewith, in neutralized and collapsed state, for the manufacture of simulacra thereof. One regrets to say that they number three thousand eight hundred forty-six, comprising all aboriginals within the quarantined area who had first-hand knowledge of the anachronisms caused by Foraminifera’s importation of contemporary weapons into this locus.

Alephplex and the four other Adjusters are at present reconstructing such physical damage as was caused by the use of said weapons. Simultaneously, while I am preparing this report, “I” am maintaining the quarantine shield which cuts off this locus, both physically and temporally, from the remainder of its environment. I deem that if replacements for the attached aboriginals can be fabricated quickly enough, there will be no significant outside percept of the shield itself, or of the happenings within it—that is, by maintaining a quasi-stasis of time while the repairs are being made, an outside aboriginal observer will see, at most, a mere flicker of silver in the sky. All Adjusters here present are working as rapidly as we can to make sure the shield can be withdrawn, before so many aboriginals have observed it as to make it necessary to replace the entire city with simulacra. We do not wish a repetition of the California incident, after all.

MY LADY GREENSLEEVES

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1957.

CHAPTER I

His name was Liam O’Leary and there was something stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn’t found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn’t been able to detect the scent of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to reach his captaincy.

And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.

He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she couldn’t adjust herself to it, now that she was in.

He demanded: “Why wouldn’t you mop out your cell?”

The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: “Watch it, auntie!”

O’Leary shook his head. “Let her talk, Sodaro.” It said in the Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration: “Detainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.” And O’Leary was a man who lived by the book.

She burst out: “I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, ‘Slush up, sister!’ And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and told them I refused to mop.”

The block guard guffawed. “Wipe talk—that’s what she was telling you to do. Cap’n, you know what’s funny about this? This Bradley is—”

“Shut up, Sodaro.”

Captain O’leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for him to judge their cases.

He said patiently: “Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your cell. If you didn’t understand what Mathias was talking about, you should have asked her. Now I’m warning you, the next time—”

“Hey, Cap’n, wait!” Sodaro was looking alarmed. “This isn’t a first offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in the mess-hall.” He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. “The block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench, and she claimed the same business—said she didn’t understand when the other one asked her to move along.” He added virtuously: “The guard warned her then that next time she’d get the Greensleeves for sure.”

Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: “I don’t care. I don’t care!”

O’Leary stopped her. “That’s enough! Three days in Block O!”

It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted to say “sir” every time she spoke to him, but he couldn’t keep it up forever and he certainly couldn’t overlook hysteria. And hysteria was clearly the next step for her.

All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet to Sodaro and said absently: “Too bad a kid like her has to be here. What’s she in for?”

“You didn’t know, Cap’n?” Sodaro leered. “She’s in for conspiracy to violate the Categoried Class laws. Don’t waste your time with her, Cap’n. She’s a figger-lover!”

Captain O’Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked “Civil Service.” But it didn’t wash the taste out of his mouth, the smell from his nose.

What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the yard, wondering about her. She’d had every advantage—decent Civil Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything, she had had a better environment than O’Leary himself, and look what she had made of it.

The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.

Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the most basic physical necessities—and not even always then.

But this was desirable, for the more specialists, the higher the degree of civilization. The ultimate should be the complete segregation of each specialization—social and genetic measures to make them breed true, because the unspecialized man is an uncivilized man, or at any rate he does not advance civilization. And letting the specializations mix would produce genetic undesirables: clerk-laborer or Professional-GI misfits, for example, being only half specialized, would be good at no specialization.

And the basis of this specialization society was: “The aptitude groups are the true races of mankind.” Putting it into law was only the legal enforcement of a demonstrable fact.

“Evening, Cap’n.” A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and touched his cap as O’Leary passed by.

“Evening.”

O’Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he’d noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn’t much to sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate’s job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain’s job to notice when they didn’t.

There wasn’t anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position—better than post-office clerk, not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He was proud of it. It was right that he should be proud of it. He was civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to do a good, clean civil-service job.

If he had happened to be born a fig—a clerk, he corrected himself—if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been proud of that, too. There wasn’t anything wrong with being a clerk—or a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer, for that matter.

Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren’t smart, maybe, but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O’Leary was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a touch of envy how comfortable it must be to be a wipe—a laborer. No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and loaf, work and loaf.

Of course, he wouldn’t really want that kind of life, because he was Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that weren’t meant to be—

“Evening, Cap’n.”

He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of maintaining the prison’s car pool, just inside the gate.

“Evening, Conan,” he said.

Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the cars going—and, O’Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.

So why didn’t this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?

CHAPTER II

Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by different names. Old Marquette called it “the canary;” Louisiana State called it “the red hats;” elsewhere it was called “the hole,” “the snake pit,” “the Klondike.” When you’re in it, you don’t much care what it is called; it is a place for punishment.

And punishment is what you get.

Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other community, it had its leading citizens…two of them. Their names were Sauer and Flock.

Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor below, when she heard the yelling.

“Owoo-o-o,” screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and “Yow-w-w!” shrieked Flock at the other.

The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on the outside.

The inside guard muttered: “Wipe rats! They’re getting on my nerves.”

The outside guard shrugged.

“Detail, halt!” The two guards turned to see what was coming in as the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. “Here they are,” Sodaro told them. “Take good care of ’em, will you? Especially the lady—she’s going to like it here, because there’s plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her company.” He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O guards.

The outside guard said sourly: “A woman, for God’s sake. Now O’Leary knows I hate it when there’s a woman in here. It gets the others all riled up.”

“Let them in,” the inside guard told him. “The others are riled up already.”

Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough, against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a rule that, even in Block O, you didn’t leave the tangler fields on all the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner’s restraining garment removed.

Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was like walking through molasses.

The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. “Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell.” He steered her in the right direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot. “Put that on. Being as you’re a lady, we won’t tie it up, but the rules say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She’s crying!” He shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry in the Greensleeves.

However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann’s shoulders were shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge to retch.

* * * *

Sauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were laborers—“wipes,” for short—or, at any rate, they had been once. They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big, grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf.

Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. “Hey, Flock!”

“What do you want, Sauer?” called Flock from his own cell.

“We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so as not to disturb the lady!” He screeched with howling, maniacal laughter. “Anyway, if we don’t cut this out, they’ll get us in trouble, Flock!”

“Oh, you think so?” shrieked Flock. “Jeez, I wish you hadn’t said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I’m so scared, I’m gonna have to yell!”

The howling started all over again.

The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. “Say, you want to take a turn in here for a while?”

“Uh-uh.” The outside guard shook his head.

“You’re yellow,” the inside guard said moodily. “Ah, I don’t know why I don’t quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I’ll come in and beat your head off!”

“Ee-ee-ee!” screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. “I’m scared!” Then he grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. “Don’t you know you can’t hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?”

“Shut up!” yelled the inside guard.

Sue-Ann Bradley’s weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They weren’t even—even human, she told herself miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!

Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen’s rebellion against the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was good that Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious system—

But did they have to scream so?

The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping and she didn’t even care who heard her any more. Senseless!

It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then she hadn’t been a prisoner very long.

CHAPTER III

“I smell trouble,” said O’Leary to the warden.

“Trouble? Trouble?” Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the last decent job he would have in his life.

“Trouble? What trouble?”

O’Leary shrugged. “Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.”

The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: “O’Leary, what did you want to worry me for? There’s nothing wrong with playing ball in the yard. That’s what recreation periods are for.”

“You don’t see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes don’t mix; it isn’t natural. And there are other things.”

O’Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that it didn’t smell right?

“For instance— Well, there’s Aunt Mathias in the women’s block. She’s a pretty good old girl—that’s why she’s the block orderly. She’s a lifer, she’s got no place to go, she gets along with the other women. But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn’t understand. Now Mathias wouldn’t—”

The warden raised his hand. “Please, O’Leary, don’t bother me about that kind of stuff.” He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O’Leary, then dropped a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the scalding heat.

He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.

“O’Leary, you’re a guard captain, right? And I’m your warden. You have your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is just as important as my job,” he said piously. “Everybody’s job is just as important as everybody else’s, right? But we have to stick to our own jobs. We don’t want to try to pass.”

O’Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was that for the warden to talk to him?

“Excuse the expression, O’Leary,” the warden said anxiously. “I mean, after all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ right?” He was a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. “You know you don’t want to worry about my end of running the prison. And I don’t want to worry about yours. You see?” And he folded his hands and smiled like a civil-service Buddha.

O’Leary choked back his temper. “Warden, I’m telling you that there’s trouble coming up. I smell the signs.”

“Handle it, then!” snapped the warden, irritated at last.

“But suppose it’s too big to handle. Suppose—”

“It isn’t,” the warden said positively. “Don’t borrow trouble with all your supposing, O’Leary.” He sipped the remains of his coffee, made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into it this time.

He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.

“Well, then,” he said at last. “You just remember what I’ve told you tonight, O’Leary, and we’ll get along fine. ‘Specialization is the—’ Oh, curse the thing.”

His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.

That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O’Leary; they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.

“Hello,” barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. “What the devil do you want? Don’t you know I’m— What? You did what? You’re going to WHAT?”

He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror. Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like clamshells in a steamer.

“O’Leary,” he said faintly, “my mistake.”

And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his fingers.

The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.

Five minutes before, he hadn’t been anywhere near the phone and it didn’t look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good. Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the hard-timers of the Greensleeves.

His name was Flock.

He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him, thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the face of an agonized man.

The outside guard bellowed: “Okay, okay. Take ten!”

Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.

“Rest period” it was called—in the rule book. The inmates had a less lovely term for it.

* * * *

At the guard’s yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.

Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn’t cry out. Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly, for the eddy currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.

The guard peered genially into her cell. “You’re okay, auntie.” She proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds. He didn’t have to untie her and practically stand over her while she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was grateful. At least she didn’t have to live quite like a fig—like an underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.

Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: “What the hell’s the matter with you?” He opened the door of the cell with an asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.

Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.

The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe. Couldn’t it? But he could see Flock’s face and the agony in it was real enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: “Cramps. I—I—”

“Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.” The guard lumbered around Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people didn’t believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning. Almost like meat scorching.

It wasn’t pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if he didn’t make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.

Every time but this.

For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.

The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn’t been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there was something that glinted and smoked.

“All right,” croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut with pain.

But it wasn’t the tears that held the guard; it was the shining, smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God knows how, hidden inside the green-sleeved jacket God knows how—filed, filed to sharpness over endless hours.

No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.

“All right,” whispered Flock, “just walk out the door and you won’t get hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won’t get hurt, so tell him not to, you hear?”

He was nearly fainting with the pain.

But he hadn’t let go.

He didn’t let go. And he didn’t stop.

CHAPTER IV

It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing the two bound deck guards.

Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. “Hey, Warden!” he said, and the voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and hating. “Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt himself real bad and he needs a doctor.” He gestured playfully at the guards with the shiv. “I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?”

And he snapped the connection.

O’Leary said: “Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!”

The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated, and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison operator: “Get me the governor—fast”

Riot!

The word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.

It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.

It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a Red Alert that was real.

It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.

Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.

A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in every limb and class. In its ten million homes, in its hundreds of thousands of public places, the city-state’s people shook under the impact of the news from the prison.

For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.

* * * *

Forty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn’t any alert scheduled for tonight; no, they didn’t know where Daddy was going; no, the kids couldn’t get up yet—it was the middle of the night.

And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing area to hear.

They caught the words from a distance—not quite correctly. “Riot!” gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. “The wipes! I told Charlie they’d get out of hand and—Alys, we aren’t safe. You know how they are about GI women! I’m going right home and get a club and stand right by the door and—”

“Club!” snapped Alys, radar-scope-sergeant, with two children querulously awake in her nursery at home. “What in God’s name is the use of a club? You can’t hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You’d better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun—you’ll need it before this night is over.”

But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.

The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off…and they were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers in each ’copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.

They were ready for the breakout.

But there wasn’t any breakout.

The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.

The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again. They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed. The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.

North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded tenements of the laborers’ quarters, the wipes shouted from window to window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.

“The whole bloody thing’s going to blow up!” a helicopter bombardier yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the whirling blades. “Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout from the Jug’s going to start a fight like you never saw and we’ll be right in the middle of it!”

He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared. No mixing. That was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There’s no harm in a family fight—and aren’t all mechanics a family, aren’t all laborers a clan, aren’t all clerks and office workers related by closer ties than blood or skin?

But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever known.

But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn’t seeming to come.

* * * *

The Jug itself was coming to a boil.

Honor Block A, relaxed and easy at the end of another day, found itself shaken alert by strange goings-on. First there was the whir and roar of the Air Force overhead. Trouble. Then there was the sudden arrival of extra guards, doubling the normal complement—day-shift guards, summoned away from their comfortable civil-service homes at some urgent call. Trouble for sure.

Honor Block A wasn’t used to trouble. A Block was as far from the Greensleeves of O Block as you could get and still be in the Jug. Honor Block A belonged to the prison’s halfbreeds—the honor prisoners, the trusties who did guards’ work because there weren’t enough guards to go around. They weren’t Apaches or Piutes; they were camp-following Injuns who had sold out for the white man’s firewater. The price of their service was privilege—many privileges.

Item: TV sets in every cell. Item: Hobby tools, to make gadgets for the visitor trade—the only way an inmate could earn an honest dollar. Item: In consequence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside world knew and put on its TV screens (including the grim, alarming reports of “trouble at Estates-General”), and the capacity to convert their “hobby tools” to—other uses.

An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching the TV screen with an expression of rage and despair.

Lafon was a credit to the Jug—he was a showpiece for visitors. Prison rules provided for prisoner training—it was a matter of “rehabilitation.” Prisoner rehabilitation is a joke and a centuries-old one at that; but it had its serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners busy. It didn’t much matter at what.

Lafon, for instance, was being “rehabilitated” by studying architecture. The guards made a point of bringing inspection delegations to his cell to show him off. There were his walls, covered with pin-ups—but not of women. The pictures were sketches Lafon had drawn himself; they were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they were splendidly conceived and immaculately executed.

“Looka that!” the guards would rumble to their guests. “There isn’t an architect on the outside as good as this boy! What do you say, Wilmer? Tell the gentlemen—how long you been taking these correspondence courses in architecture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug.”

And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the delegation would go, with the guards saying something like: “Believe me, that Wilmer could design a whole skyscraper—and it wouldn’t fall down, either!”

And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could Inmate Lafon design a skyscraper, but he had already done so. More than a dozen of them. And none had fallen down.

Of course, that was more than six years back, before he was convicted and sent to the Jug. He would never design another. Or if he did, it would never be built. For the plain fact of the matter was that the Jug’s rehabilitation courses were like rehabilitation in every prison since crime and punishment began. They kept the inmates busy. They made a show of purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose beyond punishment.

And that was all.

For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence. How does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? Lafon’s punishment was that he, as an architect, was through.

Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a man’s reputation comes off; chop-chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop, and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows.

The jail itself isn’t the punishment. The jail is only the shaman’s hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail worked—if it were meant to work—it would be the end of jails.

Rehabilitation? Rehabilitation for what?

* * * *

Wilmer Lafon switched off the television set and silently pounded his fist into the wall.

Never again to return to the Professional class! For, naturally, the conviction had cost him his membership in the Architectural Society and that had cost him his Professional standing.

But still—just to be out of the Jug, that would be something! And his whole hope of ever getting out lay not here in Honor Block A, but in the turmoil of the Greensleeves, a hundred meters and more than fifty armed guards away.

He was a furious man. He looked into the cell next door, where a con named Garcia was trying to concentrate on a game of Solitaire Splitfee. Once Garcia had been a Professional, too; he was the closest thing to a friend Wilmer Lafon had. Maybe he could now help to get Lafon where he wanted—needed!—to be.

Lafon swore silently and shook his head. Garcia was a spineless milksop, as bad as any clerk—Lafon was nearly sure there was a touch of the inkwell somewhere in his family. Shrewd and slippery enough, like all figgers. But you couldn’t rely on him in a pinch.

Lafon would have to do it all himself.

He thought for a second, ignoring the rustle and mumble of the other honor prisoners of Block A. There was no help for it; he would have to dirty his hands with physical activity.

Outside on the deck, the guards were grumbling to each other. Lafon wiped the scowl off his black face, put on a smile, rehearsed what he was going to say, and politely rattled the door of his cell.

“Shut up down there!” one of the screws bawled. Lafon recognized the voice; it was the guard named Sodaro. That was all to the good. He knew Sodaro and he had some plans for him.

He rattled the cell door again and called: “Chief, can you come here a minute, please?”

Sodaro yelled: “Didn’t you hear me? Shut up!” But he came wandering by and looked into Lafon’s tidy little cell.

“What the devil do you want?” he growled.

Lafon said ingratiatingly: “What’s going on, Chief?”

“Shut your mouth,” Sodaro said absently and yawned. He hefted his shoulder holster comfortably. That O’Leary, what a production he had made of getting the guards back! And here he was, stuck in Block A on the night he had set aside for getting better acquainted with that little blue-eyed statistician from the Census office.

“Aw, Chief. The television says there’s something going on in the Greensleeves. What’s the score?”

Sodaro had no reason not to answer him, but it was his unvarying practice to make a con wait before doing anything the con wanted. He gave Lafon a ten-second stare before he relented.

“The score? Sauer and Flock took over Block O. What about it?”

Much, much about it! But Lafon looked away to hide the eagerness in his eyes. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late.…

He suggested humbly: “You look a little sleepy. Do you want some coffee?”

“Coffee?” Sodaro scratched. “You got a cup for me?”

“Certainly! I’ve got one put aside—swiped it from the mess-hall—not the one I use myself.”

“Um.” Sodaro leaned on the cell door. “You know I could toss you in the Greensleeves for stealing from the mess-hall”

“Aw, chief!” Lafon grinned.

“You been looking for trouble. O’Leary says you were messing around with the bucks from the laundry detail,” Sodaro said halfheartedly. But he didn’t really like picking on Lafon, who was, after all, an agreeable inmate to have on occasion. “All right. Where’s the coffee?”

They didn’t bother with tanglefoot fields in Honor Block A. Sodaro just unlocked the door and walked in, hardly bothering to look at Lafon. He took three steps toward the neat little desk at the back of the cell, where Lafon had rigged up a drawing board and a table, where Lafon kept his little store of luxury goods.

Three steps.

And then, suddenly aware that Lafon was very close to him, he turned, astonished—a little too late. He saw that Lafon had snatched up a metal chair; he saw Lafon swinging it, his black face maniacal; he saw the chair coming down.

He reached for his shoulder holster, but it was very much too late for that.

CHAPTER V

Captain O’Leary dragged the scared little wretch into the warden’s office. He shook the con angrily. “Listen to this, Warden! The boys just brought this one in from the Shops Building. Do you know what he’s been up to?”

The warden wheezed sadly and looked away. He had stopped even answering O’Leary by now. He had stopped talking to Sauer on the interphone when the big convict called, every few minutes, to rave and threaten and demand a doctor. He had almost stopped doing everything except worry and weep. But—still and all, he was the warden. He was the one who gave the orders.

O’Leary barked: “Warden, this little greaser has bollixed up the whole tangler circuit for the prison. If the cons get out into the yard now, you won’t be able to tangle them. You know what that means? They’ll have the freedom of the yard, and who knows what comes next?”

The warden frowned sympathetically. “Tsk, tsk.”

O’Leary shook the con again. “Come on, Hiroko! Tell the warden what you told the guards.”

The con shrank away from him. Sweat was glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. “I—I had to do it, Cap’n! I shorted the wormcan in the tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal—‘Bollix the grid tonight or some day you’ll be in the yard and we’ll static you!’ What could I do, Cap’n? I didn’t want to—”

O’Leary pressed: “Who did the signal come from?”

The con only shook his head, perspiring still more.

The warden asked faintly: “What’s he saying?”

O’Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the warden—couldn’t even understand shop-talk from the mouths of his own inmates!

He translated: “He got orders from the prison underground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t.”

The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk.

“The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important. You’d better get it fixed, O’Leary. Right away.”

“Fixed? Warden, who’s going to fix it? You know as well as I do that every mechanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards would do a thing like that—and I’d bust him myself if he did!—he wouldn’t know where to start. That’s mechanic work.”

The warden swallowed. He had to admit that O’Leary was right. Naturally nobody but a mechanic—and a specialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser class at that—could fix something like the tangler field generators.

He said absently: “Well, that’s true enough. After all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ you know.”

O’Leary took a deep breath. He needed it.

He beckoned to the guard at the door. “Take this greaser out of here!”

The con shambled out, his head hanging.

O’Leary turned to the warden and spread his hands.

“Warden,” he said, “don’t you see how this thing is building up? Let’s not just wait for the place to explode in our faces! Let me take a squad into Block O before it’s too late.”

The warden pursed his lips thoughtfully and cocked his head, as though he were trying to find some trace of merit in an unreasonable request.

He said at last: “No.”

O’Leary made a passionate sound that was trying to be bad language, but he was too raging mad to articulate it. He walked stiffly away from the limp, silent warden and stared out the window.

At least, he told himself, he hadn’t gone to pieces. It was his doing, not the warden’s, that all the off-duty guards had been dragged double-time back to the prison, his doing that they were now ringed around the outer walls or scattered on extra-man patrols throughout the prison.

It was something, but O’Leary couldn’t believe that it was enough. He’d been in touch with half a dozen of the details inside the prison on the intercom and each of them had reported the same thing. In all of E-G, not a single prisoner was asleep. They were talking back and forth between the cells and the guards couldn’t shut them up. They were listening to concealed radios and the guards didn’t dare make a shakedown to find them. They were working themselves up to something. To what?

O’Leary didn’t want ever to find out what. He wanted to go in there with a couple of the best guards he could get his hands on—shoot his way into the Greensleeves if he had to—and clean out the infection.

But the warden said no.

O’Leary stared balefully at the hovering helicopters.

The warden was the warden. He was placed in that position through the meticulously careful operations of the Civil Service machinery, maintained in that position year after year through the penetrating annual inquiries of the Reclassification Board. It was subversive to think that the Board could have made a mistake!

But O’Leary was absolutely sure that the warden was a scared, ineffectual jerk.

* * * *

The interphone was ringing again. The warden picked up the handpiece and held it bonelessly at arm’s length, his eyes fixed glassily on the wall. It was Sauer from the Greensleeves again. O’Leary could hear his maddened bray.

“I warned you, Warden!” O’Leary could see the big con’s contorted face in miniature, in the view screen of the interphone. The grin was broad and jolly, the snake’s eyes poisonously cold. “I’m going to give you five minutes, Warden, you hear? Five minutes! And if there isn’t a medic in here in five minutes to take care of my boy Flock—your guards have had it! I’m going to slice off an ear and throw it out the window, you hear me? And five minutes later, another ear. And five minutes later—”

The warden groaned weakly. “I’ve called for the prison medic, Sauer. Honestly I have! I’m sure he’s coming as rapidly as he—”

“Five minutes!” And the ferociously grinning face disappeared.

O’Leary leaned forward. “Warden, let me take a squad in there!”

The warden gazed at him for a blank moment “Squad? No, O’Leary. What’s the use of a squad? It’s a medic I have to get in there. I have a responsibility to those guards and if I don’t get a medic—”

A cold, calm voice from the door: “I am here, Warden.”

O’Leary and the warden both jumped up.

The medic nodded slightly. “You may sit down.”

“Oh, Doctor! Thank heaven you’re here!” The warden was falling all over himself, getting a chair for his guest, flustering about.

O’Leary said sharply: “Wait a minute, Warden. You can’t let the doctor go in alone!”

“He isn’t alone!” The doctor’s intern came from behind him, scowling belligerently at O’Leary. Youngish, his beard pale and silky, he was a long way from his first practice. “I’m here to assist him!”

O’Leary put a strain on his patience. “They’ll eat you up in there, Doc! Those are the worst cons in the prison. They’ve got two hostages already. What’s the use of giving them two more?”

The medic fixed him with his eyes. He was a tall man and he wore his beard proudly. “Guard, do you think you can prevent me from healing a sufferer?” He folded his hands over his abdomen and turned to leave.

The intern stepped aside and bowed his head.

O’Leary surrendered. “All right, you can go. But I’m coming with you—with a squad!”

* * * *

Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cowered in her cell. The Greensleeves was jumping. She had never—no, never, she told herself wretchedly—thought that it would be anything like this. She listened unbelievingly to the noise the released prisoners were making, smashing the chairs and commodes in their cells, screaming threats at the bound guards.

She faced the thought with fear, and with the sorrow of a murdered belief that was worse than fear. It was bad that she was in danger of dying right here and now, but what was even worse was that the principles that had brought her to the Jug were dying, too.

Wipes were not the same as Civil-Service people!

A bull’s roar from the corridor and a shocking crash of glass—that was Flock, and apparently he had smashed the TV interphone.

“What in the world are they doing?” Inmate Bradley sobbed to herself. It was beyond comprehension. They were yelling words that made no sense to her, threatening punishments on the guards that she could barely imagine. Sauer and Flock were laborers; some of the other rioting cons were clerks, mechanics—even Civil-Service or Professionals, for all she could tell. But she could hardly understand any of them. Why was the quiet little Chinese clerk in Cell Six setting fire to his bed?

There did seem to be a pattern, of sorts. The laborers were rocketing about, breaking things at random. The mechanics were pleasurably sabotaging the electronic and plumbing installations. The white-collar categories were finding their dubious joys in less direct ways—liking setting fire to a bed. But what a mad pattern!

The more Sue-Ann saw of them, the less she understood.

It wasn’t just that they talked differently. She had spent endless hours studying the various patois of shoptalk and it had defeated her; but it wasn’t just that.

It was bad enough when she couldn’t understand the words—as when that trusty Mathias had ordered her in wipe shoptalk to mop out her cell. But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.

Sue-Ann Bradley had consecrated her young life to the belief that all men were created free and equal—and alike. Or alike in all the things that mattered, anyhow. Alike in hopes, alike in motives, alike in virtues. She had turned her back on a decent Civil-Service family and a promising Civil-Service career to join the banned and despised Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes—

Screams from the corridor outside.

Sue-Ann leaped to the door of her cell to see Sauer clutching at one of the guards. The guard’s hands were tied, but his feet were free; he broke loose from the clumsy clown with the serpent’s eyes, almost fell, ran toward Sue-Ann.

There was nowhere else to run. The guard, moaning and gasping, tripped, slid, caught himself and stumbled into her cell. “Please!” he begged. “That crazy Sauer—he’s going to cut my ear off! For heaven’s sake, ma’am—stop him!”

Sue-Ann stared at him, between terror and tears. Stop Sauer! If only she could. The big redhead was lurching stiffly toward them—raging, but not so angry that the water-moccasin eyes showed heat.

“Come here, you figger scum!” he roared.

The epithet wasn’t even close—the guard was Civil Service through and through—but it was like a reviving whip-sting to Sue-Ann Bradley.

“Watch your language, Mr. Sauer!” she snapped incongruously.

Sauer stopped dead and blinked.

“Don’t you dare hurt him!” she warned. “Don’t you see, Mr. Sauer, you’re playing into their hands? They’re trying to divide us. They pit mechanic against clerk, laborer against armed forces. And you’re helping them! Brother Sauer, I beg—”

The redhead spat deliberately on the floor.

He licked his lips, and grinned an amiable clown’s grin, and said in his cheerful, buffoon bray: “Auntie, go verb your adjective adjective noun.”

Sue-Ann Bradley gasped and turned white. She had known such words existed—but only theoretically. She had never expected to hear them. And certainly she would never have believed she would hear them, applied to her, from the lips of a—a laborer.

At her knees, the guard shrieked and fell to the floor.

“Sauer! Sauer!” A panicky bellow from the corridor; the red-haired giant hesitated. “Sauer, come on out here! There’s a million guards coming up the stairs. Looks like trouble!”

Sauer said hoarsely to the unconscious guard: “I’ll take care of you.” And he looked blankly at the girl, and shook his head, and hurried back outside to the corridor.

Guards were coming, all right—not a million of them, but half a dozen or more. And leading them all was the medic, calm, bearded face looking straight ahead, hands clasped before him, ready to heal the sick, comfort the aged or bring new life into the world.

“Hold it!” shrieked little Flock, crouched over the agonizing blister on his abdomen, gun in hand, peering insanely down the steps. “Hold it or—”

“Shut up.” Sauer called softly to the approaching group: “Let only the doc come up. Nobody else!”

The intern faltered; the guards stopped dead; the medic said calmly: “I must have my intern with me.” He glanced at the barred gate wonderingly.

Sauer hesitated. “Well—all right. But no guards!”

A few yards away, Sue-Ann Bradley was stuffing the syncoped form of the guard into her small washroom.

It was time to take a stand. No more cowering, she told herself desperately. No more waiting. She closed the door on the guard, still unconscious, and stood grimly before it. Him, at least, she would save if she could. They could get him, but only over her dead body.

Or anyway, she thought with a sudden throbbing in her throat, over her body.

CHAPTER VI

After O’Leary and the medic left, the warden tottered to a chair—but not for long. His secretary appeared, eyes bulging. “The governor!” he gasped.

Warden Schluckebier managed to say: “Why, Governor! How good of you to come—”

The governor shook him off and held the door open for the men who had come with him. There were reporters from all the news services, officials from the township governments within the city-state. There was an Air GI with major’s leaves on his collar—“Liaison, sir,” he explained crisply to the warden, “just in case you have any orders for our men up there.” There were nearly a dozen others.

The warden was quite overcome.

The governor rapped out: “Warden, no criticism of you, of course, but I’ve come to take personal charge. I’m superseding you under Rule Twelve, Paragraph A, of the Uniform Civil Service Code. Right?”

“Oh, right!” cried the warden, incredulous with joy.

“The situation is bad—perhaps worse than you think. I’m seriously concerned about the hostages those men have in there. And I had a call from Senator Bradley a short time ago—”

“Senator Bradley?” echoed the warden.

“Senator Sebastian Bradley. One of our foremost civil servants,” the governor said firmly. “It so happens that his daughter is in Block O as an inmate.”

The warden closed his eyes. He tried to swallow, but the throat muscles were paralyzed.

“There is no question,” the governor went on briskly, “about the propriety of her being there. She was duly convicted of a felonious act, namely conspiracy and incitement to riot. But you see the position.”

The warden saw all too well.

“Therefore,” said the governor. “I intend to go in to Block O myself. Sebastian Bradley is an old and personal friend—as well,” he emphasized, “as being a senior member of the Reclassification Board. I understand a medic is going to Block O. I shall go with him.”

The warden managed to sit up straight. “He’s gone. I mean they already left, Governor. But I assure you Miss Brad—Inmate Bradley—that is, the young lady is in no danger. I have already taken precautions,” he said, gaining confidence as he listened to himself talk. “I—uh—I was deciding on a course of action as you came in. See, Governor, the guards on the walls are all armed. All they have to do is fire a couple of rounds into the yard and then the ’copters could start dropping tear gas and light fragmentation bombs and—”

The governor was already at the door. “You will not,” he said; and: “Now which way did they go?”

* * * *

O’Leary was in the yard and he was smelling trouble, loud and strong. The first he knew that the rest of the prison had caught the riot fever was when the lights flared on in Cell Block A.

“That Sodaro!” he snarled, but there wasn’t time to worry about that Sodaro. He grabbed the rest of his guard detail and double-timed it toward the New Building, leaving the medic and a couple of guards walking sedately toward the Old. Block A, on the New Building’s lowest tier, was already coming to life; a dozen yards, and Blocks B and C lighted up.

And a dozen yards more and they could hear the yelling; and it wasn’t more than a minute before the building doors opened.

The cons had taken over three more blocks. How? O’Leary didn’t take time even to guess. The inmates were piling out into the yard. He took one look at the rushing mob. Crazy! It was Wilmer Lafon leading the rioters, with a guard’s gun and a voice screaming threats! But O’Leary didn’t take time to worry about an honor prisoner gone bad, either.

“Let’s get out of here!” he bellowed to the detachment, and they ran.

Just plain ran. Cut and ran, scattering as they went.

“Wait!” screamed O’Leary, but they weren’t waiting. Cursing himself for letting them get out of hand, O’Leary salvaged two guards and headed on the run for the Old Building, huge and dark, all but the topmost lights of Block O.

They saw the medic and his escort disappearing into the bulk of the Old Building and they saw something else. There were inmates between them and the Old Building! The Shops Building lay between—with a dozen more cell blocks over the workshops that gave it its name—and there was a milling rush of activity around its entrance, next to the laundry shed—

The laundry shed.

O’Leary stood stock still. Lafon leading the breakout from Block A. The little greaser who was a trusty in the Shops Building sabotaging the yard’s tangler circuit. Sauer and Flock taking over the Greensleeves with a manufactured knife and a lot of guts.

Did it fit together? Was it all part of a plan?

That was something to find out—but not just then. “Come on,” O’Leary cried to the two guards, and they raced for the temporary safety of the main gates.

The whole prison was up and yelling now.

O’Leary could hear scattered shots from the beat guards on the wall—Over their heads, over their heads! he prayed silently. And there were other shots that seemed to come from inside the walls—guards shooting, or convicts with guards’ guns, he couldn’t tell which. The yard was full of convicts now, in bunches and clumps; but none near the gate. And they seemed to have lost some of their drive. They were milling around, lit by the searchlights from the wall, yelling and making a lot of noise…but going nowhere in particular. Waiting for a leader, O’Leary thought, and wondered briefly what had become of Lafon.

“You Captain O’Leary?” somebody demanded.

He turned and blinked. Good Lord, the governor! He was coming through the gate, waving aside the gate guards, alone. “You him?” the governor repeated. “All right, glad I found you. I’m going into Block O with you.”

O’Leary swallowed and waved inarticulately at the teeming cons. True, there were none immediately near by—but there were plenty in the yard! Riots meant breaking things up; already the inmates had started to break up the machines in the laundry shed and the athletic equipment in the yard lockers. When they found a couple of choice breakables like O’Leary and the governor, they’d have a ball!

“But, Governor—”

“But my foot! Can you get me in there or can’t you?”

O’Leary gauged their chances. It wasn’t more than fifty feet to the main entrance to the Old Building—not at the moment guarded, since all the guards were in hiding or on the walls, and not as yet being invaded by the inmates at large.

He said: “You’re the boss. Hold on a minute—” The searchlights were on the bare yard cobblestones in front of them; in a moment, the searchlights danced away.

“Come on!” cried O’Leary, and jumped for the entrance. The governor was with him and a pair of the guards came stumbling after.

They made it to the Old Building.

Inside the entrance, they could hear the noise from outside and the yelling of the inmates who were still in their cells. But around them was nothing but gray steel walls and the stairs going all the way up to Block O.

“Up!” panted O’Leary, and they clattered up the steel steps.

They would have made it—if it hadn’t been for the honor inmate, Wilmer Lafon, who knew what he was after and had headed for the Greensleeves through the back way. In fact, they did make it—but not the way they planned. “Get out of the way!” yelled O’Leary at Lafon and the half-dozen inmates with him; and “Go to hell!” screamed Lafon, charging; and it was a rough-and-tumble fight, and O’Leary’s party lost it, fair and square.

So when they got to Block O, it was with the governor marching before a convict-held gun, and with O’Leary cold unconscious, a lump from a gun-butt on the side of his head.

As they came up the stairs, Sauer was howling at the medic: “You got to fix up my boy! He’s dying and all you do is sit there!”

The medic said patiently: “My son, I’ve dressed his wound. He is under sedation and I must rest. There will be other casualties.”

Sauer raged, but that was as far as it went. Even Sauer wouldn’t attack a medic. He would as soon strike an Attorney, or even a Director of Funerals. It wasn’t merely that they were Professionals. Even among the Professional class, they were special; not superior, exactly, but apart. They certainly were not for the likes of Sauer to fool with and Sauer knew it.

“Somebody’s coming!” bawled one of the other freed inmates.

* * * *

Sauer jumped to the head of the steps, saw that Lafon was leading the group, stepped back, saw whom Lafon’s helpers were carrying and leaped forward again.

“Cap’n O’Leary!” he roared. “Gimme!”

“Shut up,” said Wilmer Lafon, and pushed the big redhead out of the way. Sauer’s jaw dropped and the snake eyes opened wide.

“Wilmer,” he protested feebly. But that was all the protest he made, because the snake’s eyes had seen that Lafon held a gun. He stood back, the big hands half outstretched toward the unconscious guard captain, O’Leary, and the cold eyes became thoughtful.

And then he saw who else was with the party. “Wilmer! You got the governor there!”

Lafon nodded. “Throw them in a cell,” he ordered, and sat down on a guard’s stool, breathing hard. It had been a fine fight on the steps, before he and his boys had subdued the governor and the guards, but Wilmer Lafon wasn’t used to fighting. Even six years in the Jug hadn’t turned an architect into a laborer; physical exertion simply was not his metier.

Sauer said coaxingly: “Wilmer, won’t you leave me have O’Leary for a while? If it wasn’t for me and Flock, you’d still be in A Block and—”

“Shut up,” Lafon said again, gently enough, but he waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced around him and grinned. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock,” he mimicked. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock! Sauer, you wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv and start things rolling? If it wasn’t for me, you and Flock would have beaten up a few guards, and had your kicks for half an hour, and then the whole prison would fall in on you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, who set things up and you know it!”

He was yelling and suddenly he realized he was yelling. And what was the use, he demanded of himself contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy wipes and greasers? They’d never understand the long, soul-killing hours of planning and sweat. They wouldn’t realize the importance of the careful timing—of arranging that the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the yard right after the Greensleeves hard-timers kicked off the riot, of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturbances.

It took a Professional to organize and plan—yes, and to make sure that he himself was out of it until everything was ripe, so that if anything went wrong, he was all right. It took somebody like Wilmer Lafon—a Professional, who had spent six years too long in the Jug—

And who would shortly be getting out.

CHAPTER VII

Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off.

From the Greensleeves, where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells—the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn’t dare risk their early discharge. But for every man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling.

A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters, blazing up from the yard—that was the the laundry shed. Why burn the laundry? The cons couldn’t have said. It was burnable and it was there—burn it!

The yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were solidly covered with milling men. The guards were on the walls, sighting down their guns; the helicopter bombardiers had their fingers on the bomb trips. There had been a few rounds fired over the heads of the rioters, at first.

Nothing since.

In the milling mob, the figures clustered in groups. The inmates from Honor Block A huddled under the guards’ guns at the angle of the wall. They had clubs—all the inmates had clubs—but they weren’t using them.

Honor Block A: On the outside, Civil Service and Professionals. On the inside, the trusties, the “good” cons.

They weren’t the type for clubs.

With all of the inmates, you looked at them and you wondered what twisted devil had got into their heads to land them in the Jug. Oh, perhaps you could understand it—a little bit, at least—in the case of the figgers in Blocks B and C, the greasers in the Shop Building—that sort. It was easy enough for some of the Categoried Classes to commit a crime and thereby land in jail.

Who could blame a wipe for trying to “pass” if he thought he could get away with it? But when he didn’t get away with it, he wound up in the Jug and that was logical enough. And greasers liked Civil-Service women—everyone knew that.

There was almost a sort of logic to it, even if it was a sort of inevitable logic that made decent Civil-Service people see red. You had to enforce the laws against rape if, for instance, a greaser should ask an innocent young female postal clerk for a date. But you could understand what drove him to it. The Jug was full of criminals of that sort. And the Jug was the place for them.

But what about Honor Block A?

Why would a Wilmer Lafon—a certified public architect, a Professional by category—do his own car repairs and get himself jugged for malpractice? Why would a dental nurse sneak back into the laboratory at night and cast an upper plate for her mother? She must have realized she would be caught.

But she had done it. And she had been caught; and there she was, this wild night, huddled under the helicopters, uncertainly waving the handle of a floor mop. It was a club.

She shivered and turned to the stocky convict next to her. “Why don’t they break down the gate?” she demanded. “How long are we going to hang around here, waiting for the guards to get organized and pick us all off one at a time?”

The convict next to her sighed and wiped his glasses with a beefy hand. Once he had been an Income-Tax Accountant, disbarred and convicted on three counts of impersonating an attorney when he took the liberty of making changes in a client’s lease. He snorted: “They expect us to do their dirty work.”

The two of them glared angrily and fearfully at the other convicts in the yard.

And the other convicts, huddled greaser with greaser, wipe with wipe, glared ragingly back. It wasn’t their place to plan the strategy of a prison break.

* * * *

Captain Liam O’Leary muttered groggily: “They don’t want to escape. All they want is to make trouble. I know cons!”

He came fully awake and sat up and focused his eyes. His head was hammering.

That girl, that Bradley, was leaning over him. She looked scared and sick. “Sit still! Sauer is just plain crazy—listen to them yelling out there!”

O’Leary sat up and looked around, one hand holding his drumming skull.

“They do want to escape,” said Sue-Ann Bradley. “Listen to what they’re saying!”

* * * *

O’Leary discovered that he was in a cell. There was a battle going on outside. Men were yelling, but he couldn’t see them.

He jumped up, remembering. “The governor!”

Sue-Ann Bradley said: “He’s all right. I think he is, anyway. He’s in the cell right next to us, with a couple guards. I guess they came up with you.” She shivered as the yells in the corridor rose. “Sauer is angry at the medic,” she explained. “He wants him to fix Flock up so they can—‘crush out,’ I think he said. The medic says he can’t do it. You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with a knife he made. Something about the tanglefoot field—”

“Eddy currents,” said O’Leary dizzily.

“Anyway, the medic—”

“Never mind the medic. What’s Lafon doing?”

“Lafon? The Negro?” Sue-Ann Bradley frowned. “I didn’t know his name. He started the whole thing, the way it sounds. They’re waiting for the mob down in the yard to break out and then they’re going to make a break—”

“Wait a minute,” growled O’Leary. His head was beginning to clear. “What about you? Are you in on this?”

She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: “Do I look as if I am?”

O’Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had got a length of metal pipe—from the plumbing, maybe. She was holding it in one hand, supporting him with the other. There were two other guards in the cell, both out cold—one from O’Leary’s squad, the other, O’Leary guessed, a desk guard who had been on duty when the trouble started.

“I wouldn’t let them in,” she said wildly. “I told them they’d have to kill me before they could touch that guard.”

O’Leary said suspiciously: “You belonged to that Double-A-C, didn’t you? You were pretty anxious to get in the Greensleeves, disobeying Auntie Mathias’s orders. Are you sure you didn’t know this was going to—”

It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head in her hands. He couldn’t tell if she laughed or wept, but he could tell that it hadn’t been like that at all.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, and touched her helplessly on the shoulder.

He turned and looked out the little barred window, because he couldn’t think of any additional way to apologize. He heard the wavering beat in the air and saw them—bobbing a hundred yards up, their wide metal vanes fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The GI ’copters. Waiting—as everyone seemed to be waiting.

Sue-Ann Bradley asked shakily: “Is anything the matter?”

O’Leary turned away. It was astonishing, he thought, what a different perspective he had on those helicopter bombers from inside Block O. Once he had cursed the warden for not ordering at least tear gas to be dropped.

He said harshly: “Nothing. Just that the ’copters have the place surrounded.”

“Does it make any difference?”

He shrugged. Does it make a difference? The difference between trouble and tragedy, or so it now seemed to Captain O’Leary. The riot was trouble. They could handle it, one way or another. It was his job, any guard’s job, to handle prison trouble.

But to bring the GIs into it was to invite race riot. Not prison riot—race riot. Even the de-classed scum in the Jug would fight back against the GIs. They were used to having the Civil-Service guards over them—that was what guards were for. Civil-Service guards guarded. What else? It was their job—as clerking was a rigger’s job, and machines were a greaser’s, and pick-and-shovel strong-arm work was a wipe’s.

But the Armed Services—their job was to defend the country against forces outside—in a world that had only inside forces. The cons wouldn’t hold still under attack from the GIs. Race riot!

But how could you tell that to a girl like this Bradley? O’Leary glanced at her covertly. She looked all right. Rather nice-looking, if anything. But he hadn’t forgotten why she was in E-G. Joining a terrorist organization, the Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes.

Actually getting up on street corners and proposing that greasers’ children be allowed to go to school with GIs, that wipes inter-marry with Civil Service. Good Lord, they’d be suggesting that doctors eat with laymen next!

The girl said evenly: “Don’t look at me that way. I’m not a monster.”

O’Leary coughed. “Sorry. I didn’t know I was staring.” She looked at him with cold eyes. “I mean,” he said, “you don’t look like anybody who’d get mixed up in—well, miscegenation.”

“Miscegenation!” she blazed. “You’re all alike! You talk about the mission of the Categoried Classes and the rightness of segregation, but it’s always just the one thing that’s in your minds—sex! I’ll tell you this, Captain O’Leary—I’d rather many a decent, hard-working clerk any day than the sort of Civil-Service trash I’ve seen around here!”

O’Leary cringed. He couldn’t help it. Funny, he told himself, I thought I was shockproof—but this goes too far!

A bull-roar from the corridor. Sauer.

O’Leary spun. The big redhead was yelling: “Bring the governor out here. Lafon wants to talk to him!”

* * * *

O’Leary went to the door of the cell, fast.

A slim, pale con from Block A was pushing the governor down the hall, toward Sauer and Lafon. The governor was a strong man, but he didn’t struggle. His face was as composed and remote as the medic’s; if he was afraid, he concealed it extremely well.

Sue-Ann Bradley stood beside O’Leary. “What’s happening?”

He kept his eyes on what was going on. “Lafon is going to try to use the governor as a shield, I think.” The voice of Lafon was loud, but the noises outside made it hard to understand. But O’Leary could make out what the dark ex-Professional was saying: “—know damn well you did something. But what? Why don’t they crush out?”

Mumble-mumble from the Governor. O’Leary couldn’t hear the words.

But he could see the effect of them in Lafon’s face, hear the rage in Lafon’s voice. “Don’t call me a liar, you civvy punk! You did something. I had it all planned, do you hear me? The laundry boys were going to rush the gate, the Block A bunch would follow—and then I was going to breeze right through. But you loused it up somehow. You must’ve!”

His voice was rising to a scream. O’Leary, watching tautly from the cell, thought: He’s going to break. He can’t hold it in much longer.

“All right!” shouted Lafon, and even Sauer, looming behind him, looked alarmed. “It doesn’t matter what you did. I’ve got you now and you are going to get me out of here. You hear? I’ve got this gun and the two of us are going to walk right out, through the gate, and if anybody tries to stop us—”

“Hey,” said Sauer, waking up.

“—if anybody tries to stop us, you’ll get a bullet right in—”

“Hey!” Sauer was roaring loud as Lafon himself now. “What’s this talk about the two of you? You aren’t going to leave me and Flock!”

“Shut up,” Lafon said conversationally, without taking his eyes off the governor.

But Sauer, just then, was not the man to say “shut up” to, and especially he was not a man to take your eyes away from.

“That’s torn it,” O’Leary said aloud. The girl started to say something.

But he was no longer there to hear.

It looked very much as though Sauer and Lafon were going to tangle. And when they did, it was the end of the line for the governor.

* * * *

Captain O’Leary hurtled out of the sheltering cell and skidded down the corridor. Lafon’s face was a hawk’s face, gleaming with triumph. As he saw O’Leary coming toward him, the hawk sneer froze. He brought the gun up, but O’Leary was a fast man.

O’Leary leaped on the lithe black honor prisoner. Lafon screamed and clutched; and O’Leary’s lunging weight drove him back against the wall. Lafon’s arm smacked against the steel grating and the gun went flying. The two of them clinched and fell, gouging, to the floor.

Grabbing the advantage, O’Leary hammered the con’s head against the deck, hard enough to split a skull. And perhaps it split Lafon’s, because the dark face twitched and froth appeared at the lips; and the body slacked.

One down!

Now Sauer was charging. O’Leary wriggled sidewise and the big redhead blundered crashing into the steel grate. Sauer fell and O’Leary caught at him. He tried hammering the head as he swarmed on top of the huge clown. But Sauer only roared the louder. The bull body surged under O’Leary and then Sauer was on top and O’Leary wasn’t breathing. Not at all.

Good-by, Sue-Ann, O’Leary said silently, without meaning to say anything of the kind; and even then he wondered why he was saying it.

O’Leary heard a gun explode beside his head.

Amazing, he thought, I’m breathing again! The choking hands were gone from his throat.

It took him a moment to realize that it was Sauer who had taken the bullet, not him. Sauer who now lay dead, not O’Leary. But he realized it when he rolled over, and looked up, and saw the girl with the gun still in her hand, staring at him and weeping.

He sat up. The two guards still able to walk were backing Sue-Ann Bradley up. The governor was looking proud as an eagle, pleased as a mother hen.

The Greensleeves was back in the hands of law and order.

The medic came toward O’Leary, hands folded. “My son,” he said, “if your throat needs—”

O’Leary interrupted him. “I don’t need a thing, Doc! I’ve got everything I want right now.”

CHAPTER VIII

Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cried: “They’re coming! O’Leary, they’re coming!”

The guards who had once been hostages clattered down the steps to meet the party. The cons from the Greensleeves were back in their cells. The medic, after finishing his chores on O’Leary himself, paced meditatively out into the wake of the riot, where there was plenty to keep him busy. A faintly guilty expression tinctured his carven face. Contrary to his oath to care for all humanity in anguish, he had not liked Lafon or Sauer.

The party of fresh guards appeared and efficiently began re-locking the cells of the Greensleeves.

“Excuse me, Cap’n,” said one, taking Sue-Ann Bradley by the arm. “I’ll just put this one back—”

“I’ll take care of her,” said Liam O’Leary. He looked at her sideways as he rubbed the bruises on his face.

The governor tapped him on the shoulder. “Come along,” he said, looking so proud of himself, so pleased. “Let’s go out in the yard for a breath of fresh air.” He smiled contentedly at Sue-Ann Bradley. “You, too.”

O’Leary protested instinctively: “But she’s an inmate!”

“And I’m a governor. Come along.”

They walked out into the yard. The air was fresh, all right. A handful of cons, double-guarded by sleepy and irritable men from the day shift, were hosing down the rubble on the cobblestones. The yard was a mess, but it was quiet now. The helicopters were still riding their picket line, glowing softly in the early light that promised sunrise.

“My car,” the governor said quietly to a state policeman who appeared from nowhere. The trooper snapped a salute and trotted away.

“I killed a man,” said Sue-Ann Bradley, looking a little ill.

“You saved a man,” corrected the governor. “Don’t weep for that Lafon. He was willing to kill a thousand men if he had to, to break out of here.”

“But he never did break out,” said Sue-Ann.

The governor stretched contentedly. “He never had a chance. Laborers and clerks join together in a breakout? It would never happen. They don’t even speak the same language—as you have discovered, my dear.”

Sue-Ann blazed: “I still believe in the equality of Man!”

“Oh, please do,” the governor said, straight-faced. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Your father and I are perfectly willing to admit that men are equal—but we can’t admit that all men are the same. Use your eyes! What you believe in is your business, but,” he added, “when your beliefs extend to setting fire to segregated public lavatories as a protest move, which is what got you arrested, you apparently need to be taught a lesson. Well, perhaps you’ve learned it. You were a help here tonight and that counts for a lot.”

Captain O’Leary said, face furrowed: “What about the warden, Governor? They say the category system is what makes the world go round; it fits the right man to the right job and keeps him there. But look at Warden Shluckebier! He fell completely apart at the seams. He—”

“Turn that statement around, O’Leary.”

“Turn—?”

The governor nodded. “You’ve got it reversed. Not the right man for the job—the right job for the man! We’ve got Shluckebier on our hands, see? He’s been born; it’s too late to do anything about that. He will go to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?”

O’Leary stubbornly clamped his jaw, frowning.

“We put him,” the governor went on gently, “where the best thing to do in a crisis is to go to pieces! Why, O’Leary, you get some hot-headed man of action in here, and every time an inmate sneezes, you’ll have bloodshed! And there’s no harm in a prison riot. Let the poor devils work off steam. I wouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed for it—except I was worried about the hostages. So I came down to make sure they were protected in the best possible way.”

O’Leary’s jaw dropped. “But you were—”

The governor nodded. “I was a hostage myself. That’s one way to protect them, isn’t it? By giving the cons a hostage that’s worth more to them.”

He yawned and looked around for his car. “So the world keeps going around,” he said. “Everybody is somebody else’s outgroup and maybe it’s a bad thing, but did you ever stop to realize that we don’t have wars any more? The categories stick tightly together. Who is to say that that’s a bad thing?”

He grinned. “Reminds me of a story, if you two will pay attention to me long enough to listen. There was a meeting—this is an old, old story—a neighborhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest women’s groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from B’nai B’rith. The first thing they did was have an election for a temporary chairwoman. Twenty-one votes were cast. Mrs. Grossinger from B’nai B’rith got three and Mrs. O’Flaherty from the Auxiliary got eighteen. So when Mrs. Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. O’Flaherty after the election, she whispered: ‘Good for you! But isn’t it terrible, the way these Jews stick together?’”

He stood up and waved a signal as his long official car came poking hesitantly through the gate.

“Well,” he declared professionally, “that’s that. As we politicians say, any questions?”

Sue-Ann hesitated. “Yes, I guess I do have a question,” she said. “What’s a Jew?”

* * * *

It was full dawn at last. The recall signal had come and the helicopters were swooping home to Hap Arnold Field.

A bombardier named Novak, red-eyed and grumpy, was amusing himself on the homeward flight by taking practice sights on the stream of work-bound mechanics as they fluttered over Greaserville.

“Could pick ’em off like pigeons,” he said sourly to his pilot, as he dropped an imaginary bomb on a cluster of a dozen men. “For two cents, I’d do it, too. The only good greaser is a dead greaser.”

His pilot, just as weary, said loftily: “Leave them alone. The best way to handle them is to leave them alone.”

And the pilot was perfectly right; and that was the way the world went round, spinning slowly and unstoppably toward the dawn.

THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955.

On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.

He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.

He croaked, “Mary?”

His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.

But she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.

“Guy?” His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. “Guy, dear, are you all right?”

He called weakly, “Sure.”

There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, “Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I heard you yelling—”

Burckhardt said more confidently, “I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down.”

* * * *

In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still, bad dreams weren’t unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?

Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. “You did?” Her voice was astonished. “Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn’t actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?”

Burckhardt coughed. “Well, no,” he said. Mary was not one of these strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, “Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming.”

Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. “Maybe,” she agreed. “It’s almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn’t you hurry? You don’t want to be late to the office.”

He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out—not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.

But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn’t any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before: It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town’s only skyscraper—that was the penalty of having Contro Chemical’s main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.

None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn’t anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.

He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn’t behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.

“Where’s Mr. Stebbins?” Burckhardt asked.

The man said politely, “Sick, sir. He’ll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?”

“Chesterfields,” Burckhardt corrected.

“Certainly, sir,” the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.

“Do try these, sir,” he suggested. “They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?”

Burckhardt said suspiciously, “I never heard of this brand.”

“Of course not. They’re something new.” Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, “Look, try them out at my risk. If you don’t like them, bring back the empty pack and I’ll refund your money. Fair enough?”

Burckhardt shrugged. “How can I lose? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you?”

He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren’t bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn’t think much of Ralph’s stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.

The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.

No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn’t merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: “Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-Bite all up. That’s Choco-Bite!” There was a sobbing female whine: “I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I’d do anything for a Feckle Freezer!” Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.

But the office was happily normal—except that Mr. Barth wasn’t in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn’t know exactly why. “His home phoned, that’s all. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

“Maybe he went to the plant. It’s right near his house.”

She looked indifferent. “Yeah.”

A thought struck Burckhardt. “But today is June 15th! It’s quarterly tax return day—he has to sign the return!”

Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt’s problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.

Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn’t his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals’ downtown office, should have taken.

He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn’t really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn’t a soul in the factory—that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul—just the machines.

According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man’s habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn’t hurt the man and it didn’t make the machine into a monster.

But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.

He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures—which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.

He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. “Since Mr. Barth isn’t here, we’d better go to lunch in shifts,” he said. “You can go first.”

“Thanks.” Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply makeup.

Burckhardt offered her the envelope. “Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh—wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?”

“Didn’t say.” Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. “Wasn’t his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message.”

“The kid?” Burckhardt frowned. “I thought she was away at school.”

“She called, that’s all I know.”

Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn’t like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.

* * * *

A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually caught his bus—someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze—so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying toward him.

Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.

He said, “Hello.”

Swanson’s face was desperately eager. “Burckhardt?” he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt’s face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn’t know how to supply it.

Burckhardt coughed and said again, “Hello, Swanson.”

Swanson didn’t even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.

“Nothing doing,” he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.

Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn’t much like. Things weren’t going right.

Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn’t anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.

It isn’t the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong—the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.

It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn’t come into the office, yet Barth always came in.

Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife’s attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked—Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman’s complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife’s comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days.

Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him—he was strangely aware of it happening—he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.

II

On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming.

It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room.

His wife came pattering up the stairs. “Darling!” she cried. “What’s the matter?”

He mumbled, “Nothing. Bad dream.”

She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: “You gave me such a shock—”

But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.

The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window.

There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.

Burckhardt said in amazement, “Mary, that’s against the law! Do you know what they’re doing? They’re playing records of a fire. What are they up to?”

“Maybe it’s a practical joke,” his wife offered.

“Joke? Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o’clock in the morning?” He shook his head. “The police will be here in ten minutes,” he predicted. “Wait and see.”

But the police weren’t—not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games.

The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted:

“Feckle Freezers!

Feckle Freezers!

Gotta have a

Feckle Freezer!

Feckle, Feckle, Feckle,

Feckle, Feckle, Feckle—”

It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening.

Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, “What the hell is a Feckle Freezer?”

“Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear,” she shrieked back unhelpfully.

Abruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty morning; the Sun’s rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing the name of a freezer.

“A crazy advertising trick,” Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. “Might as well get dressed. I guess that’s the end of—”

The bellow caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the arch-angel’s trumpet, howled:

“Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn’t a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it’s a last year’s Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year’s Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!”

The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. “I’m warning you! Get out and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle.…”

It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to his wife, “Maybe we ought to call the police about—” when the speakers erupted again. It caught him off guard; it was intended to catch him off guard. It screamed:

“Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap freezers ruin your food. You’ll get sick and throw up. You’ll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you’ve got and see how rotten and moldy it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle—”

That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal—it was apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea—and while he was shakingly dialing again, the noise outside stopped.

He looked out the window. The truck was gone.

* * * *

Burckhardt loosened his tie and ordered another Frosty-Flip from the waiter. If only they wouldn’t keep the Crystal Cafe so hot! The new paint job—searing reds and blinding yellows—was bad enough, but someone seemed to have the delusion that this was January instead of June; the place was a good ten degrees warmer than outside.

He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiar flavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just as the waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton of them on the way home; Mary might like them. She was always interested in something new.

He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height, honey-blonde hair and a figure that—well, it was all hers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him.

“Mr. Burckhardt.” The voice was like distant tomtoms. “It’s wonderful of you to let me see you, after this morning.”

He cleared his throat. “Not at all. Won’t you sit down, Miss—”

“April Horn,” she murmured, sitting down—beside him, not where he had pointed on the other side of the table. “Call me April, won’t you?”

She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with what little of his mind was functioning at all. It didn’t seem fair that she should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an order for filets mignon for two.

“Hey!” he objected.

“Please, Mr. Burckhardt.” Her shoulder was against his, her face was turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous. “This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them—it’s the least they can do.”

He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.

“I put the price of the meal into your pocket,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Please do that for me, won’t you? I mean I’d appreciate it if you’d pay the waiter—I’m old-fashioned about things like that.”

She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. “But you must take the money,” she insisted. “Why, you’re letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they’ve got, disturbing your sleep like that.”

With a dizzy feeling, as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, “Why, it really wasn’t so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but—”

“Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!” The blue eyes were wide and admiring. “I knew you’d understand. It’s just that—well, it’s such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you—and I’m so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but—” the blue eyes were shyly lowered—“I’d do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It’s more than a job to me.” She looked up. She was enchanting. “I bet you think I’m silly, don’t you?”

Burckhardt coughed. “Well, I—”

“Oh, you don’t want to be unkind!” She shook her head. “No, don’t pretend. You think it’s silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn’t think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet—”

Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn’t only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street—and then left him cold.

But it didn’t matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day—leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns.

What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent “courtesy” discount—“Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt,” she had said.

And he wasn’t sure how he could explain it to his wife.

* * * *

He needn’t have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, “I wonder if we can’t afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and—well, we got to talking and—”

She had signed a purchase order, too.

It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn’t done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went out.

“Damn!” said Guy Burckhardt.

“Fuse?” His wife shrugged sleepily. “Let it go till the morning, dear.”

Burckhardt shook his head. “You go back to bed. I’ll be right along.”

It wasn’t so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.

When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.

He headed back to the steps, and stopped.

Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!

“Son of a gun,” said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut—the edges were sharp.

The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots—everywhere was metal.

The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!

Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.

He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor—they were faked.

It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.

The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.

“But I built that!” Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.

“That’s crazy,” he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, “What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?”

Reason refused an answer; there wasn’t any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.

He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn’t make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.

Consciousness went—not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

III

On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement—and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.

The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them—all completely unbelievable.

The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o’clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment.

Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps—and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.

But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget—it was quarterly tax-return day.

He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: “—and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising … United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around—”

He hung the phone up. June 15th.

“Holy heaven!” Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife’s alarm and bounded up the stairs.

Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.

“Oh!” she gasped, as her husband came in the room. “Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and—”

“Again?” Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. “Mary, something’s funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and—”

He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.

She said, “Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn’t notice anything.”

“Positive!” said Guy Burckhardt. “I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and—”

“After we what?” Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.

“After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and—”

Mary sat up in bed. “Guy, the switch didn’t stick. I turned out the lights myself last night.”

Burckhardt glared at his wife. “Now I know you didn’t! Come here and take a look!”

He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad switch, the one that he had unscrewed and left hanging the night before.…

Only it wasn’t. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls.

Mary, looking pale and worried, left him to go down to the kitchen and start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and shock; they simply were not functioning.

He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb introspection. Mary didn’t disturb him; she was apprehensive and soothing. She kissed him good-by as he hurried out to the bus without another word.

Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn. “Morning,” she said drowsily. “Mr. Barth won’t be in today.”

Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would not know that Barth hadn’t been in yesterday, either, because she was tearing a June 14th pad off her calendar to make way for the “new” June 15th sheet.

He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning’s mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck & Sons was a complaint.

After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were.

By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss Mitkin take her lunch hour first—the June-fifteenth-that-was-yesterday, he had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt’s mood.

The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. “Contro Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking.”

The voice said, “This is Swanson,” and stopped.

Burckhardt waited expectantly, but that was all. He said, “Hello?”

Again the pause. Then Swanson asked in sad resignation, “Still nothing, eh?”

“Nothing what? Swanson, is there something you want? You came up to me yesterday and went through this routine. You—”

The voice crackled: “Burckhardt! Oh, my good heavens, you remember! Stay right there—I’ll be down in half an hour!”

“What’s this all about?”

“Never mind,” the little man said exultantly. “Tell you about it when I see you. Don’t say any more over the phone—somebody may be listening. Just wait there. Say, hold on a minute. Will you be alone in the office?”

“Well, no. Miss Mitkin will probably—”

“Hell. Look, Burckhardt, where do you eat lunch? Is it good and noisy?”

“Why, I suppose so. The Crystal Cafe. It’s just about a block—”

“I know where it is. Meet you in half an hour!” And the receiver clicked.

* * * *

The Crystal Cafe was no longer painted red, but the temperature was still up. And they had added piped-in music interspersed with commercials. The advertisements were for Frosty-Flip, Marlin Cigarettes—“They’re sanitized,” the announcer purred—and something called Choco-Bite candy bars that Burckhardt couldn’t remember ever having heard of before. But he heard more about them quickly enough.

While he was waiting for Swanson to show up, a girl in the cellophane skirt of a nightclub cigarette vendor came through the restaurant with a tray of tiny scarlet-wrapped candies.

“Choco-Bites are tangy,” she was murmuring as she came close to his table. “Choco-Bites are tangier than tangy!”

Burckhardt, intent on watching for the strange little man who had phoned him, paid little attention. But as she scattered a handful of the confections over the table next to his, smiling at the occupants, he caught a glimpse of her and turned to stare.

“Why, Miss Horn!” he said.

The girl dropped her tray of candies.

Burckhardt rose, concerned over the girl. “Is something wrong?”

But she fled.

The manager of the restaurant was staring suspiciously at Burckhardt, who sank back in his seat and tried to look inconspicuous. He hadn’t insulted the girl! Maybe she was just a very strictly reared young lady, he thought—in spite of the long bare legs under the cellophane skirt—and when he addressed her, she thought he was a masher.

Ridiculous idea. Burckhardt scowled uneasily and picked up his menu.

“Burckhardt!” It was a shrill whisper.

Burckhardt looked up over the top of his menu, startled. In the seat across from him, the little man named Swanson was sitting, tensely poised.

“Burckhardt!” the little man whispered again. “Let’s get out of here! They’re on to you now. If you want to stay alive, come on!”

There was no arguing with the man. Burckhardt gave the hovering manager a sick, apologetic smile and followed Swanson out. The little man seemed to know where he was going. In the street, he clutched Burckhardt by the elbow and hurried him off down the block.

“Did you see her?” he demanded. “That Horn woman, in the phone booth? She’ll have them here in five minutes, believe me, so hurry it up!”

* * * *

Although the street was full of people and cars, nobody was paying any attention to Burckhardt and Swanson. The air had a nip in it—more like October than June, Burckhardt thought, in spite of the weather bureau. And he felt like a fool, following this mad little man down the street, running away from some “them” toward—toward what? The little man might be crazy, but he was afraid. And the fear was infectious.

“In here!” panted the little man.

It was another restaurant—more of a bar, really, and a sort of second-rate place that Burckhardt had never patronized.

“Right straight through,” Swanson whispered; and Burckhardt, like a biddable boy, side-stepped through the mass of tables to the far end of the restaurant.

It was “L”-shaped, with a front on two streets at right angles to each other. They came out on the side street, Swanson staring coldly back at the question-looking cashier, and crossed to the opposite sidewalk.

They were under the marquee of a movie theater. Swanson’s expression began to relax.

“Lost them!” he crowed softly. “We’re almost there.”

He stepped up to the window and bought two tickets. Burckhardt trailed him in to the theater. It was a weekday matinee and the place was almost empty. From the screen came sounds of gunfire and horse’s hoofs. A solitary usher, leaning against a bright brass rail, looked briefly at them and went back to staring boredly at the picture as Swanson led Burckhardt down a flight of carpeted marble steps.

They were in the lounge and it was empty. There was a door for men and one for ladies; and there was a third door, marked “MANAGER” in gold letters. Swanson listened at the door, and gently opened it and peered inside.

“Okay,” he said, gesturing.

Burckhardt followed him through an empty office, to another door—a closet, probably, because it was unmarked.

But it was no closet. Swanson opened it warily, looked inside, then motioned Burckhardt to follow.

It was a tunnel, metal-walled, brightly lit. Empty, it stretched vacantly away in both directions from them.

Burckhardt looked wondering around. One thing he knew and knew full well:

No such tunnel belonged under Tylerton.

* * * *

There was a room off the tunnel with chairs and a desk and what looked like television screens. Swanson slumped in a chair, panting.

“We’re all right for a while here,” he wheezed. “They don’t come here much any more. If they do, we’ll hear them and we can hide.”

“Who?” demanded Burckhardt.

The little man said, “Martians!” His voice cracked on the word and the life seemed to go out of him. In morose tones, he went on: “Well, I think they’re Martians. Although you could be right, you know; I’ve had plenty of time to think it over these last few weeks, after they got you, and it’s possible they’re Russians after all. Still—”

“Start from the beginning. Who got me when?”

Swanson sighed. “So we have to go through the whole thing again. All right. It was about two months ago that you banged on my door, late at night. You were all beat up—scared silly. You begged me to help you—”

“I did?”

“Naturally you don’t remember any of this. Listen and you’ll understand. You were talking a blue streak about being captured and threatened, and your wife being dead and coming back to life, and all kinds of mixed-up nonsense. I thought you were crazy. But—well, I’ve always had a lot of respect for you. And you begged me to hide you and I have this darkroom, you know. It locks from the inside only. I put the lock on myself. So we went in there—just to humor you—and along about midnight, which was only fifteen or twenty minutes after, we passed out.”

“Passed out?”

Swanson nodded. “Both of us. It was like being hit with a sandbag. Look, didn’t that happen to you again last night?”

“I guess it did,” Burckhardt shook his head uncertainly.

“Sure. And then all of a sudden we were awake again, and you said you were going to show me something funny, and we went out and bought a paper. And the date on it was June 15th.”

“June 15th? But that’s today! I mean—”

“You got it, friend. It’s always today!”

It took time to penetrate.

Burckhardt said wonderingly, “You’ve hidden out in that darkroom for how many weeks?”

“How can I tell? Four or five, maybe. I lost count. And every day the same—always the 15th of June, always my landlady, Mrs. Keefer, is sweeping the front steps, always the same headline in the papers at the corner. It gets monotonous, friend.”

IV

It was Burckhardt’s idea and Swanson despised it, but he went along. He was the type who always went along.

“It’s dangerous,” he grumbled worriedly. “Suppose somebody comes by? They’ll spot us and—”

“What have we got to lose?”

Swanson shrugged. “It’s dangerous,” he said again. But he went along.

Burckhardt’s idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing—the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation, and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel.

They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck—at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use.

Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why?

And falling asleep, completely involuntarily—everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything—Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing.

And Swanson had lived his mouse’s existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them.

Them. One of “them” was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt’s office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected.

They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look—for they, alone in Tylerton, changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all.

Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade?

Burckhardt didn’t know the answer—but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. They slipped through.

And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant.

Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd—the automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still.

Only—now it was still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no commands; the coils and relays were at rest.

Burckhardt said, “Come on.” Swanson reluctantly followed him through the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks.

They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way, they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory, if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind.

Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.

Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never overlooking anything, never forgetting.…

Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. “I’m scared,” he said.

They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a door and dared to peer around it.

It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one—a dozen or more, at least—with a man or woman sitting before it, staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the same picture.

The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what looked like the cigar stand in his office building.

It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that someone would look their way or walk out and find them.

They found another room. This one was empty. It was an office, large and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared at them, briefly at first—then, as the words on one of them caught his attention, with incredulous fascination.

He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers.

Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk.

Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: “Look!” He dragged a gun from the desk. “And it’s loaded, too!”

Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt’s eyes sparked. “Good man!” he cried. “We’ll take it. We’re getting out of here with that gun, Swanson. And we’re going to the police! Not the cops in Tylerton, but the F.B.I., maybe. Take a look at this!”

The sheaf he handed Swanson was headed: “Test Area Progress Report. Subject: Marlin Cigarettes Campaign.” It was mostly tabulated figures that made little sense to Burckhardt and Swanson, but at the end was a summary that said:

Although Test 47-K3 pulled nearly double the number of new users of any of the other tests conducted, it probably cannot be used in the field because of local sound-truck control ordinances.

The tests in the 47-K12 group were second best and our recommendation is that retests be conducted in this appeal, testing each of the three best campaigns with and without the addition of sampling techniques.

An alternative suggestion might be to proceed directly with the top appeal in the K12 series, if the client is unwilling to go to the expense of additional tests.

All of these forecast expectations have an 80% probability of being within one-half of one per cent of results forecast, and more than 99% probability of coming within 5%.

Swanson looked up from the paper into Burckhardt’s eyes. “I don’t get it,” he complained.

Burckhardt said, “I don’t blame you. It’s crazy, but it fits the facts, Swanson, it fits the facts. They aren’t Russians and they aren’t Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow—heaven knows how they did it—they’ve taken Tylerton over. They’ve got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people, right under their thumbs.

“Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it’s something else; but however they do it, what happens is that they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day, they see what happened—and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising.”

Swanson’s jaw was hanging. He managed to close it and swallow. “Nuts!” he said flatly.

Burckhardt shook his head. “Sure, it sounds crazy—but this whole thing is crazy. How else would you explain it? You can’t deny that most of Tylerton lives the same day over and over again. You’ve seen it! And that’s the crazy part and we have to admit that that’s true—unless we are the crazy ones. And once you admit that somebody, somehow, knows how to accomplish that, the rest of it makes all kinds of sense.

“Think of it, Swanson! They test every last detail before they spend a nickel on advertising! Do you have any idea what that means? Lord knows how much money is involved, but I know for a fact that some companies spend twenty or thirty million dollars a year on advertising. Multiply it, say, by a hundred companies. Say that every one of them learns how to cut its advertising cost by only ten per cent. And that’s peanuts, believe me!

“If they know in advance what’s going to work, they can cut their costs in half—maybe to less than half, I don’t know. But that’s saving two or three hundred million dollars a year—and if they pay only ten or twenty per cent of that for the use of Tylerton, it’s still dirt cheap for them and a fortune for whoever took over Tylerton.”

Swanson licked his lips. “You mean,” he offered hesitantly, “that we’re a—well, a kind of captive audience?”

Burckhardt frowned. “Not exactly.” He thought for a minute. “You know how a doctor tests something like penicillin? He sets up a series of little colonies of germs on gelatine disks and he tries the stuff on one after another, changing it a little each time. Well, that’s us—we’re the germs, Swanson. Only it’s even more efficient than that. They don’t have to test more than one colony, because they can use it over and over again.”

It was too hard for Swanson to take in. He only said: “What do we do about it?”

“We go to the police. They can’t use human beings for guinea pigs!”

“How do we get to the police?”

Burckhardt hesitated. “I think—” he began slowly. “Sure. This place is the office of somebody important. We’ve got a gun. We’ll stay right here until he comes along. And he’ll get us out of here.”

Simple and direct. Swanson subsided and found a place to sit, against the wall, out of sight of the door. Burckhardt took up a position behind the door itself—

And waited.

* * * *

The wait was not as long as it might have been. Half an hour, perhaps. Then Burckhardt heard approaching voices and had time for a swift whisper to Swanson before he flattened himself against the wall.

It was a man’s voice, and a girl’s. The man was saying, “—reason why you couldn’t report on the phone? You’re ruining your whole day’s test! What the devil’s the matter with you, Janet?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dorchin,” she said in a sweet, clear tone. “I thought it was important.”

The man grumbled, “Important! One lousy unit out of twenty-one thousand.”

“But it’s the Burckhardt one, Mr. Dorchin. Again. And the way he got out of sight, he must have had some help.”

“All right, all right. It doesn’t matter, Janet; the Choco-Bite program is ahead of schedule anyhow. As long as you’re this far, come on in the office and make out your worksheet. And don’t worry about the Burckhardt business. He’s probably just wandering around. We’ll pick him up tonight and—”

They were inside the door. Burckhardt kicked it shut and pointed the gun.

“That’s what you think,” he said triumphantly.

It was worth the terrified hours, the bewildered sense of insanity, the confusion and fear. It was the most satisfying sensation Burckhardt had ever had in his life. The expression on the man’s face was one he had read about but never actually seen: Dorchin’s mouth fell open and his eyes went wide, and though he managed to make a sound that might have been a question, it was not in words.

The girl was almost as surprised. And Burckhardt, looking at her, knew why her voice had been so familiar. The girl was the one who had introduced herself to him as April Horn.

Dorchin recovered himself quickly. “Is this the one?” he asked sharply.

The girl said, “Yes.”

Dorchin nodded. “I take it back. You were right. Uh, you—Burckhardt. What do you want?”

Swanson piped up, “Watch him! He might have another gun.”

“Search him then,” Burckhardt said. “I’ll tell you what we want, Dorchin. We want you to come along with us to the FBI and explain to them how you can get away with kidnapping twenty thousand people.”

“Kidnapping?” Dorchin snorted. “That’s ridiculous, man! Put that gun away—you can’t get away with this!”

Burckhardt hefted the gun grimly. “I think I can.”

Dorchin looked furious and sick—but, oddly, not afraid. “Damn it—” he started to bellow, then closed his mouth and swallowed. “Listen,” he said persuasively, “you’re making a big mistake. I haven’t kidnapped anybody, believe me!”

“I don’t believe you,” said Burckhardt bluntly. “Why should I?”

“But it’s true! Take my word for it!”

Burckhardt shook his head. “The FBI can take your word if they like. We’ll find out. Now how do we get out of here?”

Dorchin opened his mouth to argue.

Burckhardt blazed: “Don’t get in my way! I’m willing to kill you if I have to. Don’t you understand that? I’ve gone through two days of hell and every second of it I blame on you. Kill you? It would be a pleasure and I don’t have a thing in the world to lose! Get us out of here!”

Dorchin’s face went suddenly opaque. He seemed about to move; but the blonde girl he had called Janet slipped between him and the gun.

“Please!” she begged Burckhardt. “You don’t understand. You mustn’t shoot!”

“Get out of my way!”

“But, Mr. Burckhardt—”

She never finished. Dorchin, his face unreadable, headed for the door. Burckhardt had been pushed one degree too far. He swung the gun, bellowing. The girl called out sharply. He pulled the trigger. Closing on him with pity and pleading in her eyes, she came again between the gun and the man.

Burckhardt aimed low instinctively, to cripple, not to kill. But his aim was not good.

The pistol bullet caught her in the pit of the stomach.

* * * *

Dorchin was out and away, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps racing into the distance.

Burckhardt hurled the gun across the room and jumped to the girl.

Swanson was moaning. “That finishes us, Burckhardt. Oh, why did you do it? We could have got away. We could have gone to the police. We were practically out of here! We—”

Burckhardt wasn’t listening. He was kneeling beside the girl. She lay flat on her back, arms helter-skelter. There was no blood, hardly any sign of the wound; but the position in which she lay was one that no living human being could have held.

Yet she wasn’t dead.

She wasn’t dead—and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought: She isn’t alive, either.

There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the outstretched fingers of one hand.

There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling noise.

The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.

She said, through lips that writhed erratically, “Don’t—worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I’m—all right.”

Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should have been blood, there was a clean break of a substance that was not flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire.

Burckhardt moistened his lips.

“You’re a robot,” he said.

The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, “I am. And so are you.”

V

Swanson, after a single inarticulate sound, walked over to the desk and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words.

The girl managed to say, “I’m—sorry all this happened.” The lovely lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young face, until she got them under control. “Sorry,” she said again. “The—nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it difficult to—control this body.”

Burckhardt nodded automatically, accepting the apology. Robots. It was obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something stranger still—idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted the facts better and more economically.

All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with its transplanted minds—why not transplant a mind into a humanoid robot, give it its original owner’s features and form?

Could it know that it was a robot?

“All of us,” Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. “My wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same.”

“No.” The voice was stronger. “Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose it, you see. I—” this time the convulsed lips were not a random contortion of the nerves—“I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt, and nearly sixty years old. Life had passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity. Believe me, I jumped, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is still alive—it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I never do.”

“And the rest of us?”

“Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I’m carrying out Mr. Dorchin’s orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests, watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead.”

“Dead?” cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream.

The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him swallow, and sweat, and eat.

He said: “Oh. The explosion in my dream.”

“It was no dream. You are right—the explosion. That was real and this plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast didn’t get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that was Dorchin’s chance.”

“The damned ghoul!” said Burckhardt.

The twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. “Why? You were gone. And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted—a whole town, a perfect slice of America. It’s as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one. Easier—the dead can’t say no. Oh, it took work and money—the town was a wreck—but it was possible to rebuild it entirely, especially because it wasn’t necessary to have all the details exact.

“There were the homes where even the brains had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn’t be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day—June 15th—over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won’t have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight.”

The face tried to smile. “That’s the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day of June 15th, because you never really lived it. It’s a present from Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you responded to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down the tunnel to go through the whole city, washing out the new dream with their little electronic drains, and then the dream starts all over again. On June 15th.

“Always June 15th, because June 14th is the last day any of you can remember alive. Sometimes the crews miss someone—as they missed you, because you were under your boat. But it doesn’t matter. The ones who are missed give themselves away if they show it—and if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the test. But they don’t drain us, the ones of us who work for Dorchin. We sleep when the power is turned off, just as you do. When we wake up, though, we remember.” The face contorted wildly. “If I could only forget!”

Burckhardt said unbelievingly, “All this to sell merchandise! It must have cost millions!”

The robot called April Horn said, “It did. But it has made millions for Dorchin, too. And that’s not the end of it. Once he finds the master words that make people act, do you suppose he will stop with that? Do you suppose—”

The door opened, interrupting her. Burckhardt whirled. Belatedly remembering Dorchin’s flight, he raised the gun.

“Don’t shoot,” ordered the voice calmly. It was not Dorchin; it was another robot, this one not disguised with the clever plastics and cosmetics, but shining plain. It said metallically: “Forget it, Burckhardt. You’re not accomplishing anything. Give me that gun before you do any more damage. Give it to me now.”

Burckhardt bellowed angrily. The gleam on this robot torso was steel; Burckhardt was not at all sure that his bullets would pierce it, or do much harm if they did. He would have put it to the test—

But from behind him came a whimpering, scurrying whirlwind; its name was Swanson, hysterical with fear. He catapulted into Burckhardt and sent him sprawling, the gun flying free.

“Please!” begged Swanson incoherently, prostrate before the steel robot. “He would have shot you—please don’t hurt me! Let me work for you, like that girl. I’ll do anything, anything you tell me—”

The robot voice said. “We don’t need your help.” It took two precise steps and stood over the gun—and spurned it, left it lying on the floor.

The wrecked blonde robot said, without emotion, “I doubt that I can hold out much longer, Mr. Dorchin.”

“Disconnect if you have to,” replied the steel robot.

Burckhardt blinked. “But you’re not Dorchin!”

The steel robot turned deep eyes on him. “I am,” it said. “Not in the flesh—but this is the body I am using at the moment. I doubt that you can damage this one with the gun. The other robot body was more vulnerable. Now will you stop this nonsense? I don’t want to have to damage you; you’re too expensive for that. Will you just sit down and let the maintenance crews adjust you?”

Swanson groveled. “You—you won’t punish us?”

The steel robot had no expression, but its voice was almost surprised. “Punish you?” it repeated on a rising note. “How?”

Swanson quivered as though the word had been a whip; but Burckhardt flared: “Adjust him, if he’ll let you—but not me! You’re going to have to do me a lot of damage, Dorchin. I don’t care what I cost or how much trouble it’s going to be to put me back together again. But I’m going out of that door! If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. You won’t stop me any other way!”

The steel robot took a half-step toward him, and Burckhardt involuntarily checked his stride. He stood poised and shaking, ready for death, ready for attack, ready for anything that might happen.

Ready for anything except what did happen. For Dorchin’s steel body merely stepped aside, between Burckhardt and the gun, but leaving the door free.

“Go ahead,” invited the steel robot. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

* * * *

Outside the door, Burckhardt brought up sharp. It was insane of Dorchin to let him go! Robot or flesh, victim or beneficiary, there was nothing to stop him from going to the FBI or whatever law he could find away from Dorchin’s synthetic empire, and telling his story. Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul’s technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breath of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps—but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt.

There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton—an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now.

It had to be the other direction.

It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it—skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door.

It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen.

First there was light—brilliant, incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid.

He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him.

No wonder Dorchin could so easily give him his freedom! From the factory, there was nowhere to go—but how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above!

A voice by his side said inquiringly, “Burckhardt?” And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him.

Burckhardt wet his lips. “Y-yes?” he croaked.

“This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?”

Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him.

It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light.

It looked like—

Impossible!

The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, “Burckhardt?” But he was unable to answer.

A heavy rumbling sigh. “I see,” said the voice. “You finally understand. There’s no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I’m a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn’t any need to in this case.”

From the mountain before him, Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness.…

“Poor little Burckhardt,” crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. “It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top.”

VI

It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words.

He shuddered and opened his eyes.

Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling.

Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scent was normal enough—except for the sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared:

“Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up and down the ballot? YES! You just bet you are!”

Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles…but his voice goes on and on through one June 15th after another.

PYTHIAS

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1955.

I am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn’t comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable.

They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house.

Sure, there will be a trial first, but that is only a formality. Not only did they catch me with the smoking gun in my hand and Connaught bubbling to death through the hole in his throat, but I admitted it.

I—knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought—deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught.

They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me.

Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life.

Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury.

Connaught and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the war. We met again in Washington, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a man with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And—well, I had my own life, too. It wasn’t scientific research in my case—I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I’m not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn’t like it, I didn’t want to do it, and when I was forced to do it, I did it badly. So—I left.

Thus I have no string of degrees, but you don’t need them in order to be a Senate guard.

Does that sound like a terribly impressive career to you? Of course not; but I liked it. The Senators are relaxed and friendly when the guards are around, and you learn wonderful things about what goes on behind the scenes of government. And a Senate guard is in a position to do favors—for newspapermen, who find a lead to a story useful; for government officials, who sometimes base a whole campaign on one careless, repeated remark; and for just about anyone who would like to be in the visitors’ gallery during a hot debate.

Larry Connaught, for instance. I ran into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his moist little eyes, when the Secretary got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Central American fanatics dragged out their weapons and began trying to change American policy with gunpowder.

You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me.

The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt.

For it did go off—and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right.

He didn’t come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor.

I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me.

“That was a close one, Dick,” he said. “Take me back to Tarawa.”

I said, “I guess you saved my life, Larry.”

“Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that’s all.”

“The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened.”

He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary. “Nobody was really watching, I suppose.”

“I was watching,” I told him flatly.

He looked at me silently for a moment.

“I was between you and the grenade,” I said. “You didn’t go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade.”

He started to shake his head.

I said, “Also, Larry, you fell on the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, as a matter of—”

“Cut it out, Larry! What’s the answer?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, “Don’t you read the papers? It went off a yard away.”

“Larry,” I said gently, “I was there.”

He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself.

Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, “Well, hell, Dick—I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?”

I can’t tell you all of what he said. I’ll tell most of it—but not the part that matters.

I’ll never tell that part to anybody.

Larry said, “I should have known you’d remember.” He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. “Those bull sessions in the cafeterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered.”

“You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis,” I said. “You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere, instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind.”

I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a man thinking himself from one place to another! But—I had been on that gallery.

I licked my lips and looked to Larry Connaught for confirmation.

“I was all wet,” Larry laughed. “Imagine!”

I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my shoulder.

He said, becoming sober, “Sure, Dick, you’re wrong, but you’re right all the same. The mind alone can’t do anything of the sort—that was just a silly kid notion. But,” he went on, “but there are—well, techniques—linking the mind to physical forces—simple physical forces that we all use every day—that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I haven’t found out yet.

“Fly across the ocean? In a second, Dick! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it’s work. It takes energy—you can’t escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it’s a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It’s even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can’t even be fired. Want the Crown Jewels of England? I could get them, Dick!”

I asked, “Can you see the future?”

He frowned. “That’s silly. This isn’t supersti—”

“How about reading minds?”

Larry’s expression cleared. “Oh, you’re remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can’t do that either, Dick. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing— Well, I can’t right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good.”

“Show me something you can do,” I asked.

He smiled. Larry was enjoying himself; I didn’t begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years, from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer.… He needed to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, someone had found him out.

He said, “Show you something? Why, let’s see, Dick.” He looked around the room, then winked. “See that window?”

I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sash weights. It closed again.

“The radio,” said Larry. There was a click and his little set turned itself on. “Watch it.”

It disappeared and reappeared.

“It was on top of Mount Everest,” Larry said, panting a little.

The plug on the radio’s electric cord picked itself up and stretched toward the baseboard socket, then dropped to the floor again.

“No,” said Larry, and his voice was trembling, “I’ll show you a hard one. Watch the radio, Dick. I’ll run it without plugging it in! The electrons themselves—”

He was staring intently at the little set. I saw the dial light go on, flicker, and hold steady; the speaker began to make scratching noises. I stood up, right behind Larry, right over him.

I used the telephone on the table beside him. I caught him right beside the ear and he folded over without a murmur. Methodically, I hit him twice more, and then I was sure he wouldn’t wake up for at least an hour. I rolled him over and put the telephone back in its cradle.

I ransacked his apartment. I found it in his desk: All his notes. All the information. The secret of how to do the things he could do.

I picked up the telephone and called the Washington police. When I heard the siren outside, I took out my service revolver and shot him in the throat. He was dead before they came in.

For, you see, I knew Laurence Connaught. We were friends. I would have trusted him with my life. But this was more than just a life.

Twenty-three words told how to do the things that Laurence Connaught did. Anyone who could read could do them. Criminals, traitors, lunatics—the formula would work for anyone.

Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you?

They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend. But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world.

SEARCH THE SKY (written with C. M. Kornbluth)

Originally published in 1954.

CHAPTER 1

Decay.

Ross stood on the traders’ ramp, overlooking the Yards, and the word kept bobbing to the top of his mind.

Decay.

About all of Halsey’s Planet there was the imperceptible reek of decay. The clean, big, bustling, efficient spaceport only made the sensation stronger. From where he stood on the height of the Ramp, he could see the Yards, the spires of Halsey City ten kilometers away—and the tumble-down gray acres of Ghost Town between.

Ross wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t a man given to brooding, but the scent of decay had saturated his nostrils that morning. He had tossed and turned all the night, wrestling with a decision. And he had got up early, so early that the only thing that made sense was to walk to work.

And that meant walking through Ghost Town. He hadn’t done that in a long time, not since childhood. Ghost Town was a wonderful place to play. “Tag,” “Follow My Fuehrer,” “Senators and President”—all the ancient games took on new life when you could dodge and turn among crumbling ruins, dart down unmarked lanes, gallop through sagging shacks where you might stir out a screeching, unexpected recluse.

But it was clear that—in the fifteen years between childhood games and a troubled man’s walk to work—Ghost Town had grown.

Everybody knew that! Ask the right specialists, and they’d tell you how much and how fast. An acre a year, a street a month, a block a week, the specialists would twinkle at you, convinced that the acre, street, block was under control, since they could measure it.

Ask the right specialists and they would tell you why it was happening. One answer per specialist, with an ironclad guarantee that there would be no overlapping of replies. “A purely psychological phenomenon, Mr. Ross. A vibration of the pendulum toward greater municipal compactness, a huddling, a mature recognition of the facts of interdependence, basically a step forward.…”

“A purely biological phenomenon, Mr. Ross. Falling birth rate due to biochemical deficiency of trace elements processed out of our planetary diet. Fortunately the situation has been recognized in time and my bill before the Chamber will provide.…”

“A purely technological problem, Mr. Ross. Maintenance of a sprawling city is inevitably less efficient than that of a compact unit. Inevitably there has been a drift back to the central areas and the convenience of air-conditioned walkways, winterized plazas.…”

Yes. It was a purely psychological-biological-technological-educational-demographic problem, and it was basically a step forward.

Ross wondered how many Ghost Towns lay corpselike on the surface of Halsey’s Planet. Decay, he thought. Decay.

But it had nothing to do with his problem, the problem that had kept him awake all the night, the problem that blighted the view before him now.

The trading bell clanged. The day’s work began.

For Ross it might be his last day’s work at the Yards.

* * * *

He walked slowly from the ramp to the offices of the Oldham Trading Corporation. “Morning, Ross boy,” his breezy young boss greeted him. Charles Oldham IV’s father had always taken a paternal attitude toward his help, and Charles Oldham IV was not going to change anything that Daddy had done. He shook Ross’s hand at the door of the suite and apologized because they hadn’t been able to find a new secretary for him yet. They’d been looking for two weeks, but the three applicants they had been able to dredge up had all been hopeless. “It’s the damn Chamber,” said Charles Oldham IV, winsomely gesturing with his hands to show how helpless men of affairs were against the blundering interference of Government. “Damn labor shortage is nothing but a damn artificial scarcity crisis. Daddy saw it; he knew it was coming.”

Ross almost told him he was quitting, but held back. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to spoil Oldham’s day with bad news, right on top of the opening bell. Or maybe it was because, in spite of a sleepless night, he still wasn’t quite sure.

The morning’s work helped him to become sure. It was the same monotonous grind.

Three freighters had arrived at dawn from Halsey’s third moon, but none of them was any affair of his. There was an export shipment of jewelry and watches to be attended to, but the ship was not to take off for another week. It scarcely classified as urgent. Ross worked on the manifests for a couple of hours, stared through his window for an hour, and then it was time for lunch.

Little Marconi hailed him as he passed through the traders’ lounge.

Of all the juniors on the Exchange, Marconi was the one Ross found easiest to take. He was lean and dark where Ross was solid and fair; worse, he stood four ranks above Ross in seniority. But, since Ross worked for Oldham, and Marconi worked for Haarland’s, the difference could be waived in social intercourse.

Ross suspected that, to Marconi as to him, trading was only a job—a dull one, and not a crusade. And he knew that Marconi’s reading was not confined to bills of lading. “Lunch?” asked Marconi. “Sure,” Ross said. And he knew he’d probably spill his secret to the little man from Haarland’s.

The skyroom was crowded—comparatively. All eight of the usual tables were taken; they pushed on into the roped-off area by the windows and found a table overlooking the Yards. Marconi blew dust off his chair. “Been a long time since this was used,” he grumbled. “Drink?” He raised his eyebrows when Ross nodded. It made a break; Marconi was the one usually who had a drink with lunch, Ross never touched it.

When the drinks came, each of them said to the other in perfect synchronism: “I’ve got something to tell you.”

They looked startled—then laughed. “Go ahead,” said Ross.

The little man didn’t even argue. Rapturously he drew a photo out of his pocket.

God, thought Ross wearily, Lurline again! He studied the picture with a show of interest. “New snap?” he asked brightly. “Lovely girl—” Then he noticed the inscription: To my fiance, with crates of love. “Well!” he said, “Fiance, is it? Congratulations, Marconi!”

Marconi was almost drooling on the photo. “Next month,” he said happily. “A big, big wedding. For keeps, Ross—for keeps. With children!”

Ross made an expression of polite surprise. “You don’t say!” he said.

“It’s all down in black and white! She agrees to have two children in the first five years—no permissive clause, a straight guarantee. Fifteen hundred annual allowance per child. And, Ross, do you know what? Her lawyer told her right in front of me that she ought to ask for three thousand, and she told him, ‘No, Mr. Turek. I happen to be in love.’ How do you like that, Ross?”

“A girl in a million,” Ross said feebly. His private thoughts were that Marconi had been gaffed and netted like a sugar perch. Lurline was of the Old Landowners, who didn’t own anything much but land these days, and Marconi was an undersized nobody who happened to make a very good living. Sure she happened to be in love. Smartest thing she could be. Of course, promising to have children sounded pretty special; but the papers were full of those things every day. Marconi could reliably be counted on to hang himself. He’d promise her breakfast in bed every third week end, or the maid that he couldn’t possibly find on the labor market, and the courts would throw all the promises on both sides out of the contract as a matter of simple equity. But the marriage would stick, all right.

Marconi had himself a final moist, fatuous sigh and returned the photo to his pocket. “And now,” he asked brightly, craning his neck for the waiter, “what’s your news?”

Ross sipped his drink, staring out at the nuzzling freighters in their hemispherical slips. He said abruptly, “I might be on one of those next week. Fallon’s got a purser’s berth open.”

Marconi forgot the waiter and gaped. “Quitting?”

“I’ve got to do something!” Ross exploded. His own voice scared him; there was a knife blade of hysteria in the sound of it. He gripped the edge of the table and forced himself to be calm and deliberate.

Marconi said tardily, “Easy, Ross.”

“Easy! You’ve said it, Marconi: ‘Easy.’ Everything’s so damned easy and so damned boring that I’m just about ready to blow! I’ve got to do something,” he repeated. “I’m getting nowhere! I push papers around and then I push them back again. You know what happens next. You get soft and paunchy. You find yourself going by the book instead of by your head. You’re covered, if you go by the book—no matter what happens. And you might just as well be dead!”

“Now, Ross—”

“Now, hell!” Ross flared. “Marconi, I swear I think there’s something wrong with me! Look, take Ghost Town for instance. Ever wonder why nobody lives there, except a couple of crazy old hermits?”

“Why, it’s Ghost Town,” Marconi explained. “It’s deserted.”

“And why is it deserted? What happened to the people who used to live there?”

Marconi shook his head. “You need a vacation, son,” he said sympathetically. “That was a long time ago. Hundreds of years, maybe.”

“But where did the people go?” Ross persisted desperately. “All of the city was inhabited hundreds of years ago—the city was twice as big as it is now. How come?”

Marconi shrugged. “Dunno.”

Ross collapsed. “Don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows. Only thing is, I care! I’m curious. Marconi, I get—well, moody. Depressed. I get to worrying about crazy things. Ghost Town, for one. And why can’t they find a secretary for me? And am I really different from everybody else or do I just think so—and doesn’t that mean that I’m insane?”

He laughed. Marconi said warmly, “Ross, you aren’t the only one; don’t ever think you are. I went through it myself. Found the answer, too. You wait, Ross.”

He paused. Ross said suspiciously, “Yeah?”

Marconi tapped the breast pocket with the photo of Lurline. “She’ll come along,” he said.

Ross managed not to sneer in his face. “No,” he said wearily. “Look, I don’t advertise it, but I was married once. I was eighteen, it lasted for a year and I’m the one who walked out. Flat-fee settlement; it took me five years to pay off the loan, but I never regretted it.”

Marconi began gravely, “Sexual incompatibility—”

Ross cut him off with an impatient gesture. “In that department,” he said, “it so happens she was a genius. But—”

“But?”

Ross shrugged. “I must have been crazy,” he said shortly. “I kept thinking that she was half-dead, dying on the vine like the rest of Halsey’s Planet. And I must still be crazy, because I still think so.”

The little man involuntarily felt his breast pocket. He said gently, “Maybe you’ve been working too hard.”

“Too hard!” Ross laughed, a curious blend of true humor and self-disgust. “Well,” he admitted, “I need a change, anyhow. I might as well be on a longliner. At least I’d have my spree to look back on.”

“No!” Marconi said, so violently that Ross slopped the drink he was lifting to his mouth.

Ross looked hard at the little man—hard and speculatively. “No, then,” he said. “It was just a figure of speech, of course. But tell me something, won’t you, Marconi?”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me why such a violent reaction to the word ‘longliner.’ I want to know.”

“Hell, Ross,” the little man grumbled, “you know what a longliner is. Gutter-scrapings for crews; nothing for a man like you.”

“I want to know more,” Ross insisted. “When I ask you what a longliner is, what the crew do with themselves for two or three centuries, you change the subject. You always change the subject! Maybe you know something I don’t know. I want to know what it is, and this time the subject doesn’t get changed. You don’t get off the hook until I find out.” He took a sip of his drink and leaned back. “Tell me about longliners,” he said. “I’ve never seen one coming in; it’s been fifteen years or so since that bucket from Sirius IV, hasn’t it? But you were on the job then.”

Marconi was no longer a man in love or one of the few people whom Ross considered to be wholly alive—like him. He was a hard-eyed little stranger with a stubborn mouth and an ingratiating veneer. In short he was again a trader, and a good one.

“I’ll tell you anything I know,” Marconi declared positively, and insincerely. “Tend to that fellow first though, will you?” He pointed to a uniformed Yards messenger whose eye had just alighted on Ross. The man threaded his way, stumbling, through the tables and laid a sealed envelope down in the puddle left by Ross’s drink.

“Sorry, sir,” he said crisply, wiped off the envelope with his handkerchief and, for lagniappe, wiped the puddle off the table into Ross’s lap.

Speechless, Ross signed for the envelope on a red-tabbed slip marked URGENT * PRIORITY * RUSH. The messenger saluted, almost putting his own eye out, and left, crashing into tables and chairs.

“Half-dead,” Ross muttered, following him with his eyes. “How the devil do they stay alive at all?”

Marconi said, unsmiling, “You’re taking this kick pretty seriously, Ross. I admit he’s a little clumsy, but—”

“But nothing,” said Ross. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know something’s wrong, Marconi! He’s a bumbling incompetent, and half his generation is just like him.” He looked bitterly at the envelope and dropped it on the table again. “More manifests,” he said. “I swear I’ll start throwing tableware if I have to check another bill of lading. Brighten my day, Marconi; tell me about the longliners. You’re not off the hook yet, you know.”

Marconi signaled for another drink. “All right,” he said. “Marconi tells all about longliners. They’re ships. They go from the planet of one star to the planet of another star. It takes a long time, because stars are many light-years apart and rocket ships cannot travel as fast as light. Einstein said so—whoever he was. Do we start with the Sirius IV ship? I was around when it came in, all right. Fifteen years ago, and Halsey’s Planet is still enjoying the benefits of it. And so is Leverett and Sons Trading Corporation. They did fine on flowers from seeds that bucket brought, they did fine on sugar perch from eggs that bucket brought. I’ve never had it myself. Raw fish for dessert! But some people swear by it—at five shields a portion. They can have it.”

“The hook, Marconi,” Ross reminded grimly.

Trader Marconi laughed amiably. “Sorry. Well, what else? Pictures and music, but I’m not much on them. I do read, though, and as a reader I say, God bless that bucket from Sirius IV. We never had a novelist like Morris Halliday on this planet—or an essayist like Jay Waring. Let’s see, there have been eight Halliday novels off the microfilms so far, and I think Leverett still has a couple in the vaults. Leverett must be—”

“Marconi. I don’t want to hear about Leverett and Sons. Or Morris Halliday, or Waring. I want to hear about longliners.”

“I’m trying to tell you,” Marconi said sullenly, the mask down.

“No, you’re not. You’re telling me that the longline ships go from one stellar system to another with merchandise. I know that.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Don’t be difficult, Marconi. I want to know the facts. All about longliners. The big hush-hush. The candid explanations that explain nothing—except that a starship is a starship. I know that they’re closed-system, multigeneration jobs; a group of people get in on Sirius IV and their great-great-great-great-grandchildren come giggling and stumbling out on Halsey’s Planet. I know that every couple of generations your firm—and mine, for that matter—builds one with profits that would be taxed off anyway and slings it out, stocked with seeds and film and sound tape and patent designs and manufacturing specifications for every new gimmick on the market, in the hope that it’ll be back long after we’re dead with a similar cargo to enrich your firm’s and my firm’s then-current owners. Sounds silly—but, as I say, it’s tax money anyhow. I know that your firm and mine staff the ships with half a dozen bums of each sex, who are loaded aboard with a dandy case of delirium tremens, contracted from spending their bounty money the only way they know how. And that’s just about all I know. Take it from there, Marconi. And be specific.”

The little man shrugged irritably. “That gag’s beginning to wear thin, Ross,” he complained. “What do you want me to tell you—the number of welds in Bulkhead 47 of ‘Starship 74’? What’s the difference? As you said, a starship is a starship is a longliner. Without them the inhabited solar systems would have no means of contact or commerce. What else is there to say?”

Ross looked suddenly lost. “I—don’t know,” he said. “Don’t you know, Marconi?”

Marconi hesitated, and for a moment Ross was sure he did know—knew something, at any rate, something that might be an answer to the doubts and nagging inconsistencies that were bothering him. But then Marconi shrugged and looked at his watch and ordered another drink.

But there was something wrong. Ross felt himself in the position of a diagnostician whose patient willfully refuses to tell where it hurts. The planet was sick—but wouldn’t admit it. Sick? Dying! Maybe he was on the wrong track entirely. Maybe the starships had nothing to do with it. Maybe there was nothing that Marconi knew that would fit a piece into the puzzle and make the answer come out all clear—but Ghost Town continued to grow acre by acre, year by year. And Oldham still hadn’t found him a secretary capable of writing her own name.

“According to the historians, everything fits nicely into place,” Ross said, dubiously. “They say we came here ourselves in longliners once, Marconi. Our ancestors under some man named Halsey colonized this place, fourteen hundred years ago. According to the longliners that come in from other stars, their ancestors colonized wherever they came from in starships from a place called Earth. Where is this Earth, Marconi?”

Marconi said succinctly, “Look in the star charts. It’s there.”

“Yes, but—”

“But, hell,” Marconi said in annoyance. “What in the world has got into you, Ross? Earth is a planet like any other planet. The starship Halsey colonized in was a starship like any other starship—only bigger. I guess, that is—I wasn’t there. After all, what are the longliners but colonists? They happen to be going to planets that are already inhabited, that’s all. So a starship is nothing new or even very interesting, and this is beginning to bore me, and you ought to read your urgent-priority-rush message.”

Ross felt repentant—knowing that that was just how Trader Marconi wanted him to feel. He said slowly, “I’m sorry if I’m being a nuisance, Marconi. You know how it is when you feel stale and restless. I know all the stories—but it’s so damned hard to believe them. The famous colonizing ships. They must have been absolutely gigantic to take any reasonable number of people on a closed-circuit, multigeneration ride. We can’t build them that big now!”

“No reason to.”

“But we couldn’t if we had to. Imagine shooting those things all over the Galaxy. How many inhabited planets in the charts—five hundred? A thousand? Think of the technology, Marconi. What became of it?”

“We don’t need that sort of technology any more,” Marconi explained. “That job is done. Now we concentrate on more important things. Learning to live with each other. Developing our own planet. Increasing our understanding of social factors and demographic—”

Ross was laughing at last. “Well, Marconi,” he said at last, “that takes care of that! We sure have figured out how to handle the social factors, all right. Every year there are fewer of them to handle. Pretty soon we’ll all be dead, and then the problem can be marked ‘solved.’”

Marconi laughed too—eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for the chance. He said, “Now that that’s settled, are you going to open your message? Are you at least going to have some lunch?”

The Yards messenger stumbled up to their table again, this time with an envelope for Marconi. He looked sharply at Ross’s unopened envelope and said nothing, pointedly. Ross guiltily picked it up and tore it open. You could act like a sulky child in front of a friend, but strangers didn’t understand.

The message was from his office:

RADAR REPORTS HIGH VELOCITY SPACECRAFT ON AUTOCONTROLS. FIRST APPROXIMATION TRAJECTORY INDICATES INTERSTELLAR ORIGIN. PROBABLE ETA YARDS 1500. NO RADIO MESSAGES RECEIVED. DON’T HAVE TO TELL YOU TO GET ON THIS IMMEDIATELY AND GIVE IT YOUR BEST.

OLDHAM.

Ross looked at Marconi, whose expression was perturbed. “Bet I know what your message says,” he offered with an uneasy quaver in his voice.

Marconi said: “I’ll bet you do. Oldham’s radar setup on Sunward always has been better than Haarland’s. Better location. Man, you are in trouble! Let’s get out there and hope nobody’s missed you so far.”

They grabbed sandwiches from the snack bar on the way out and munched them while the Yards jeep took them to the ready line. Skirting the freighters in their pits, slipping past the enormous overhaul sheds, they saw excited debates going on. Twice they were passed by Yards vehicles heading toward the landing area. Halfway to the line they heard the recall sirens warning everybody and everything out of the ten seared acres surrounded by homing and Ground-Controlled Approach radars. That was where the big ones were landed.

The ready line was jammed when they got there. Ships from one or another of the five moons that circled Halsey’s planet were common; the moons were the mines. Even the weekly liner and freighters from the colony on Sunward, the planet next in from Halsey’s, were routine to the Yards workers. But to anybody an interstellar ship was a sensation, a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thrill.

Protocols were uncertain. Traders argued about the first crack at the strangers and their goods. A dealer named Aalborg said the only fair system would be to give every trade there an equal opportunity to do business—in alphabetical order. Everybody agreed that under no circumstances should the man from Leverett and Sons be allowed to trade—everybody, except the man from Leverett and Sons. He pointed out that his firm was the logical choice because it had more and fresher experience in handling interstellar goods than any other.…

They almost mobbed him.

It wasn’t merely money that filled the atmosphere with electric tingles. The glamor of time-travel was on them. The crew aboard that ship were travelers of time as well as space. The crew that had launched the ship was dust. The crew that served it now had never seen a planet.

There was even some humility in the crowd. There were thoughtful ones among them who reflected that it was not, after all, a very great feat to hitch a rocket to a shell and lob it across a few million miles to a neighboring planet. It was eclipsed by the tremendous deed whose climax they were about to witness. The thoughtful ones shrugged and sighed as they thought that even the starship booming down toward Halsey’s Planet—fitted with the cleverest air replenishers and the most miraculously efficient waste converters—was only a counter in the game whose great rule was the mass-energy formulation of the legendary Einstein: that there is no way to push a material object past the speed of light.

A report swept the field that left men reeling in its wake. Radar Track confirmed that the ship was of unfamiliar pattern. All hope that it might be a starship launched from this very spot on the last leg of a stupefying round trip was officially dead. The starship was foreign.

“Wonder what they have?” Marconi muttered.

“Trader!” Ross sneered ponderously. He was feeling better; the weight of depression had been lifted for the time being, either by his confession or the electric atmosphere. If every day were like this, he thought vaguely.…

“Let’s not kid each other,” Marconi was saying exuberantly. “This is an event, man! Where are they from, what are they peddling? Do I get a good cut at their wares? It could be fifty thousand shields for me in commission alone. Lurline and I could build a tower house on Great Blue Lake with that kind of money, with a whole floor for her parents! Ross, you just don’t know what it is to really be in love. Everything changes.”

A jeep roared up and slammed to a stop; Ross blinked and yelled: “Here it comes!”

They watched the ground-controlled approach with the interest of semiprofessionals and concealed their rising excitement with shop talk.

“Whups! There goes the high-power job into action.” Marconi pointed as a huge dish antenna swiveled ponderously on its mast. “Seems the medium-output dishes can’t handle her.”

“Maybe the high-power dish can’t either. She might be just plain shot.”

“Standard, sealed GCA doesn’t get shot, my young friend. Not in a neon-atmosphere tank it doesn’t.”

“Maybe along about the fifth generation they forgot what it was and cut it open with an acetylene torch to see what was inside.”

“Bad luck for us in that case, Ross.” The ship steadied on a due-west course and flashed across the heavens and over the horizon.

“Somebody decided a braking ellipse or two was in order. What about line of sight?”

“No sweat. The GCA jockey—and I’d bet it’s Delafield himself—pushes a button that hooks him into the high-power dish at every rocket field on Halsey’s. It’s been all thought out. There’s a potential fortune aboard that longliner and Fields Administration wants its percentage for servicing and accommodating.”

“Wonder what they have?”

“I already asked that one, Ross.”

“So you did.”

They lapsed into silence until the rocket boomed in again from the east, high and slow. The big dish swiveled abruptly and began tracking again.

“He’ll try to bring her down this time. Yes! There go fore and stabilizing jets.”

Flame jutted from the silvery speck high in the blue; its apparent speed slowed to a crawl. It vanished for a second as steering jets turned her slowly endwise. They caught sight of the stern jets when they blasted for the descent.

It was uneventful—just the landing of a very, very big rocket. When a landing is successful it is like every other successful landing ever made.

But the action that the field whirled into immediately following the landing was far from routine. The bullhorns roared that all traders, wipers, rubbernecks, and visitors were to get behind the ready lines and stay there. All Class-Three-and-higher Field personnel were to take stations for longliner clearance. The weapons and decontamination parties were to take their stations immediately. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders and don’t let any of the traders talk you out of it, men. Captain Delafield would issue all future orders.

Ross watched in considerable surprise as Field men working with drilled precision broke out half a dozen sleek, needle-nosed guns from an innocent-looking bay of the warehouse and manhandled them into position. From another bay a large pressure tank was hauled and backed against the lock of the starship. Ross could see the station medic bustlingly supervise that, and the hosing of white gunk onto the juncture between tank and ship.

Delafield crossed the stretch from the GCA complex to the tank, vanished into it through a pressure-fitted door and that was that. The tank had no windows.

Ross said to Marconi, wonderingly: “What’s all this about? There was Doc Gibbons handling the pressure tank, there was Chunk Blaney rolling out a God-damned cannon I never knew was there—how many more little secrets are there that I don’t know about?”

Marconi grinned. “They have gun drill once a month, my young friend, and they never say a word about it. Let the right rabble-rouser get hold of the story and he might sail into office on a platform of ‘Keep the bug-eyed monsters off of Halsey’s Planet.’ You have to have reasonable precautions, military and medical, though—and this is the straight goods—there’s never been any trouble of either variety.”

The conversation died and there was a long, boring hour of nothing. At last Delafield appeared again. One of the decontamination party ran up in a jeep with a microphone.

“What’ll it be?” Ross demanded. “Alphabetic order? Or just a rush?”

The announcement floored him. “Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation please report to the decontamination tank.”

The representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation was Marconi.

“Hell,” Ross said bitterly. “Good luck with them, whoever they are.”

Marconi brooded for a moment and then said gruffly, “Come on along.”

“You mean it?”

“Sure. Uh—naturally, Ross, you’ll give me your word not to make any commercial offers or inquiries without my permission.”

“Oh. Naturally.” They started across the field and were checked through the ready line, Marconi cheerfully presenting his identification and vouching for Ross.

Captain Delafield, at the tank, snapped, “What are you doing here, Ross? You’re Oldham’s man. I distinctly said—”

“My responsibility, Captain. Will that do it?” Marconi asked.

Delafield snapped, “It’ll be your fundament if Haarland hears about it. Actually it’s the damnedest situation—they asked for Haarland’s.”

Marconi looked frightened and his hand involuntarily went to his breast pocket. He swallowed and asked, “Where are they from?”

Delafield grimaced and said, “Home.”

Marconi exploded, “Oh, no!”

“That’s all I can get out of them. I suppose their trajectory can be analyzed, and there must be books. We haven’t been in the ship yet. Nobody goes in until it gets sprayed, rayed, dusted, and busted down into its component parts. Too many places for nasty little mutant bacteria and viruses to lurk.”

“Sure, Captain. ‘Home,’ eh? They’re pretty simple?”

“Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is ‘home’ and ‘we wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.’ First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women, said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby, and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you’re the Haarland Trading Corporation. Go on in.”

CHAPTER 2

They were all naked. Why not? There’s no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Their laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful—no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with a red rubber bone.

A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago.… Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.

The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths, including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.

The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi, “We wish to see the representative of the Haarland—”

“Yes, I know. I’m the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation. Welcome to Halsey’s Planet. May I ask what your name is, ma’am?”

“Ma,” she said genially.

“Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name’s Marconi.”

Ma said, bewildered, “You just said you were the representative of the Haarland Trading—”

“Yes, Ma, but that’s all right. Let’s say that’s my other name. Two names—understand?”

She laughed at the idea of two names, wonderingly.

Marconi pressed, “And what’s the name of this gentleman?”

“He isn’t Gentleman. He’s Sonny.”

Sonny was a hundred years old.

“Pleased to meet you, Sonny. And your name, sir?”

“Sonny,” said a redheaded man of eighty or thereabouts.

The identical-twin women were named The Kids. The baby was named Him. The rest of the troop were named Girl, Ma, or Sonny. After introductions Ross noticed that Him had been passed to another Ma who was placidly suckling him. She had milk; it dribbled from the corner of the baby’s mouth. “There isn’t another baby left in the ship, is there?” Ross asked in alarm.

They laughed and the Ma suckling the baby said: “There was, but she died. Mostly they do when you put them into the box after they get born. Ma here was lucky. Her Him didn’t die.”

“Put them in the box? What box? Why?”

Marconi was nudging him fiercely in the ribs. He ignored it.

They laughed amiably at his ignorance and explained that the box was the box, and that you put your newborn babies into it because you put your newborn babies into it.

A beep tone sounded from the ship.

Ma said, “We have to go back now, The Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation Marconi.”

“What for?”

Ma said, “At regular intervals signaled by a tone of six hundred cycles and an intermittent downward shifting of the ship lights from standard illumination frequency to a signal frequency of 420 millimicrons, ship’s operating personnel take up positions at the control boards for recalibration of ship-working meters and instruments against the battery of standard masters. We’ll be right back.”

They trooped through the hatch, leaving Ross and Marconi staring at each other in the decontamination tank.

“Well,” Ross said slowly, “at last I know why the Longliner Departments have their little secrets. ‘The box.’ I say it’s murder.”

“Be reasonable,” Marconi told him—but his own face was white under the glaring germicidal lamps. “You can’t let them increase without limit or they’d all die. And before they died there’d be cannibalism. Which do you prefer?”

“Letting kids be born and then snuffing them out if a computer decides they’re the wrong sex or over the quota is inhuman.”

“I didn’t say I like it, Ross. But it works.”

“So do pills!”

“Pills are a private matter. A person might privately decide not to take hers. The box is a public matter and the group outnumbers and overrules a mother who decides not to use it. There’s your question of effectiveness answered, but there’s another point. Those people are sane, Ross. Preposterously naive, but sane! Saner than childless women or sour old bachelors we both know who never had to love anything small and helpless, and so come to love nobody but themselves. They’re sane. Partly because the women get a periodic biochemical shakeup called pregnancy that their biochemical balance is designed to mesh with. Partly because the men find tenderness and protectiveness in themselves toward the pregnant women. Mostly, I think, because—it’s something to do.

“Can you imagine the awful monotony of life in the ship? The work is sheer rote and repetition. They can’t read or watch screentapes. They were born in the ship, and the books and screentapes are meaningless because they know nothing to compare them with. The only change they see is each other, aging toward death. Frequent pregnancies are a Godsend to them. They compare and discuss them; they wonder who the fathers are; they make bets of rations; the men brag and keep score. The girls look forward to their first and their last. The jokes they make up about them! The way they speculate about twins! The purgative fear, even, keeps them sane.”

“And then,” Ross said, “‘the box.’”

Staring straight ahead at the ship’s port Marconi echoed: “Yes. ‘The box.’ If there were another way—but there isn’t.”

* * * *

His breezy young boss, Charles Oldham IV, was not pleased with what Ross had to report.

“Asked for Haarland!” he repeated unbelievingly. “Those dummies didn’t know where they were going or where they were from, but they knew enough to ask for Haarland.” He slammed a ruler on his desk and yelled: “God-damn it!”

“Mr. Oldham!” Ross protested, aghast. For a superior to lose his temper publicly was unthinkable; it covered you with embarrassment.

“Manners be God-damned too!” Oldham screamed, breaking up fast. “What do you know about the state of our books? What do you know about the overhead I inherited from my loving father? What the hell do you know about the downcurve in sales?”

“These fluctuations—” Ross began soothingly.

“Fluctuations be God-damned! I know a fluctuation when I see one, and I know a long-term downtrend when I see one. And that’s what we’re riding, right into bankruptcy, fellow. And now these God-damned dummies blow in from nowhere with a consignment exclusively for Haarland—I don’t know why I don’t get to hell out of this stupid business and go live in a shack on Great Blue Lake and let the planet go ahead and rot.”

Ross’s horror at the unseemly outburst was eclipsed by his interest at noting how similarly he and Oldham had been thinking. “Sir,” he ventured, “I’ve had something on my mind for a while—”

“It can wait,” Oldham growled, collecting himself with a visible effort. So there went his chance to resign. “What about customs? I know Haarland hasn’t got enough cash to lay out. Who has?”

Ross said glibly: “Usual arrangement, sir. They turn an estimated twenty-five percent of the cargo over to the port authority for auction, the receipts to be in full discharge of their import tax. And I suppose they enter protective bids. They aren’t wasting any time—auction’s 2100 tonight.”

“You handle it,” Oldham muttered. “Don’t go over one hundred thousand shields. Diversify the purchases as much as possible. And try to sneak some advance information out of the dummies if you get a chance.”

“Yes, sir,” Ross said. As he left he saw Oldham taking a plastic bottle from a wall cabinet.

And that, thought Ross as he rode to the Free Port, was the first crack he had ever seen in the determined optimism of the trading firm’s top level. They were optimists and they were idealists, at least to hear them tell it. Interplanetary trading was a cause and a mission; the traders kept the flame of commerce alight. Perhaps, thought Ross, they had been able to indulge in the hypocrisy of idealism only so long as a population upcurve assured them of an expanding market. Perhaps now that births were flattening out—some said the dirty word “declining”—they all would drop their optimistic creed in favor of fang-and-claw competition for the favors of the dwindling pool of consumers.

And that, Ross thought gloomily, was the way he’d go himself if he stayed on: junior trader, to senior trader, to master trader, growing every year more paranoidally suspicious of his peers, less scrupulous in the chase of the shield.…

But he was getting out, of course. The purser’s berth awaited. And then, perhaps, the awful depressions he had been enduring would lift off him. He thought of the master traders he knew: his own man Oldham, none too happy in the hereditary business; Leverett, still smug and fat with his terrific windfall of the Sirius IV starship fifteen years ago; Marconi’s boss Haarland—Haarland broke the sequence all to hell. It just wasn’t possible to think of Haarland being driven by avarice and fear. He was the oldest of them all, but there was more zest and drive in his parchment body than in the rest of them combined.

In the auction hall Ross found a seat near the velvet ropes. One of the professional bidders lounging against a wall flicked him an almost imperceptible signal, and he answered with another. That was that; he had his man, and a good one. They had often worked together in the commodity pits, but not so often or so exclusively that the bidder would be instantly known as his.

Inside the enclosure Marconi, seated at a bare table, labored over a sheaf of papers with one of the “Sonnies” from the ship. Sonny was wriggling in coveralls, the first clothes he had ever worn. Ross saw they hadn’t been able to get shoes onto him.

Who else did he know? Captain Delafield was sitting somberly within the enclosure; Win Fraley, the hottest auctioneer on the Port, was studying a list, his lips moving. Every trading firm was represented; the heads of the smaller firms were there in person, not daring to delegate the bidding job. Plenty of Port personnel, just there for the excitement of the first longliner in fifteen years, even though it was well after close of the business day.

The goods were in sealed cases against the back wall as usual. Ross could only tell that some of them were perforated and therefore ought to contain living animals. Only the one Sonny from the starship crew was there; presumably the rest were back on the ship. He wouldn’t be able to follow Oldham’s orders to snoop out the nature of the freight from them. Well, damn Oldham; damn even the auction, Ross thought to himself. His mood of gloom did not lift.

The auction was a kind of letdown. All that turmoil and bustle, concentrated in a tiny arc around the velvet ropes, contrasted unpleasantly with the long, vacant rows of dusty seats that stretched to the back of the hall. Maybe a couple of centuries ago Ross would have enjoyed the auction more. But now all it made him think of was the thing he had been brooding about for a night and a day, the slow emptying of the planet, the.…

Decay.

But, as usual, no one else seemed to notice or to care.

Captain Delafield consulted his watch and stood up. He rapped the table. “In accordance with the rules of the Trade Commission and the appropriate governing statutes,” he droned, “certain merchandise will now be placed on public auction. The Haarland Trading Corporation, consignee, agrees and consents to divest itself of merchandise from Consignment 97-W amounting by estimate of the customs authorities to twenty-five percent of the total value of all merchandise in said consignment. All receipts of this auction are to be entered as excise duties paid by the consignee on said merchandise, said receipts to constitute payment in full on excise on Consignment 97-W. The clerk will record; if any person here present wishes to enter an objection let him do so thank you.” He glanced at a slip of paper in his hand. “I am requested to inform you that the Haarland Trading Corporation has entered with the clerk a protective bid of five thousand shields on each item.” There was a rustle in the hall. Five thousand shields was a lot of money. “Your auctioneer, Win Fraley,” said Captain Delafield, and sat down in the first row of seats.

The auctioneer took a long, slow swallow of water, his eyes gleaming above the glass at the audience. Theatrically he tossed the glass to an assistant, smacked his hands together and grinned. “Well,” he boomed genially, “I don’t have to tell you gentlemen that somebody’s going to get rich tonight. Who knows—maybe it’ll be you? But you can’t make money without spending money, so without any further ado, let’s get started. I have here,” he rapped out briskly, “Item Number One. Now you don’t know and I don’t know exactly what Item Number One contains, but I can tell you this, they wouldn’t have sent it two hundred and thirty-one lights if they didn’t think it was worth something. Let’s get this started with a rush, folks, and I mean with a big bid to get in the right mood. After all, the more you spend here the less you have to pay in taxes,” he laughed. “You ready? Here’s the dope. Item Number One—” His assistant slapped a carton at the extreme left of the line. “—weight two hundred and fifteen grams, net; fifteen cubic centimeters; one microfilm reel included. Reminds me,” he reminisced, “of an item just about that size on the Sirius IV shipment. Turned out to be Maryjane seeds, and I don’t suppose I have to tell anybody here how much Mr. Leverett made out of Maryjanes; I bet every one of us has been smoking them ever since. What do you say, Mr. Leverett? You did all right last time—want to say ten thousand as a first big bid on Item Number One? Nine thousand? Do I hear—?”

One of the smaller traders, not working through a professional bidder, not even decently delegating the work to a junior, bid seventy-five hundred shields. Like the spokesmen for the other big traders, Ross sat on his hands during the early stages. Let the small fry give themselves a thrill and drop out. The big firms knew to a fraction of a shield how much the small ones could afford to bid on a blind purchase, and the easiest way to handle them was to let them spend their budgets in a hurry. Of course the small traders knew all this, and their strategy, when they could manage it, was to hold back as long as possible. It was a matter of sensing emotion rather than counting costs; of recognizing the fraction of a second in which a little fellow made up his mind to acquire an item and bidding him up—of knowing when he’d gone his limit and letting him have it at a ruinous price. It was an art, and Ross, despising it, knew that he did it very, very well.

He yawned and pretended to read a magazine while the first six items went on the block; the little traders seemed desperate enough to force the price up without help. He bid on Item Seven partly to squeeze a runt trader and partly to test his liaison with his professional bidder. It was perfect; the pro caught his signal—a bored inspection of his fingernails—while seeming to peek clumsily at the man from Leverett’s.

Ross let the next two pass and then acquired three items in rapid succession. The fever had spread to most of the bidders by then; they were starting at ten thousand and up. One or two of the early birds had spent their budgets and were leaving, looking sandbagged—as indeed they had been. Ross signaled “take five” to his professional and strolled out for a cup of coffee.

On the way back he stopped for a moment outside the hall to look at the stars and breathe. There were the familiar constellations—The Plowman, the Rocket Fleet, Marilyn Monroe. He stood smoking a cigarette and yearning toward them until somebody moved in the darkness near him. “Nice night, Ross,” the man said gloomily.

It was Captain Delafield. “Oh, hello, sir,” Ross said, the world descending around him again like a too-substantial curtain. “Taking a breather?”

“Had to,” the captain growled. “Ten more minutes in that place and I would have thrown. Damned money-grabbing traders. No offense, Ross; just that I don’t see how you stand the life. Seems to have got worse in my time. Much worse. You high-rollers goading the pee-wees into shooting their wads—it didn’t use to be like that. Gallantry. Not stomping a downed man. I don’t see how you stand it.”

“I can’t stand it,” Ross said quietly. “Captain Delafield, you don’t know—I’m so sick to death of the life I’m leading and the work I’m doing that I’d do anything to get away. Mr. Fallon offered me a purser’s spot on his ship; I’ve been thinking about it very seriously.”

“Purser? A dirty job. There’s nothing to do except when you’re in port, and then there’s so much to do that you never get to see the planet. I don’t recommend it, Ross.”

Ross grunted, thinking. If even the purser’s berth was no way out, what was left for him? Sixty more years of waiting for a starship and scheming how to make a profit from its contents? Sixty more years watching Ghost Town grow by nibbles on Halsey City, watching the traders wax in savagery as they battled for the ever-diminishing pool of consumers, watching obscene comedies like Lurline of the Old Landowners graciously consenting to wed Marconi of the New Nobodies? He said wearily: “Then what shall I do, Captain? Rot here with the rest of the planet?”

Delafield shrugged, suprisingly gentle. “You feel it too, Ross? I’m glad to hear it. I’m not sensitive, thank God, but I know they talk about me. They say I quit the space-going fleet as soon as I had a chance to grab off the port captaincy. They’re right; I did. Because I was frightened.”

“Frightened? You?” Delafield’s ribbons for a dozen heroic rescues gleamed in the light that escaped from the hall.

“Sure, Ross.” He flicked the ribbons. “Each one of these means I and my men pulled some people out of a jam they got into because of somebody’s damned stupidity or slow reflexes or defective memory. No; I withdraw that. The ‘Thetis’ got stove in because of mechanical failure, but all the rest were human error. There got to be too many for me; I want to enjoy my old age.

“Ready to face that if you become a purser? I can tell you that if you don’t like it here you won’t be happy on Sunward and you won’t like the moons. And you most especially and particularly won’t like being a purser. It’s the same job you’re doing now, but it pays less, offers you a six-by-eight cubicle to work and live in, and gives you nothing resembling a future to aim at. Now if you’ll excuse me I’d better get back inside. I’ve enjoyed our talk.”

Ross followed the captain gloomily. Nothing had changed inside; Ross lounged in the doorway inconspicuously picking up the eye of his bidder. Marconi was gone from the enclosure. Ross looked around hopefully and found his friend in agitated conversation with an unrecognizable but also agitated man at the back of the hall. Ross drifted over. Heads were turning in the front rows. As Ross got within range he heard a couple of phrases. “—in the ship. Mr. Haarland specially asked for you. Please, Mr. Marconi!”

“Oh, hell,” Marconi said disgustedly. “Go on. Tell him I’ll be there. But how he expects me to take care of things here and—” He trailed off as he caught sight of Ross.

“Trouble?” Ross asked.

“Not exactly. The hell with it.” Marconi stared indecisively at the auctioneer for a moment. He said obscurely, “Taking your life isn’t enough; he wants more. And I thought I’d be able to see Lurline tonight. Excuse me, Ross. I’ve got to get over to the ship.” He hurried out.

Ross looked wonderingly after him, caught the eye of his bidder, and went back to work. By the time the auction was over and dawn was breaking in the west, Oldham Trading had bought nine lots of merchandise: three breathing, five flowering, and one a roll of microfilm. Ross took his prizes to the office where Charles Oldham was waiting, much the better for a few drinks and a long nap.

“How much?” demanded Oldham. Evidently they were both supposed to ignore his hysteria of the night before.

“Fifty-seven thousand,” Ross said dully.

“For nine lots? Good man! With any kind of luck at all—” And Oldham babbled on and on. He wanted Ross to stay and view the microfilm projection, stand by for a report from a zoologist and a botanist on the living acquisitions. He pleaded weariness and Oldham became conciliatory to the wonderful young up-and-comer who had bid in the merchandise at a whopping bargain price.

Ross dragged himself from the building, into a cab, and home. Morosely undressing he lit a cigarette and brooded: well, that was it. What you’d been waiting for since you were a junior apprentice. The starship came, you had the alien prizes in your hands and you realized they were as tawdry as the cheap gimcracks you export every week to Sunward.

He stared out the window, over Ghost Town, to the Field. The sun was high over the surrounding mountains; he imagined he could pick out the reflected glimmer from the starship a dozen miles away. Marconi at least got to examine the ship. Marconi might be there now; he’d been headed that way when Ross saw him last. And evidently not enjoying it much. Ross wondered vaguely if anybody really enjoyed anything. He stubbed out his cigarette.

As he fell asleep he was remembering what Delafield had told him about the moons and the planet ports. His dreams were of the cities of other planets, and every one of them was populated by aloof Delafields and avaricious Oldhams.

CHAPTER 3

“Wake up, Ross,” Marconi was saying, joggling him. “Come on, wake up.”

Ross thrust himself up on an elbow and opened his eyes. He said with a tongue the size of his forearm in a dust-lined mouth: “Wha’ time is it? Wha’ the hell are you doing here, for that matter?”

“It’s around noon. You’ve slept for three hours; you can get up.”

“Uh.” Ross automatically reached for a cigarette. The smoke got in his eyes and he rubbed them; it dehydrated and seared what little healthy tissue appeared to be left in his mouth. But it woke him up a little. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Marconi’s hand was involuntarily on his breast pocket again, the one in which he carried Lurline’s picture. He said harshly: “You want a job? Topside? Better than purser?” He wasn’t meeting Ross’s eye. His gaze roved around the apartment and lighted on a coffee maker. He filled it and snapped it on. “Get dressed, will you?” he demanded.

Ross sat up. “What’s this all about, Marconi? What do you want, anyway?”

Marconi, for his own reasons, became violently angry. “You’re the damnedest question-asker I ever did meet, Ross. I’m trying to do you a favor.”

“What favor?” Ross asked suspiciously.

“You’ll find out. You’ve been bellyaching to me long enough about how dull your poor little life is. Well, I’m offering you a chance to do something big and different. And what do you do? You crawfish. Are you interested or aren’t you? I told you: It’s a space job, and a big one. Bigger than being a purser for Fallon. Bigger than you can imagine.”

Ross began to struggle into his clothes, no more than half comprehending, but stimulated by the magic words. He asked, puzzling sleepily over what Marconi had said, “What are you sore about?” His guess was that Lurline had broken a date—but it seemed to be the wrong time of day for that.

“Nothing,” Marconi said grumpily. “Only I have my own life to live.” He poured two cups of coffee. He wouldn’t answer questions while they sipped the scalding stuff. But somehow Ross was not surprised when, downstairs, Marconi headed his car along the winding road through Ghost Town that led to the Yards.

Every muscle of Ross’s body was stiff and creaky; another six hours of sleep would have been a wonderful thing. But as they drove through the rutted streets of Ghost Town he began to feel alive again. He stared out the window at the flashing ruins, piecing together the things Marconi had said.

“Watch it!” he yelled, and Marconi swerved the car around a tumbled wall. Ross was shaking, but Marconi only drove faster. This was crazy! You didn’t race through Ghost Town as though you were on the pleasure parkways around the Great Blue Lake; it wasn’t safe. The buildings had to fall over from time to time—nobody, certainly, bothered to keep them in repair. And nobody bothered to pick up the pieces when they fell, either, until the infrequent road-mending teams made their rounds.

But at last they were out of Ghost Town, on the broad highway from Halsey City to the ’port. The administration building and car park was just ahead.

It was there that Marconi spoke again. “I’m assuming, Ross, that you weren’t snowing me when you said you wanted thrills, chills, and change galore.”

“That’s not the way I put it. But I wasn’t snowing you.”

“You’ll get them. Come on.”

He led Ross across the field to the longliner, past a gaggle of laughing, chattering Sonnies and Mas. He ignored them.

The longliner was a giant of a ship, a blunt torpedo a hundred meters tall. It had no ports—naturally enough; the designers of the ship certainly didn’t find any reason for its idiot crew to look out into space, and landings and takeoffs would be remote-controlled. Two hundred years old it was; but its metal was as bright, its edges as sharp, as the newest of the moon freighters at the other end of the hardstand. Two hundred years—a long trip, but an almost unimaginably long distance that trip covered. For the star that spawned it was undoubtedly almost as far away as light would travel in two centuries’ time. At 186,000 miles per second, sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. Ross’s imagination gave up the task. It was far.

He stared about him in fascination as they entered the ship. He gaped at sterile, gray-walled cubicles, each of which contained the same chair and cot—no screen or projector for longliners. Ross remembered his rash words of the day before about shipping out on a longliner, and shuddered.

“Here we are,” said Marconi stopping before a closed door. He knocked and entered.

It was a cubicle like the others, but there were reels stacked on the floor and a projector. Sitting on the cot in a just-awakened attitude was old man Haarland himself. Beady-eyed, Ross thought. Watchful.

Haarland asked: “Ross?”

“Yes, sir,” Marconi said. There was tension in his voice and attitude. “Do you want me to stay, sir?”

Haarland growled: “Good God, no. You can get out. Sit down, Ross.”

Ross sat down. Marconi, carefully looking neither to right or left, went out and closed the door. Haarland stretched, scratched, and yawned. He said: “Ross, Marconi tells me you’re quite a fellow. Sincere, competent, a good man to give a tough job to. Namely, his.”

“Junior-Fourth Trader?” Ross asked, bewildered.

“A little more dramatic than that—but we’ll come to the details in a minute. I’m told you were ready to quit Oldham for a purser’s berth. That’s ethical. Would you consider it unethical to quit Oldham for Haarland?”

“Yes—I think I would.”

“Glad to hear it! What if the work had absolutely nothing to do with trading and never brings you into a competitive situation with Oldham?”

“Well—” Ross scratched his jaw. “Well, I think that would be all right. But a Junior Fourth’s job, Mr. Haarland—” The floor bucked and surged under him. He gasped, “What was that?”

“Blastoff, I imagine,” Haarland said calmly. “We’re taking off. Better lie down.”

Ross flopped to the floor. It was no time to argue, not with the first-stage pumps thundering and the preheaters roaring their threat of an imminent four-G thrust.

It came like thunder, slapping Ross against the floor plates as though he were glued to them. He felt every tiny wrinkle in every weld he lay on, and one arm had fallen across a film reel. He heaved, and succeeded in levering it off the reel. It thwacked to the floor as though sandbags were stacked meters-high atop it.

Blackout came very soon.

* * * *

He awoke in free fall. He was orbiting aimlessly about the cubicle.

Haarland was strapped to the cot, absorbed in manipulating the portable projector, trying to thread a free-floating film. Ross bumped against the old man; Haarland abstractedly shoved him off.

He careened from a bulkhead and flailed for a grip.

“Oh,” said Haarland, looking up. “Awake?”

“Yes, awake!” Ross said bitterly. “What is all this? Where are we?”

The old man said formally, “Please forgive my cavalier treatment of you. You must not blame your friend Marconi; he had no idea that I was planning an immediate blastoff with you. I had an assignment for him which he—he preferred not to accept. Not to mince words, Ross, he quit.”

“Quit his job?”

The old man shook his head. “No, Ross. Quit much more than the job of working for me. He quit on an assignment which is—I am sorry if it sounds melodramatic—absolutely vital to the human race.” He suddenly frowned. “I—I think,” he added weakly. “Bear with me, Ross. I’ll try to explain as I go along. But, you see, Marconi left me in the lurch. I needed him and he failed me. He felt that you would be glad to take it on, and he told me something about you.” Haarland glowered at Ross and said, with a touch of bitterness, “A recommendation from Marconi, at this particular point, is hardly any recommendation at all. But I haven’t much choice—and, besides, I took the liberty of calling that pompous young fool you work for.”

“Mister Haarland!” Ross cried, outraged. “Oldham may not be any prize but really—”

“Oh, you know he’s a fool. But he had a lot to say about you. Enough so that, if you want the assignment, it’s yours. As to the nature of the assignment itself—” Haarland hesitated, then said briskly, “The assignment itself has to do with a message my organization received via this longliner. Yes, a message. You’ll see. It has also to do with certain facts I’ve found in its log which, if I can ever get this damned thing working—There we are.”

He had succeeded in threading the film.

He snapped on the projector. On the screen appeared a densely packed block of numerals, rolling up and being replaced by new lines as fast as the eye could take them in. Haarland said, “Notice anything?”

Ross swallowed. “If that stuff is supposed to mean anything to me,” he declared, “it doesn’t.”

Haarland frowned. “But Marconi said—Well, never mind.” He snapped off the projector. “That was the ship’s log, Ross. It doesn’t matter if you can’t read it; you wouldn’t, I suppose, have had much call for that sort of thing working for Oldham. It is a mathematical description of the routing of this ship, from the time it was space-launched until it arrived here yesterday. It took a long time, Ross. The reason that it took a long time is partly that it came from far away. But, even more, there is another reason. We were not this ship’s destination! Not the original destination. We weren’t even the first alternate—or the second alternate. To be exact, Ross, we were the seventh choice for this ship.”

Ross let go of his stanchion, floated a yard, and flailed back to it. “That’s ridiculous, Mr. Haarland,” he protested. “Besides, what has all this to do with—”

“Bear with an old man,” said Haarland, with an amused gleam in his eye.

There was very little he could do but bear with him, Ross thought sourly. “Go on,” he said.

Haarland said professorially, “It is conceivable, of course, that a planet might be asleep at the switch. We could believe it, I suppose, if it seemed that the first-choice planet somehow didn’t pick the ship up when this longliner came into radar range. In that event, of course, it would orbit once or twice on automatics, and then select for its first alternate target—which it did. It might be a human failure in the GCA station—once.” He nodded earnestly. “Once, Ross. Not six times. No planet passes up a trading ship.”

“Mr. Haarland,” Ross exploded, “it seems to me that you’re contradicting yourself all over the place. Did six planets pass this ship up or didn’t six planets pass this ship up? Which is it? And why would anybody pass a longliner up anyhow?”

Haarland asked, “Suppose the planets were vacant?”

“What?” Ross was shaken. “But that’s silly! I mean, even I know that the star charts show which planets are inhabited and which aren’t.”

“And suppose the star charts are wrong. Suppose the planets have become vacant. The people have died off, perhaps; their culture decayed.”

Decay. Death and decay.

Ross was silent for a long time. He took a deep breath. He said at last, “Sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”

Haarland’s expression was a weft of triumph and relief.

“Six planets passed this ship up. Remember Leverett’s ship fifteen years ago? Three planets passed that one before it came to us. Nine different planets, all listed on the traditional star charts as inhabited, civilized, equipped with GCA radars, and everything else needed. Nine planets out of communication, Ross.”

Decay, thought Ross. Aloud he said, “Tell me why.”

Haarland shook his head. “No,” he said strongly, “I want you to tell me. I’ll tell you what I can. I’ll tell you the message that this ship brought to me. I’ll tell you all I know, all I’ve told Marconi that he isn’t man enough to use, and the things that Marconi will never learn, as well. But why nine planets that used to be pretty much like our own planet are now out of communication, that you’ll have to tell me.”

Forward rockets boomed; the braking blasts hurled Ross against the forward bulkhead. Haarland rummaged under the cot for space suits. He flung one at Ross.

“Put it on,” he ordered. “Come to the airlock. I’ll show you what you can use to find out the answers.” He slid into the pressure suit, dived weightless down the corridor, Ross zooming after.

They stood in the airlock, helmets sealed. Wordlessly Haarland opened the pet cocks, heaved on the lock door. He gestured with an arm.

Floating alongside them was a ship, a ship like none Ross had ever seen before.

CHAPTER 4

Picture Leif’s longboat bobbing in the swells outside Ambrose Light, while the twentieth-century liners steam past; a tiny, ancient thing, related to the new giants only as the Eohippus resembles the horse.

The ship that Haarland revealed was fully as great a contrast. Ross knew spaceships as well as any grounder could, both the lumbering interplanet freighters and the titanic longliners. But the ship that swung around Halsey’s Planet was a midget (fueled rocket ships must be huge); its jets were absurdly tiny, clearly incapable of blasting away from planetary gravity; its entire hull length was unbroken and sheer (did the pilot dare fly blind?).

The coupling connections were being rigged between the ships. “Come aboard,” said Haarland, spryly wriggling through the passage. Ross, swallowing his astonishment, followed.

The ship was tiny indeed. When Ross and Haarland, clutching handholds, were drifting weightlessly in its central control cabin, they very nearly filled it. There was one other cabin, Ross saw; and the two compartments accounted for a good nine-tenths of the cubage of the ship. Where that left space for the combustion chambers and the fuel tanks, the crew quarters, and the cargo holds, Ross could not imagine. He said: “All right, Mr. Haarland. Talk.”

Haarland grinned toothily, his expression eerie in the flickering violet light that issued from a gutter around the cabin’s wall.

“This is a spaceship, Ross. It’s a pretty old one—fourteen hundred years, give or take a little. It’s not much to look at, compared with the up-to-date models you’re used to, but it’s got a few features that you won’t find on the new ones. For one thing, Ross, it doesn’t use rockets.” He hesitated. “Ask me what it does use,” he admitted, “and I can’t tell you. I know the name, because I read it: nucleophoretic drive. What nucleophoresis is and how it works, I can’t say. They call it the Wesley Effect, and the tech manual says something about squared miles of acceleration. Does that mean anything to you? No. How could it? But it works, Ross. It works well enough so that this little ship will get you where you’re going very quickly. The stars, Ross—it will take you to the stars. Faster than light. What the top speed is I have no idea; but there is a ship’s log here, too. And it has a three-month entry—three months, Ross!—in which this little ship explored the solar systems of fourteen stars.”

Wide-eyed, Ross held motionless. Haarland paused. “Fourteen hundred years,” he repeated. “Fourteen hundred years this ship has been floating out here. And for all that time, the longliners have been crawling from star to star, while little hidden ships like this one could have carried a thousand times as much goods a million times faster. Maybe the time has come to get the ships out of hiding. I don’t know. I want to find out; I want you to find out for me. I’ll be specific, Ross. I need a pilot. I’m too old, and Marconi turned it down. Someone has to go out there—” he gestured to the blind hull and the unseen stars beyond—“and find out why nine planets are out of communication. Will you do it?”

Ross opened his mouth to speak, and a thousand questions competed for utterance. But what he said, barely aloud, was only: “Yes.”

The far-off stars—more than a thousand million of them in our galaxy alone. By far the greatest number of them drifted alone through space, or with only a stellar companion as utterly unlivable by reason of heat and crushing gravity as themselves. Fewer than one in a million had a family of planets, and most even of those could never become a home for human life.

But out of a thousand million, any fraction may be a very large number, and the number of habitable planets was in the hundreds.

Ross had seen the master charts of the inhabited universe often enough to recognize the names as Haarland mentioned them: Tau Ceti II, Earth, the eight inhabitable worlds of Capella. But to realize that this ship—this ship!—had touched down on each of them, and on a hundred more, was beyond astonishment; it was a dream thing, impossible but unquestioned.

Through Haarland’s burning, old eyes, Ross looked back through fourteen centuries, to the time when this ship was a scout vessel for a colonizing colossus. The lumbering giant drove slowly through space on its one-way trip from the planet that built it—was it semi-mythical Earth? The records were not clear—while the tiny scout probed each star and solar system as it drew within range. While the mother ship was covering a few hundred million miles, the scout might flash across parsecs to scan half a dozen worlds. And when the scout came back with word of a planet where humans could survive, they christened it with the name of the scout’s pilot, and the chartroom labored, and the ship’s officers gave orders, and the giant’s nose swerved through a half a degree and began its long, slow deceleration.

“Why slow?” Ross demanded. “Why not use the faster-than-light drive for the big ships?”

Haarland grimaced. “I’ve got to answer that one for you sooner or later,” he said, “but let me make it later. Anyway, that’s what this ship was: a faster-than-light scout ship for a real longliner. What happened to the longliner the records don’t show; my guess is the colonists cannibalized it to get a start in constructing homes for themselves. But the scout ship was exempted. The captain of the expedition had it put in an orbit out here, and left alone. It’s been used a little bit, now and then—my great-grandfather’s father went clear to 40 Eridani when my great-grandfather was a little boy, but by and large it has been left alone. It had to be, Ross. For one thing, it’s dangerous to the man who pilots it. For another, it’s dangerous to—the Galaxy.”

Haarland’s view was anthropomorphic; the danger was not to the immense and uncaring galaxy, but to the sparse fester of life that called itself humanity.

When the race abandoned Earth, it was a gesture of revulsion. Behind them they left a planet that had decimated itself in wars; ahead lay a cosmos that, in all their searches, had revealed no truly sentient life.

Earth was a crippled world, the victim of its playing with nuclear fission and fusion. But the techniques that gave them a faster-than-light drive gave them as well a weapon that threatened solar systems, not cities; that could detonate a sun as readily as uranium could destroy a building. The child with his forbidden matches was now sitting atop a munitions dump; the danger was no longer a seared hand or blinded eye, but annihilation.

And the decision had been made: secrecy. By what condign struggles the secrecy had been enforced, the secrecy itself concealed. But it had worked. Once the radiating colonizers had reached their goals, the nucleophoretic effect had been obliterated from their records and, except for a single man on each planet, from their minds.

Why the single man? Why not bury it entirely?

Haarland said slowly, “There was always the chance that something would go wrong, you see. And—it has.”

Ross said hesitantly, “You mean the nine planets that have gone out of communication?”

Haarland nodded. He hesitated. “Do you understand it now?” he asked.

Ross shook his head dizzily. “I’m trying,” he said. “This little ship—it travels faster than light. It has been circling out here—how long? Fourteen hundred years? And you kept it secret—you and your ancestors before you because you were afraid it might be used in war?” He was frowning.

“Not ‘afraid’ it would be used,” Haarland corrected gently. “We knew it would be used.”

Ross grimaced. “Well, why tell me about it now? Do you expect me to keep it secret all the rest of my life?”

“I think you would,” Haarland said soberly.

“But suppose I didn’t? Suppose I blabbed all over the Galaxy, and it was used in war?”

Haarland’s face was suddenly, queerly gray. He said, almost to himself, “It seems that there are things worse than war.” Abruptly he smiled. “Let’s find Ma.”

They returned through the coupling and searched the longliner for the old woman. A Sonny told them, “Ma usually hangs around the meter room. Likes to see them blinking.” And there they found her.

“Hello, Haarland,” she smiled, flashing her superb teeth. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Perfect, Ma. I want to talk to you under the seal.”

She looked at Ross. “Him?” she asked.

“I vouch for him,” Haarland said gravely. “Wesley.”

She answered, “The limiting velocity is C.”

“But C^2 is not a velocity,” Haarland said. He turned to Ross. “Sorry to make a mystery,” he apologized. “It’s a recognition formula. It identifies one member of what we call the Wesley families, or its messenger, to another. And these people are messengers. They were dispatched a couple of centuries ago by a Wesley family whose ship, for some reason, no longer could be used. Why?—I don’t know why. Try your luck, maybe you can figure it out. Ma, tell us the history again.”

She knitted her brows and began to chant slowly:

In great-grandfather’s time the target was Clyde,

Rocketry firm and ores on the side.

If we hadn’t of seen them direct we’d of missed ’em;

There wasn’t a blip from the whole damn system.

That was the first.

Before great-grandfather’s day was done

We cut the orbit of Cyrnus One.

The contact there was Trader McCue,

But the sons o’ bitches missed us too.

That was the second.

My grandpa lived to see the green

Of Target Three through the high-powered screen.

But where in hell was Builder Carruthers?

They let us go by like all the others.

That was the—”

“Ma,” said Haarland. “Thanks very much, but would you skip to the last one?”

Ma grinned.

The Haarland Trading Corp. was last

With the fuel down low and going fast.

I’m glad it was me who saw the day

When they brought us down on GCA.

I told him the message; he called it a mystery,

But anyway this is the end of the history.

And it’s about time!

“The message, please,” Haarland said broodingly.

Ma took a deep breath and rattled off: “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N.”

Ross gaped. “That’s the message?”

“Used to be more to it,” Ma said cheerfully “That’s all there is now, though. The darn thing doesn’t rhyme or anything. I guess that’s the most important part. Anyway, it’s the hardest.”

“It’s not as bad as it seems,” Haarland told Ross. “I’ve asked around. It makes a very little sense.”

“It does?”

“Well, up to a point,” Haarland qualified. “It seems to be a formula in genetics. The notation is peculiar, but it’s all explained, of course. It has something to do with gene loss. Now, maybe that means something and maybe it doesn’t. But I know something that does mean something: some member of a Wesley Family a couple of hundred years ago thought it was important enough to want to get it across to other Wesley families. Something’s happening. Let’s find out what it is, Ross.” The old man suddenly buried his face in his hands. In a cracked voice he mumbled, “Gene loss and war. Gene loss or war. God, I wish somebody would take this right out of my hands—or that I could drop with a heart attack this minute. You ever think of war, Ross?”

Shocked and embarrassed, Ross mumbled some kind of answer. One might think of war, good breeding taught, but one never talked about it.

“You should,” the old man said hoarsely. “War is what this faster-than-light secrecy and identification rigmarole is all about. Right now war is impossible—between solar systems, anyhow, and that’s what counts. A planet might just barely manage to fit an invading multigeneration expedition at gigantic cost, but it never would. The fruits of victory—loot, political domination, maybe slaves—would never come back to the fitters of the expedition but to their remote descendants. A firm will take a flyer on a commercial deal like that, but no nation would accept a war on any such basis—because a conqueror is a man, and men die. With F-T-L—faster-than-light travel—they might invade Curnus or Azor or any of those other tempting dots on the master maps. Why not? Take the marginal population, hop them up with patriotic fervor and lust for booty, and ship them off to pillage and destroy. There’s at least a fifty percent chance of coming out ahead on the investment, isn’t there? Much more attractive deal commercially speaking than our present longliners.”

Ross had never seen a war. The last on Halsey’s planet had been the Peninsular Rebellion about a century and a half ago. Some half a million constitutional psychopathic inferiors had started themselves an ideal society with theocratic trimmings in a remote and unfruitful corner of the planet. Starved and frustrated by an unrealistic moral creed they finally exploded to devastate their neighboring areas and were quickly quarantined by a radioactive zone. They disintegrated internally, massacred their priesthood, and were permitted to disperse. It was regarded as a shameful episode by every dweller on the planet. It wasn’t a subject for popular filmreels; if you wanted to find out about the Peninsular Rebellion you went through many successive library doors and signed your name on lists, and were sternly questioned as to your age and scholarly qualifications and reasons for sniffing around such an unsavory mess.

Ross therefore had not the slightest comprehension of Haarland’s anxiety. He told him so.

“I hope you’re right,” was all the old man would say. “I hope you don’t learn worse.”

* * * *

The rest was work.

He had the Yard worker’s familiarity with conventional rocketry, which saved him some study of the fine-maneuvering apparatus of the F-T-L craft—but not much. For a week under Haarland’s merciless drilling he jetted the ship about its remote area of space, far from the commerce lanes, until the old man grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied.

There were skull-busting sessions with the Wesley drive, or rather with a first derivative of it, an insane-looking object which you could vaguely describe as a fan-shaped slide rule taller than a man. There were twenty-seven main tracks, analogues of the twenty-seven main geodesics of Wesley Space—whatever they were and whatever that was. Your cursor settings on the main tracks depended on a thirty-two step computation based on the apparent magnitudes of the twenty-seven nearest celestial bodies above a certain mass which varied according to yet another lengthy relationship. Then, having cleared the preliminaries out of the way, you began to solve for your actual setting on the F-T-L drive controls.

Somehow he mastered it, while Haarland, driving himself harder than he drove the youth who was to be his exploring eyes and ears, coached him and cursed him and—somehow!—kept his own complicated affairs going back on Halsey’s Planet. When Ross had finally got the theory of the Wesley Drive in some kind of order in his mind, and had learned all there was to learn about the other worlds, and had cut his few important ties with Halsey’s Planet, he showed up in Haarland’s planet-based office for a final, repetitive briefing.

Marconi was there.

He had trouble meeting Ross’s eyes, but his handclasp was firm and his voice warmly friendly—and a little envious. “The very best, Ross,” he said. “I—I wish—” He hesitated and stammered. He said, in a flood, “Damn it, I should be going! Do a good job, Ross—and I hope you don’t hate me.” And he left while Ross, disturbed, went in to see old man Haarland.

Haarland spared no time for sentiment. “You’re cleared for space flight,” he growled. “According to the visa, you’re going to Sunward—in case anyone asks you between here and the port. Actually, let’s hear where you are going.”

Ross said promptly, “I am going on a mission of exploration and reconnaissance. My first proposed destination is Ragansworld; second Gemser, third Azor. If I cannot make contact with any of these three planets, I will select planets at random from the master charts until I find some Wesley Drive families somewhere. The contacts for the first three planets are: On Ragansworld, Foley Associates; on Gemser, the Franklin Foundation; on Azor, Cavallo Machine Tool Company. F-T-L contacts on other planets are listed in the appendix to the master charts. The co-ordinates for Ragansworld are—”

“Skip the co-ordinates,” mumbled Haarland, rubbing his eyes. “What do you do when you get in contact with a Wesley Drive family?”

Ross hesitated and licked his lips. “I—well, it’s a little hard—”

“Dammit,” roared Haarland, “I’ve told you a thousand times—”

“Yessir, I know. All I meant was I don’t exactly understand what I’m looking for.”

“If I knew what you were to look for,” Haarland rasped, “I wouldn’t have to send you out looking! Can’t you get it through your thick head? Something is wrong. I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy for bothering about it—heaven knows, I’ve got troubles enough right here—but we Haarlands have a tradition of service, and maybe it’s so old that we’ve kind of forgotten just what it’s all about. But it’s not so old that I’ve forgotten the family tradition. If I had a son, he’d be doing this. I counted on Marconi to be my son; now all I have left is you. And that’s little enough, heaven knows,” he finished bitterly.

Ross, wounded, said by rote: “On landing, I will attempt at once to make contact with the local Wesley Drive family, using the recognition codes given me. I will report to them on all the data at hand and suggest the need for action.”

Haarland stood up. “All right,” he said. “Sorry I snapped at you. Come on; I’ll go up to the ship with you.”

And that was the way it happened. Ross found himself in the longliner, then with Haarland in the tiny, ancient, faster-than-light ship which had once been tender to the ship that colonized Halsey’s Planet. He found himself shaking hands with a red-eyed, suddenly-old Haarland, watching him crawl through the coupling to the longliner, watching the longliner blast away.

He found himself setting up the F-T-L course and throwing in the drive.

CHAPTER 5

Ross was lucky. The second listed inhabited planet was still inhabited.

He had not quite stopped shuddering from the first when the approach radar caught him. The first planet was given in the master charts as “Ragansworld. Pop. 900,000,000; diam. 9400 m.; mean orbit O.8 AU,” and its co-ordinates went on to describe it as the fourth planet of a small G-type sun. There had been some changes made: the co-ordinates now intersected well inside a bright and turbulent gas cloud.

It appeared that suppressing the F-T-L drive had not quite annihilated war.

But the second planet, Gemser—there, he was sure, was a world where nothing was seriously awry.

He left the ship mumbling a name to himself: “Franklin Foundation.” And he was greeted by a corporal’s guard of dignified and ceremonially dressed men; they smiled at him, welcomed him, shook his hand, and invited him to what seemed to be the local equivalent of the administration building. He noticed disapprovingly that they didn’t seem to go in for the elaborate decontamination procedures of Halsey’s Planet, but perhaps, he thought, they had bred disease-resistance into their bloodlines. Certainly the four men in his guide party seemed hale and well-preserved, though the youngest of them was not less than sixty.

“I would like,” he said, “to be put in touch with the Franklin Foundation, please.”

“Come right in here,” beamed one of the four, and another said:

“Don’t worry about a thing.” They held the door for him, and he walked into a small and sybaritically furnished room. The second man said, “Just a few questions. Where are you from?”

Ross said simply, “Halsey’s Planet,” and waited.

Nothing happened, except that all four men nodded comprehendingly, and the questioner made a mark on a sheet of paper. Ross amplified, “Fifty-three light years away. You know—another star.”

“Certainly,” the man said briskly. “Your name?”

Ross told him, but with a considerable feeling of deflation. He thought wryly of his own feelings about the longlines and the far stars; he remembered the stir and community excitement that a starship meant back home. Still, Ross told himself. Halsey’s Planet might be just a back eddy in the main currents of civilization. Quite possibly on another world—this one, for instance—travelers from the stars were a commonplace. The field hadn’t seemed overly busy, though; and there was nothing resembling a spaceship. Unless—he thought with a sudden sense of shock—those rusting hulks clumped together at the edge of the field had once been spaceships. But that was hardly likely, he reassured himself. You just don’t let spaceships rust.

“Sex?” the man asked, and “Age? Education? Marital status?” The questions went on for more time than Ross quite understood; and they seemed far from relevant questions for the most part; and some of them were hard questions to answer. “Tau quotient?” for instance; Ross blinked and said, with an edge to his voice:

“I don’t know what a tau quotient is.”

“Put him down as zero,” one of the men advised, and the interlocutor nodded happily.

“Working-with-others rating?” he asked, beaming.

Ross said with controlled irritation, “Look, I don’t know anything about these ratings. Will you take me to somebody who can put me in touch with the Franklin Foundation?”

The man who was sitting next to him patted him gently on the shoulder. “Just answer the questions,” he said comfortably. “Everything will be all right.”

Ross flared, “The hell everything will—”

Something with electrified spikes in it hit him on the back of the neck.

Ross yelled and ducked away; the man next to him returned a little rod to his pocket. He smiled at Ross. “Don’t feel bad,” he said sympathetically. “Go ahead now, answer the questions.”

Ross shook his head dazedly. The pain was already leaving his neck, but he felt nauseated by the suddenness and sharpness of it; he could not remember any pain quite like that in his life. He stood up waveringly and said, “Wait a minute, now—”

This time it was the man on the other side, and the pain was about twice as sharp. Ross found himself on the floor, looking up through a haze. The man on his right kept the rod in his hand, and the expression on his face, while in no way angry, was stern. “Bad boy,” he said tenderly. “Why don’t you want to answer the questions?”

Ross gasped, “God damn it, all I want is to see somebody! Keep your dirty hands off me, you old fools!” And that was a mistake, as he learned in the blessedly few minutes before he passed out completely under the little rods held by the gentle but determined men.

He answered all the questions—bound to a chair, with two of the men behind him, when he had regained consciousness. He answered every one. They only had to hit him twice.

When they untied him the next morning, Ross had caught on to the local folkways quite well. The fatherly fellow who released him said, “Follow me,” and stood back, smiling but with one hand on one of the little rods. And Ross was careful to say:

“Yes, sir!”

They rode in a three-wheeled car, and entered a barracks-like building. Ross was left alone next to a bed in a dormitory with half a hundred beds. “Just wait here,” the man said, smiling. “The rest of your group is out at their morning session now. When they come in for lunch you can join them. They’ll show you what to do.”

Ross didn’t have too long to wait. He spent the time in conjecture as confused as it was fruitless; he had obviously done something wrong, but just what was it?

If he had had twice as long he would have got no farther toward an answer than he was: nowhere. But a noise outside ended his speculations. He glanced toward the curiously shaped door—all the doors on this planet seemed to be rectangular. A girl of about eighteen was peering inside.

She stared at Ross and said, “Oh!” Then she disappeared. There were footsteps and whispers, and more heads appeared and blinked at him and were jerked back.

Ross stood up in wretched apprehension. All of a sudden he was fourteen years old again, and entering a new school where the old hands were giggling and whispering about the new boy. He swore sullenly to himself.

A new face appeared, halted for an inspection of Ross, and walked confidently in. The man was a good forty years old, Ross thought; perhaps a kind of overseer in this institution—whatever kind of institution it was. He approached Ross at a sedate pace, and he was followed through the door in single file by a couple score men and women. They ranged in age, Ross thought wonderingly, from the leader’s forty down to the late teens of the girl who had first peered in the door, and now was at the end of the procession.

The leader said, “How old are you?”

“Why, uh—” Ross figured confusedly: this planet’s annual orbital period was roughly forty percent longer than his own; fourteen into his age, multiplied by ten, making his age in their local calculations.…

“Why, I’m nineteen of your years old, about. And a half.”

“Yes. And what can you do?”

“Look here, sir. I’ve been through all this once. Why don’t you go and ask those gentlemen who brought me here? And can anybody tell me where the Franklin Foundation is?”

The fortyish fellow, with a look of outrage, slapped Ross across the mouth. Ross knocked him down with a roundhouse right.

A girl yelled, “Good for you, Junior!” and jumped like a wildcat onto a slim, gray-haired lady, clawing, and slapping. The throng dissolved immediately into a wild melee. Ross, busily fighting off the fortyish fellow and a couple of his stocky buddies, noted only that the scrap was youth against age, whatever it meant.

“How dare you?” a voice thundered, and the rioters froze.

A decrepit wreck was standing in the doorway, surrounded by three or four gerontological textbook cases only a little less spavined than he. “Glory,” a girl muttered despairingly. “It would be the minister.”

“What is the meaning of this brawl?” rolled from the wreck’s shriveled lips in a rich basso—no; rolled, Ross noted, from a flat perforated plate on his chest. There was a small, flesh-colored mike slung before his lips. “Who is responsible here?” asked the golden basso.

Ross’s fortyish assailant said humbly: “I am, sir. This new fellow here—”

“Manners! Speak when you’re spoken to.”

Abjectly: “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“Silly fools!” the senile wreck hectored them. “I’m going to take no official notice of this since I’m merely passing through. Luckily for you this is no formal inspection. But you’ve lost your lunch hour with your asinine pranks. Now get back to your work and never let me hear of a disgraceful incident like this again from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.”

He swept out with his retinue. Ross noted that some of the younger girls were crying and that the older men and women were glaring at him murderously.

“We’ll teach you manners, you pup,” the foreman-type said. “You go on the dye vats this afternoon. Any more trouble and you’ll miss a few meals.”

Ross told him: “Just keep your hands off me, mister.”

The foreman-type expanded into a beam of pleasure. “I thought you’d be sensible,” he said. “Everybody to the plant, now!” He collared a pretty girl of about Ross’s age. “Helena here is working out a bit of insolence on the dye vats herself. She’ll show you.” The girl stood with downcast eyes. Ross liked her face and wondered about her figure. Whatever it was like, it was covered from neck to knee by a loose shirt. But the older women wore fitted clothes.

The foreman-type led a grand procession through the door. Helena told Ross: “I guess you’d better get in front of me in line. I go here—” She slipped in deftly, and Ross understood a little more of what went on here. The procession was in order of age.

He had determined to drift for a day or two—not that he seemed to have much choice. The Franklin Foundation, supposedly having endured a good many years, would last another week while he explored the baffling mores of this place and found out how to circumvent them and find his way to the keepers of F-T-L on this world. Nobody would go anywhere with his own ship—not without first running up a setting for the Wesley Drive!

The line filed into a factory whose like Ross had never before seen. He had a fair knowledge of and eye for industrial processes; it was clear that the place was an electric-cable works. But why was the concrete floor dangerously cracked and sloppily patched? Why was the big enameling oven rumbling and stinking? Why were the rolling mills in a far corner unsupplied with guards and big, easy-to-hit emergency cutoffs? Why was the light bad and the air full of lint? Why did the pickling tank fume and make the workers around it cough hackingly? Most pointed of all, why did the dye vats to which Helena led him stink and slop over?

There were grimy signs everywhere, including the isolated bay where braiding cord was dyed the standard code colors. The signs said things like: AGE IS A PRIVILEGE AND NOT A RIGHT. AGE MUST BE EARNED BY WORK. GRATITUDE IS THE INDEX OF YOUR PROGRESS TO MATURITY.

Helena said girlishly as she took his arm and hooked him out of the moving line: “Here’s Stinkville. Believe me, I’m not going to talk back again. After all, one’s maturity is measured by one’s acceptance of one’s environment, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Ross. “Listen, Helena, have you ever heard of a place called the Franklin Foundation?”

“No,” she said. “First you climb up here—golly! I don’t even know your name.”

“Ross.”

“All right, Ross. First you climb up here and make sure the yarn’s running over the rollers right; sometimes it gets twisted around and then it breaks. Then you take one of the thermometers from the wall and you check the vat temperature. It says right on the thermometers what it should be for the different colors. If it’s off you turn that gas tap up or down, just a little. Then you check the wringer rolls where the yarn comes out. Watch your fingers when you do! The yarn comes in different thicknesses on the same thread so you have to adjust the wringer rolls so too much dye doesn’t get squeezed out. You can tell by the color; it shouldn’t be lighter after it goes through the rolls. But the yarn shouldn’t come through sloppy and drip dye on the floor while it travels to the bobbin—”

There was some more, equally uncomplicated. He took the yellow and green vats; she took the red and blue. They had worked in the choking stench and heat for perhaps three hours before Ross finished one temperature check and descended to adjust a gas tap. He found Helena, spent and gasping, on the floor, hidden from the rest of the shop by the bulky tanks.

“Heat knock you out?” he asked briskly. “Don’t try to talk. I’ll tote you over by the wall away from the burners. Maybe we’ll catch a little breeze from the windows there.” She nodded weakly.

He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.

It’s been a long time, he thought—and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a drowsy smile on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.

Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.

Wildcat!

Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he sputtered. “Please accept my sincerest—”

The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she’d be set back three years if he told anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no right to treat her that way, and what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when everybody knew you went crazy from it.

He soothed her—from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.

Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn’t this shift ever going to end?

All the shifts ended in time. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner—porridge!—and then came the evening shift on the dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got plenty to eat.

But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he had painted to himself back on Halsey’s Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior of humanity.…

Ross, the semipermanent KP.

He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly clear that there no longer was a Franklin Foundation on Gemser, but more had been lost than time and effort. For Ross himself, he silently admitted, was as close to lost as he ever wanted to be. He was, in effect, a prisoner, in a prison from which there was no easy escape as long as he was cursed with youthfulness.…

Of course, the implications of that were that there was a perfectly easy escape in time. All he had to do was get old enough to matter, on this insane planet. Ninety, maybe. And then he would be perfectly free to totter out to the spaceport, dragoon a squad of juniors into lifting him into the ship, and take off.…

Helena was some help. But only psychologically; she was pleasant company, but neither she nor anyone else in the roster of forty-eight to whom he was permitted to speak had ever heard of the Franklin Foundation, or F-T-L travel, or anything. Helena said, “Wait for Holiday. Maybe one of the grownups will tell you then?”

“Holiday?” Ross slid back and scratched his shoulder blades against the corner of his bed. Helena was sprawled on the floor, half watching a projected picture on the screen at the end of the dormitory.

“Yes. You’re lucky, it’s only eight days off. That’s when Dobermann—” she pointed to the foreman—“graduates; he’s the only one this year. And we all move up a step, and the new classes come in, and then we all get everything we want. Well, pretty near,” she amended. “We can’t do anything bad. But you’ll see; it’s nice.”

Then the picture ended, and it was calisthenics time, and then lights out. Forty-eight men and women on their forty-eight bunks—the honor system appeared to work beautifully; there had been no signs of sex play that Ross had been able to see—slept the sleep of the innocent. While Ross, the forty-ninth, lay staring into the dark with rising hope.

In the kitchen the next morning he got more information from Helena. Holiday seemed to be a cross between saturnalia and Boy’s Week; for one day of the year the elders slightly relaxed their grip on the reins. On that day alone one could Speak Before Being Spoken To, Interrupt One’s Elders, even Leave the Room without Being Excused.

Whee, Ross thought sourly. But still…

The foreman, Dobermann, once you learned how to handle him, wasn’t such a bad guy. Ross, studying his habits, learned the proper approach and used it. Dobermann’s commonest complaint was of irresponsibility—irresponsibility when some thirty-year-old junior was caught sneaking into line ahead of his proper place, irresponsibility when Ross forgot to make his bed before stumbling out in the dark to his kitchen shift, one awful case of irresponsibility when Helena thoughtlessly poured cold water into the cooking vat while it was turned on. There was a sizzle, a crackle, and a puff of steam, and Helena was weeping over a broken heating element.

Dobermann came storming over, and Ross saw his chance. “That is very irresponsible of you, Helena,” he said coldly, back to Dobermann but entirely conscious of his presence. “If Junior Unit Twenty-Three was all as irresponsible as you, it would reflect badly on Mr. Dobermann. You don’t know how lucky you are that Mr. Dobermann is so kind to you.”

Helena’s weeping dried up instantly; she gave Ross one furious glance, and lowered her eyes before Dobermann. Dobermann nodded approvingly to Ross as he waded into Helena; it was a memorable tirade, but Ross heard only part of it. He was looking at the cooking vat; it was a simple-minded bit of construction, a spiral of resistance wire around a ceramic core. The core had cracked and one end of the wire was loose; if it could be reconnected, the cracked core shouldn’t matter much—the wire was covered with insulation anyhow. He looked up and opened his mouth to say something, then remembered and merely stood looking brightly attentive.

“—looks like you want to go back to the vats,” the foreman was finishing. “Well, Helena, if that’s what you want we can make you happy. This time you’ll be by yourself, too; you won’t have Ross to help you out when the going’s rough. Will she, Ross?”

“No, sir,” Ross said immediately. “Sir?”

Dobermann looked back at him, frowning. “What?”

“I think I can fix this,” Ross said modestly.

Dobermann’s eyes bulged. “Fix it?”

“Yes, sir. It’s only a loose wire. Back where I come from, we all learned how to take care of things like that when we were still in school. It’s just a matter of—”

“Now, hold on, Ross”; the foreman howled. “Tampering with a machine is bad enough, but if you’re going to turn out to be a liar, too, you’re going just too far! School, indeed! You know perfectly well, Ross, that even I won’t be ready for school until after Holiday. Ross, I knew you were a troublemaker, knew it the first day I set eyes on you. School! Well, we’ll see how you like the school I’m going to send you to!”

The vats weren’t so bad the second time. Even though the porridge was cold for two days, until somebody got around to delivering a different though equally worn-out cooking vat.

Helena passed out from the heat three times. And when, on the third time, Ross, goaded beyond endurance, kissed her again, there were no hysterics.

CHAPTER 6

From birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann’s age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.

And then you were Of Age.

Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry—after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.

It meant freedom.

As a bare beginning, it meant the freedom to command any number of juniors or scholars. On Ross’s last punitive day in the dye vats, a happy ancient commandeered the entire staff to help set shrubs in his front lawn—a good dozen acres of careful landscaping it was, and the prettiest sight Ross had seen on this ugly planet.

When they got back to the dye vats, the yellow and blue had boiled over, and broken strands of yarn had fouled all the bobbins. Dobermann raged—at the juniors.

But then Dobermann’s raging came to an end forever. It was the night before Holiday, and there was a pretty ceremony as he packed his kit and got ready to turn Junior Unit Twenty-three over to his successor. Everyone was scrubbed, and though a certain amount of license in regard to neatness was allowed between dinner and lights out, each bunk was made and carefully smoothed free of wrinkles.

After half an hour of fidgety waiting, Dobermann called—needlessly—for attention, and the minister came in with his ancient retinue.

The rich mechanical voice boomed out from his breastplate: “Junior Dobermann, today you are a man!”

Dobermann stood with his head bowed, silent and content. Junior Unit Twenty-Three chanted antiphonally: “Good-by, Junior Dobermann!”

The retinue took three steps forward, and the minister boomed, “Beauty comes with age. Age is beauty!”

And the chorus: “Old heads are wisest!” Ross, standing as straight as any of them, faked the words with his lips and tongue, and wondered how many repetitions had drilled those sentiments into Junior Unit Twenty-Three.

There were five more chants, and five responses, and then the minister and his court of four were standing next to Dobermann. Breathing heavily from his exertions, the minister reached behind him and took a book from the hands of the nearest of his retinue. He said, panting, “Scholar Dobermann, in the Book lies the words of the Fathers. Read them and learn.”

The chorus cried thrice, “The Word of the Fathers Is Law.” And then the minister touched Dobermann’s hand, and in solemn silence, left.

As soon as the elders had gone, the juniors flocked around Dobermann to wish him well. There was excited laughter in the congratulations, and a touch of apprehension too: Dobermann, with all his faults, was a known quantity, and the members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three were beginning to look a little fearfully at the short, red-headed youth who, from the next day on, would be Dobermann’s successor.

Ross promised himself: He can be good or bad, a blessing or a problem. But he won’t be my problem. I’m getting out of here tomorrow!

Holiday.

“Oh, it’s fun,” Helena told him enthusiastically. “First you get up early to get the voting out of the way—”

“Voting?”

“Sure. Don’t they vote where you come from? I thought everybody voted. That’s democracy, like we have it here.”

He sardonically quoted one of the omnipresent wall signs: “THE HAPPINESS OF THE MAJORITY MEANS THE HAPPINESS OF THE MINORITY.” He had often wondered what, if anything, it meant. But Helena solemnly nodded.

They were whispering from their adjoining cots by dim, false dawn filtering through the windows on Holiday morning. They were not the only whisperers. Things were relaxing already.

“Ross,” Helena said.

“Yes?”

“I thought maybe you might not know. On Holiday if you, ah, want to do that again you don’t have to wait until I faint. Ah, of course you don’t do it right out in the open.”

Overcome by her own daring she buried her head under the coarse blanket.

Fine, thought Ross wearily. Once a year—or did Holiday come once a year?—the kids were allowed to play “Spin The Bottle.” No doubt their elders thought it was too cute for words: mere tots of thirty and thirty-five childishly and innocently experimenting with sex. Of course it would be discreetly supervised so that nobody would Get In Trouble.

He was quite sure Helena’s last two faints had been unconvincing phonies.

* * * *

The wake-up whistle blew at last. The chattering members of Junior Unit Twenty-Three dawdled while they dressed, and the new foreman indulgently passed out shabby, smutted ribbons which the girls tied in their hair. They had sugar on their mush for breakfast, and Ross’s stomach came near turning as he heard burbles of gratitude at the feast.

With pushing and a certain amount of inexpert horseplay they formed a column of fours and hiked from the hall—from the whole factory complex, indeed, along a rubberized highway.

Once you got out of the factory area things became pleasanter by the mile. Hortatory roadside signs thinned out and vanished. Stinking middens of industrial waste were left behind. And then the landscape was rolling, sodded acres with the road pleasantly springy underfoot, the air clean and crisp.

They oohed and aahed at houses glimpsed occasionally in the distance—always rambling, one-story affairs that looked spanking-new.

Once a car overhauled them on the highway and slowed to a crawl. It was a huge thing, richly upholstered within. A pair of grimlooking youths were respectively chauffeur and footman; the passenger waved at the troop from Junior Twenty-Three and grinned out of a fantastic landscape of wrinkles. Ross gaped. Had he thought the visiting minister was old? This creature, male or female, was old.

After the car sped on, to the cheers of the marchers, there was happy twittering speculation. Junior Twenty-Three didn’t recognize the Citizen who had graciously waved to them, but they thought he—or she?—was wonderful. So dignified, so distinguished, so learned, so gracious, so democratic!

“Wasn’t it sweet of him?” Helena burbled. “And I’m sure he must be somebody important connected with the voting, otherwise he’d just vote from home.”

Ross’s feet were beginning to hurt when they reached the suburban center. To the best of his recollection, they were no more than eight or ten kilos from the field and his starship. Backtrack on the road to the suburban center about three kilos, take the fork to the right, and that would be that.

Junior Twenty-Three reached a pitch of near-ecstasy marveling at the low, spacious buildings of the center. Through sweeping, transparent windows they saw acres of food and clothing in the shopping center; the Drive-In Theater was an architectural miracle. The Civic Center almost finished them off, with its statue of Equal Justice Under the Law (a dignified beldame whose chin and nose almost met, leaning on a gem-crusted crutch) and Civic Virtue (in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an emergency oxygen tent, Lindbergh-Carrel auxiliary blood pump and an artificial kidney).

Merry oldsters were everywhere in their cars and wheelchairs, gaily waving at the kids. Only one untoward incident marred their prevoting tour of inspection. A thick-headed young man mistakenly called out a cheerful: “Life and wisdom, ma’am!” to a beaming oldster.

“Ma’am, is it?” the oldster roared through his throat mike and amplifier in an unmistakable baritone. “I’ll ma’am you, you wise punk!” He spun his wheelchair on a decishield, threw it into high and roared down on the offender, running him over. The boy covered himself as well as he could while the raging old man backed over him again and ran over him again. His ordeal ended when the oldster collapsed forward in the chair, hanging from his safety belt.

The boy got up with tire marks on him and groaned: “Oh, lord! I’ve hurt him.” He appealed hysterically: “What’ll I do? Is he dead?”

Another Senior Citizen buzzed up and snapped: “Cut in his L-C heart, you booby!”

The boy turned on the Lindbergh-Carrel pump, trembling. The white-faced juniors of Twenty-Three watched as the tubes to the oldster’s left arm throbbed and pulsed. A massive sigh went up when the old man’s eyes opened and he sat up groggily. “What happened?”

“You died again, Sherrington,” said the other elder. “Third time this week—good thing there was a responsible person around. Now get over to the medical center this minute and have a complete checkup. Hear me?”

“Yes, Dad,” Sherrington said weakly. He rolled off in low gear.

His father turned to the youngster who stood vacantly rubbing the tire marks on his face. “Since it’s Holiday,” he grated, “I’ll let this pass. On any other day I would have seen to it that you were set back fifteen years for your disgraceful negligence.”

Ross knew by then what that meant, and shuddered with the rest. It amounted to a death sentence, did fifteen additional years of the grinding toil and marginal diet of a junior.

Somewhat dampened they proceeded to the Hall of Democracy, a glittering place replete with slogans, statues, and heroic portraits of the heroic aged. Twenty-Three huddled together as it joined with a stream of juniors from the area’s other factory units. Most of them were larger than the cable works; many of them, apparently, involved more wearing and hazardous occupations. Some groups coughed incessantly and were red-eyed from the irritation of some chemical. Others must have been heavy-manual-labor specialists. They were divided into the hale, whose muscles bulged amazingly, and the dying—men and women who obviously could not take the work but who were doing it anyway.

They seated themselves at long benches, with push buttons at each station. Helena, next to him, explained the system to Ross. Voting was universal and simultaneous, in all the Halls of Democracy around the planet and from all the homes of the Senior Citizens who did not choose to vote from a Hall. Simultaneously the votes were counted at a central station and the results were flashed to screens in the Centers and homes. She said a number of enthusiastic things about Democracy while Ross studied a sheet on which the candidates and propositions were listed.

The names meant nothing to him. He noted only that each of three candidates for Chief of State was one hundred thirty years old, that each of three candidates for First Assistant Chief was one hundred and twenty-seven years old, and so on. Obviously the nominating conventions by agreement named candidates of the same age for each office to keep it a contest.

Proposition One read: “To dismantle seven pediatric centers and apply the salvage value to the construction of, and the funds no longer required for their maintenance to the maintenance of, a new wing of the Gerontological Center, said wing to be devoted to basic research in the extension of human life.”

Proposition Two was worse. Ross didn’t bother to read the rest of them. He whispered hoarsely to Helena, “What next?”

“Ssh!” She pointed to a screen at the front of the Hall. “It’s starting.”

A Senior Citizen of a very high rank (his face was entirely hidden by an oxygen mask) was speaking from the screen. There was what seemed to be a ritual speech of invocation, then he got down to business. “Citizens,” he said through his throat mike, “behold Democracy in Action! I give you three candidates for Chief of State—look them over, and make up your minds. First, Citizen Raphael Flexner, age one century, three decades, seven months, ten days.” Senior Citizen Flexner rolled on screen, spoke briefly through his throat mike and rolled off. The first speaker said again, “Behold Democracy in Action! See now Citizen Sheridan Farnsworth, age one century, three decades, ten months, forty-two days.” Applause boomed louder; some of the younger juniors yelled hysterically and drummed their heels on the floor.

Helena was panting with excitement, eyes bright on the screen. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she gasped ecstatically. “Oh, look at him!”

“Him” was the third candidate, and the first oldster Ross had seen whose gocart was a wheeled stretcher. Prone and almost invisible through the clusters of tubing and chromed equipment, Senior Citizen Immanuel Appleby acknowledged his introduction—“Age one century, three decades, eleven months and five days!” The crowd went mad; Helena broke from Ross’s side and joined a long yelling snake dance through the corridors.

Ross yelled experimentally as protective coloration, then found himself yelling because everybody was yelling, because he couldn’t help it. By the time the speaker on the screen began to call for order, Ross was standing on top of the voting bench and screaming his head off.

Helena, weeping with excitement, tugged at his leg. “Vote now, Ross,” she begged, and all over the hall the cry was “Vote! Vote!”

Ross reached out for the voting buttons. “What do we do now?” he asked Helena.

“Push the button marked ‘Appleby,’ of course. Hurry!”

“But why Appleby?” Ross objected. “That fellow Flexner, for instance—”

“Hush, Ross! Somebody might be listening.” There was sickening fright on Helena’s face. “Didn’t you hear? We have to vote for the best man. ‘Oldest Is Bestest,’ you know. That’s what Democracy means, the freedom of choice. They read us the ages, and we choose which is oldest. Now please, Ross, hurry before somebody starts asking questions!”

The voting was over, and the best man had won in every case. It was a triumph for informed public opinion. The mob poured out of the hall in happy-go-lucky order, all precedences and formalities suspended for Holiday.

Helena grasped Ross firmly by the arm. The crowd was spreading over the quiet acres surrounding the Center, each little cluster heedlessly intent on a long-planned project of its own. Under the pressure of Helena’s arm, Ross found himself swerving toward a clump of shrubbery.

He said violently, “No! That is, I mean I’m sorry, Helena, but I’ve got something to do.”

She stared at him with shock in her eyes. “On Holiday?”

“On Holiday. Truly, Helena, I’m sorry. Look, what you said last night—from now till tomorrow morning, I can do what I want, right?”

Sullenly, “Yes. I thought, Ross, that I knew what—”

“Okay.” He jerked his arm away, feeling like all of the hundred possible kinds of a skunk. “See you around,” he said over his shoulder. He did not look back.

Three kilos back, he told himself firmly, then the right-hand fork in the road. And not more than a dozen kilos, at the most, to the spaceport. He could do it in a couple of hours.

One thing had been established for certain: If ever there had been a “Franklin Foundation” on this planet, it was gone for good now. Dismantled, no doubt, to provide building materials for an eartrumpet plant. No doubt the little F-T-L ship that the Franklin Foundation was supposed to cover for was still swinging in an orbit within easy range of the spaceport; but the chance that anybody would ever find it, or use it if found, was pretty close to zero. If they bothered to maintain a radar watch at all—any other watch than the fully automatic one set to respond only to highvelocity interstellar ships—and if anyone ever took time to look at the radar plot, no doubt the F-T-L ship was charted. As an asteroid, satellite, derelict or “body of unknown origin.” Certainly no one of these smug oldsters would take the trouble to investigate.

The only problem to solve on this planet was how to get off it—fast.

On the road ahead of him was what appeared to be a combination sex orgy and free-for-all. It rolled in a yelling, milling mob of half a hundred excited juniors across the road toward him, then swerved into the fields as a cluster of screaming women broke free and ran, and the rest of the crowd roared after them.

Ross quickened his step. If he ever did get off this planet, it would have to be today; he was not fool enough to think that any ordinary day would give him the freedom to poke around the spaceport’s defenses. And it would be just his luck, he thought bitterly, to get involved in a gang fight on the way to the port.

There was a squeal of tires behind him, and a little vehicle screeched to a halt. Ross threw up a defensive arm in automatic reflex.

But it was only Helena, awkwardly fumbling open the door of the car. “Get in,” she said sourly. “You’ve spoiled my Holiday. Might as well do what you want to do.”

* * * *

“What’s that?”

Helena looked where he was pointing, and shrugged. “Guard box,” she guessed. “How would I know? Nobody’s in it, anyhow.”

Ross nodded. They had abandoned the car and were standing outside a long, seamless fence that surrounded the spaceport. The main gates were closed and locked; a few hundred feet to the right was a smaller gate with a sort of pillbox, but that had every appearance of being locked too.

“All right,” said Ross. “See that shed with the boxes outside it? Over we go.”

The shed was right up against the fence; the metal boxes gave a sort of rough and just barely climbable foothold. Helena was easy enough to lift to the top of the shed; Ross, grunting, managed to clamber after her.

They looked down at the ground on the other side, a dozen feet away. “You don’t have to come along,” Ross told her.

“That’s just like you!” she flared. “Cast me aside—trample on me!”

“All right, all right.” Ross looked around, but neither junior nor elder was anywhere in sight. “Hang by your hands and then drop,” he advised her. “Get moving before somebody shows up.”

“On Holiday?” she asked bitterly. She squirmed over the narrow top of the fence, legs dangling, let herself down as far as she could, and let go. Ross watched anxiously, but she got up quickly enough and moved to one side.

Ross plopped down next to her, knocking the wind out of himself. He got up dizzily.

His ship, in lonesome quiet, was less than a quarter of a mile away. “Let’s go,” Ross panted, and clutched her hand. They skirted another shed and were in the clear, running as fast as they could.

Almost in the clear.

Ross heard the whine of the little scooter before he felt the blow, but it was too late. He sprawled on the ground, dragging Helena after him.

A Senior Citizen with a long-handled rod of the sort Ross remembered all too well was scowling down at them. “Children,” he rumbled through his breast-speaker in a voice of awful disgust, “is this the way to act on Holiday?”

Helena, gibbering in terror, was beyond words. Ross croaked, “Sorry, sir. We—we were just—”

Crash! The rod came down again, and every muscle in Ross’s body convulsed. He rolled helplessly away, the elder following him. Crash! “We give you Holiday,” the elder boomed, “and—” crash “—you act like animals. Terrible! Don’t you know that freedom of play on Holiday—” crash “—is the most sacred right of every junior—” crash “—and heaven help you—” crash “—if you abuse it!”

The wrenching punishment and the caressing voice stopped together. Ross lay blinking into the terrible silence that followed. He became conscious of Helena’s weeping, and forced his head to turn to look at her.

She was standing behind the elder’s scooter, a length of wire in her hand. The senior lay slumped against his safety strap. “Ross!” she moaned. “Ross, what have I done? I turned him off!”

He stood up, coughing and retching. No one else was in sight, only the two of them and the silent, slack form of the old man. He grabbed her arm. “Come on,” he said fuzzily, and started toward the starship.

She hung back, mumbling to herself, her eyes saucers. She was in a state of grievous shock, it was clear.

Ross hesitated, rubbing his back. He knew that she might never pull out of it. Even if she did, she was certain to be a frightful handicap. But it was crystal-clear that she had declared herself on his side. Even if the elder could be revived, the punishment in store for Helena would be awful to contemplate.…

Come what may, he was now responsible for Helena.

He towed her to the starship. She climbed in docilely enough, sat staring blankly as he sealed ship and sent it blasting off the face of the planet.

* * * *

She didn’t speak until they were well into deep space. Then the blank stare abruptly clouded and she exploded in a fit of tears. Ross said ineffectually, “There, there.” It had no effect; until, in its own time, the storm ended.

Helena said hoarsely, “Wh-what do I do now?”

“Why, I guess you come right along with me,” Ross said heartily, cursing his luck.

“Where’s that?”

“Where? You mean, where?” Ross scratched his head.

“Well, let’s see. Frankly, Helena, your planet was quite a disappointment to me. I had hoped— Well, no matter. I suppose the best thing to do is to look up the next planet on the list.”

“What list?”

Ross hesitated, then shrugged and plunged into the explanation. All about the longliners and the message and faster-than-light travel and the Wesley Families—and none of it, while he was talking, seemed convincing at all. But perhaps Helena was less critical; or perhaps Helena simply did not care. She listened attentively and made no comment. She only said, at the end, “What’s the name of the next planet?”

He consulted the master charts. Haarland’s listing showed a place called Azor, conveniently near at hand in the strange geodesics of the Wesley Effect, where the far galaxies might be near at hand in the warped space-lines, and the void just beyond the viewplates be infinitely distant. The F-T-L family of Azor was named Cavallo; when last heard from, they had been builders of machine tools.

Ross told Helena about it. She shrugged and watched curiously as he began to set up the F-T-L problem on the huge board.

CHAPTER 7

They were well within detection range of Azor’s radar, if any, and yet there had been no beeping signal that the planet’s GCA had taken over and would pilot them down. Another blank? He studied the surface of the world under his highest magnification and saw no signs that it had been devastated by war. There were cities—intact, as far as he could tell, but not very attractive. The design ran to huge, gloomy piles that mounted toward central towers.

Azor was a big world which showed not much water and a great deal of black rock. It was the fifth of its system and reportedly had colonized its four adjacent neighbors and their moons.

His own search radar pinged. The signal was followed at once by a guarded voice from his ship-to-ship communicator: “What ship are you? Do you receive me? The band is 798.44.”

He hastily dialed the frequency on his transmitter and called, “I receive you. We are a vessel from outside your solar system, home planet Halsey. We want to contact a family named Cavallo of the planet Azor believed to be engaged in building machine tools. Can you help us?”

“You are a male?” the voice asked cautiously. “In command or simply the communicator?”

“I’m a male and I’m in command of this vessel.”

The voice said: “Then sheer off this system and go elsewhere, my friend.”

“What is this? Who are you?”

“My name does not matter. I happen to be on watch aboard the prison orbital station ‘Minerva.’ Get going, my friend, before the planetary GCA picks you up.”

Prison orbital station? A very sensible idea. “Thanks for the advice,” he parried. “Can you tell me anything about the Cavallo family?”

“I have heard of them. My friend, your time is running out. If you do not sheer off very soon they will land you. And I judge from the tone of your voice that it will not be long before you join the rest of us criminals aboard ‘Minerva.’ It is not pleasant here. Good-by.”

“Wait, please!” Ross had no intention at all of committing any crimes that would land him aboard a prison hulk, and he had every intention of fulfilling his mission. “Tell me about the Cavallo family—and why you expect me to get in trouble on Azor.”

“The time is running out, my friend, but—the Cavallo family of machine tool builders is located in Novj Grad. And the crime of which all of us aboard ‘Minerva’ were convicted is conspiracy to advocate equality of the sexes. Now go!”

The carrier-wave hum of the communicator died, but immediately there was another electronic noise to fill the cabin—the beep of a GCA radar taking over the sealed landing controls of the craft.

Helena had been listening with very little comprehension. “Who was your friend, Ross?” she asked. “Where are we?”

“I think,” Ross said, “he was my friend. And I think we are—in trouble.”

The ship began to jet tentative bursts of reaction mass, nosing toward the big, gloomy planet.

“That’s all right,” Helena said comfortably. “At least they won’t know I disconnected a Senior Citizen.” She thought a moment. “They won’t, will they? I mean, the Senior Citizens here won’t know about the Senior Citizens there, will they?”

He tried to break it to her gently as the ship picked up speed. “Helena, it’s possible that the old people here won’t be Senior Citizens—not in your planet’s sense. They may just be old people, with no special authority over young people. I think, in fact, that we may find you outranking older people who happen to be males.”

She took it as a joke. “You are funny, Ross. Old means Senior, doesn’t it? And Senior means better, wiser, abler, and in charge, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll see,” he said thoughtfully as the main reaction drive cut in. “We’ll see very shortly.”

* * * *

The spaceport was bustling, busy, and efficient. Ross marveled at the speed and dexterity with which the anonymous ground operator whipped his ship into a braking orbit and set it down. And he stared enviously at the crawling clamshells on treads, bigger than houses, that cupped around his ship; the ship was completely and hermetically surrounded, and bathed in a mist of germicides and prophylactic rays.

A helmeted figure riding a little platform on the inside of one of the clamshells turned a series of knobs, climbed down, and rapped on the ship’s entrance port.

Ross opened it diffidently, and almost strangled in the antiseptic fumes. Helena choked and wheezed behind him as the figure threw back its helmet and said, “Where’s the captain?”

“I am he,” said Ross meticulously. “I would like to be put in touch with the Cavallo Machine-Tool Company of Novj Grad.”

The figure shook its long hair loose, which provided Ross with the necessary clue: it was a woman. Not a very attractive-looking woman, for she wore no makeup; but by the hair, by the brows and by the smoothness of her chin, a woman all the same. She said coldly, “If you’re the captain, who’s that?”

Helena said in a small voice, “I’m Helena, from Junior Unit Twenty-Three.”

“Indeed.” Suddenly the woman smiled. “Well, come ashore, dear,” she said. “You must be tired from your trip. Both of you come ashore,” she added graciously.

She led the way out of the clamshells to a waiting closed car. Azor’s sun had an unpleasant bluish cast to it, not a type-G at all; Ross thought that the lighting made the woman look uglier than she really had to be. Even Helena looked pinched and bloodless, which he knew well was not the case at all.

All around them was activity. Whatever this planet’s faults, it was not a stagnant home for graybeards. Ross, craning, saw nothing that was shoddy, nothing that would have looked out of place in the best-equipped port of Halsey’s Planet. And the reception lounge, or whatever it was, that the woman took them to was a handsome and prettily furnished construction. “Some lunch?” the woman asked, directing her attention to Helena. “A cup of tribrew, maybe? Let me have the boy bring some.” Helena looked to Ross for signals, and Ross, gritting his teeth, nodded to her to agree. Too young the last time, too male this time; was there ever going to be a planet where he mattered to anyone?

He said desperately, “Madam, forgive my interruption, but this lady and myself need urgently to get in touch with the Cavallo company. Is this Novj Grad?”

The woman’s pale brows arched. She said, with an effort, “No, it is not.”

“Then can you tell us where Novj Grad is?” Ross persisted. “If they have a spaceport, we can hop over there in our ship—”

The woman gasped something that sounded like, “Well!” She stood up and said pointedly to Helena, “If you’ll excuse me, I have something to attend to.” And swept out.

Helena stared wide-eyed at Ross. “She must’ve been a real Senior Citizen, huh?”

“Not exactly,” said Ross despairingly. “Look, Helena, things are different here. I need your help.”

“Help?”

“Yes, help!” he bellowed. “Get a grip on yourself, girl. Remember what I told you about the planet I came from? It was different from yours, remember? The old people were just like anybody else.” She giggled in embarrassment. “They were!” he yelled. “And they are here, too. Old people, young people, doesn’t matter. On my planet, the richest people were—well, never mind. On this planet, women are the bosses. Get it? Women are like elders. So you’ll have to take over, Helena.”

She was looking at him with a puzzled frown. She objected, “But if women are—”

“They are. Never mind about that part of it now; just remember that for the purposes of getting along here, you’re going to be my boss. You tell me what to do. You talk to everybody. And what you have to say to them is this: You must get to Novj Grad immediately, and talk to a high-ranking member of the Cavallo Machine-Tool Company. Clear? Once we get there, I’ll take over; everything will be under control then.” He added prayerfully, “I hope.”

Helena blinked at him. “I’m going to be your boss?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“Like an elder bosses a junior? And it’s legal?”

Ross started to repeat, “That’s right,” impatiently again. But there was a peculiar look in Helena’s round eyes. “Helena!” he said warningly.

She was all concern. “Why, what is it, Ross?” she asked solicitously. “You look upset. Just leave everything to me, dear.”

* * * *

They got started on the way to Novj Grad—not in their ship (the woman had said there was no spaceport in Novj Grad), and not alone, so that Ross could not confirm his unhappy opinion of Helena’s inner thoughts. But at least they were on their way to Novj Grad in the Azorian equivalent of a chartered aircraft, with Helena chatting happily with the female pilot, and Ross sitting uncomfortably on a narrow, upholstered strip behind.

Everything he saw in Azor confirmed his first impressions. The planet was busy and prosperous. Nobody seemed to be doing anything very productive, he thought, but somehow everything seemed to get done. Automatic machinery, he guessed; if women were to have any chance of gaining the upper hand on a planet, most of the hard physical work would have to be fairly well mechanized anyhow. And particularly on this planet. They had been flying for six hours, at a speed he guessed to be not much below that of sound, and fully half of the territory they passed over was bare, black rock.

The ship began losing altitude, and the pilot, who had been curled up in a relaxed position, totally ignoring the aircraft, glanced at her instrument panel. “Coming in for a landing,” she warned. “Don’t distract me right now, dear, I’ve got a thousand things to do.”

She didn’t seem to be doing any of them, Ross thought disapprovingly; all she did was watch varicolored lights blink on and off. But no doubt the ship landing, too, was as automatic as the piloting.

Helena turned and leaned back to Ross. “We’re coming in for a landing,” she relayed.

Ross said sourly, “I heard.”

Helena gave him a look of reprimand and forgiveness. “I’m hungry,” she mused.

The pilot turned from her controls. “You can get something at the airport,” she offered eagerly. “I’ll show you.”

Helena looked at Ross. “Would you like something?”

But the pilot frowned. “I don’t believe there’s any place for men,” she said disapprovingly. “Perhaps we can get something sent out for him if you like. Although, really, it’s probably against the rules, you know.”

Ross started to say with great dignity, “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.” But he didn’t quite get it out. The ship came in for its landing. There was an enormous jolt and a squawk of alarm bells and flashing lights. The ship careened crazily, and stopped.

“Oh, darn,” complained the pilot mildly. “It’s always doing that. Come on, dear, let’s get something to eat. We’ll come back for him later.”

And Ross was left alone to stare apprehensively at the unceasingly flashing lights and to listen to the strident alarms for three-quarters of an hour.

* * * *

His luck was in, though. The ship didn’t explode. And eventually a pallid young man in a greasy apron appeared with a tray of sandwiches and a vacuum jug.

“Up here, boy,” Ross called.

He gaped through the port. “You mean come in?”

“Sure. It’s all right.”

The young man put down the tray. Something in the way he looked at it prompted Ross to invite him: “Have some with me? More here than I can handle.”

“Thanks; I believe I will. I, uh, was supposed to take my break after I brought you this stuff.” He poured steaming brew into the cup that covered the jug, politely pushed it to Ross and swigged from the jug himself. “You’re with the starship?” he asked, around a mouthful of sandwich.

“Yes. I—the captain, that is—wants to contact an outfit called Cavallo Machine-Tool. You know where they are?”

“Sure. Biggest firm on the south side. Fifteen Street; you can’t miss them. The captain—is she the lady who was with Pilot Breuer?”

“Yes.”

The youngster’s eyes widened. “You mean you were in space—alone—with a lady?”

Ross nodded and chewed.

“And she didn’t—uh—there wasn’t—well—any problem?”

“No,” said Ross. “You have much trouble with that kind of thing?”

The boy winced. “If I’ve asked once I’ve asked a hundred times for a transfer. Oh, those jet pilots! I used to work in a roadside truck stop. I know truckers are supposed to be rough and tough; maybe they are. But you can’t tell me that deep down a trucker isn’t a lady. When you tell them no, that’s that. But a pilot—it just eggs them on. Azor City today, Novj Grad tomorrow—what do they care?”

Ross was fascinated and baffled. It seemed to him that they should care and care plenty. Back where he came from, it was the woman who paid and he couldn’t imagine any cultural setup which could alter that biological fact.

He asked cautiously: “Have you ever been—in trouble?”

The boy stiffened and looked disapproving. Then he said with a sigh: “I might as well tell you. It’s all over the station anyway; they call me ‘Bernie the Pullover.’ Yes. Twice. Pilots both times. I can’t seem to say no—” He took another long pull from the jug and a savage bite from a second sandwich.

“I’m sure,” Ross said numbly, “it wasn’t your fault.”

“Try telling that to the judge,” Bernie the Pullover said bitterly. “The pilot speaks her piece, the medic puts the blood group tests in evidence, the doctor and crèche director depose that the child was born and is still living. Then the judge says, without even looking up, ‘Paternity judgment to the plaintiff, defendant ordered to pay one thousand credits annual support, let this be a warning to you, young man, next case.’ I shouldn’t have joined you and eaten your sandwiches, but the fact is I was hungry. I had to sell my meal voucher yesterday to meet my payment. Miss three payments and—” He jerked his thumb heavenward.

Ross thought and realized that the thumb must indicate the orbiting prison hulk “Minerva.” It was the man who paid here.

He demanded: “How did all this happen?”

Bernie, having admitted his hunger, had stopped stalling and seized a third sandwich. “All what?” he asked indistinctly.

Ross thought hard and long. He realized first that he could probably never explain what he meant to Bernie, and second that if he did they’d probably both wind up aboard “Minerva” for conspiracy to advocate equality. He shifted his ground. “Of course everybody agrees on the natural superiority of women,” he said, “but people seem to differ from planet to planet as to the reasons. What do they say here on Azor?”

“Oh—nothing special or fancy. Just the common-sense, logical thing. They’re smaller, for one thing, and haven’t got the muscles of men, so they’re natural supervisors. They accumulate money as a matter of course because men die younger and women are the beneficiaries. Then, women have a natural aptitude for all the interesting jobs. I saw a broadcast about that just the other night. The biggest specialist on the planet in vocational aptitude. I forget her name, but she proved it conclusively.”

He looked at the empty platter before them. “I’ve got to go now. Thanks for everything.”

“The pleasure was mine.” Ross watched his undernourished figure head for the station. He swore a little, and then buckled down to some hard thinking. Helena was his key to this world. He’d have to have a long skull-session or two with her; he couldn’t be constantly prompting her or there would be serious trouble. She would be the front and he would be the very inconspicuous brains of the outfit, trailing humbly behind. But was she capable of absorbing a brand-new, rather complicated concept? She seemed to be, he told himself uncomfortably, in love with him. That would help considerably.…

Helena and Pilot Breuer showed up, walking with a languor that suggested a large and pleasant meal disposed of. Helena’s first words disposed with shocking speed of Ross’s doubts that she was able to acquire a brand-new sociological concept. They were: “Ah, there you are, my dear. Did the boy bring you something or other to eat?”

“Yes. Thanks. Very thoughtful of you,” he said pointedly, with one eye on Breuer’s reaction. There was none; he seemed to have struck the right note.

“Pilot Breuer,” said Helena blandly, “thinks I’d enjoy an evening doing the town with her and a few friends.”

“But the Cavallo people—”

“Ross,” she said gently, “don’t nag.”

He shut up. And thought: wait until I get her out into space. If I get her out into space. She’d be a damned fool to leave this wacked-up culture.…

Breuer was saying, with an altogether too-innocent air, “I’d better get you two settled in a hotel for the night; then I’ll pick up Helena and a few friends and we’ll show her what old Novj Grad has to offer in the way of night life. Can’t have her batting around the universe saying Azor’s sidewalks are rolled up at 2100, can we? And then she can do her trading or whatever it is with Cavallo bright and early tomorrow, eh?”

Ross realized that he was being jollied out of an attack of the sulks. He didn’t like it.

* * * *

The hotel was small and comfortable, with a bar crowded by roistering pilots and their dates. The glimpses Ross got of social life on Azor added up to a damnably unfair picture. It was the man who paid. Breuer roguishly tested the mattress in their room, nudging Helena, and then announced, “Get settled, kids, while I visit the bar.”

When the door rolled shut behind her Ross said furiously: “Look, you! Protective mimicry’s fine up to a point, but let’s not forget what this mission is all about. We seem to be suckered into spending the night, but by hell tomorrow morning bright and early we find those Cavallo people—”

“There,” Helena said soothingly. “Don’t be angry, Ross. I promise I won’t be out late, and she really did insist.”

“I suppose so,” he grumbled. “Just remember it’s no pleasure trip.”

“Not for you, perhaps,” she smiled sweetly.

He let it drop there, afraid to push the matter.

Breuer returned in about ten minutes with a slight glow on. “It’s all fixed,” she told Helena. “Got a swell crowd lined up. Table at Virgin Willie’s—oops!” She glanced at Ross. “No harm in it, of course,” she said. “Anything you want, Ross, just dial service. It’s on my account. I fixed it with the desk.”

“Thanks.”

They left, and Ross went grumpily to bed.

* * * *

A secretive rustle in the room awoke him. “Helena?” he asked drowsily.

Pilot Breuer’s voice giggled drunkenly, “Nope. Helena’s passed out at Virgin Willie’s, kind of the way I figured she would be on triple antigravs. Had my eye on you since Azor City, baby. You gonna be nice to me?”

“Get out of here!” Ross hissed furiously. “Out of here or I’ll yell like hell.”

“So yell,” she giggled. “I got the house dick fixed. They know me here, baby—”

He fumbled for the bedside light and snapped it on. “I’ll pitch you right through the door,” he announced. “And if you give me any more lip I won’t bother to open it before I do.”

She hiccupped and said, “A spirited lad. That’s the way I like ’em.” With one hand she drew a nasty-looking little pistol. With the other she pulled a long zipper and stepped out of her pilot’s coveralls.

Ross gulped. There were three ways to play this, the smart way, the stupid way, and the way that all of a sudden began to look attractive. He tried the stupid way.

He got the pistol barrel alongside his ear for his pains. “Don’t jump me,” Pilot Breuer giggled. “The boys that’ve tried to take this gun away from me are stretched end to end from here to Azor City. By me, baby.”

Ross blinked through a red-spotted haze. He took a deep breath and got smart. “You’re pretty tough,” he said admiringly.

“Oh, sure.” She kicked the coveralls across the room and moved in on him. “Baby,” she said caressingly, “if I seem to sort of forget myself in the next couple of minutes, don’t get any ideas. I never let go of my gun. Move over.”

“Sure,” Ross said hollowly. This, he told himself disgustedly, was the damnedest, silliest, ridiculousest.…

There was a furious hiccup from the door. “So!” Helena said venomously, pushing the door wide and almost falling to the floor. “So!”

Ross flailed out of the bed, kicking the pistol out of Pilot Breuer’s hand in the process. He cried enthusiastically, “Helena, dear!”

“Don’t you ‘Helena-dear’ me!” she said, moving in and kicking the door shut behind her. “I leave you alone for one little minute, and what happens? And you!”

“Sorry,” Pilot Breuer muttered, climbing into her coveralls. “Wrong room. Must’ve had one antigrav too many.” She licked her lips apprehensively, zipping her coveralls and sidling toward the door. With one hand on the knob, she said diffidently, “If I could have my gun back—? No, you’re right! I’ll get it tomorrow.” She got through the door just ahead of a lamp.

“Hussy!” spat Helena. “And you, Ross—”

It was the last straw. As Ross lurched toward her he regretted only one thing: that he didn’t have a hairbrush.

Pilot Breuer had been right. Nobody paid any attention to the noise.

* * * *

“Yes, Ross.” Helena had hardly touched her breakfast; she sat with her eyes downcast.

“‘Yes, Ross’,” he mimicked bitterly. “It better be ‘Yes, Ross.’ This place may look all right to you, but it’s trouble. You don’t want to find yourself stuck here all your life, do you? Then do what I tell you.”

“Yes, Ross.”

He pushed the remains of his food away. “Oh, the hell with it,” he said dispiritedly. “I wish I’d never started out on this fool’s errand. And I double damn well wish I’d left you in the dye vats.”

“Yes, Ro—I mean, I’m glad you didn’t, Ross,” she said in a small voice.

He stood up and patted her shoulder absently. “Come on,” he said, “we’ve got to get over to the Cavallo place. I wish you had let me talk to them on the phone.”

She said reasonably, “But you said—”

“I know what I said. When we get there, remember that I do the talking.”

They walked through green-lit streets, filled with proud-looking women and sad-eyed men. The Cavallo Machine-Tool Corporation was only a few intersections away, by the map the desk clerk had drawn for Helena; they found it without trouble. It was a smallish sort of building for a factory, Ross thought, but perhaps that was how factories went on Azor. Besides, it was well constructed and beautifully landscaped with the purplish lawns these people seemed to prefer.

Helena led him through the door, as was right and proper. She said to the busy little bald-headed man who seemed to be the receptionist, “We’re expected. Miss Cavallo, please.”

“Certainly, Ma’am,” he said with a gap-toothed smile, and worked a combination of rods and buttons on the desk beside him. In a moment, he said, “Go right in. Three up and four over; can’t miss it.”

They passed through a noisy territory of machines where metal was sliced, spun, hacked, and planed; no one seemed to be paying any attention to them. Ross wondered who had built the machines, and had a sudden flash of realization as to where those builders were now: On “Minerva,” staring at the unattainable free sky.

Miss Cavallo was a motherly type with a large black cigar. “Sit right down,” she said heartily. “You, too, young man. Tell me what we in Cavallo Company can do for you.”

Helena opened her mouth, but Ross stopped her with a gesture. “That’s enough,” he said quietly. “I’ll take over. Miss Cavallo,” he declaimed from memory, “what follows is under the seal.”

“Is it indeed! What do you know,” she said.

Ross said, “Wesley.”

Miss Cavallo slapped her thigh admiringly. “Son of a gun,” she said admiringly. “How this takes me back—those long-ago childhood days, learning these things at my mother’s knee. Let’s see. Uh—the limiting velocity is C.”

“But C^2 is not a velocity,” Ross finished triumphantly. And, from the heart, “Miss Cavallo, you don’t begin to know how happy this makes me.”

Miss Cavallo reached over and pumped his hand, then Helena’s. To the girl she said, “You’ve got a right to be a proud woman, believe me. The way he got through it, without a single stumble! Never saw anything like it in my life. Well, just tell me what I can do for you, now that that’s over.”

Ross took a deep, deep breath. He said earnestly, “A great deal. I don’t know where to begin. You see, it all goes back to Halsey’s Planet, where I come from. This, uh, this ship came in, a longliner, and it got some of us a little worried because, well, it seemed that some of the planets were no longer in communication. We—uh, Miss Cavallo?” She was smiling pleasantly enough, but Ross had the crazy feeling that he just wasn’t getting through to her.

“Go right ahead,” she boomed. “God knows, I’ve got nothing against men in business; that’s old-fashioned prejudice. Take your time. I won’t bite you. Get on with your proposition, young man.”

“It isn’t exactly a proposition,” Ross said weakly. All of a sudden the words seemed hard to find. What did you say to a potential partner in the salvation of the human race when she just nodded and blew cigar smoke at you?

He made an effort. “Halsey’s Planet was the seventh alternate destination for this ship, and so we figured—That is, Miss Cavallo, it kind of looked like there was some sort of trouble. So Mr. Haarland—he’s the one who has the F-T-L secret on Halsey, like you do here on Azor—he passed it on to me, of course—well, he asked me to, well, sort of take a look around.” He stopped. The words by then were just barely audible anyhow; and Miss Cavallo had been looking furtively at her watch.

Miss Cavallo shrugged sympathetically to Helena. “They’re all like that under the skin, aren’t they?” she observed ambiguously. “Well, if men could take our jobs away from us, what would we do? Stay home and mind the kids?” She roared and poked a box of cigars at Helena.

“Now,” she said briskly, “let’s get down to cases. I really enjoyed hearing those lines from you, young man, and I want you to know that I’m prepared to help you in any possible way because of them. Open a line of credit, speed up deliveries, send along some of our technical people to help you get set up—anything. Now, what can I do for you? Turret lathes? Grinders? Screw machines?”

“Miss Cavallo,” Ross said desperately, “don’t you know anything about the faster-than-light secret?”

She said impatiently, “Of course I do, young man. Said the responses, didn’t I? There’s no call for that item, though.”

“I don’t want to buy one,” Ross cried. “I have one. Don’t you realize that the human race is in danger? Populations are dying out or going out of communication all over the galaxy. Don’t you want to do something about it before we all go under?”

Miss Cavallo dropped all traces of a smile. Her face was like flint as she stood up and pointed to the window. “Young man,” she said icily, “take a look out there. That’s the Cavallo Machine-Tool Company. Does that look as if we’re going under?”

“I know, but Clyde, Cyrnus One, Ragansworld—at least a dozen planets I can name—are gone. Didn’t you ever think that you might be next?”

Miss Cavallo kept her voice level, but only with a visible effort.

She said flatly, “No. Never. Young man, I have plenty to do right here on Azor without bothering my head about those places you’re talking about. Seventy-five years ago there was another fellow just like you; Flarney, some name like that; my grandmother told me about him. He came bustling in here causing trouble, with that old silly jingle about Wesley and C-square and so on, with some cock-and-bull story about a planet that was starving to death, stirring up a lot of commotion. Well, he wound up on ‘Minerva,’ because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Watch out that you don’t do the same.”

She marched majestically to the door. “And now,” she said, “if you’ve wasted quite enough of my time, kindly leave.”

CHAPTER 8

“Stupid old bat,” Ross muttered. They were walking aimlessly down Fifteen Street, the nicely-landscaped machine tool works behind them.

Helena said timidly: “You really shouldn’t talk that way, Ross. She is older than you, after all. Old heads are—”

“—wisest,” he wearily agreed. “Also the most conservative. Also the most rigidly inflexible; also the most firmly closed to the reception of new ideas. With one exception.”

She reeled under the triple blasphemy and then faintly asked: “What’s the exception?”

Ross became aware that they were not alone. Their very manner of walking, he a little ahead, obviously leading the way, was drawing unfavorable attention from passers-by. Nothing organized or even definite—just looks ranging from puzzled distaste to anger. He said, “Somebody named Haarland. Never mind,” and in a lower voice: “Straighten up. Step out a little ahead of me. Scowl.”

She managed it all except the scowl. The expression on her face got some stupefied looks from other pedestrians, but nothing worse.

Helena said loudly and plaintively: “I don’t like it here after all, Ross. Can’t we get away from all these women?”

Should the impulse seize you, placard ancient Brooklyn with twenty-four sheets proclaiming the Dodgers to be cellar-dwelling bums. Mount a detergent box and inform a crowd of Altairians that they are degenerate slith-fondlers if you must. Announce in a crowded Cephean bar room that Sadkia Revall is no better than she should be. From these situations you have some chance of emerging intact. But never, never pronounce the word “women” as Helena pronounced it on Fifteen Street, Novj Grad, Azor.

The mob took only seconds to form.

Ross and Helena found themselves with their backs to the glass doors of a food store. The handful of women who had actually heard the remark were all talking to them simultaneously, with fist-shaking. Behind them stood as many as a dozen women who knew only that something had happened and that there were comfortably outnumbered victims available. The noise was deafening, and Helena began to cry. Ross first wondered if he could bring himself to knock down a woman; then realized after studying the hulking virago in their foreground that he might bring himself to try but probably would not succeed.

She seemed to be accusing Helena of masquerading, of advocating equality, of uttering obscenely antisocial statements in the public road, to the affront of all decent-minded girls.

There was violence in the air. Ross was on the point of blocking a roundhouse right when the glass doors opened behind them. The small diversion distracted the imbecile collective brain of the mob.

“What’s going on here?” a suety voice demanded. “Ladies, may I please get through?”

It was a man trying to emerge from the food shop with a double armful of cartons. He was a great fat slob, quite hairless, and smelling powerfully of kitchen. He wore the gravy-spotted whites of any cook anywhere.

The virago said to him, “Keep out of this, Willie. This fellow here’s a masquerader. The thing I heard him say—!”

“I’m not,” Helena wept. “I’m not!”

The cook stooped to look into her face and turned on the mob. “She isn’t,” he said definitely. “She’s a lady from another system. She was slopping up triple antigravs at my place last night with a gang of jet pilots.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing!” the virago yelled.

“Madam,” the cook said wearily, “after her third antigrav I had to trip her up and crown her. She was about to climb the bar and corner my barman.”

Ross looked at her fixedly. She stopped crying and nervously cleared her throat.

“So if you’ll just let us through,” the cook bustled, seizing the psychological moment of doubt. His enormous belly bulldozed a lane for them. “Beg pardon. Excuse us. Madam, will you—thank you. Beg pardon—”

The lynchers were beginning to drift away, embarrassed. The party had collapsed. “Faster,” the cook hissed at them. “Beg pardon—” And they were in the clear and well down the street.

“Thank you, Sir,” Helena said humbly.

“Just ‘Willie’, if you please,” the fat man said.

One hand descended on Ross’s shoulder and another on Helena’s. They both belonged to the virago. She spun them around, glaring. “I’m not satisfied with the brush-off,” she snapped. “Exactly what did you mean by that remark you made?”

Helena wailed, “It’s just that you and all these other women here seem so young.”

The virago’s granite face softened. She let go and tucked in a strand of steel-wool hair. “Did you really think so, dear?” she asked, beaming. “There, I’m sorry I got excited. A wee bit jealous, were you? Well, we’re broad-minded here in Novj Grad.” She patted Helena’s arm and walked off, smiling and jaunty.

Virgin Willie led off and they followed him. Ross’s knees were shaky. The virago had not known that to Helena “young” meant “stupid.”

The cook absently acknowledged smiles and nods as they walked. He was, obviously, a character. Between salutes he delivered a low-voiced, rapid-fire reaming to Ross and Helena. “Silly stunt. Didn’t you hear about the riots? Supposed to be arms caches somewhere here on the south side. Everybody’s nerves absolutely ragged. Somebody gets smashed up in traffic, they blame it on us. Don’t care where you’re from. Watch it next time.”

“We will, Willie,” Helena said contritely. “And I think you run an awfully nice restaurant.”

“Yeah,” said Ross, looking at her.

Willie muttered, “I guess you’re clear. You still staying at that hot pilot’s hangout? This is where we say good-by, then. You turn left.”

He waddled on down the street. Helena said instantly, “I don’t remember a thing, Ross.”

“Okay,” he said. “You don’t remember a thing.”

She looked relieved and said brightly, “So let’s get back to the hotel.”

“Okay,” he said. Climbed the bar and tried to corner the.… Halfway to the hotel he slowed, then stopped, and said, “I just thought of something. Maybe we’re not staying there any more. After last night why should Breuer carry us on her tab? I thought we’d have some money to carry us from the Cavallos by now—”

“The ship?” she asked in a small voice.

“Across the continent. Hell! Maybe Breuer forgave and forgot. Let’s try, anyway.”

They never got as far as the hotel. When they reached the square it stood on, there was a breathless rush and Bernie stood before them, panting and holding a hand over his chest. “In here,” he gasped, and nodded at a shopfront that announced hot brew. Ross thoughtlessly started first through the door and caught Bernie’s look of alarm. He opened the door for Helena, who went through smiling nervously.

They settled at a small table in an empty corner in stiff silence. “I’ve been walking around that square all morning,” Bernie said, with a cowed look at Helena.

Ross told her: “This young man and I had a talk yesterday at the plane while you were eating. What is it, Bernie?”

He still couldn’t believe that he was doing it, but Bernie said in a scared whisper: “Wanted to head you off and warn you. Breuer was down at the field cafe this morning, talking loud to the other hot-shots. She said you—both of you—talked equality. Said she got up with a hangover and you were gone. But she said there’d be six policewomen waiting in your room when you got back.” He leaned forward on the table. Ross remembered that he had been forced to sell his ration card.

“Here comes the waiter,” he said softly. “Order something for all of us. We have a little money. And thanks, Bernie.”

Helena asked, “What do we do?”

“We eat,” Ross said practically. “Then we think. Shut up; let Bernie order.”

They ate; and then they thought. Nothing much seemed to come from all the thinking, though.

They were a long, long way from the spaceship. Ross commandeered all of Helena’s leftover cash. It was almost, not quite, enough for one person to get halfway back to Azor City. He and Bernie turned out their pockets and added everything they had, including pawnable valuables. That helped. It made the total almost enough for one person to get three-quarters of the way back.

It didn’t help enough.

Ross said, “Bernie, what would happen if we, well, stole something?”

Bernie shrugged. “It’s against the law, of course. They probably wouldn’t prosecute, though.”

“They wouldn’t?”

“Not if they can prove egalitarianism on you. Stealing’s against the law; preaching equality is against the state. You get the maximum penalty for that.”

Helena choked on her drink, but Ross merely nodded. “So we might as well take a chance,” he said. “Thanks, Bernie. We won’t bother you any more. You’ll forget you heard this, won’t you?”

“The hell I will!” Bernie squawked. “If you’re getting out of here, I want to go with you! You aren’t leaving me behind!”

“But Bernie—” Ross started. He was interrupted by the manager, a battleship-class female with a mighty prow, who came scowling toward them.

“Pipe down,” she ordered coarsely. “This place is for decent people; we don’t want no disturbances here. If you can’t act decent, get out.”

“Awk,” said Helena as Ross kicked her under the table. “I mean, yes ma’am. Sorry if we were talking too loud.” They watched the manager walk away in silence.

As soon as she was fairly away, Ross hissed, “It’s out of the question, Bernie. You might be jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.”

Bernie asked, startled, “The what?”

“The—never mind, it’s just an expression where I come from. It means you might get out of this place and find yourself somewhere worse. We don’t know where we’re going next; you might wish to God you were back here within the next three days.”

“I’ll take that chance,” Bernie said earnestly. “Look, Ross, I played square with you. I didn’t have to stick my neck out and warn you. How about giving me a break too?”

Helena interrupted, “He’s right, Ross. After all, we owe him that much, don’t we? I mean, if a person does that much for a person, a person ought to—”

“Oh, shut up.” Ross glared at both of them. “You two seem to think this is a game,” he said bitterly. “Let me set you straight, both of you. It isn’t. More hangs on what happens to me than either of you realize. The fate of the human race, for instance.”

Helena flashed a look at Bernie. “Of course, Ross,” she said soothingly. “Both of us know that, don’t we, Bernie?”

Bernie stammered, “Sure—sure we do, Ross.” He rubbed his ankle. He went on, “Honest, Ross, I want to get the hell away from Azor once and for all. I don’t care where you’re going. Anything would be better than this place and the damned female bloodsuckers that—”

He stopped, petrified. His eyes, looking over Ross’s shoulder, were enormous.

“Go on, sonny,” said a rich female voice from behind Ross. “Don’t let me and the lieutenant stop you just when you’re going good.”

“It must have been that damn manager,” Bernie said for the fifteenth time.

Ross uncrossed his legs painfully and tried lying on the floor on his side. “What’s the difference?” he asked. “They got us; we’re in the jug. And face it: somebody would have caught us sooner or later, and we might have wound up in a worse jail than this one.” He shifted uncomfortably. “If that’s possible, I mean. Why don’t they at least have beds in these places?”

“Oh,” said Bernie immediately, “some do. The jails in Azor City and Nuevo Reykjavik have beds; Novj Grad, Eleanor, and Milo don’t. I mean, that’s what they tell me,” he added virtuously.

“Sure,” Ross growled. “Well, what do they tell you usually happens next?”

Bernie spread his hands. “Different things. First there’s a hearing. That’s all over by now. Then an indictment and trial. Maybe that’s started already; sometimes they get it in on the same day as the hearing, sometimes not. Then—tomorrow sometime, most likely—comes the sentencing. We’ll know about that, though, because we’ll be there. The law’s very strict on that—they always have you in the court for sentencing.”

Ross cried, “You mean the trial might be going on right now without us?”

“Of course. What else? Think they’d take a chance on having the prisoners creating a disturbance during the trial?”

Ross groaned and turned his face to the wall. For this, he thought, he had come the better part of a hundred light years; for this he had left a comfortable job with a brilliant future. He spent a measurable period of time cursing the memory of old Haarland and his double-jointed, persuasive tongue.

Back in the days of Ross’s early teens he had seen a good many situations like this in the tri-dis, and the hero had never failed to extricate himself by a simple exercise of superhuman strength, intellect, and ingenuity. That, Ross told himself, was just what he needed now. The trouble was, he didn’t have them.

All he had was the secret of faster-than-light travel.

And, here on Azor as on the planet of the graybeards, it had laid a king-sized egg. Women, Ross thought bitterly, women were basically inward-directed and self-seeking; trust them with the secret of F-T-L; make them, like the Cavallos, custodians of a universe-racking truth; and see the secret lost or embalmed in sterile custom. What, he silently demanded of himself, did the greatest of scientific discoveries mean to a biological baby-foundry? How could any female—no single member of which class had ever painted a great picture, written a great book, composed a great sonata, or discovered a great scientific truth—appreciate the ultimate importance of the F-T-L drive? It was like entrusting a first-folio Shakespeare to a broody hen; the shredded scraps would be made into a nest. For the egg came first. Motherhood was all.

That explained it, of course. That, Ross told himself moodily, explained everything except why the F-T-L secret had fallen into apparently equal or worse desuetude on such planets as Gemsel, Clyde, Cyrnus One, Ragansworld, Tau Ceti II, Capella’s family of eight, and perhaps a hundred others.

Ragansworld was gone entirely, drowned in a planetary nebula.

The planet of the graybeard had gone to seed; nothing new, nothing not hallowed by tradition had a chance in its decrepit social order.

His home, Halsey’s Planet, was rapidly, calmly, inevitably depopulating itself.

And Azor had fallen into a rigid, self-centered matriarchal order that only an act of God could break.

Was there a pattern? Were there any similarities?

Ross searched desperately in his mind; but without result. The image of Helena kept intruding itself between him and his thoughts. Was he getting sentimental about that sweet little chucklehead? Who, he hastily added, had come near to criminally assaulting him, who had climbed the.…

He turned to the little waiter and demanded: “Will she—Helena—be on the orbital station with us if we’re all convicted?”

“Hmm—no, I should think not. As a responsible person, she gets the supreme penalty.”

Ross numbly asked after a long pause, “How? Nothing—painful?” It was hard to think of Helena dangling grotesquely at a rope’s end or jolting as she sat strapped in a large, ugly chair. But there were things he had heard of which were horribly worse.

Bernie had been watching him. “I’m sorry,” the little man said soberly. “It’s up to the judge. She’s a foreigner, so they may consider that an extenuating circumstance and place some quick-acting poison aboard for her to take. Otherwise it’s slow starvation.”

A faint, irrational hope had begun to dawn in Ross’s mind. “Aboard what? Exactly how does it work?”

“They’ll put her aboard some hulk with the rockets disabled, fire it off into space—and that’s that. I suppose they’ll use the ship she came in—”

Ross was frantically searching his pockets. He had a stylus. “Got any paper?” he briskly demanded of Bernie.

“Yes, but—?” The waiter blankly passed over an order book. Ross sprawled on the floor and began to scribble: “Never mind how or why this works. Do it. You saw me work the big fan-shaped computer in the center room and you can do it too. Find the master star maps in the chart room. Look up the co-ordinates of Halsey’s System. Set these co-ordinates on the twenty-seven dials marked Proximate Mass. Take the readings on the windows above the dials and set them on the cursors of the computer—”

He scribbled furiously, from time to time forcing himself deliberately to slow down as the writing became an unreadable scrawl. He filled the ruled fronts of the order pages and then the backs—perhaps ten thousand closely-written words, and not one of them wasted. Haarland’s precise instructions, mercilessly drilled into him, flowed out again.

He flung the stylus down at last and read through the book again, ignoring the gaping Bernie. It was all there, as far as he could tell. Grant her a lot of luck and more brains than he privately credited her with, and she had a fighting chance of winding up within radar range of Halsey’s Planet. GCA could take her down from there; an annoying ship-like object hanging on the radarscopes would provoke a reconnaissance.

She knew absolutely nothing about F-T-L or the Wesley drive, but then—neither did he. That fact itself was no handicap.

He might rot on “Minerva,” but some word might get back to Haarland. And so would the ship. And Helena would not perish miserably in a drifting hulk.

Bernie saw the mysterious job was ended and dared to ask, “A letter?”

“No,” Ross said jubilantly. “By God, if things break right they won’t get her. It’s like this—”

He happily began to explain that his F-T-L ship’s rockets were only auxiliaries for fine maneuvering, but he counted on the court not knowing that. If he and Helena could persuade.…

As he went on the look on Bernie’s face changed very slowly from hope to pity to politely-simulated interest. Correspondingly Ross’s accounting became labored and faulty. The pauses became longer and at last he broke off, filled with self-contempt at his folly. He said bitterly, “You don’t think it’ll work.”

“Oh, no!” Bernie protested with too much heartiness. “I could see she’s awfully mechanically-minded for a woman, even if it wouldn’t be polite to say so. Sure it’ll work, Ross. Sure!”

The hell it would.

At least he had disposed of a few hours. And—perhaps some bungling setting would explode the ship, or end a Wesley Jump in the heart of a white dwarf star—sudden annihilation, whiffing Helena out of existence before her body could realize that it had died, before the beginning of apprehension could darken happy absorption with a task she thought would bring her to safety.

For that reason alone he had to carry the scheme through.

* * * *

The courtroom was a chintzy place bright with spring flowers. Ross and Helena looked numbly at one another from opposite corners while the previous order of business was cleared from the docket. A wedding.

The judge, unexpectedly sweet-faced and slender though gray, obviously took such parts of her work seriously. “Marylyn and Kent,” she was saying earnestly to the happy couple, “I suppose you know my reputation. I lecture people a bit before I tie the knot. Evidently it’s not such a bad idea because my marriages turn out well. Last week in Eleanor one of my girls was arrested and reprimanded for gross infidelity and a couple of years ago right here in Novj Grad one of my boys got five hundred lashes for nonsupport. Let’s hope it did them some good, but the cases were unusual. My people, I like to think, know their rights and responsibilities when they walk out of my court, and I think the record bears me out.

“Marylyn, you have chosen to share part of your life with this man. You intend to bear his children. This should not be because your animal appetites have overcome you and you can’t win his consent in any other way but because you know, down deep in your womanly heart, that you can make him happy. Never forget this. If you should thoughtlessly conceive by some other man, don’t tell him. He would only brood. Be thrifty, Marylyn. I have seen more marriages broken up by finances than any other reason. If your husband earns a hundred Eleanors a week, spend only that and no more. If he makes fifty Eleanors a week spend only that and no more. Honorable poverty is preferable to debt. And, from a practical standpoint, if you spend more than your husband earns he will be jailed for debt sooner or later, with resulting loss to your own pocket.

“Kent, you have accepted the proposal of this woman. I see by your dossier that you got in just under the wire. In your income group the antibachelor laws would have caught up with you in one more week. I must say I don’t like the look of it, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to talk to you about the meaning of marriage. Not just the wage assignment, not just the insurance policy, not just the waiver of paternity and copulation ‘rights’, so-called. Those, as a good citizen, you will abide by automatically—Heaven help you if you don’t. But there is more to marriage than that. The honor you have been done by this woman who sees you as desirable and who wishes to make you happy over the years is not a sterile legalism. Marriage is like a rocket, I sometimes think. The brute, unreasoning strength of the main jets representing the husband’s share and the delicate precise steering and stabilizing jets the wife’s. We have all of us seen too many marriages crash to the ground like a rocket when these roles were reversed. It is not reasonable to expect the wife to provide the drive—that is, the income. It is not reasonable to expect the husband to provide the steering—that is, the direction of the personal and household expenditures. So much for the material side of things. On the spiritual side, I have little to say. The laws are most explicit; see that you obey them—and if you don’t, you had better pray that you wind up in some court other than mine. I have no patience with the obsolete doctrine that there is such a legal entity as seduction by female, despite the mouthings of certain so-called jurists who disgrace the bench of a certain nearby city.

“Having heard these things, Marylyn and Kent, step forward and join hands.”

They did. The ceremony was short and simple; the couple then walked from the courtroom under the beaming smile of the judge.

A burly guard next to Ross pointed at the groom. “Look,” she said sentimentally. “He’s crying. Cute!”

“I don’t blame the poor sucker,” Ross flared, and then, being a man of conscience, wondered suddenly if that was why, on Halsey’s Planet, women cried at weddings.

A clerk called: “Dear, let’s have those egalitarians front and center, please. Her honor’s terribly rushed.”

Helena was escorted forward from one side, while Ross and Bernie were jostled to the fore from the other. The judge turned from the happy couple. As she looked down at the three of them the smile that curved her lips turned into something quite different. Ross, quailing, suddenly realized that he had seen just that expression once before. It was when he was very, very young, when a friend of his mother’s had come bustling into the kitchen where he was playing, just after she had smelled, and just before she had seen, the long-dead rat he had fetched up from the abandoned cellar across the street.

While the clerk was reading the orders and indictment, the judge’s stare never wavered. And when the clerk had finished, the judge’s silent stare remained, for a long, terrible time.

In the quietest of voices, the judge said, “So.”

Ross caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. He turned just in time to see Bernie, knees buckling, slip white-faced and unconscious to the floor. The guards rushed forward, but the judge raised a peremptory hand. “Leave him alone,” she ordered soberly. “It is kinder. Defendants, you are charged with the gravest of crimes. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed on you?”

Ross tried to force words—any words, to protest, to plead, to vilify—through his clogged throat. All he managed was a croaking sound; and Helena, by his side, nudged him sharply to silence. He turned to her sharply, and realized that this was the best chance he’d be likely to get. He clutched at her, rolled up his eyes, slumped to the floor in as close an imitation of Bernie’s swoon as he could manage.

The judge was visibly annoyed, and this time she didn’t stop the attendants when they rushed in to kick him erect. But he had the consolation of seeing a flash of understanding cross Helena’s face, and her hand dart to a pocket with the paper he had handed her. In the confusion no one saw.

The rest of the courtroom scene was kaleidoscopic in Ross’s recollection. The only part he remembered clearly was the judge’s voice as she said to him and Bernie, “—for the rest of your lives, as long as Almighty God shall, in Her infinite wisdom, permit you the breath of life, be banished from Azor and all of its allied worlds to the prison hulk in ‘Orbit Minerva.’”

And they were hustled out as the judge, even more wrathful than before, turned to pronounce sentence on Helena.

CHAPTER 9

The guard spat disgustedly. “Fine lot of wrecks we’re getting,” she complained. “Not like the old days. They used to send real men here.” She glowered at Ross and Bernie, holding their commitment papers loosely in her hand. “And for treason, too!” she added. “Used to be it took guts to commit a crime against the state.” She shook her head, then made a noise of distaste and scribbled initials on the commitment papers. She handed them back to the pilot who had brought them up from Azor, who grinned, waved, and got out of there. “All right,” said the guard, “we have to take what we get. I’ll have to put you two on construction; you’ll never stand up under hard work. Keep your noses clean, that’s all. Up at 0500; breakfast till 0510; work detail till 1950; dinner and recreation till 2005; then lights out. Miss a formation and you miss a meal. Miss two, and you get punishment detail. Nobody misses three.”

Ross and Bernie found themselves sharing a communal cell. They had all of five minutes to look around and get oriented; then they were out on their first work detail.

It wasn’t so bad as it sounded. Their shiftmates were a couple of dozen ragged-looking wrecks, half-heartedly assembling a sort of meccano-toy wall out of sheets of perforated steel and clip-spring bolts. All the parts seemed well worn; some of the bolts hardly closed. It took Ross three different substations down on Azor, push the RC releases. And they don’t do that until they look in their screens, and see that everybody who has turned up in the tender has stripped down to nothing at all, and every one of them is by-God female. Any further questions?” He grinned wryly. “Don’t even think about plastic surgery, if that happens to cross your mind,” he said. “We have two men here who tried it. You don’t have much equipment here; you can’t do a neat enough job.”

Ross gulped. “Hadn’t given it a thought,” he assured the other man. “You can’t even hide away in a trunk or something?”

The prisoner shook his head. “Aren’t any trunks. Everything’s one way—Azor to ‘Minerva’—except pilots and guards. No men ever go back. When you die, you go out the lock—without a ship. Same with everything else that they want to get rid of.”

Ross thought hard. “What if they—well, what if you’re sent up here and all, and then some new evidence turns up and you’re found innocent? Don’t they send you back then?”

“Found innocent?” The man looked at Ross pityingly. “Man, you are new. Hey,” he called. “Hey, Chuck! This guy wants to know what happens if they find out back on Azor that he’s innocent!”

Chuck exploded into laughter. Wiping his eyes, he walked over to Ross. “Thanks,” he grinned. “Haven’t had a good laugh in fifteen years.”

“I don’t see that that’s so funny,” Ross said defensively. “After all, the judge can make a mistake, none of us is per—awk!”

“Shut up!” Chuck hissed, holding a hand over Ross’s mouth. “Do you want to get us all in real trouble? Some of these guys would rat to the guards for an extra hunk of bread! The judges never make a mistake.” And his lips formed the silent word: “Officially.”

He let go of Ross and stood back, but didn’t walk away. He scratched his head. “Say,” he said, “you ask some stupid questions. Where are you from, anyhow?”

Ross said bitterly, “What’s the use? You won’t believe the better part of his first detail, whispering when the guards were looking the other way, to find out why. Their half of the prisoners were Construction; the other half was Demolition. What Construction in the morning put up, Demolition in the evening tore down. Neither side was anxious to set any speed records, and the guards without exception were too bored to care.

With any kind of luck, Ross found, he could hope eventually to get a real job—manning the “Minerva’s” radar, signal, or generating facilities, working in the kitchens or service shops, perhaps even as an orderly in the guard quarters. (Although Ross quite by accident chanced to see a guard’s orderly as he passed through a corridor near the work area, a handkerchief held daintily to his nose. And though the orderly’s clothing was neat and his plump cheeks indicated good eating, the haunted expression in his eyes made Ross think twice.)

The one thing he could not do, according to the testimony of every man he spoke to, was escape.

The fifth time Ross got that answer, the guard had stepped out of the room. Ross took the opportunity to thrash the thing through. “Why?” he demanded. “Back where I come from we’ve got lots of prisons. I never heard of one nobody escaped from.”

The other prisoner laughed shortly. “Now you have,” he said. “Go ahead, try. Every one of us has tried, one time or another. There’s only one thing stopping you—there’s no place to go. You can get past the guards easy enough—they’re lazy, when they’re not either drunk or boy-chasing. You can roam around ‘Minerva’ all you like. You can even get to the spacelock, and if you want to you can walk right through it. But not in a spacesuit, because there aren’t any on board. And not into the tender that brings us up from Azor, because you aren’t built right.”

Ross looked puzzled. “Not built right?”

“That’s right. There’s telescreens and remote-control locks built into that tender. The pilot brings you up, but once she couples with ‘Minerva’ the controls lock. And the only way they get unlocked is when three women, in me. I happen to be from a place called Halsey’s Planet, which is a good long distance from here. About as far as light will travel in two hundred years, if that gives you an idea. I came here in an F-T-L—that is, a faster-than-light ship. You don’t know what that is, of course, but I did. It was a mistake, I admit it. But here I am.”

Somewhat to Ross’s surprise, Chuck didn’t laugh again. He looked dubious, and he scratched his head some more, but he didn’t laugh. To the other prisoner he said, “What do you think, Sam?”

Sam shrugged. “So maybe we were wrong,” he observed.

Ross demanded, “Wrong about what?”

“Well,” Chuck said hesitantly, “there’s a guy here named Flarney. He’s a pretty old son-of-a-gun by now, must be at least ninety, and he’s been here a good long time. Dunno how long. But he talks crazy, just like you. No offense,” he added, “it’s just that we all thought he’d gone space-happy. But maybe we’re wrong. Unless—” his eyes narrowed “unless the two of you are both space-happy, or trying to kid us, or something.”

Ross said urgently, “I swear, Chuck, there’s no such thing. It’s true. Who’s this Flarney? Where does he say he came from?”

“Who can make sense out of what he says? All I know is, he talked a lot about something faster than light. That’s crazy; that’s like saying slower than dark, or bigger than green, or something. But I don’t know, maybe it means something.”

“Believe me, Chuck, it does! Where is this man—can I see him?”

Chuck looked uncertain. “Well, sure. That is, you can see him all right. But it isn’t going to do you a whole hell of a lot of good, because he’s dead. Died yesterday; they’re going to pitch him out into space sometime today.”

Sam said, “This is when Whitker flips. One week without his old pal Flarney and he’ll begin to look funny. Two weeks and he starts acting funny. Three and he’s talking funny and the guards begin to crack down. I give him a month to get shot down and heaved through the locker.”

Old pal? Ross demanded, “Who’s this Whitker? Where can I get in touch with him?”

“Him and Flarney were both latrine orderlies. That’s where they put the feeble old men, mopping and polishing. Number Two head, any hour of the day or night. Old buzzard has his racket—we’re supposed to get a hank of cellosponge per man per day, but he’s always ‘fresh out’—unless you slip him your saccharine ration every once in a while.”

Ross asked the way to Number Two head and the routine. But it was an hour before he could bring himself to ask the hulking guard for permission.

“Sure, sonny,” she boomed. “I’ll show you the way. Need any help?”

“No, thanks, ma’am,” he said hastily, and she roared with laughter. So did the members of the construction gang; it must have been an ancient gag. He hurried on his way thinking dark and bloody thoughts.

“Whitker?” he asked a tottering ancient who nodded and drowsed amid the facilities of the head.

The old man looked up blearily and squeaked: “Fresh out. Fresh out. You should’ve saved some from yesterday.”

“That’s all right. I’m a new man here. I want to ask you about your friend Flarney—”

Whitker bowed his head and began to cry noiselessly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Whitker. I heard. But there’s something we can do about it—maybe. Flarney was a faster-than-light man. He must have told you that. So am I. Ross, from Halsey’s Planet.”

He hadn’t the faintest idea as to whether any of this was getting through to the ancient.

“It seems Flarney and I were both on the same mission, finding out how and why planets were dropping out of communication. You and he used to talk a lot, they tell me. Did he ever tell you anything about that?”

Whitker looked up and squeaked dimly. “Oh, yes. All the time. I humored him. He was an old man, you know. And now he’s dead.” The tears leaked from his rheumy eyes and traced the sad furrows beside his nose.

Was he getting through? “What did he say, Mr. Whitker? About faster-than-light?”

The old man said, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”

That damned formula again! “But what does it mean, Mr. Whitker? What did he say it meant?” Ross softly urged.

The old man looked surprised. “Genes?” he asked himself hazily. “Generations? I don’t remember. But you go to Earth, young man. Flarney said they’d know, and know what to do about it, too, which is more than he did. His very words, young man!”

Ross didn’t dare stay longer. Furthermore he suspected that the old man’s attention span had been exhausted. He started from the room with a muttered thanks, and was stopped at the door by Whitker’s hand on his shoulder.

“You’re a good boy,” Whitker squeaked. “Here.”

Ross found himself walking down the corridor with an enormous wad of cellosponge in his hand.

The bunks were hard, but that didn’t matter. Dormitories were the outermost layer of the hulk, pseudogravity varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance, and the field generator was conventionally located near “Minerva’s” center. When your relative weight is one-quarter normal you can sleep deliciously on a gravel driveway. This was the dormitory’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was too many steel slabs, tiered and spotted too close, too many unwashed males, too much weary snoring. The only things in short supply were headroom and air.

Not everybody slept. Insomniacs turned and grunted; those who had given up the struggle talked from bunk to bunk in considerately low tones.

Bernie muttered from a third-tier bunk facing Ross’s: “I wonder if she made it.”

Ross knew what he meant. “Unlikeliest thing in the world,” he said. “But I think she went fast and never knew what hit her.” He thought of the formula and “They’d know on Earth—and know what to do about it too.” Earth the enigma, from which all planetary peoples were supposed to be derived. Earth—the dot on the traditional master charts, Earth—from which and to which no longliners ever seemed to travel. Haarland had told him no F-T-L ship had in recent centuries ever reported again after setting out for Earth. Another world sunk in barbarism? But Flarney had said—no; that was not data. That was the confused recollections of a very old man, possibly based on the confused recollections of another very old man. Perhaps it had got mixed up with the semilegendary origin story.

Poor sweet Helena! He hoped it had happened fast, that she had been thinking of some pleasant prospect on Halsey’s Planet. In her naïve way she’d think it just around the corner, a mere matter of following instructions.…

* * * *

So thought Ross, the pessimist.

In his gloom he had forgotten that this was exactly what it was. In his snobbishness he never realized that he was guilty of the most frightful arrogance in assuming that what he could do, she could not. In his ignorance he was not aware that since navigation began, every new instrument, every technique, has drawn the shuddery warnings of savants that uneducated skippers, working by rote, could not be expected to master these latest fruits of science—or that uneducated skippers since navigation began have cheerfully adopted new instruments and techniques at the drop of a hat and that never once have the shuddery warnings been justified by the facts.

Up the aisle somebody was saying in a low, argumentative tone, “I saw the drum myself. Naturally it was marked Dulsheen Creme, but the guards here never did give a damn whether their noses were dull or bright enough to flag down a freighter and I don’t think they’ve suddenly changed. It was booze, I tell you. Fifty liters of it.”

“Gawd! The hangovers tomorrow.”

“We’ll all have to watch our steps. I hope they don’t do anything worse than getting quietly drunk in their quarters. Those foot-kissing orderlies’ll get a workout, but who cares what happens to an orderly?”

“They haven’t been on a real tear since I’ve been here.”

“Lucky you. Let’s hope they don’t bust loose tonight. It’s a break in the monotony, sure—but those girls play rough. Five prisoners died last time.”

“They beat them up?”

“One of them.”

“What about the others? Oh! Oh, Gawd—fifty liters, you said?”

Bernie began to whimper: “Not again! Not those plug-uglies! I swear I’ll throw myself through the spacelock if they make a pass at me. Ross, isn’t there anything we can do?”

“Seems not, Bernie. Maybe they won’t come in. Or if they do, maybe they’ll pass you by. There certainly isn’t any place to hide.”

A raucous female voice roared through the annunciator: “Bed check five minutes, boys. Anybody got any li’l thing to do down the hall, better do it now. See you lay-terrr!” Hiccup and drunken giggle.

For the first time in his life Ross suddenly and spontaneously acted like a tri-di hero, with the exception that he felt like a silly ass through it all.

“Got an idea,” he muttered. “Get out of your bunk.” He pulled the wad of cellosponge, old Whitker’s present, from his pocket and yanked it in half, one for him and one for Bernie.

The Pullover said faintly: “Thanks, but I don’t have to—”

Ross didn’t bother to answer. He was carefully fluffing the stuff out to its maximum dimensions. He unzipped his coveralls and began wadding them with cellosponge.

“I get it,” Bernard said softly. He stepped out of his one-piece garment and followed suit. In less than a minute they had creditable dummies lying on their bunks.

The others watched their activity with emotions ranging between awe and envy. One giant of a man proclaimed grimly to whoever cared to listen: “These are a couple of smart guys. I wish them luck. And I want you guys to know that I will personally break the back of any sneaking rat who tips off a guard about this.”

“Sure, Ox. Sure,” came a muted chorus.

Arranged in a fetal sleeping position, face down, the dummies astonished even their creators. It would take a lucky look in a fair light to note that the heads were earless, fibrous globes.

“They’ll do,” Ross snapped. “Come on, Bernie.”

They walked quietly from the dormitory in their singlet underwear toward the dormitory latrine—and past it. Into the corridor. Through a doorless opening into a storeroom piled with crates of rations.

“This’ll do,” Ross said quietly.

They ducked into a small cavern formed by sloppy issuing of stock and hunched down.

“The dummies will fool the bed check. It’s only a sweep with a hundred-line TV system. If the guards do raid the dormitory tonight we’ll have to count on them ignoring the dummies or thinking they’re a joke or being too busy with other things to care. They’ll be drunk, after all. Then in the morning things’ll be plenty disorganized. We’ll be able to sneak back into formation—and that’ll be that for a matter of years. They can’t often bribe the pilots with enough to guarantee a real ripsnorting drunk. Now try and get some sleep. There’s nothing more we can do.”

They actually did doze off for a couple of hours, and then were awakened by drunken war whoops.

“It’s them!” Bernie wailed.

“Shut up. They’re heading for the dormitory. We’re safe.”

“Safe!” Bernie echoed derisively. “Safe until when?”

Ross threatened him with the side of his hand and Bernie was quiet, though his lips were mumbling soundlessly. The guards lurched giggling past and Ross said:

“We’ll sneak into the lockroom. There won’t be anybody there tonight; at least we’ll get a night’s sleep.”

“Big deal,” grumbled Bernie, but he followed, complaining inarticulately to himself. Ross thought tiredly: All this work for a night’s sleep! And saw, half-formed, the dreadful procession of days and nights and years ahead.…

They reached the lockroom and stumbled in breathlessly.

“Dearie!” Two guards, playing a card game on the floor with a ring of empty bottles around them, looked up in drunken delight. “Dearie!” repeated the bigger of the two. “Angela, look what we’ve got!”

Ross said stupidly. “But you shouldn’t be here—”

The guard made a clumsy pass at fluffing up her back hair and giggled. “Duty comes first, dearie. Angela, just lock that door, will you?” The other guard scrambled unevenly to her feet and weaved over to the door. It was locked before Ross or Bernie could move.

The big guard stood up too, leering at Bernie. “Wow!” she said. “New merchandise. Just be patient, dearie. We’ve got a little something to attend to in a couple of minutes, but we’ll have lots of time after that.”

Then things began to happen rapidly. There was Angela the guard, inarticulate, falling-down drunk; she waved bonelessly at a brightly flickering light on the far side of the lockroom. There was the other guard, reaching out for Bernie with one hand, pawing at a bottle with the other. There was Ross, a paralyzed spectator.

And there was Bernie.

Bernie’s eyes bulged wide as the guard came toward him. He babbled hysterically, “No! Nonononono! I said I’d kill myself and I—”

He stiff-armed the big guard and leaped for the lock door. Ross suddenly came to life. “Bernie!” he bellowed. “Hold it! Don’t jump!”

But it was too late. The one guard sprawling, the other staggering helplessly across the floor, Bernie was clear. He scrabbled at the lockwheels, spun them open. Ross tensed himself for the sudden, awful rush of expanding air; he leaped after Bernie just as Bernie flung the lock door open and jumped.

Ross jumped after.

There was no rush of air. They were not in space. Around them was no ripping, sucking void, no flaming backdrop of stars; around them were six walls and a Wesley board, and Helena peering at them wide-eyed and delighted.

“Well!” she said. “That was fast!”

Ross said, “But—”

Helena, hanging from the acceleration loops, smiled maternally. “Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “Ross don’t you think we’re far enough away yet?”

Ross said hopelessly, “All right,” and cut the drive. The starship hung in space in the limbo between stars. Azor, “Minerva,” and the rest were light-years behind, far out of range of challenge.

Helena wriggled free from the loops and rubbed her arms where the retaining straps had gripped them. “After all,” she said demurely, “you told me how to run the ship, and really, Ross, I’m not quite stupid.”

Ross said, “But—”

“But what, Ross? It isn’t as if I were some sort of brainless little thing that had never run a machine in her life. My goodness, Ross—” She wrinkled her nose. “You should remember. All those days in the dye vats? Don’t you think I had to learn a little something about machines there?”

Ross swore incredulously. To compare those clumsy constructs of wheels and rollers with the subtle subelectronic flows of the Wesley force—and to make it work! He said, unbelievingly, “And the ‘Minerva’ helped you vector in? They gave you the co-ordinates and radared your course?”

“Certainly.” Helena turned to Bernie, who was staring dazedly around him. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.

Ross turned his back on them and faced the Wesley Christmas tree of controls. Don’t question it, he told himself; take a miracle for what it is. God wanted you out of “Minerva”—and God moves in most mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

Anyway, they had to get going. When the court had exiled Helena in the starship they had gone through the customary rituals; not only was everything that looked like a weapon gone, along with all but a teacup of fuel for the auxiliary jets, but the food locker was stripped entirely. He put everything else out of his mind and began to calculate a setting.

Bernie said over his shoulder, “Home, huh? That place you call Halsey’s Planet?”

Ross shook his head. “Not this time. I got this far and I’m still alive; maybe I can finish the job. Anyway, I’ll try. The first solid suggestion I’ve had ever since I took off was what that half-witted old moron—” He ignored a little gasp from Helena. “—said back on ‘Minerva.’ If Flarney had lived, he would have gone there; we’ll go there now.” He finished manipulating the calculator and began to set it up on the board. He said, “The name of the place is—Earth.”

CHAPTER 10

It took Ross a while to learn a lesson, but when he learned it, it stuck. This time, he promised himself, no spaceport.

They sneaked into the solar system that held fabulous old Earth from far outside the ecliptic, where the chance of radar detection was least; they came to a relative dead halt millions of miles from the planet and cautiously scanned the surrounding volume of space with their own radar.

No ships seemed to be in space. Earth’s solar system turned out to be a trivial affair, only five planets, scarcely a half-dozen moons among them. None of the planets except Earth itself was anything like inhabitable.

“Hold tight,” said Ross grimly, “I’m not so good at this fine navigation.” He cautiously applied power along a single vector; the starship leaped and bucked. He corrected with another; and the distant sun swelled in their view plates with frightening rapidity. The alarm beeps bleated furiously, and the automatic cutoff restored all controls to neutral.

Ross, sweating, picked himself up from the floor and staggered back to the panel. Helena said carefully, “You’re doing fine, Ross, but if you’d like me to take over for a minute—”

Ross swallowed his pride and stood back. After one wide-eyed stare of shock—she wasn’t even calculating!—he gripped the loops and closed his eyes and waited for death.

There was a punishing bump and his eyes flew open. Helena was looking at him apologetically. “You would have done it better,” she lied, “but anyway we’re down.”

Ross lied, “Of course, but I’m glad you had the practice. Where—uh, where are we?”

Helena silently showed him the radar plot. Earth, it seemed, had a confusing multiplicity of continents; they were on one in the northern hemisphere, a large one as Earth’s continents went, and smack in the middle of it. It was night on their side of Earth just then; and, by the plot, a largish city was only a dozen or so miles away.

“Okay,” said Ross wearily, “landing party away. Helena, you stay here while Bernie and I—”

Helena said simply, “No.”

Ross stared at her a minute, then shrugged. “All right. Then Bernie will stay while—”

“I will not!” said Bernie.

Clearly it was time for a showdown. Ross roared: “Who’s the captain here, anyway?”

“You are,” Helena said promptly. “As long as I don’t have to stay here alone.”

“Yeah,” said Bernie.

Ross said, “Oh.” He thought for a while and then said, “Well, let’s all go.” They thought it was a wonderful idea.

Earth wasn’t a very unusual planet—lots of green sand and purple vegetation. Either the master star chart was wrong or the gravity meter was off; the former, strangely enough, gave Earth’s gravity as 1.000000 and the latter as O.8952, a whopping ten percent discrepancy. Further, the principal inert gas in Earth’s atmosphere was, according to the master chart’s planetary supplement, nitrogen; and according to the ship’s instruments was indubitably neon. A terrific aurora polaris display constantly flickering in the northern sky bore that out.

But the gap between the chart and the facts didn’t particularly worry Ross as they swung along overland. So the chart was off, or perhaps things had changed. This was—according to Flarney via Whitker—the place where people knew about the formula, where his questions would be answered. After this, he thought happily, it’s off to Halsey’s Planet and an unspecified glorious future, revered as the savior of humanity instead of a lousy Yards clerk pushing invoices around. And Helena, he thought sentimentally.…

He turned to smile at her and found she and Bernie were giggling.

“Listen, you two!” Captain Ross roared. “Haven’t you learned anything yet? What’s the good of us exploring if we stroll along with our silly heads in the clouds, not paying attention? Do you realize that this place may be as dangerous as Azor or worse?”

“Ross—” Helena said.

“Don’t interrupt! What this outfit needs is some discipline—tightening up. You two have got to accept your responsibilities. Keep alert! Be on the lookout! Any single thing out of the ordinary may be a deathtrap. Watch for—”

Helena was looking not at Ross but over his shoulder. Bernie was making strangled noises and pointing.

Ross turned. Behind him stood a mechanical monstrosity vaguely recognizable as a heavily-armed truck, its motor faintly humming. A man leaned darkly from the cab and transfixed them to the ground with a powerful spotlight. From the dazzling circle of light his voice came, hasty and furtive. “Thought it was two women and a man, but I guess you’re the ones. Ugh, those faces on you! Yes, you’re the ones. Get in. Fast.”

The light blinked out. When their eyes adjusted to the dimmer illumination of the stars and the aurora display they saw a side door in the body of the truck standing open. Too, one of the long, slim gun barrels with which the truck seemed copiously supplied swiveled to cover them.

Ross stupidly read aloud a sign on the truck: “Jones Floor-Cover Company. Finest Tile on Jones. Wall-to-Wall a Specialty. ‘Rugs Fit For a Jones’.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t try to buy any. Get in, for Jones’ sake! If I’d of known you were halfwits I wouldn’t of taken this job for a million Joneses, cash. Get in!” His voice was hysterical and the gun covering them moved ominously. “If this is a frame—” he began to shrill.

“Get in,” Ross said shakily to the others. They climbed in and the door slammed violently and automatically. Helena began to cry in a preoccupied sort of way and Bernie began a long, mumbling inventory of his own mental weaknesses for ever getting involved in this crackbrained, imbecilic, feeble-minded.…

There were windows in the truck body and Ross turned from one to another. He saw the guns on the cab telescope into stubs, the stubs fold into the mounts, the mounts smoothly descend flush with the sheet metal. He saw the cursing driver manipulate a dozen levers as the car began to glide across the green sand, purple-dotted with vegetation. Finally, through the rear window, he saw three figures racing across the sand waving their arms, rapidly being left behind. All he could make out was that they seemed to be two women and a man.

Helena was wailing softly, “—and I am not ugly and just because we’re young and we’re strangers isn’t any reason to go around insulting people—”

From Bernie: “—fatheaded, goggly-eyed, no-browed, slobber-lipped, dim-witted—”

“Shut up,” Ross said softly. “Before I bang both your heads together.”

They stared.

“Thank you. We’ve got to think. What’s this spot we’re in? What can we do about it? I don’t have any F-T-L contact name for Earth and obviously this fellow picked us up by mistake. I saw two women and a man—remember what he said?—just now trying to catch up with us. He seems to be some kind of criminal. Otherwise why a disguised gun-carrier? Why floor coverings ‘but don’t try to buy any’? And Jones seems to be the name of the local political subdivision, the name of the local deity and the currency. That’s important. It points to a rigid one-man dictatorship—Jones, of course, or possibly his dynasty. What course of action should we take? Kick it around. Helena, what do you think?”

“He shouldn’t have said we were ugly,” she pouted. “Isn’t that important?”

“Women!” Ross said grimly. “If you’ll kindly forget the trivial affront to your vanity perhaps we can figure something out.”

Helena said stubbornly: “But he shouldn’t. We’re not. What if they just think we are because they all look alike and we don’t look like them?”

Ross collapsed. After a long pause during which he tried and almost failed to control his temper he said slowly: “Thank you, Helena. You’re wrong, of course, but it was a contribution. You see, you can’t build up such a wild, farfetched theory from the few facts available.” His voice was beginning to choke with anger. “It isn’t reasonable and it isn’t really any help. In fact it’s the God-damndest stupidest imitation of reasoning I have ever—”

“City,” Bernard croaked, pointing. The jolting ride had become smoother, and gliding past the windows were green tiled buildings and street lights.

“Fine,” Ross said bitterly. “We had a few clear minutes to think and now we find they were wasted by the crackpot dissertation of a female and my reasonable attempt to show her the elements of logical thinking.” He put his head in his hands and tried to ignore them, tried to reason it out. But the truck made a couple of sharp turns and jolted to a stop.

The door opened and the voice of their driver said, again from behind a flashlight’s dazzling circle: “Out. Walk ahead of me.”

They did, into a fair-sized, well-lighted room with eight people in it whom they studied in amazement. Every one of the eight was exactly the same height—six feet. Every one had straight red hair of exactly the same shade, sprouting from an identical hairline. Every one had precisely the same build—gangling but broad-shouldered. Their sixteen eyes were the identical blue under sixteen identical eyebrows. Head to toe, they were duplicates. One of them spoke—in exactly the same voice as the truckdriver’s.

“So you want to be Joneses, do you?” he said.

“Absolutely impossible.”

“But we took their money.”

“Give it back. Reasonable changes, yes, but look at them!”

“We can’t give it back. Look what we spent already. Anyway, Sam,—” It sounded like “Sam” to Ross. “—anyway, Sam, look at some of the work you’ve done already. You can do it. I doubt if anybody else could, but you can.”

Ross felt his eyes crossing, and gave up the effort of trying to tell which Jones was speaking to which. Even the clothing was nearly identical—purple pantaloons, scarlet jacket, black cummerbund sash, black shoes. Then he noticed that Third-from-the-left Jones—the one who seemed to be named Sam—wore a frilly shirt of white under the scarlet jacket. Only a lacy edge showed at the open collar; but where his was white, the others were all muted pastels of pink and green.

Sam said coldly, “I know nobody else can do it. Anybody else! Who else is there?”

A Jones with a frill of chartreuse pursed his lips. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s Northside Tim Jones—”

“Northside Tim Jones,” Sam mimicked. “Eight of his jobs are in the stockade right now! Paraffin, for Jones’s sake—he still uses paraffin to mold a face!”

“I know, Sam, but after all, these people need help. If you won’t do it for them, what’s left?”

Sam shrugged morosely. “Well—” he said. Then he shook his head, sighed, and came forward to look at the three travelers. With an expression of revulsion he said, “Strip.”

Ross hesitated. “Hold it!” he said sharply to Helena, already half out of her coveralls. “Sir, there may have been some mistake. Would you mind explaining just what you propose to do?”

“The usual thing,” Sam said irritably. “Fix your hair, build up your frames, level you off at standard Jones height. The works. Though I must say,” he added bitterly, “I never saw such unpromising specimens in my life. How the Jones have you managed to stay out of trouble this long? Whose garrets have you been hiding in?”

Ross licked his lips. “You mean,” he said, “you want to make us look more like you gentlemen, is that it?”

“I want!” Sam repeated in bafflement. Over his shoulder he roared, “Ben, what kind of creeps are you saddling me with?”

Ben, looking worried, said, “Holy Jones, Sam, I don’t get it either. It was a perfectly normal deal. This guy came up to me in Jones’s Joint and made a pitch. He knew the setup all right, and he had the money with him. Six hundred Joneses, cold cash; and it wasn’t funny money, either.” His face clouded. “I did think, though,” he mentioned, “that he said two women and one man. But Paul Jones picked them up right at the rendezvous, so it must’ve been the right ones.”

He glowered suspiciously at Ross and the others. “Come to think of it,” he said, “maybe not. Tell you what, Sam, you just sit tight here for twenty minutes or so.” And he hurried out of the room.

One of the other Joneses said curtly, “Sit down.” Ross, Bernie, and Helena found chairs lined up against a wall; they sat. A different Jones rummaged in a stack of papers on a table; he handed something to each of them. “Relax,” he advised. Obediently the three spacefarers opened the magazines he gave them. When they were settled, most of the Joneses, after a whispered conference, went out. The one that was left said, “No talking. If we made a mistake, we’re sorry. Meanwhile, you do what you’re told.”

Ross found that his magazine was called By Jones; it seemed to be a periodical devoted to entertaining news and gossip of sports, fashion, and culture. He stared at an article headed “Be Glad the People’s Police Are Watching YOU!”, but the words made little sense. He tried to think; but somehow he couldn’t find a point at which to grasp the flickering mass of impressions that were circling through his brain. Nothing seemed to make a great deal of sense any more; and Ross suddenly realized that he was very, very tired. His mind an utter blank, he sat and waited.

* * * *

It was twenty minutes and a bit more. Then the door flew open and half a dozen Joneses burst in. Even at first sight, Ross could tell that three of them were newcomers. For one thing, two were women; and the third, though red-haired, tall and gangling, had a nose a full centimeter shorter than any of the others, and his hair was crisply curled.

“All right, you Peepeece!” snarled the first Jones. “You found what you were looking for—now try to get out!”

Helena did the talking. It wasn’t Ross’s idea, but when her heel crunched down on his instep he was too startled to object, and from then on he didn’t get a chance to get a word in edgewise.

He had to admit that her act was getting across with the audience. Long before she had finished reporting their meeting, their flight to Azor, the escape from “Minerva,” and the flight here, most of the Joneses had put their guns away, and all were showing signs of stupefaction. “—And then,” she finished, “we saw this truck, and that very good-looking man picked us up. And so we’re here on Earth; and, honest to goodness, that’s the exact truth.”

There was silence while the Joneses looked at each other. Then the plastic-surgeon-type Jones, Sam with the white shirt front, stepped forward. “Hold still, my dear,” he ordered. Helena bravely stood rigid while the surgeon raked searchingly through the roots of her hair, peered into her eyes, expertly traced the configuration of her ribs.

He stepped back, shaken. “One thing is for sure,” he told the others, “they’re not Peepeece. Not with those bones. They’d never get in.”

Ben Jones beat his forehead and moaned. “How do I get into these things?” he demanded.

One of the female Joneses said shrilly, “We didn’t expect anything like this. “We’re honest Jones-fearing Joneses and—”

“Shut up!” Ben Jones roared. “What about the other two, Sam? They all right too?”

“Oh, for Jones’s sake, Ben,” Sam said disgustedly, “just look at them, will you? Do you think the police would take in a five-inch height deviation like that one—” he pointed to Bernie—” or a half-bald scarecrow like that?” Ross, stung, opened his mouth to object; but swiftly closed it again. Nobody was paying much attention to him, anyhow, except as Exhibit A.

“So what do we do?” Ben demanded.

Sam shrugged. “The first thing we do,” he said wearily, “is to take care of our, uh, clients here. We get them out of the way, and then we decide what to do next.” He looked around at the other Joneses. “If you three will come this way,” he said, “we’ll finish up your job and get you back home. I needn’t remind you, of course, that if you should happen to mention anything you’ve seen here tonight to the Peepeece it would—” His voice was cut off by the closing door before Ross could catch the nature of the threat.

Ben Jones stayed behind, scowling to himself. “You people got any Joneses?” he demanded abruptly.

“You mean money? Not any at all,” Helena said honestly. Ross could have kicked her.

Ben Jones growled deep in his throat. “Always it happens to me!” he complained. “I suppose we’re going to have to feed you, too.”

“Well,” Helena said diffidently, “we haven’t eaten in a long time—”

Ben Jones swore to his god, whose name was Jones, but he stepped to the door and ordered food. When it came it was surprisingly good; each of the three, with their diverse backgrounds, found it delicious. While they were eating, Ben Jones sat watching them, refreshing himself from time to time with a greenish bubbling liquid out of a jug. He offered some to Ross; who clutched his throat as though he’d swallowed molten steel.

Ben Jones guffawed till his eyes ran. “First taste of Jones’s Juice, hey? Kind of gets right down inside, doesn’t it?” He wiped his eyes, then sobered. “I guess you people are all right,” he admitted. “What I’m going to do with you I don’t know. I can’t take you to Earth, and I can’t keep you here, and I can’t throw you out on the street—the Peepeece would have you in the stockade in ten minutes.”

Ross, startled, said, “Aren’t we on Earth?”

“Naw,” Ben Jones said disgustedly. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re on Jones, halfway between Jones’s Forks and Jonesgrad. But you came pretty close, at that. Earth’s about fifty miles out the Jones Pike past Jonesgrad, turn right at Jonesboro Minor.”

Ross said bewilderedly, “The planet Earth is fifty miles along the Pike?”

“Not a planet,” Ben Jones said. “It’s an old city, kind of. Nobody lives there any more; the Peepeece don’t permit it. I’ve never been there, but they say it’s kind of, you know, different. Some of the buildings—” he seemed actually to be blushing—“are as much as fifteen, twenty stories high; and the walls aren’t even all green. Excuse me,” he added, looking at Helena.

Sam Jones returned and said to Ben, “It’s all right. All finished. Trivial alterations. Maybe they could have gone along for the rest of their lives on wigs and pads—but we don’t tell them that, do we? And anyway now they won’t worry. Healy Jones, the older man, for instance. Very bright fellow, but it seems he was working as a snathe-handler’s apprentice. Afraid to take the master’s test, afraid to change his line of work—might be noticed and questioned.” He heaved a tremendous sigh and poured himself a tremendous slug of the green fluid. Ben Jones gave Ross a cynical wink and shrug.

“Look at my hand!” the surgeon exploded. It was shaking. He gulped the Jones Juice and poured himself another. “Nothing physical,” he said. “Neurosis. The subconscious coldly counting up my crimes and coldly imposing and executing sentence. I’m a surgeon, so my hand trembles.” He drank. “Jones is not mocked,” he said broodingly. “Jones is not mocked. Think those three are going to be happy? Think they’re going to be folded in Jones’s bosom just because they’re Joneses externally now? No. Watch them five years, ten years. Maybe they’ll sentence themselves to be hateful, vitriol-tempered lice and wonder why nobody loves them. Maybe they’ll sentence themselves to penal servitude and wonder why everybody pushes them around, why they haven’t the guts to hit back—Jones is not mocked,” he told the jug of green liquid, ignoring the others, and drank again.

Ben Jones said softly to them, “Come on,” and led them into an adjoining room furnished with sleeping pads. He said apologetically, “The doctor’s nerves are shot tonight. Trouble is, he’s too Jonesfearing. Me, I can take it or leave it alone.” His laugh had a little too much bravado in it. “There’s a little bit of nonJones in the best of us, I always say—but not to the doctor. And not when he’s hitting the Jones juice.” He shrugged cynically and said, “What the hell? L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”

Ross had him by his shirt frill. “Say that again!”

Ben Jones shoved him away. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

“I’m sorry. Would you please repeat that formula? What you said?” he hastily amended when the word “formula” obviously failed to register.

Ben Jones repeated the formula wonderingly.

“What does it mean?” Ross demanded. “I’ve been chasing the damned thing across the Galaxy.” He hastily filled Ben Jones in on its previous appearances.

“Well,” Ben Jones said, “it means what it says, of course. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He studied their faces and added uncertainly, “Isn’t it?”

“What does it mean to you, Ben?” Ross asked softly.

“Why, what it means to anybody, pal. Right’s right, wrong’s wrong, Jones is in his Heaven, conform or else—it means morality, man. What else could it mean?”

Ross then proceeded to make an unmannerly nuisance of himself. He grilled their involuntary host mercilessly, shrugging aside all attempted diversions of the talk into what they were going to do with the three visitors. He ignored protestations that Ben was no Jonesologist, Jones knew, and drilled in. By the time Ben Jones exploded, stamped out, and locked them in for the night, he had elicited the following:

Everybody knew the formula; they were taught it at their mother’s knee. It was recited antiphonally before and after Jones Meetings. Ben knew it was right, of course, and some day he was going to get right with Jones and live up to it, but not just yet, because if he didn’t make money in the prosthesis racket somebody else would. The formula was everywhere: on the lintels of public buildings, hanging in classrooms, and on the bedroom walls of the most Jones-fearing old ladies where they could see its comforting message last thing at night and first thing in the morning.

From a book? Well yes, he guessed so; sure it was in the Book of Joneses, but who could say whether that was where it started. Most people thought it was just Handed Down. Way back during the war—what war? The War of the Joneses, of course! Anyway, in the war the last of the holdouts against the formula had been destroyed. No, he didn’t know anything about the war. No, not his grandfather’s time or his grandfather’s grandfather’s time. Long ago, that war was. Maybe there were records in the old museum in Earth. The city, of course, not some damn planet he never heard of!

After Ben Jones slammed out and the room darkened Helena and Bernie exchanged comforting words from adjoining sleeping pads, to Ross’s intense displeasure. They fell asleep and at last he fell asleep still churning over the problem.

When he woke he found that evidently the doctor, Sam Jones, had stumbled in during the night and passed out on the pad next to him. The white frill was stiff and green with dried Jones Juice. Helena and Bernie still slept. He tried the door.

It was locked, but there was a tantalizing hum of voices beyond it. He put his ear to the cold steel. The fruits of his eavesdropping were scanty but alarming.

“—cut ’em down mumble found someplace mumble.”

“—mumble never killed yet mumble prosthesis racket.”

“—Jones’s sake, it’s their lives or mumble mumble time to get scared mumble Peepeece are you?”

And then apparently the speakers moved out of range. Ross was cold with sweat, and there was an abnormal hollow in the pit of his stomach that breakfast would never fill.

He spun around as a Jones voice croaked painfully: “Hear anything good, stranger?”

The surgeon, looking very dilapidated, was sitting up and regarding him through bloodshot eyes. “They’re talking about killing us,” he said shortly.

“They are not really intelligent,” Sam Jones said wearily. “They were just bright enough to entangle me to the point where I had to work for them—and to keep me copiously supplied with that green stuff I haven’t the intelligence to use in moderation.”

Ross said, “How’d you like to break away from this?”

Sam Jones mutely extended his hand. It trembled like a leaf. He said, “For his own inscrutable reason, Jones grants me steadiness of hand during an operation designed to frustrate his grand design. He then overwhelms me with a titanic thirst for oblivion to my shame.”

“There’s no design,” Ross said. “Or if there is, luckily this planet is a trifling part of it. I have never heard of such arrogant pip-squeakery in my life. You flyspecks in your shabby corner of the Galaxy think your own fouled-up mess is the pattern of universal life. You’re wrong! I’ve seen life elsewhere and I know it isn’t.”

The doctor passed his trembling hand over his eyes. “Jones is not mocked,” he croaked. “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N. You can’t fight that, stranger. You can’t fight that.”

Ross realized he was silently crying behind his covering hand.

He said, much more gently, “It’s nothing you have to fight. It’s something you have to understand.” He told Sam Jones of his two previous encounters with the formula. The doctor looked up, his eyes full of wonder. Ross said, “How would you like to be free, doctor? Free of your shaking hands, free of your guilt, free of these killers? How would you like to know the truth?”

The doctor said faintly, “If I dared—”

Ross pressed, “The museum in Earth city. Get me records, facts, anything about the War of the Joneses. If there’s any meaning to the formula it’ll have to lie in that. It seems there was a battle about its interpretation and we know who won. Let’s find out what the other side said. Get me in there.” He was thinking of the disgraceful war of fanaticism that had marred his own planet’s history. The doctor’s weak Jones jaw was firming up, though his eyes were still haunted. “Stall your killer friends, doctor,” Ross urged. “Tell them you can use us for experiments that’ll cut the cost of the operations. That ought to bring them around. And get me the facts!”

“To be free,” the doctor said wistfully. He said after a pause, “I’ll try. But—” And rapped a code series on the steel door.

CHAPTER 11

The doctor said with weak belligerence, “Who do you think I am? Jones? I had to leave your friends behind. I had enough trouble getting those hoods to let me take you along. After all, I’m not a miracle-worker.”

Ross said sullenly, “Okay, okay.” He glowered out of the car window and spat out a tendril of red hair that had come loose from the fringe surrounding his mouth. The trouble with a false beard was that it itched, worse than the real article, worse than any torment Ross had ever known. But at least Ross, externally and at extreme range, was enough of a Jones to pass a casual glance.

And what would Helena and Bernie be thinking now? He hadn’t had a chance to whisper to them; they’d been just waking when the doctor dragged him out. Ross put that problem out of his mind; there were problems enough right on hand.

He cautiously felt his red wig to see if it was on straight. The doctor didn’t seem to look away from his driving, but he said: “Leave it alone. That’s the first thing the Peepeece look for, somebody who obviously isn’t sure if his hair is still on or not. It won’t come off.”

“Umph,” said Ross. The road was getting worse, it seemed; they had passed no houses for several miles now. They rounded a rutted turn, and ahead was a sign.

STOP!

Restricted Area Ahead

WARNING: THIS ROAD IS MINED

NO TRAFFIC ALLOWED! DETOUR

“Trespassers beyond this point will be shot without further notice.”

—Decree #404-5

People’s Commissariat of

Culture and Solidarity.

The doctor spat contemptuously out the window and roared past. Ross said, “Hey!”

“Oh, relax,” said the doctor. “That’s just the Cultureniks. Nobody pays any attention to them.”

Ross swallowed and sat as lightly as possible on the green leather cushion of the car. By the time they had gone a quarter of a mile, he began to feel a little reassured that the doctor knew what he was talking about. Then the doctor swerved sharply to miss a rusted hulk and almost skidded off the road. He swore and manhandled the wheel until they were back on the straightaway.

White lipped, Ross asked, “What was that?”

“Car,” grunted the doctor. “Hit a mine. Silly fools!”

Ross squawked, “But you said—”

“Shut up,” the doctor ordered tensely. “That was weeks ago; they haven’t had a chance to lay new mines since then.” Pause. “I hope.”

The car roared on. Ross closed his eyes, limply abandoning himself to what was in store. But if it was bad to see what was going on, the roaring, swerving, jolting race was ten times worse with his eyes closed. He opened them again in time to see another sign flash past, gone before he could read it.

“What was that?” he demanded.

“What’s the difference?” the doctor grunted. “Want to go back?”

“Well, no—” Ross thought for a moment. “Do we have to go this fast, though?”

“If we want to get there. Crossed a Peepeece radar screen ten miles back; they’ll be chasing us by now.”

“Oh, I see,” Ross said weakly. “Look, Doc, tell me one thing—why do they make this place so hard to get to?”

“Tabu area,” the doctor said shortly. “Not allowed.”

“Why not allowed?”

“Because it’s not allowed. Don’t want people poking through the old records.”

“Why not just put the old records in a safe place—or burn the damn things up?”

“Because they didn’t, that’s why. Shut up! Expect me to tell you why the Peepeece do anything? They don’t know themselves. It isn’t Jonesly to destroy, I guess.”

Ross shut up. He leaned against the window, letting the air rush over his head. They were moving through forest, purplish squatty trees with long, rustling leaves. The sky overhead was crisp and cool looking; it was still early morning. Ross exhaled a long breath. Back on Halsey’s Planet he would be getting up about now, rising out of a soft, warm bed, taking his leisurely time about breakfast, climbing into a comfortable car to make his way to the spaceport where he was safe, respected, and at home.… Damn Haarland!

At least, Ross thought, some sort of a pattern was beginning to shape up. The planets were going out of communication each for its own reason; but wasn’t there a basic reason-for-the-reasons that was the same in each case? Wasn’t there some overall design—some explanation that covered all the facts, pointed to a way out?

He sat up straight as they approached a string of little signs. He scanned them worriedly as they rolled past.

“Workers, Peasants, Joneses all—”

“By these presents know ye—”

“If you don’t stop in spite of all—”

“THIS to hell will blow ye!”

“Duck!” the doctor yelled, crouching down in the seat and guiding the careening car with one hand. Ross, startled, followed his example, but not before he saw that “THIS” was an automatic, radar-actuated rapid-fire gun mounted a few yards past the last sign. There was a stuttering roar from the gun and a splatter of metal against the armored sides of the car. The doctor sat up again as soon as the burst had hit; evidently only one was to be feared. “Yah, yah,” he jeered at the absent builders of the gun. “Lousy fifty-millimeters can’t punch their way through a tin can!”

Ross, gasping, got up just in time to see the last sign in the series:

“By order of People’s Democratic Council of Arts & Sciences, Small Arms Division.”

He said wildly, “They can’t even write a poem properly. Did you notice the first and third line rhyme-words?”

Surprisingly, the doctor glanced at him and laughed with a note of respect. He took a hand off the wheel to pat Ross on the shoulder. “You’ll make a Jones yet, my boy,” he promised. “Don’t worry about these things; I told you this place was restricted. This stuff isn’t worth bothering about.”

Ross found that he was able to smile. There was a point, he realized with astonishment, where courage came easily; it was the only thing left. He sat up straighter and breathed the air more deeply. Then it happened.

They rounded another curve; the doctor slammed on the brakes. Suspended overhead across the road was a single big sign:

THAT’S ALL, JONES!

—People’s Police

The car bucked, slewed around, and skidded. The wheels locked, but not in time to keep it from sliding into the pit, road wide and four feet deep, that was dug in front of them.

Ross heard the axles crack and the tires blow; but the springing of the car was equal to the challenge. He was jarred clear in the air and tumbled to the floor in a heap; but no bones were broken.

Painfully he pushed the door open and crawled out. The doctor limped after and the two of them stood on the edge of the pit, looking at the ruin of their car.

“That one,” said the doctor, “was worth bothering about.” He motioned Ross to silence and cocked an ear. Was there a distant roaring sound, like another car following on the road they had traveled? Ross wasn’t sure; but the doctor’s expression convinced him. “Peepeece,” he said briefly. “From here on it’s on foot. They won’t follow beyond here; but let’s get out of sight. They’ll by-Jones shoot beyond here if they see us!”

Ross stared unbelievingly. “This is Earth?” he asked.

The doctor fanned himself and blew. “That’s it,” he said, looking around curiously. “Heard a lot about it, but I’ve never been here before,” he explained. “Funny-looking, isn’t it? He nudged Ross, indicating a shattered concrete structure beside them on the road. “Notice that toll booth?” he whispered slyly. “Eight sides!”

Ross said wearily, “Yes, mighty funny! Look, Doc, why don’t you sort of wander around by yourself for a while? That big thing up ahead is the museum you were talking about, isn’t it?”

The doctor squinted. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his breathing was fast, but he was making an attempt to seem casual in the presence of these manifold obscenities of design. He licked his lips. “Round pillars,” he marveled. “Why, yes, I think that’s the museum. You go on up there, like you say. I’ll, uh, sort of see what there is to see. Jones, yes!” He staggered off, staring from ribald curbing to scatological wall in an orgy of prurience.

Ross sighed and walked through the deserted, weed-grown streets to the stone building that bore on its cracked lintel the one surviving word, “Earth.” This was all wrong, he was almost certain; Earth had to be a planet, not a city. But still.…

The museum had to have the answers.

On its moldering double doors was a large lead seal. He read: “Surplus Information Repository. Access denied to unauthorized personnel.” But the seal had been forced by somebody; one of the doors swung free, creaking.

Ross invoked the forcer of the door. If he could do it.…

He went in and stumbled over a skeleton, presumably that of the last entrant. The skull had been crushed by a falling beam. There was some sort of mechanism involved—a trigger, a spring, a release hook. All had rusted badly, and the spring had lost its tension over the years. A century? Two? Five? Ross prayed that any similar mantraps had likewise rusted solid, and cautiously inched through the dismal hall of the place, ready for a backward leap at the first whisper of a concealed mechanism in action.

It was unnecessary. The place was—dead.

Exploring room after room, he realized slowly that he was stripping off history in successive layers. The first had been the booby-trapped road, lackadaisically planned to ensure that mere inquisitiveness would be discouraged. There had been no real denial of access, for there was almost no possibility that anybody would care to visit the place.

Next, the seal and the mantraps. An earlier period. Somebody had once said: “This episode is closed. This history is determined. We have all reached agreement. Only a dangerous or frivolous meddler would seek to rake over these dead ashes.”

And then, prying into the museum, Ross found the era during which agreement had been reached, during which it still was necessary to insist and demonstrate and cajole.

The outer rooms and open shelves were testimonials to Jones. There were books of Jonesology—ingenious, persuasive books divided usually into three sections. Human Jonesology would be a painstaking effort to determine the exact physical and mental tolerances of a Jones. Anatomical atlases minutely gave femur lengths, cranial angles, eye color to an angstrom, hair thickness to a micron. Moral Jonesology treated of the dangers of deviating from these physical and more elastic mental specifications. (Here the formula appeared again, repeatedly invoked but never explained. Already it was a truism.) And Sacred Jonesology was a series of assertions concerning the nature of The Jones in whose image all other Joneses were created.

Subdivisions of the open shelves held works on Geographical Jonesology (the distribution across the planet of Joneses) and similar works.

Ross went looking for a lower layer of history and found it in a bale of crumbling pamphlets. “Comrades, We Must Now Proceed to Consolidate Our Victory”; “Ultra-Jonesism, An Infantile Political Disorder”; “On The Fallacy of ‘Jonesism In One Country’.” These Ross devoured. They added up to the tale of a savage political battle among the victors of a greater war. Clemency was advocated and condemned; extermination of the opposition was casually mentioned; the Cultural Faction and the Biological Faction had obviously been long locked in a death struggle. Across the face of each pamphlet stood a similar logotype: the formula. It was enigmatically mentioned in one pamphlet, which almost incomprehensibly advanced the claims of the Biological faction to supremacy among the Joneses United: “Let us never forget, comrades, that the initiation of the great struggle was not caused by our will or by the will of our sincere and valiant opponents, the Culturists. The inexorable law of nature, L_{T}=L_{0}e-{T/2N}, was the begetter of that holocaust from which our planet has emerged purified—”

Was it now?

The entrance to a musty, airless wing had once been bricked up. The mortar was crumbling and a few bricks had fallen. Above the arched doorway a sign said Military Archives. On the floor was a fallen metal plaque whose inscription said simply Dead Storage. He kicked the loose bricks down and stepped through.

That was it. The place was lightless, except for the daylight filtering through the violated archway. Ross hauled maps and orders and period newspapers and military histories and handbooks into the corridor in armfuls and spread them on the floor. It took only minutes for him to realize that he had his answer. He ran into the street and shouted for the doctor.

Together they pored over the papers, occasionally reading aloud choice bits, wonderingly.

The simplest statement of the problem they found was in the paper-backed “Why We Fight” pamphlet issued for the enlisted men of the Provisional North Continent Government Army.

“What is a Jones?” the pamphlet asked rhetorically. “A Jones is just a human being, the same as you and I. Dismiss rumors that a Jones is supernatural or unkillable with a laugh when you hear them. They arose because of the extraordinary resemblance of one Jones to another. Putting a bullet through one Jones in a skirmish and seeing another one rise up and come at you with a bayonet is a chilling experience; in the confusion of battle it may seem that the dead Jones rose and attacked. But this is not the case. Never let the rumor pass unchallenged, and never fail to report habitual rumor-mongers.

“How did the Joneses get that way? Many of you were too young when this long war began to be aware of the facts. Since then, wartime disruption of education and normal communications facilities has left you in the dark. This is the authoritative statement in simple language that explains why we fight.

“This planet was colonized, presumably from the quasi-legendary planet Earth. (The famous Earth Archives Building, incidentally, is supposed to derive its puzzling name from this fact.) It is presumed that the number of colonists was originally small, probably in the hundreds. Though the number of human beings on the planet increased enormously as the generations passed, genetically the population remained small. The same ones (heredity units) were combined and reshuffled in varying combinations, but no new ones were added. Now, it is a law of genetics that in small populations, variations tend to smooth out and every member of the population tends to become like every other member. So-called unfixed genes are lost as the generations pass; the end product of this process would theoretically be a population in which every member had exactly the same genes as every other member. This is a practical impossibility, but the Joneses whom we fight are a tragic demonstration of the fact that the process need not be pushed to its ultimate extreme to dislocate the life of a planet and cause endless misery to its dwellers.

“From our very earliest records there have been Joneses. It is theorized that this gangling redheaded type was well represented aboard the original colonizing ship, but some experts believe one Jones type and the workings of chance would be sufficient to produce the unhappy situation of type-dominance.

“Some twenty-five years ago Joneses were everywhere among us and not, as now, withdrawn to South Continent and organized into a ruthless aggressor nation. They made up about thirty percent of the population and had become a closely knit organization devoted to mutual help. They held the balance of political power in every election from the municipal to the planetary level and virtually monopolized production and finance. There were fanatics and rabble-rousers among them who readily exploited a rising tide of discontent over a series of curbing laws, finally pushed through by a planetary majority, united at last in self-defense against the rapacity and ruthless self-interest of the Joneses.

“The Joneses withdrew en masse to South Continent. Some sincerely wished them well; others scoffed at the secession as a sulky and childish gesture. Only a handful of citizens guessed the terrible truth, and were laughed at for their pains. Five years after their withdrawal the Joneses returned across the Vandemeer Peninsula and the war had begun.

“A final word. There has been much loose talk among the troops about the slogan of the Joneses, which goes L_{t}=L_{0}e-{T/2N}. Some uninformed people actually believe it is an invocation which gives the Joneses supernatural power and invulnerability. It is not. It is merely an ancient and well-known formula in genetics which quantitatively describes the loss of unfixed genes from a population. By mouthing this formula, the Joneses are simply expressing in a compact way their ruthless determination that all genes except theirs shall disappear from the planet and the Joneses alone survive. In the formula L_{t} means the number of genes after the lapse of T years, L_{0} means the original number of genes, e means the base of the natural system of logarithms and N means number of generations.”

The surgeon said slowly and with wonder: “So that was my God!” He stretched out his hands before him. The fingers were rock-steady.

Ross left him and paced the corridor uneasily. Fine. Now he knew. Lost genes in genetically small populations. On Halsey’s Planet, some fertility gene, no doubt. On Azor, a male-sex-linked gene that provides men with the backbone required to come out ahead in the incessant war of the genders? Bernie was a gutless character. Here, all too many genes determining somatotype. On the planets that had dropped out of communication, who knew? Scientific-thought genes? Sex-drive-determining genes?

One thing was clear: any gene-loss was bad for the survival of a planetary colony. Evolution had—on Earth—worked out in a billion trial-and-error years a working mechanism, man. Man exhibited a vast range of variation, which was why he survived almost any conceivable catastrophe.

Reduce man to a single type and he is certain to succumb, sooner or later, to the inevitable disaster that his one type cannot cope with.

The problem, now stated clearly, was bigger than he had dreamed. And now he knew only the problem—not the solution.

Go to Earth.

Well, he had tried. There had been no flaw in his calculations, no failure in setting up the Wesley panel. Yet—this was Jones, not Earth; the city was only a city, not the planet that the star charts logged. And the planet, beyond all other considerations, was less like Earth than any conceivable chart error could account for. Gravitation, wrong; atmosphere, wrong; flora and fauna, wrong.

So. Eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however unlikely, is true. So there had been a flaw in his calculations. And the way to check that, once and for all, was to get back to the starship.

Ross wheeled and went back into the book room. “Doc,” he called, “how do we get out of here?”

The answer was: on their bellies. They trudged through the forest for hours, skirting the road, hiding whenever a suspicious noise gave warning that someone might be in the vicinity. The Peepeece knew they were in the woods; there was no doubt of that. And as soon as they got past the tabu area, they had to crawl.

It was well past dark before Ross and the doctor, scratched and aching, got to the tiny hamlet of Jonesie-on-the-Pike. By the light from the one window in the village that gave any signs of life, the doctor took a single horrified look at Ross and shuddered.

“You wait here,” he ordered. “Hide under a bush or something—your beard rubbed off.”

Ross watched the doctor rap on the door and be admitted. He couldn’t hear the conversation that followed, but he saw the doctor’s hand go to his pocket, then clasp the hand of the figure in the doorway. That was the language all the galaxy understood, Ross realized; he only hoped that the householder was an honest man—i.e., one who would stay bribed, instead of informing the Peepeece on them. It was beyond doubt that their descriptions had long since been broadcast; the road must have been lined with TV scanners on the way in.

The door opened again, and the doctor walked briskly out. He strode out into the street, walked half a dozen paces down the road, and waited for Ross to catch up with him. “Okay,” the doctor whispered. “They’ll pick us up in half an hour, down the road about a quarter of a mile. Let’s go.”

“What about the man you were talking to?” Ross asked. “Won’t he turn us in?”

The doctor chuckled. “I gave him a drink of Jones’s Juice out of my private stock,” he said. “No, he won’t turn anybody in, at least not until he wakes up.”

Ross nodded invisibly in the dark. He had a thought, and suppressed it. But it wouldn’t stay down. Cautiously he let it seep through his subconscious again, and looked it over from every angle.

No, there wasn’t any doubt of it. Things were definitely looking up!

* * * *

Ben Jones roared, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Doc?”

The doctor pushed Ross through the doorway and turned to face the other Jones. He asked mildly, “What?”

“You heard me!” Ben Jones blustered. “I let you out with this one, and maybe I made a mistake at that. But I by-Jones don’t intend to let you get out of here with all three of them. What are you trying to get away with anyhow?”

The doctor didn’t change his mild expression. He took a short, unhurried step forward. Smack.

Ben Jones reeled back from the slap, his mouth open, hand to his face. “Hey!” he squawked.

The doctor said levelly, “I’m telling you this just one time, Ben. Don’t cross me. You’ve got the guns, but I’ve got these.” He held up his spread hands. “You can shoot me, I won’t deny that. But you can’t make me do your dirty work for you. From now on things go my way—with these three people, with my own life, with the bootleg plastic surgery we do to keep you in armored cars. Or else there won’t be any plastic surgery.”

Ben Jones swallowed, and Ross could see the man fighting himself. He said after a moment, “No reason to act sore, Doc. Haven’t we always got along? The only thing is, maybe you don’t realize how dangerous these three—”

“Shut up,” said the doctor. “Right, boys?”

The other two Joneses in the room shuffled and looked uncomfortable. One of them said, “Don’t get mad, Ben, but it kind of looks as if he’s right. We and the doc had a little talk before you got here. It figures, you have to admit it. He does the work; we ought to let him have something to say about it.”

The look that Ben Jones gave him was pure poison, but the man stood up to it, and in a minute Ben Jones looked away. “Sure,” he said distantly. “You go right ahead, Doc. We’ll talk this over again later on, when we’ve all had a chance to cool off.”

The doctor nodded coldly and followed Ross out. Helena and Bernie, suitably Jonesified for the occasion, were already in the car; Ross and the doctor jumped in with them, and they drove away. Now that the strain was relaxed a bit the doctor was panting, but there was a grin on his lips. “Son-of-a-Jones,” he said happily, “I’ve been waiting five years for this day!”

Ross asked, “Is it all right? They won’t chase after us?”

“No, not Ben Jones. He has his own way of handling things. Now if we were stupid enough to go back there, after he had a chance to talk to the others without me around, that would be something different. But we aren’t going back.”

Ross’s eyes widened. “Not even you, Doc?”

“Especially not me.” The doctor concentrated on his driving. Presently: “If I take you to the rendezvous, can you find your ship from there?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Ross confidently. “And Doc—welcome to our party.”

* * * *

Space had never looked better.

They hung half a million miles off Jones, and Ross fumbled irritatedly with the Wesley panel while the other three stood around and made helpful suggestions. He set up the integrals for Earth just as he had set them up once before; the plot came out the same. He transferred the computations to the controls and checked it against the record in the log. The same. The ship should have gone straight as a five-dimensional geodesic arrow to the planet Earth.

Instead, he found by cross-checking the star atlas, it had gone in almost the other direction entirely, to the planet of Jones.

He threw his pencil across the room and swore. “I don’t get it,” he complained.

“It’s probably broken, Ross,” Helena told him seriously. “You know how machines are. They’re always doing something funny just when you least expect it.”

Ross bit down hard on his answer to that. Bernie contributed his morsel, and even Dr. Sam Jones, whose race had lost even the memory of spaceflight, had a suggestion. Ross swore at them all, then took time to swear at the board, at the starship, at Haarland, at Wesley, and most of all at himself.

Helena turned her back pointedly. She said to Bernie, “The way Ross acts sometimes you’d honestly think he was the only one who’d ever run this thing. Why, my goodness, I know you can’t rely on that silly board! Didn’t I have just exactly the same experience with it myself?”

Ross gritted his teeth and doggedly started all over again with the computations for Earth. Then he did a slow double-take.

“Helena,” he whispered. “What experience did you have?”

“Why, just the same as now! Don’t you remember, Ross? When you and Bernie were in jail and I had to come rescue you?”

“What happened?” Ross shouted.

“My goodness, Ross don’t yell at me! There was that silly light flashing all the time. It was driving me out of my mind. Well, I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to get anywhere if it was going to act like that, so I just—”

Ross, eyes glazed, robotlike, lifted the cover off the main Wesley unit. Down at the socket of the alarm signal, shorting out two delicately machined helices that were a basic part of the Wesley drive, wedged between an eccentric vernier screw and a curious crystalline lattice, was—the hairpin.

He picked it out and stared at it unbelievingly. He marveled, “It says in the manual, ‘On no account should any alterations be made in any part of the Wesley driving assembly by any technician under a C-Twelve rating.’ She didn’t like the alarm going off. So she fixed it. With a hairpin.”

Helena giggled and appealed to Bernie. “Doesn’t he kill you?” she asked.

Ross’s eyes were glazed and his hands worked convulsively. “Kill,” he muttered, advancing on Helena. “Kill, kill, kill—”

“Help!” she screamed.

The two men managed to subdue Ross with the aid of a needle from Dr. Jones’s kit-pocket.

Helena was in tears and tried to explain to the others: “Just for no reason at all—”

She got only icy stares. After a while she sulkily began setting up the Wesley board for the Earth jump.

CHAPTER 12

Ross awoke, clearheaded and alert. Helena and Bernie were looking at him apprehensively.

He understood and said grudgingly, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Everything seemed to go black—”

They smothered him with relieved protestations that they understood perfectly and Helena wouldn’t stick hairpins into the Wesley Drive ever again. Even if the ship hadn’t blown up. Even if she had rescued the men from “Minerva.”

“Anyway,” she said happily, “we’re off Earth. At least, it’s supposed to be Earth, according to the charts.”

He unkinked himself and studied the planet through a vision screen at its highest magnification. The apparent distance was one mile; nothing was hidden from him.

“Golly,” he said, impressed. “Science! Makes you realize what backward gropers we were.”

Obviously they had it, down there on the pleasant, cloud-flecked, green and blue planet. Science! White, towering cities whose spires were laced by flying bridges—and inexplicably decorated with something that looked like cooling fins. Huge superstreamlined vehicles lazily coursing the roads and skies. Long, linked-pontoon cities slowly heaving on the breasts of the oceans. Science!

Ross said reverently, “We’re here. Flarney was right. Helena, Bernie, Doc—maybe this is the parent planet of us all and maybe it isn’t. But the people who built those cities must know all the answers. Helena, will you please land us?”

“Sure, Ross. Shall I look for a spaceport?”

Ross frowned. “Of course. Do you think these people are savages? We’ll go in openly and take our problem to them. Besides, imagine the radar setup they must have! We’d never sneak through even if we wanted to.”

Helena casually fingered the controls; there was the sickening swoop characteristic of her ship-handling, several times repeated. As she jerked them wildly across the planet’s orbit she explained over her shoulder, “I had the darnedest time finding a really big spaceport on that little radar thing—oops!—but there’s a nice-looking one near that coastal city. Whee! That was close! There was one—sorry, Ross—on a big lake inland, but I didn’t like—Now everybody be very quiet. This is the hard part and I have to concentrate.”

Ross hung on.

Helena landed the ship with her usual timber-shivering crash. “Now,” she said briskly, “we’d better allow a little time for it to cool down. This is nice, isn’t it?”

Ross dragged himself, bruised, from the floor. He had to agree. It was nice. The landing field, rimmed by gracious, light buildings (with the cooling fins), was dotted with great, silvery ships. They didn’t, Ross thought with a twinge of irritation, seem to be space vessels, though; leave it to Helena to get them down at some local airport! Still—the ships also, he noticed, were liberally studded with the fins. He peered at them with puzzlement and a rising sense of excitement. Certainly they had a function, and that function could only be some sort of energy receptor. Could it be—dared he imagine that it was the long-dreamed-of cosmic energy tap? What a bonus that would be to bring back with him! And what other marvels might this polished technology have to give them.…

Bernie distracted him. He said, “Hey, Ross. Here comes somebody.”

But even Bernie’s tone was awed. A magnificent vehicle was crawling toward them across the field. It was long, low, bullet-shaped—and with cooling fins. Multiple plates of silvery metal contrasted with a glossy black finish. All about its periphery was a lacy pattern of intricate crumples and crinkles of metal, as though its skirts had been crushed and rumpled. Ross sighed and marveled: What a production problem these people had solved, stamping those forms out between dies.

Then he saw the faces of the passengers.

He drew in his breath sharply. Godlike. Two men whose brows were cliffs of alabaster, whose chins were strong with the firmness of steady, flamelike wisdom. Two women whose calm, lovely features made the heart within him melt and course.

The vehicle stopped ten yards from the open spacelock of the ship. From its tip gushed upward a ten-foot fountain of sparks that flashed the gamut of the rainbow. Simultaneously one of the godlike passengers touched the wheel, and there was a sweet, piercing, imperative summons like a hundred strings and brasses in unison.

Helena whispered, “They want us to come out. Ross—Ross—I can’t face them!” She buried her face in her hands.

“Steady,” he said gravely. “They’re only human.”

Ross gripped that belief tightly; he hardly dared permit himself to think, even for a second, that perhaps these people were no longer merely human. Hoarsely he said, “We need their help. Maybe we should send Doc Jones out first. He’s the oldest of us, and he’s the only one you could call a scientist; he can talk to them. Where is he?”

A raucous Jones voice bellowed through the domed control room: “Who wansh ol’ doc, hargh? Who wansh goo’ ol’ doc?”

Good old doc staggered into the room, obviously loaded to the gills by a very enjoyable backslide. He began to sing:

“In A. J. seven thirty-two a Jones from Jones’s Valley,

He wandered into Jones’s Town to hold a Jonesist Rally.

He shocked the gents and ladies both; his talk was most disturbing;

He spoke of seven-sided doors and purple-colored curbing—”

Jones’s eyes focused on Helena. He flushed. “’m deeply sorry,” he mumbled. “Unf’rgivable vulgararrity. Mom’ntarily f’rgot ladies were present.”

Again that sweet summons sounded.

“Pull yourself together, doctor,” Ross begged. “This is Earth. The people seem—very advanced. Don’t disgrace us. Please!”

Jones’s face went pale and perspiration broke out. “’Scuse me,” he mumbled, and staggered out again.

Ross closed the door on him and said, “We’ll leave him. He’ll be all right; nothing’s going to happen here.” He took a deep breath. “We’ll all go out,” he said.

Unconsciously Ross and Helena drew closer together and joined hands. They walked together down the unfolding ramp and approached the vehicle.

One of the coolly lovely women scrutinized them and turned to the man beside her. She remarked melodiously, “Yuhsehtheybebems!”, and laughed a silvery tinkle.

Panic gripped Ross for a long moment. A thing he had never considered, but a thing which he should have realized would be inevitable. Of course! These folk—older and incomparably more advanced than the rest of the peoples in the universe—would have evolved out of the common language into a speech of their own, deliberately or naturally rebuilt to handle the speed, subtlety, and power of their thoughts.

But perhaps the older speech was merely disused and not lost.

He said formally, quaking: “People of Earth, we are strangers from another star. We throw ourselves on your mercy and ask for your generosity. Our problem is summed up in the genetic law L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N. Of course—”

One of the men was laughing. Ross broke off.

The man smiled: “Wha’s that again?”

They understood! He repeated the formula, slowly, and would have explained further, but the man cut him off.

“Math,” the man smiled. “We don’ use that stuff no more. I got a lab assistant, maybe he uses it sometimes.”

They were beyond mathematics! They had broken through into some mode of symbolic reasoning that must be as far beyond mathematics as math was beyond primitive languages!

“Sir,” he said eagerly, “you must be a scientist. May I ask you to—”

“Get in,” he smiled. Gigantic doors unfolded from the vehicle. Thought-reading? Had the problem been snatched from his brain even before he stated it? Mutely he gestured at Helena and Bernie. Jones would be all right where he was for several hours if Ross was any judge of blackouts. And you don’t quibble with demigods.

The man, the scientist, did something to a glittering control panel that was, literally, more complex than the Wesley board back on the starship. Noise filled the vehicle—noise that Ross identified as music for a moment. It was a starkly simple music whose skeleton was three thumps and a crash, three thumps and a crash. Then followed an antiphonal chant—a clear tenor demanding in a monotone: “Is this your car?” and a tremendous chorally-shouted: “NO!”

Too deep for him, Ross thought forlornly as the car swerved around and sped off. His eyes wandered over the control board and fixed on the largest of its dials, where a needle crawled around from a large forty to a large fifty and a red sixty, proportional to the velocity of the vehicle. Unable to concentrate because of the puzzling music, unable to converse, he wondered what the units of time and space were that gave readings of fifty and sixty for their very low rate of speed—hardly more than a brisk walk, when you noticed the slow passage of objects outside. But there seemed to be a whistle of wind that suggested high speed—perhaps an effect peculiar to the cooling-fin power system, however it worked. He tried to shout a question at the driver, but it didn’t get through. The driver smiled, patted his arm and returned to his driving.

They nosed past a building—cooling fins—and Ross almost screamed when he saw what was on the other side: a curve of highway jammed solid with vehicles that were traveling at blinding speed. And the driver wasn’t stopping.

Ross closed his eyes and jammed his feet against the floorboards waiting for the crash which, somehow, didn’t come. When he opened his eyes they were in the traffic and the needle on the speedometer quivered at 275. He blew a great breath and thought admiringly: reflexes to match their superb intellects, of course. There couldn’t have been a crash.

Just then, across the safety island in the opposing lane, there was a crash.

The very brief flash of vision Ross was allowed told him, incredibly, that a vehicle had attempted to enter the lane going the wrong way, with the consequences you’d expect. He watched, goggle-eyed, as the effects of the crash rippled down the line of oncoming traffic. The squeal of brakes and rending of metal was audible even above the thumping music: “Is this your car?” “NO!”

Thereafter, as they drove, the opposing lane was motionless, but not silent. The piercing blasts of strings and trumpets rose to the heavens from each vehicle, as did the brilliant pyrotechnic jets. A call for help, Ross theorized. The music was beginning to make his head ache. It had been going on for at least ten minutes. Suddenly, blessedly, it changed. There was a great fanfare of trombones in major thirds that seemed to go on forever, but didn’t quite. At the end of forever, the same tenor chanted: “You got a Roadmeister?” and the chorus roared: “YES!”

Ross realized forlornly that the music must contain values and subtleties which his coarser senses and undeveloped esthetic background could not grasp. But he wished it would stop. It was making him miss all the scenery. After perhaps the fifteenth repetition of the Roadmeister motif, it ended; the driver, with a look of deep satisfaction, did something to the control board that turned off a subsequent voice before it could get out more than a syllable.

He turned to Ross and yelled above the suddenly-noticeable rush of air, “Talk-talk-talk,” and gave a whimsical shrug.

During the moment his attention wandered from the road, his vehicle rammed the one ahead, decelerated sharply and was rammed by the one behind, accelerated and rammed the one ahead again and then fell back into place.

Ross suddenly realized that he knew what had caused those crumples and crinkles around the periphery of the car.

“Subtle,” the driver yelled. “Indirection. Sneak it in.”

“What?” Ross screamed.

“The commersh,” the driver yelled.

It meant nothing to Ross, and he felt miserable because it meant nothing. He studied the roadside unhappily and almost beamed when he saw a sign coming up. Not advertising, of course, he thought. Perhaps some austere reminder of a whole man’s duty to the race and himself, some noble phrase that summed up the wisdom of a great thinker.…

But the sign—and it had cooling fins—declared:

BE SMUG! SMOKE SMOGS!

And the next one urged:

BEAT YOUR SISTER

CHEAT YOUR BROTHER

BUT SEND SOME SMOGS

TO DEAR OLD MOTHER.

It said it on four signs which, apparently alerted by radar, zinged in succession along a roadside track even with the vehicle.

There were more. And worse. They were coming to a city.

Turmoil and magnificence! White pylons, natty belts of green, lacy bridges, the roaring traffic, nimble-skipping pedestrians waving at the cars and calling—greetings? It sounded like “Suvvabih! Suvvabih! Bassa-bassa!” The shops were packed and radiant, dazzling. Ross wondered fleetingly how one parked here, and then found out. A car pulled from the curb and a hundred cars converged on the spot, shrilling their sweet message and spouting their gay sparkles. Theirs too! There were a pair of jolting crashes as it shouldered two other vehicles aside and parked, two wheels over the curb and on the sidewalk.

“Suvvabih-bassa!” shouted drivers, and the man beside Ross gaily repeated the cry. The vehicle’s doors opened and they climbed out into the quick tempo of the street.

* * * *

It was loud with a melodious babble from speaker horns visible everywhere. The driver yelled cheerfully at Ross: “C’mon. Party.” He followed, dazed and baffled, assailed by sudden doubts and contradictions.

It was a party, all right—twenty floors up a shimmering building in a large, handsome room whose principal decorative motif seemed to be cooling fins.

Perhaps twenty couples were assembled; they turned and applauded as they made their appearance.

The vehicle driver, standing grandly at the head of a short flight of stairs leading to the room, proclaimed: “I got these rocket flyers like on the piece of paper you guys read me. Right off the field. Twenny points. How about that?”

A tall, graying man with a noble profile hurried up and beamed: “Good show, Joe. I knew we could count on you to try for the high-point combo. You was always a real sport. You got the fish?”

“Sure we got the fish.” Joe turned and said to one of the lovely ladies, “Elna, show him the fish.”

She unwrapped a ten-pound swordfish and proudly held it up while Ross, Bernie, and Helena stared wildly.

The profile took the fish and poked it. “Real enough, Joe. You done great. Now if the rocket flyers here are okay you’re okay. Then you got twenny points and the prize.

“You’re a rocket flyer, ain’t you, Buster?”

Ross realized he was being addressed. He croaked: “Men of Earth, we come from a far-distant star in search of—”

The profile said, “Just a minute, Buster. Just a minute. You ain’t from Earth?”

“We come from a far-distant star in search of—”

“Stick to the point, Buster. You ain’t a rocket flyer from Earth? None of you?”

“No,” Ross said. He furtively pinched himself. It hurt. Therefore he must be awake. Or crazy.

The profile was sorrowfully addressing a downcast Joe. “You should of asked them, Joe. You really should of. Now you don’t even get the three points for the swordfish, because you went an’ tried for the combo. It reely is a pity. Din’t you ask them at all?”

Joe blustered, “He did say sump’m, but I figured a rocket flyer was a rocket flyer, and they come out of a rocket.” His lower lip was trembling. Both of the ladies of his party were crying openly. “We tried,” Joe said, and began to blubber. Ross moved away from him in horrified disgust.

The profile shook its head, turned and announced: “Owing to a unfortunate mistake, the search group of Dr. Joseph Mulcahy, Sc.D., Ph.D., got disqualified for the combination. They on’y got three points. So that’s all the groups in an’ who got the highest?”

“I got fifteen! I got fifteen!” screamed a gorgeous brunette in a transport of joy. “A manhole cover from the museum an’ a las’ month Lipreaders Digest an’ a steering wheel from a police car! I got fifteen!”

The others clustered about her, chattering. Ross said to the profile mechanically: “Man of Earth, we come from a far-distant star in search of—”

“Sure, Buster,” said the profile. “Sure. Too bad. But you should of told Joe. You don’t have to go. You an’ your friends have a drink. Mix. Have fun. I gotta go give the prize now.” He hurried off.

A passing blonde, stacked, said to Ross: “Hel-looo, baldy. Wanna see my operation?” He began to shake his head and felt Helena’s fingers close like steel on his arm. The blonde sniffed and passed on.

“I’ll operate her,” Helena said, and then: “Ross, what’s wrong with everybody? They act so young, even the old people!”

“Follow me,” he said, and began to circulate through the party, trailing Bernie and a frankly terrified Helena, button-holing and confronting and demanding and cajoling. Nothing worked. He was greeted with amused tolerance and invited to have a drink and asked what he thought of the latest commersh with its tepid trumpets. Nobody gave a damn that he was from a far-distant star except Joe, who sullenly watched them wander and finally swaggered up to Ross.

“I figured something out,” he said grimly. “You made me lose.” He brought up a roundhouse right, and Ross saw the stars and heard the birdies.

* * * *

Bernie and Helena brought him to on the street. He found he had been walking for some five minutes with a blanked-out mind. They told him he had been saying over and over again, “Men of Earth, I come from a far-distant star.” It had got them ejected from the party.

Helena was crying with anger and frustration; she had also got a nasty scare when one of the vehicles had swerved up onto the sidewalk and almost crushed the three of them against the building wall.

“And,” she wailed, “I’m hungry and we don’t know where the ship is and I’ve got to sit down and—and go someplace.”

“So do I,” Bernie said weakly.

So did Ross. He said, “Let’s just go into this restaurant. I know we have no money—don’t nag me please, Helena. We’ll order, eat, not pay, and get arrested.” He held up his hand at the protests. “I said, get arrested. The smartest thing we could do. Obviously somebody’s running this place—and it’s not the stoops we’ve seen. The quickest way I know of to get to whoever’s in charge is to get in trouble. And once they see us we can explain everything.”

It made sense to them. Unfortunately the first restaurant they tried was coin-operated—from the front door on. So were the second to seventh. Ross tried to talk Bernie into slugging a pedestrian so they could all be jugged for disturbing the peace, but failed.

Helena noted at last that the women’s wear shops had live attendants who, presumably, would object to trouble. They marched into one of the gaudy places, each took a dress from a rack and methodically tore them to pieces.

A saleslady approached them dithering and asked tremulously: “What for did you do that? Din’t you like the dresses?”

“Well yes, very much,” Helena began apologetically. “But you see, the fact is—”

“Shuddup!” Ross told her. He said to the saleslady: “No. We hated them. We hate every dress here. We’re going to tear up every dress in the place. Why don’t you call the police?”

“Oh,” she said vaguely. “All right,” and vanished into the rear of the store. She returned after a minute and said, “He wants to know your names.”

“Just say ‘three desperate strangers,’” Ross told her.

“Oh. Thank you.” She vanished again.

The police arrived in five minutes or so. An excited elder man with many stripes on his arms strode up to them excitedly as they stood among the shredded ruins of the dresses. “Where’d they go?” he demanded. “Didja see what they looked like?”

“We’re them. We three. We tore these dresses up. You’d better take them along for evidence.”

“Oh,” the cop said. “Okay. Go on into the wagon. And no funny business, hear me?”

They offered no funny business. In the wagon Ross expounded on his theme that there must be directing intelligences and that they must be at the top. Helena was horribly depressed because she had never been arrested before and Bernie was almost jaunty. Something about him suggested that he felt at home in a patrol wagon.

It stopped and the elderly stripe-wearer opened the door for them. Ross looked on the busy street for anything resembling a station house and found none.

The cop said, “Okay, you people. Get going. An’ let’s don’t have no trouble or I’ll run you in.”

Ross yelled in outrage, “This is a frame-up! You have no right to turn us loose. We demand to be arrested and tried!”

“Wise guy,” sneered the cop, climbed into the wagon and drove off.

They stood forlornly as the crowd eddied and swirled around them. “There was a plate of sandwiches at that party,” Helena recalled wistfully. “And a ladies’ room.” She began to cry. “If only you hadn’t acted so darn superior, Ross! I’ll bet they would have let us have all the sandwiches we wanted.”

Bernie said unexpectedly, “She’s right. Watch me.”

He buttonholed a pedestrian and said, “Duh.”

“Yeah?” asked the pedestrian with kindly interest.

Bernie concentrated and said, “Duh. I yam losted. I yam broke. I losted all my money. Gimme some money, mister, please?”

The pedestrian beamed and said, “That is real tough luck, buddy. If I give you some money will you send it to me when you get some more? Here is my name wrote on a card.”

Bernie said, “Sure, mister. I will send the money to you.”

“Then,” said the pedestrian, “I will give you some money because you will send it back to me. Good luck, buddy.”

Bernie, with quiet pride, showed them a piece of paper that bore the interesting legend Twenty Dollars.

“Let’s eat,” Ross said, awed.

A machine on a restaurant door changed the bill for a surprising heap of coins and they swaggered in, making beelines for the modest twin doors at the rear of the place. Close up the doors were not very modest, but after the initial shock Ross realized that there must be many on this planet who could not read at all. The washroom attendant, for instance, who collected the “dimes” and unlocked the booths. “Dime” seemed to be his total vocabulary.

By comparison the machines in the restaurant proper were intelligent. The three of them ate and ate and ate. Only after coffee did they spare a thought for Dr. Sam Jones, who should about then be awakening with a murderous hangover aboard the starship.

Thinking about him did not mean they could think of anything to do.

“He’s in trouble,” Bernie said. “We’re in trouble. First things first.”

“What trouble?” asked Helena brightly. “You got twenty dollars by asking for it and I suppose you can get plenty more. And I think we wouldn’t have got thrown out of that party if—ah—we hadn’t gone swaggering around talking as if we knew everything. Maybe these people here aren’t very bright—”

Ross snorted.

Helena went on doggedly, “—not very bright, but they certainly can tell when somebody’s brighter than they are. And naturally they don’t like it. Would you like it? It’s like a really old person talking to a really young person about nothing but age. But here when you’re bright you make everybody feel bad every time you open your mouth.”

“So,” Ross said impatiently, “we can go on begging and drifting. But that’s not what we’re here for. The answer is supposed to be on Earth. Obviously none of the people we’ve seen could possibly know anything about genetics. Obviously they can’t keep this machine civilization going without guidance. There must be people of normal intelligence around. In the government, is my guess.”

“No,” said Helena, but she wouldn’t say why. She just thought not.

The inconclusive debate ended with them on the street again. Bernie, who seemed to enjoy it, begged a hundred dollars. Ross, who didn’t, got eleven dollars in singles and a few threats of violence for acting like a wise guy. Helena got no money and three indecent proposals before Ross indignantly took her out of circulation.

They found a completely automatic hotel at nightfall. Ross tried to inspect Helena’s room for comfort and safety, but was turned back at the threshold by a staggering jolt of electricity. “Mechanical house dick,” he muttered, picking himself up from the floor. “Well,” he said to her sourly, “it’s safe. Good night.”

And later in the gents’ room, to Bernie: “You’d think the damn-fool machine could be adjusted so that a person with perfectly innocent intentions could visit a lady—”

“Sure,” said Bernie soothingly, “sure. Say, Ross, frankly, is this Earth exactly what you expected it to be?”

The attendant moved creakily across the floor and said hopefully, “Dime?”

CHAPTER 13

Their second day on the bum they accumulated a great deal of change and crowded into a telephone booth. The plan was to try to locate their starship and find out what, if anything, could be done for Sam Jones.

An automatic Central conferred with an automatic Information and decided that they wanted the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field.

They got the Port Captain on the wire and Ross asked after the starship. The captain asked, “Who wan’sta know, huh?”

Ross realized he had overdone it and shoved Bernie at the phone. Bernie snorted and guggled and finally got out that he jus’ wannit ta know. The captain warmed up immediately and said oh, sure, the funny-lookin’ ship, it was still there all right.

“How about the fella that’s in it?”

“You mean the funny-lookin’ fella? He went someplace.”

“He went someplace? What place?”

“Someplace. He went away, like. I din’t see him go, mister. I got plenty to do without I should watch out for every dummy that comes along.”

“T’anks,” said Bernie hopelessly at Ross’s signal.

They walked the street, deep in thought. Helena sobbed, “Let’s leave him here, Ross. I don’t like this place.”

“No.”

Bernie growled, “What’s the difference, Ross? He can get a snootful just as easy here as anywhere else—”

“No! It isn’t the Doc, don’t you see? But this is the place we’re looking for. All the answers we need are here; we’ve got to get them.”

Bernie stepped around two tussling men on the ground, ineffectually thumping each other over a chocolate-covered confection. “Yeah,” he said shortly.

* * * *

Helena said: “Isn’t that a silly way to put up a big sign like that?”

Ross looked up. “My God,” he said. A gigantic metal sign with the legend, Buy Smogs—You Can SMOKE Them, was being hoisted across the street ahead. The street was nominally closed to traffic by cheerfully inattentive men with red flags; a mobile boom hoist was doing the work, and quite obviously doing it wrong. The angle of the boom arm with the vertical was far too great for stability; the block-long sign was tipping the too-light body of the hoisting engine on its treads.…

Ross made a flash calculation: when the sign fell, as fall it inevitably would, perhaps two hundred people who had wandered uncaringly past the warning flags would be under it.

There was a sudden aura of blue light around the engine body.

It tipped back to stability. The boom angle decreased, and the engine crawled forward to take up the horizontal difference.

The blue light went out.

Helena choked and coughed and babbled, “But Ross, it couldn’t have because—”

Ross said: “It’s them!”

“Who?”

Excitedly: “The people behind all this! The people who built the cities and put up the buildings and designed the machines. The people who have the answers! Come on, Bernie. I just seem to antagonize these people—I want you to ask the boom operator what happened.”

The boom operator cheerfully explained that nah, it was just somep’n that happened. Nah, nobody did nothin’ to make it happen. It was in case if anything went wrong, like. You know?

They retired and regrouped their forces.

“Foolproof machines,” Ross said slowly. “And I mean really fool proof. Friends, I was wrong, I admit it; I thought that those buildings and cars were something super-special, and they turned out to be just silly gimcracks. But not this blue light thing. That boom had to fall.”

Bernie shrugged rebelliously. “So what? So they’ve got some kinds of machines you don’t have on Halsey’s Planet?”

“A different order of machines, Bernie! Believe me, that blue light was something as far from any safety device I ever heard of as the starships are from oxcarts. When we find the people who designed them—”

“Suppose they’re all dead?”

Ross winced. He said determinedly, “We’ll find them.” They returned to their begging and were recognized one day by the gray-haired profile of the party. He didn’t remember just who they were or where they were from or where he had met them, but he enthusiastically invited them to yet another party. He told them he was Hennery Matson, owner of an airline.

Ross asked about accidents and blue lights. Matson jovially said some o’ his pilots talked about them things but he din’t bother his head none. Ya get these planes from the field, see, an’ they got all kinds of gadgets on them. Come on to the party!

They went, because Hennery promised them another guest—Sanford Eisner, who was a wealthy aircraft manufacturer. But he din’t bother his head none either; them rockets was hard to make, you had to feed the patterns, like, into the master jigs just so, and, boy!, if you got ’em in backwards it was a mess. Wheredja get the patterns? Look, mister, we always had the patterns, an’ don’t spoil the party, will ya?

* * * *

The party was a smasher. They all woke with headaches on Matson’s deep living room rug.

“You did fine, Ross,” Helena softly assured him. “Nobody would have guessed you were any smarter than anybody else here. There wasn’t a bit of trouble.”

Ross seemed to have a hiatus in his memory.

The importance of the hiatus faded as time passed. There was a general move toward the automatic dispensing bar. It seemed to be regulated by a time clock; no matter what you dialed first thing in the morning, it ruthlessly poured a double rye with Worcestershire and tabasco and plopped a fair imitation of a raw egg into the concoction. It helped!

Along about noon something clicked in the bar’s innards. Guests long since surfeited with the prairie oysters joyously dialed martinis and manhattans and the day’s serious drinking began.

Ross fuzzily tried to trace the bar’s supply. There were nickel pipes that led Heaven knew where. Some vast depot of fermentation tanks and stills? Fed grain and cane by crawling harvest-monsters? Grain and cane planted from seed the harvest-monsters carefully culled from the crop for the plow-and-drag-and-drill-and-fertilize-and-cultivate monsters?

His head was beginning to ache again. A jovial martini-drinker who had something to do with a bank-a bank!—roared, “Hey, fellas! I got a idea what we can do! Less go on over to my place!”

So they all went, and that disposed of another day.

It blended into a dream of irresponsible childhood. When your clothes grew shabby you helped yourself to something that fit from your host of the moment’s wardrobe. When you grew tired of one host you switched to another. They seldom remembered you from day to day, and they never asked questions.

Their sex was uninhibited and most of the women were more or less pregnant most of the time. They fought and sulked and made up and giggled and drank and ate and slept. All of the men had jobs, and all of them, once in a while, would remember and stagger over to a phone and make a call to an automatic receptionist to find out if everything was going all right with their jobs. It always was. They loved their children and tolerated anything from them, except shrewd inquisitiveness which drew a fast bust in the teeth from the most indulgent daddy or adoring mommy. They loved their friends and their guests, as long as they weren’t wise guys, and tolerated anything from them—as long as they weren’t wise guys.

Did it last a day, a week, a month?

Ross didn’t know. The only things that were really bothering Ross were, first, nobody wouldn’t tell him nothin’ about the blue lights and, second, that Bernie, he was actin’ like a wise guy.

There came a morning when it ended as it had begun: on somebody’s living room rug with a headache pounding between his eyes. Helena was sobbing softly, and that wise guy, Bernie, was tugging at him.

“Lea’ me alone,” ordered Captain Ross without opening his eyes. Wouldn’t let a man get his rest. What did he have to bring them along for, anyway? Should have left them where he found them, not brought them to this place Earth where they could act like a couple of wise guys and keep getting in his way every time he came close to the blue-light people, the intelligent people, the people with the answers to—to—

He lay there, trying to remember what the question was.

“—have to get him out of here,” said Helena’s voice with a touch of hysteria.

“—go back and get that fellow Haarland,” said Bernie’s voice, equally tense. Ross contemplated the fragments of conversation he had caught, ignoring what the two were saying to him. Haarland, he thought fuzzily, that wise guy.…

Bernie had him on his feet. “Leggo,” ordered Ross, but Bernie was tenacious. He stumbled along and found himself in the men’s room of the apartment. The tired-looking attendant appeared from nowhere and Bernie said something to him. The attendant rummaged in his chest and found something that Bernie put into a fizzy drink.

Ross sniffed at it suspiciously. “Wassit?” he asked.

“Please, Ross, drink it. It’ll sober you up. We’ve got to get out of here—we’re going nuts, Helena and me. This has been going on for weeks!”

“Nope. Gotta find a blue light,” Ross said obstinately, swaying.

“But you aren’t finding it, Ross. You aren’t doing anything except get drunk and pass out and wake up and get drunk. Come on, drink the drink.” Ross impatiently dashed it to the floor. Bernie sighed. “All right, Ross,” he said wearily. “Helena can run the ship; we’re taking off.”

“Go ’head.”

“Good-by, Ross. We’re going back to Halsey’s Planet, where you came from. Maybe Haarland can tell us what to do.”

“Go ’head. That wise guy!” Ross sneered.

The attendant was watching dubiously as Bernie slammed out and Ross peered at himself in a mirror. “Dime?” the attendant asked in his tired voice. Ross gave him one and went back to the party.

Somehow it was not much fun.

He shuffled back to the bar. The boilermaker didn’t taste too good. He set it down and glowered around the room. The party was back in swing already; Helena and Bernie were nowhere in sight. Let them go, then.…

He drank, but only when he reminded himself to. This party had become a costume ball; one of the men lurched out of the room and staggered back guffawing. “Looka him!” one of the women shrieked. “He got a woman’s hat on! Horace, you get the craziest kinda ideas!”

Ross glowered. He suddenly realized that, while he wasn’t exactly sober, he wasn’t drunk either. Those soreheads, they had to go and spoil the party.…

He began abruptly to get less drunk yet. Back to Halsey’s Planet, they said? Ask Haarland what to do, they said? Leave him here—?

He was cold sober.

He found a telephone. The automatic Central checked the automatic Information and got him the Captain of the Port, Baltimore Rocket Field. The Captain was helpful and sympathetic; caught by the tense note in Ross’s voice when he told him who wannit to know, the Captain said, “Gee, buddy, if I’d of known I woulda stopped them. Stoled your ship, is that what they done? They could get arrested for that. You could call the cops an’ maybe they could do something—”

Ross didn’t bother to explain. He hung up.

The party was no fun at all. He left it.

Ross walked along the street, hating himself. He couldn’t hate Helena and Bernie; they had done the right thing. It had been his fault, all the way down the line. He’d been acting like a silly child; he’d had a job of work to do, and he let himself be sidetracked by a crazy round of drinking and parties.

Of course, he told himself, something had been accomplished. Somebody had built the machines—not the happy morons he had been playing with. Somebody had invented whatever it was that flared with blue light and repaired the idiot errors the morons made. Somebody, somewhere.

Where?

Well, he had some information. All negative. At the parties had been soldiers and politicians and industrialists and clergy and entertainers and, heaven save the mark, scientists. And none of them had had the wit to do more than push the Number Three Button when the Green Light A blinked, by rote. None of them could have given him the answer to the question that threatened to end human domination over the cosmos; none of them would have known what the words meant.

Maybe—Ross made himself face it—maybe there was no answer. Maybe even if he found the intellects that lurked beneath the surface on this ancient planet, they could not or would not tell him what he wanted to know. Maybe the intellects didn’t exist.

Maybe he was all wrong in all of his assumptions; maybe he was wasting his time. But, he told himself wryly, he had fixed it for himself that time was all he had left. He might as well waste it. He might as well go right on looking.…

A migrant party was staggering down the street toward him, a score of persons going from one host’s home to another. He crossed to avoid them. They were singing drunkenly.

Ross looked at them with the distaste of the recently reformed. One of the voices raised in song caught his ear:

“—bobbed his nose and dyed it rose, and kissed

his lady fair, And sat her down on a cushion brown in

a seven-legged chair. ‘By Jones,’ he said, ‘my shoes

are red, and so’s my overcoat, And with buttons

nine in a zigzag line, I’ll—”

“Doc!” Ross bellowed. “Doc Jones! For God’s sake, come over here!”

They got rid of the rest of Doctor Sam Jones’s party, and Ross sobered the doctor up in an all-night restaurant. It wasn’t hard; the doctor had had plenty of practice.

Ross filled him in, carefully explaining why Bernie and Helena had left him. Doc Jones filled Ross in. He didn’t have much to tell. He had come to in the ship, waited around until he got hungry, fallen into a conversation with a rocket pilot on the field—and that was how his round of parties had begun.

Like Ross, Doc, in his soberer moments, had come to the conclusion that Earth was run by person or persons unseen. He had learned little that Ross hadn’t found out or deduced. The blue lights had bothered him, too; he’d asked the pilot about it, and found out about what Ross had—there appeared to be some sort of built-in safety device which kept the inevitable accidents from becoming unduly fatal. How they worked, he didn’t know—

But he had an idea.

“It sounds a little ridiculous, I admit,” he said, embarrassed. “But I think it might work. It’s a radio program.”

“A radio program?”

“I said it sounded ridiculous. They call it, ‘What’s Biting You,’ and one of the fellows was telling me about it. It seems that you can appear before the panel on the program with any sort of problem, any sort at all, and they guarantee to solve it for you. There’s some sort of bond posted—I don’t know much about the details, but this man assured me that the bond was only a formality; they never failed. Of course,” Doc finished, hearing his own proposal with a touch of doubt, “I don’t know whether they ever had any problem like this before, but—”

“Yeah,” said Ross. “What have we got to lose?”

They got into the program. It took the techniques of a doubler on an army chow line and a fair amount of brute strength, but they got to the head of the queue at the studio and wedged themselves inside. Doc came close to throttling the man who prowled through the studio audience, selecting the lucky few who would get on stage—but they got on.

The theme music swelled majestically around them, and a chorus crooned, “What’s Biting You—Hunh?” It was repeated three times, with crashing cymbals under the “Hunh?”

Ross listened to the beginning of the program and cursed himself for being persuaded into such a harebrained tactic. But, he had to admit, the program offered the only possibility in sight. The central figure was a huge, jovially grinning figure of papier-mâché, smoking a Smog and billowing smoke rings at the audience. An announcer, for some obscure reason in blackface, interviewed the disturbed derelicts who came before Smiley Smog, the papier-mâché figure, and propounded their problems to Smiley in a sort of doggerel. And in doggerel the answers came back.

The first person to go up before Smiley was a woman, clearly in her last month of pregnancy. The announcer introduced her to the audience and begged for a real loud holler of hello for this poor mizzuble li’l girl. “Awright, honey,” he said. “You just step right up here an’ let ol’ Uncle Smiley take care of your troubles for you. Less go, now. What’s Bitin’ You?”

“Uh,” she sobbed, “it’s like I’m gonna have a baby.”

“Hoddya like that!” the announcer screamed. “She’s gonna have a baby! Whaddya say to that, folks?” The audience shrieked hysterically. “Awright, honey,” the announcer said. “So you’re gonna have a baby, so what’s bitin’ you about that?”

“It’s my husband,” the woman sniffled. “He don’t like kids. We got eight already,” she explained. “Jack, he says if we have one more kid he’s gonna take off an’ marry somebody else.”

“He’s gonna many somebody else!” the announcer howled. “Hoddya like that, folks?” There was a tempest of boos. “Awright, now,” the announcer said, “you just sit there, honey, while I tell ol’ Uncle Smiley about this. Ya ready? Listen:

What’s bitin’ this lady is plain to see:

Her husband don’t want no more family!”

The huge figure’s head rotated on a concealed hinge to look down on the woman. From a squawk-box deep in Smiley’s papier-mâché belly, a weary voice declaimed:

“If one more baby is your husband’s dread,

Cross him up, lady. Have twins instead!”

The audience roared its approval. The announcer asked anxiously, “Ya get it? When ya get inta the hospital, like, ya jus’ tell the nurse ya want to take two kids home with you. See?”

The grateful woman staggered away. Ross gave Doc a poisonous look.

“What else is there to do?” the doctor hissed. “All right, perhaps this won’t work out—but let’s try!” He half rose, and staggered against the man next to him, who was already starting toward the announcer. “Go on, Ross,” Doc hissed venomously, blocking off the other man.

Ross went. What else was there to do?

“What’s biting me,” he said belligerently before the announcer could put him through the preliminaries, “is simply this: L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N.”

Dead silence in the studio. The announcer quavered, “Wh-what was that again, buddy?”

“I said,” Ross repeated firmly, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the—”

“Now, wait a minute, buddy,” the announcer ordered. “We never had no stuff like that on this program before. Whaddya, some kind of a wise guy?”

There might have been violence; the conditions were right for it. But Uncle Smiley Smog saved the day.

The papier-mâché figure puffed a blinding series of smoke rings at Ross. From its molded torso, the weary voice said:

“If you’re looking for counsel sagacious and wise,

The price is ten cents. It’s right under your eyes.”

They left the studio in a storm of animosity.

“Maybe we could have collected the forfeit,” Doc said hopefully.

“Maybe we could have collected some lumps,” Ross growled. “Got any more ideas?”

The doctor sipped his coffee. “No,” he admitted. “I wonder—No, I don’t suppose that means anything.”

“That jingle? Sure it means something, Doc. It means I should have had my head examined for letting you talk me into that performance.”

The doctor said rebelliously, “Maybe I’m wrong, Ross, but I don’t see that you’ve had any ideas than panned out much better.”

Ross got up. “All right,” he admitted. “I’m sorry if I gave you a hard time. It’s all this coffee and all the liquor underneath it; I swear, if I ever get back to a civilized planet I’m going on a solid diet for a month.”

They headed for the room marked “Gents,” Ross sullenly quiet, Doc thoughtfully quiet.

Doc said reflectively, “‘The price is ten cents.’ Ross, could that mean a paper that we could buy on a newsstand, maybe?”

“Yeah,” Ross said in irritation. “Look, Doc, don’t give it another thought. There must be some way to straighten this thing out; I’ll think of it. Let’s just make believe that whole asinine radio program never happened.” The attendant materialized and offered Ross a towel.

“Dime?” he said wearily.

Ross fished absently in his pocket. “The thing that bothers me, Doc,” he said, “is that I know there are intelligent people somewhere around. I even know what they’re doing, I bet. They’re doing exactly what I tried to do: acted as stupid as anybody else, or stupider. I’d make a guess,” he said, warming up, “that if we could just make a statistical analysis of the whole planet and find the absolute stupidest-seeming people of the lot, we’d—”

He ran out of breath all at once. His eyes bulged.

He looked at the men’s-room attendant, and at the ten-cent piece in his own hand.

“You!” he breathed.

The attendant’s face suddenly seemed to come to life. In a voice that was abruptly richer and deeper than before, the man said: “Yes. You had to find us yourself, you know.”

CHAPTER 14

There was a home base, a gigantic island called Australia, to which they took Ross and Doc Jones in a little car that sprouted no wings and flashed no rockets, but flew.

They lived underground there, invisible to goggling passengers and crewmen aboard the “rockets.” (They weren’t rockets. They were turbo-jets. But it made the children happy to think that they had rockets, so iron filings were added to the hot jet stream, and they sparkled in magnificent display.)

There they were born, and there they spent strange childhoods, learning such things as psychodynamics and teleportation. By the time they were eight months or so old they thought it amusing to converse of Self and the Meaning of Meaning. By eighteen months a dozen infants would chat in terza rima. But by the age of two they had put such toys behind them with a sigh of pleasant regret. They would revert to them only for such purposes as love-making or choral funeral addresses.

They were then of an age to begin their work.

They were born there, and trained there for terrible tasks. And they died there, at whatever risk. For that they would not surrender: their right to die among their own.

But their lives between cradle and grave, those they gave away.

Nursemaids? What else can one call them?

They explained it patiently to Ross and the doctor.

“The pattern emerged clearly in the twentieth century. Swarming slums abrawl with children, children, children everywhere. Walk down a Chicago Southside street, and walk away with the dazed impression that all the world was pregnant. Walk through pretty, pleasant Evanston, and find the impression wrong. Those who lived in Evanston were reasonable people. They waited and thought. Being reasonable, they saved and planned. Being reasonable, they resorted to gadgets or chemicals or continence.

“A woman of the period had some three hundred and ninety opportunities to conceive a child. In the slums and the hills they took advantage of as many of them as they might. But around the universities, in the neighborhoods of the well-educated and the well-to-do, what was the score?

“First, education, until the age of twenty. This left two hundred and ninety-nine opportunities. Then, for perhaps five years, shared work; the car, the mortgage, the furniture, that two salaries would pay off earlier than one. Two hundred and thirty-four opportunities were left. Some of them were seized: a spate of childbearing perhaps would come next. But subtract a good ten years more at the end of the cycle, for the years when a child would be simply too, late—too late for fashion, too late for companionship with the first-born. We started with three hundred and ninety opportunities. We have, perhaps, one hundred and forty-four left.

“Is that the roster complete? No. There is the battle of the budget: No, not right now, not until the summer place is paid for. And more. The visits from the mothers-in-law, the quarterly tax payments, the country-club liaisons and the furtive knives behind the brownstone fronts and what becomes of fertility—they have all been charted. But these are superfluous. The ratio 390:144 points out the inevitable. As three hundred and ninety outweighs one hundred and forty-four, so the genes of the slovenly and heedless outweigh the thoughtful and slow to act.

“We tampered with the inevitable.

“The planet teemed and burst. The starships went forth. The strong, bright, quick ones went out in the ships. Two sorts were left: The strong ones who were not bright, the bright ones who were not strong.

“We are the prisoners of the planet. We cannot leave.

“The children—the witless ones outside—can leave. But who would have them?”

Ross peered into the shifting shadows. “But,” he said, “you are the masters of the planet—”

“Masters? We are slaves! Fully alive only here where we are born and die. Abstracted and as witless as they when we are among them—well we might be. For each of us, square miles to stand guard over. Our minds roving across the traps we dare not ignore, ready to leap out and straighten these children’s toppling walls of blocks, ready to warn the child that sharp things cut and hot things burn. The blue lights—did you think they were machines?” They were us!

“You’re torturing yourselves!” Ross exploded. “Let them die.”

“Let—ten—billion—children—die? We are not such monsters.”

Ross was humbled before their tragedy. Diffidently he spoke of Halsey’s Planet, Ragansworld, Azor, Jones. He warmed to the task and was growing, he thought, eloquent when their smiles left him standing ashamed.

“I don’t understand,” he said, almost weeping.

The voice corrected him: “You do. But you do not—yet—know that you do. Consider the facts:

“Your planet. Sterile and slowly dying.

“The planets you have seen. One sterile because it is imprisoned by ancients, one sterile under an in-driven matriarchal custom, one sterile because all traces of divergence have been wiped out.

“Earth. Split into an incurable dichotomy—the sterility of brainless health, the sterility of sick intellect.

“Humanity, then, imprisoned in a thousand sterile tubes, cut off each from the other, dying. We feared war, and so we isolated the members with a wall of time. We have found something worse to fear. What if the walls are cracked?”

“Crack the walls? How? Is it too late?”

Somehow the image of Helena was before him.

“Is it too late?” they gently mocked. “Surely you know. How? Perhaps you will ask her.”

The image of Helena was blushing.

Ross’s heart leaped. “As simple as that?”

“For you, yes. For others there will be lives spent over the lathes and milling machines, eyes gone blind in calculating and refining trajectories, daring ones lost screaming in the hearts of stars, or gibbering with hunger and pain as the final madness closes down on them, stranded between galaxies. There will be martyrs to undergo the worst martyrdom of all—which is to say, they will never know of it. They will be unhappy traders and stock-chasers, grinding their lives to smooth dull blanks against the wearying routine so that the daring ones may go forth to the stars. But for you—you have seen the answer.

“Old blood runs thin. Thin blood runs cold. Cold blood dies. Let the walls crack.”

There was a murmuring in the shadows that Ross could not hear. Then the voice again, saying a sort of good-by.

“We have had a great deal of experience with children, so we know that they must not be told too much. There is nothing more you need be told. You will go back now—”

Ross dared interrupt. “But our ship—the others have taken it away—”

Again the soundless laughter. “The ship has not been taken far. Did you think we would leave you stranded here?”

Ross peered hard into the shadows. But only the shadows were there, and then he and Jones were in the shadows no longer.

“Ross!” Helena was hysterical with joy. Even Bernie was stammering and shaking his head incredulously. “Ross, dearest! We thought—And the ship acted all funny, and then it landed here and there just wasn’t anybody around, and I couldn’t make it go again—”

“It will go now,” Ross promised. It did. They sealed ship; he took the controls; and they hung in space, looking back on a blue-green planet with a single moon.

There were questions; but Ross put an end to questions. He said, “We’re going back to Halsey’s Planet. Haarland wanted an answer. We’ve found it; we’ll bring it to him. The F-T-L families have kept their secret too well. No wars between the planets—but stagnation worse than wars. And Haarland’s answer is this: He will be the first of the F-T-L traders. He’ll build F-T-L ships, and he’ll carelessly let their secrets be stolen. We’ll bridge the galaxy with F-T-L transports; and we’ll pack the ships with a galaxy of crews! New genes for old; hybrid vigor for dreary decay!

“Do you see it?” His voice was ringing loud; Helena’s eyes on him were adoring. “Mate Jones to Azor, Halsey’s Planet to Earth. Smash the smooth, declining curve! Cross the strains, and then breed them back. Let mankind become genetically wild again instead of rabbits isolated in their sterile hutches!”

Exultantly he set up the combinations for Halsey’s Planet on the Wesley board.

Helena was beside him, proud and close, as he threw in the drive.

THE HATED

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.

The bar didn’t have a name. No name of any kind. Not even an indication that it had ever had one. All it said on the outside was:

Cafe

EAT

Cocktails

which doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it was a bar. It had a big TV set going ya-ta-ta ya-ta-ta in three glorious colors, and a jukebox that tried to drown out the TV with that lousy music they play. Anyway, it wasn’t a kid hangout. I kind of like it. But I wasn’t supposed to be there at all; it’s in the contract. I was supposed to stay in New York and the New England states.

Cafe-EAT-Cocktails was right across the river. I think the name of the place was Hoboken, but I’m not sure. It all had a kind of dreamy feeling to it. I was—

Well, I couldn’t even remember going there. I remembered one minute I was downtown New York, looking across the river. I did that a lot. And then I was there. I don’t remember crossing the river at all.

I was drunk, you know.

* * * *

You know how it is? Double bourbons and keep them coming. And after a while the bartender stops bringing me the ginger ale because gradually I forget to mix them. I got pretty loaded long before I left New York. I realize that. I guess I had to get pretty loaded to risk the pension and all.

Used to be I didn’t drink much, but now, I don’t know, when I have one drink, I get to thinking about Sam and Wally and Chowderhead and Gilvey and the captain. If I don’t drink, I think about them, too, and then I take a drink. And that leads to another drink, and it all comes out to the same thing. Well, I guess I said it already, I drink a pretty good amount, but you can’t blame me.

There was a girl.

I always get a girl someplace. Usually they aren’t much and this one wasn’t either. I mean she was probably somebody’s mother. She was around thirty-five and not so bad, though she had a long scar under her ear down along her throat to the little round spot where her larynx was. It wasn’t ugly. She smelled nice—while I could still smell, you know—and she didn’t talk much. I liked that. Only—

Well, did you ever meet somebody with a nervous cough? Like when you say something funny—a little funny, not a big yock—they don’t laugh and they don’t stop with just smiling, but they sort of cough? She did that. I began to itch. I couldn’t help it. I asked her to stop it.

She spilled her drink and looked at me almost as though she was scared—and I had tried to say it quietly, too.

“Sorry,” she said, a little angry, a little scared. “Sorry. But you don’t have to—”

“Forget it.”

“Sure. But you asked me to sit down here with you, remember? If you’re going to—”

“Forget it!” I nodded at the bartender and held up two fingers. “You need another drink,” I said. “The thing is,” I said, “Gilvey used to do that.”

“What?”

“That cough.”

She looked puzzled. “You mean like this?”

“Goddam it, stop it!” Even the bartender looked over at me that time. Now she was really mad, but I didn’t want her to go away. I said, “Gilvey was a fellow who went to Mars with me. Pat Gilvey.”

“Oh.” She sat down again and leaned across the table, low. “Mars.”

* * * *

The bartender brought our drinks and looked at me suspiciously. I said, “Say, Mac, would you turn down the air-conditioning?”

“My name isn’t Mac. No.”

“Have a heart. It’s too cold in here.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.

I was cold. I mean that kind of weather, it’s always cold in those places. You know around New York in August? It hits eighty, eighty-five, ninety. All the places have air-conditioning and what they really want is for you to wear a shirt and tie.

But I like to walk a lot. You would, too, you know. And you can’t walk around much in long pants and a suit coat and all that stuff. Not around there. Not in August. And so then, when I went into a bar, it’d have one of those built-in freezers for the used-car salesmen with their dates, or maybe their wives, all dressed up. For what? But I froze.

“Mars,” the girl breathed. “Mars.”

I began to itch again. “Want to dance?”

“They don’t have a license,” she said. “Byron, I didn’t know you’d been to Mars! Please tell me about it.”

“It was all right,” I said.

That was a lie.

She was interested. She forgot to smile. It made her look nicer. She said, “I knew a man—my brother-in-law—he was my husband’s brother—I mean my ex-husband—”

“I get the idea.”

“He worked for General Atomic. In Rockford, Illinois. You know where that is?”

“Sure.” I couldn’t go there, but I knew where Illinois was.

“He worked on the first Mars ship. Oh, fifteen years ago, wasn’t it? He always wanted to go himself, but he couldn’t pass the tests.” She stopped and looked at me.

I knew what she was thinking. But I didn’t always look this way, you know. Not that there’s anything wrong with me now, I mean, but I couldn’t pass the tests any more. Nobody can. That’s why we’re all one-trippers.

I said, “The only reason I’m shaking like this is because I’m cold.”

It wasn’t true, of course. It was that cough of Gilvey’s. I didn’t like to think about Gilvey, or Sam or Chowderhead or Wally or the captain. I didn’t like to think about any of them. It made me shake.

You see, we couldn’t kill each other. They wouldn’t let us do that. Before we took off, they did something to our minds to make sure. What they did, it doesn’t last forever. It lasts for two years and then it wears off. That’s long enough, you see, because that gets you to Mars and back; and it’s plenty long enough, in another way, because it’s like a strait-jacket.

You know how to make a baby cry? Hold his hands. It’s the most basic thing there is. What they did to us so we couldn’t kill each other, it was like being tied up, like having our hands held so we couldn’t get free. Well. But two years was long enough. Too long.

The bartender came over and said, “Pal, I’m sorry. See, I turned the air-conditioning down. You all right? You look so—”

I said, “Sure, I’m all right.”

He sounded worried. I hadn’t even heard him come back. The girl was looking worried, too, I guess because I was shaking so hard I was spilling my drink. I put some money on the table without even counting it.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We were just going.”

“We were?” She looked confused. But she came along with me. They always do, once they find out you’ve been to Mars.

* * * *

In the next place, she said, between trips to the powder room, “It must take a lot of courage to sign up for something like that. Were you scientifically inclined in school? Don’t you have to know an awful lot to be a space-flyer? Did you ever see any of those little monkey characters they say live on Mars? I read an article about how they lived in little cities of pup-tents or something like that—only they didn’t make them, they grew them. Funny! Ever see those? That trip must have been a real drag, I bet. What is it, nine months? You couldn’t have a baby! Excuse me— Say, tell me. All that time, how’d you—well, manage things? I mean didn’t you ever have to go to the you-know or anything?”

“We managed,” I said.

She giggled, and that reminded her, so she went to the powder room again. I thought about getting up and leaving while she was gone, but what was the use of that? I’d only pick up somebody else.

It was nearly midnight. A couple of minutes wouldn’t hurt. I reached in my pocket for the little box of pills they give us—it isn’t refillable, but we get a new prescription in the mail every month, along with the pension check. The label on the box said:

CAUTION

Use only as directed by physician. Not to be taken by persons suffering heart condition, digestive upset or circulatory disease. Not to be used in conjunction with alcoholic beverages.

I took three of them. I don’t like to start them before midnight, but anyway I stopped shaking.

I closed my eyes, and then I was on the ship again. The noise in the bar became the noise of the rockets and the air washers and the sludge sluicers. I began to sweat, although this place was air-conditioned, too.

I could hear Wally whistling to himself the way he did, the sound muffled by his oxygen mask and drowned in the rocket noise, but still perfectly audible. The tune was Sophisticated Lady. Sometimes it was Easy to Love and sometimes Chasing Shadows, but mostly Sophisticated Lady. He was from Juilliard.

Somebody sneezed, and it sounded just like Chowderhead sneezing. You know how everybody sneezes according to his own individual style? Chowderhead had a ladylike little sneeze; it went hutta, real quick, all through the mouth, no nose involved. The captain went Hrasssh; Wally was Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo. Gilvey was Hutch-uh. Sam didn’t sneeze much, but he sort of coughed and sprayed, and that was worse.

Sometimes I used to think about killing Sam by tying him down and having Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I thought about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in the belly, one shot. For Wally it was a tommy gun—just stitching him up and down, you know, back and forth. The captain I would put in a cage with hungry lions, and Gilvey I’d strangle with my bare hands. That was probably because of the cough, I guess.

* * * *

She was back. “Please tell me about it,” she begged. “I’m so curious.”

I opened my eyes. “You want me to tell you about it?”

“Oh, please!”

“About what it’s like to fly to Mars on a rocket?”

“Yes!”

“All right,” I said.

It’s wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn’t even shaking.

“There’s six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that’s all the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes—because it’s the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the only place where you can rest without somebody’s elbow in your side. But you can’t. Because by then it’s the next man’s turn.

“And maybe you don’t have elbows in your side while it’s your turn off watch, but in the starboard bunk there’s the air-regenerator master valve—I bet I could still show you the bruises right around my kidneys—and in the port bunk there’s the emergency-escape-hatch handle. That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast.

“And you can’t really sleep, I mean not soundly, because of the noise. That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren’t going, then you’re in free-fall, and that’s bad, too, because you dream about falling. But when they’re going, I don’t know, I think it’s worse. It’s pretty loud.

“And even if it weren’t for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever do that? You’re strangling and choking and you can’t get any air? It isn’t dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago—

“Well. So you’ve always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don’t do that very often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of weeks, sure—everybody’s friends then. You don’t even need the mask, for that matter. Or not very much. Everybody’s still pretty clean. The place smells—oh, let’s see—about like the locker room in a gym. You know? You can stand it. That’s if nobody’s got space sickness, of course. We were lucky that way.

“But that’s about how it’s going to get anyway, you know. Outside the masks, it’s soup. It isn’t that you smell it so much. You kind of taste it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That’s after the first two or three months. Later on, it gets worse.

“And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under pressure. That’s funny if you’re not used to it. Your lungs have to work a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially when you’re asleep, so after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then—

“Well.

“Before we take off, the psych people give us a long doo-da that keeps us from killing each other. But they can’t stop us from thinking about it. And afterward, after we’re back on Earth—this is what you won’t read about in the articles—they keep us apart. You know how they work it? We get a pension, naturally. I mean there’s got to be a pension, otherwise there isn’t enough money in the world to make anybody go. But in the contract, it says to get the pension we have to stay in our own area.

“The whole country’s marked off. Six sections. Each has at least one big city in it. I was lucky, I got a lot of them. They try to keep it so every man’s home town is in his own section, but—well, like with us, Chowderhead and the captain both happened to come from Santa Monica. I think it was Chowderhead that got California, Nevada, all that Southwest area. It was the luck of the draw. God knows what the captain got.

“Maybe New Jersey,” I said, and took another white pill.

* * * *

We went on to another place and she said suddenly, “I figured something out. The way you keep looking around.”

“What did you figure out?”

“Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don’t belong in this section, right?”

“Right,” I said after a minute.

“So why are you here? I know why. You’re here because you’re looking for somebody.”

“That’s right.”

She said triumphantly, “You want to find that other fellow from your crew! You want to fight him!”

I couldn’t help shaking, white pills or no white pills. But I had to correct her.

“No. I want to kill him.”

“How do you know he’s here? He’s got a lot of states to roam around in, too, doesn’t he?”

“Six. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland—all the way down to Washington.”

“Then how do you know—”

“He’ll be here.” I didn’t have to tell her how I knew. But I knew.

I wasn’t the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing that somebody was on the other side. I knew. You fight a war and you don’t have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You know he wants to fight, too.

Hutta. Hutta.

I spilled my drink.

I looked at her. “You—you didn’t—”

She looked frightened. “What’s the matter?”

“Did you just sneeze?”

“Sneeze? Me? Did I—”

I said something quick and nasty, I don’t know what. No! It hadn’t been her. I knew it.

It was Chowderhead’s sneeze.

* * * *

Chowderhead. Marvin T. Roebuck, his name was. Five feet eight inches tall. Dark-complected, with a cast in one eye. Spoke with a Midwest kind of accent, even though he came from California—“shrick” for “shriek,” “hawror” for “horror,” like that. It drove me crazy after a while. Maybe that gives you an idea what he talked about mostly. A skunk. A thoroughgoing, deep-rooted, mother-murdering skunk.

I kicked over my chair and roared, “Roebuck! Where are you, damn you?”

The bar was all at once silent. Only the jukebox kept going.

“I know you’re here!” I screamed. “Come out and get it! You louse, I told you I’d get you for calling me a liar the day Wally sneaked a smoke!”

Silence, everybody looking at me.

Then the door of the men’s room opened.

He came out.

He looked lousy. Eyes all red-rimmed and his hair falling out—the poor crumb couldn’t have been over twenty-nine. He shrieked, “You!” He called me a million names. He said, “You thieving rat, I’ll teach you to try to cheat me out of my candy ration!”

He had a knife.

I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything and that was stupid, but it didn’t matter. I got a bottle of beer from the next table and smashed it against the back of a chair. It made a good weapon, you know; I’d take that against a knife any time.

I ran toward him, and he came all staggering and lurching toward me, looking crazy and desperate, mumbling and raving—I could hardly hear him, because I was talking, too. Nobody tried to stop us. Somebody went out the door and I figured it was to call the cops, but that was all right. Once I took care of Chowderhead, I didn’t care what the cops did.

I went for the face.

He cut me first. I felt the knife slide up along my left arm but, you know, it didn’t even hurt, only kind of stung a little. I didn’t care about that. I got him in the face, and the bottle came away, and it was all like gray and white jelly, and then blood began to spring out. He screamed. Oh, that scream! I never heard anything like that scream. It was what I had been waiting all my life for.

I kicked him as he staggered back, and he fell. And I was on top of him, with the bottle, and I was careful to stay away from the heart or the throat, because that was too quick, but I worked over the face, and I felt his knife get me a couple times more, and—

And—

* * * *

And I woke up, you know. And there was Dr. Santly over me with a hypodermic needle that he’d just taken out of my arm, and four male nurses in fatigues holding me down. And I was drenched with sweat.

For a minute, I didn’t know where I was. It was a horrible queasy falling sensation, as though the bar and the fight and the world were all dissolving into smoke around me.

Then I knew where I was.

It was almost worse.

I stopped yelling and just lay there, looking up at them.

Dr. Santly said, trying to keep his face friendly and noncommittal, “You’re doing much better, Byron, boy. Much better.”

I didn’t say anything.

He said, “You worked through the whole thing in two hours and eight minutes. Remember the first time? You were sixteen hours killing him. Captain Van Wyck it was that time, remember? Who was it this time?”

“Chowderhead.” I looked at the male nurses. Doubtfully, they let go of my arms and legs.

“Chowderhead,” said Dr. Santly. “Oh—Roebuck. That boy,” he said mournfully, his expression saddened, “he’s not coming along nearly as well as you. Nearly. He can’t run through a cycle in less than five hours. And, that’s peculiar, it’s usually you he— Well, I better not say that, shall I? No sense setting up a counter-impression when your pores are all open, so to speak?” He smiled at me, but he was a little worried in back of the smile.

I sat up. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

“Give him a cigarette, Johnson,” the doctor ordered the male nurse standing alongside my right foot.

Johnson did. I fired up.

“You’re coming along splendidly,” Dr. Santly said. He was one of these psych guys that thinks if you say it’s so, it makes it so. You know that kind? “We’ll have you down under an hour before the end of the week. That’s marvelous progress. Then we can work on the conscious level! You’re doing extremely well, whether you know it or not. Why, in six months—say in eight months, because I like to be conservative—” he twinkled at me—“we’ll have you out of here! You’ll be the first of your crew to be discharged, you know that?”

“That’s nice,” I said. “The others aren’t doing so well?”

“No. Not at all well, most of them. Particularly Dr. Gilvey. The run-throughs leave him in terrible shape. I don’t mind admitting I’m worried about him.”

“That’s nice,” I said, and this time I meant it.

He looked at me thoughtfully, but all he did was say to the male nurses, “He’s all right now. Help him off the table.”

It was hard standing up. I had to hold onto the rail around the table for a minute. I said my set little speech: “Dr. Santly, I want to tell you again how grateful I am for this. I was reconciled to living the rest of my life confined to one part of the country, the way the other crews always did. But this is much better. I appreciate it. I’m sure the others do, too.”

“Of course, boy. Of course.” He took out a fountain pen and made a note on my chart; I couldn’t see what it was, but he looked gratified. “It’s no more than you have coming to you, Byron,” he said. “I’m grateful that I could be the one to make it come to pass.”

He glanced conspiratorially at the male nurses. “You know how important this is to me. It’s the triumph of a whole new approach to psychic rehabilitation. I mean to say our heroes of space travel are entitled to freedom when they come back home to Earth, aren’t they?”

“Definitely,” I said, scrubbing some of the sweat off my face onto my sleeve.

“So we’ve got to end this system of designated areas. We can’t avoid the tensions that accompany space travel, no. But if we can help you eliminate harmful tensions with a few run-throughs, why, it’s not too high a price to pay, is it?”

“Not a bit.”

“I mean to say,” he said, warming up, “you can look forward to the time when you’ll be able to mingle with your old friends from the rocket, free and easy, without any need for restraint. That’s a lot to look forward to, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said. “I look forward to it very much,” I said. “And I know exactly what I’m going to do the first time I meet one—I mean without any restraints, as you say,” I said. And it was true; I did. Only it wouldn’t be a broken beer bottle that I would do it with.

I had much more elaborate ideas than that.

THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1958.

I

There was three of us—I mean if you count Arthur. We split up to avoid attracting attention. Engdahl just came in over the big bridge, but I had Arthur with me so I had to come the long way around.

When I registered at the desk, I said I was from Chicago. You know how it is. If you say you’re from Philadelphia, it’s like saying you’re from St. Louis or Detroit—I mean nobody lives in Philadelphia any more. Shows how things change. A couple years ago, Philadelphia was all the fashion. But not now, and I wanted to make a good impression.

I even tipped the bellboy a hundred and fifty dollars. I said: “Do me a favor. I’ve got my baggage booby-trapped—”

“Natch,” he said, only mildly impressed by the bill and a half, even less impressed by me.

“I mean really booby-trapped. Not just a burglar alarm. Besides the alarm, there’s a little surprise on a short fuse. So what I want you to do, if you hear the alarm go off, is come running. Right?”

“And get my head blown off?” He slammed my bags onto the floor. “Mister, you can take your damn money and—”

“Wait a minute, friend.” I passed over another hundred. “Please? It’s only a shaped charge. It won’t hurt anything except anybody who messes around, see? But I don’t want it to go off. So you come running when you hear the alarm and scare him away and—”

“No!” But he was less positive. I gave him two hundred more and he said grudgingly: “All right. If I hear it. Say, what’s in there that’s worth all that trouble?”

“Papers,” I lied.

He leered. “Sure.”

“No fooling, it’s just personal stuff. Not worth a penny to anybody but me, understand? So don’t get any ideas—”

He said in an injured tone: “Mister, naturally the staff won’t bother your stuff. What kind of a hotel do you think this is?”

“Of course, of course,” I said. But I knew he was lying, because I knew what kind of hotel it was. The staff was there only because being there gave them a chance to knock down more money than they could make any other way. What other kind of hotel was there?

Anyway, the way to keep the staff on my side was by bribery, and when he left I figured I had him at least temporarily bought. He promised to keep an eye on the room and he would be on duty for four more hours—which gave me plenty of time for my errands.

* * * *

I made sure Arthur was plugged in and cleaned myself up. They had water running—New York’s very good that way; they always have water running. It was even hot, or nearly hot. I let the shower splash over me for a while, because there was a lot of dust and dirt from the Bronx that I had to get off me. The way it looked, hardly anybody had been up that way since it happened.

I dried myself, got dressed and looked out the window. We were fairly high up—fifteenth floor. I could see the Hudson and the big bridge up north of us. There was a huge cloud of smoke coming from somewhere near the bridge on the other side of the river, but outside of that everything looked normal. You would have thought there were people in all those houses. Even the streets looked pretty good, until you noticed that hardly any of the cars were moving.

I opened the little bag and loaded my pockets with enough money to run my errands. At the door, I stopped and called over my shoulder to Arthur: “Don’t worry if I’m gone an hour or so. I’ll be back.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. That would have been pointless under the circumstances.

After Philadelphia, this place seemed to be bustling with activity. There were four or five people in the lobby and a couple of dozen more out in the street.

I tarried at the desk for several reasons. In the first place, I was expecting Vern Engdahl to try to contact me and I didn’t want him messing with the luggage—not while Arthur might get nervous. So I told the desk clerk that in case anybody came inquiring for Mr. Schlaepfer, which was the name I was using—my real name being Sam Dunlap—he was to be told that on no account was he to go to my room but to wait in the lobby; and in any case I would be back in an hour.

“Sure,” said the desk clerk, holding out his hand.

I crossed it with paper. “One other thing,” I said. “I need to buy an electric typewriter and some other stuff. Where can I get them?”

“PX,” he said promptly.

“PX?”

“What used to be Macy’s,” he explained. “You go out that door and turn right. It’s only about a block. You’ll see the sign.”

“Thanks.” That cost me a hundred more, but it was worth it. After all, money wasn’t a problem—not when we had just come from Philadelphia.

* * * *

The big sign read “PX,” but it wasn’t big enough to hide an older sign underneath that said “Macy’s.” I looked it over from across the street.

Somebody had organized it pretty well. I had to admire them. I mean I don’t like New York—wouldn’t live there if you gave me the place—but it showed a sort of go-getting spirit. It was no easy job getting a full staff together to run a department store operation, when any city the size of New York must have a couple thousand stores. You know what I mean? It’s like running a hotel or anything else—how are you going to get people to work for you when they can just as easily walk down the street, find a vacant store and set up their own operation?

But Macy’s was fully manned. There was a guard at every door and a walking patrol along the block-front between the entrances to make sure nobody broke in through the windows. They all wore green armbands and uniforms—well, lots of people wore uniforms.

I walked over.

“Afternoon,” I said affably to the guard. “I want to pick up some stuff. Typewriter, maybe a gun, you know. How do you work it here? Flat rate for all you can carry, prices marked on everything, or what is it?”

He stared at me suspiciously. He was a monster; six inches taller than I, he must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. He didn’t look very smart, which might explain why he was working for somebody else these days. But he was smart enough for what he had to do.

He demanded: “You new in town?”

I nodded.

He thought for a minute. “All right, buddy. Go on in. You pick out what you want, see? We’ll straighten out the price when you come out.”

“Fair enough.” I started past him.

He grabbed me by the arm. “No tricks,” he ordered. “You come out the same door you went in, understand?”

“Sure,” I said, “if that’s the way you want it.”

That figured—one way or another: either they got a commission, or, like everybody else, they lived on what they could knock down. I filed that for further consideration.

Inside, the store smelled pretty bad. It wasn’t just rot, though there was plenty of that; it was musty and stale and old. It was dark, or nearly. About one light in twenty was turned on, in order to conserve power. Naturally the escalators and so on weren’t running at all.

I passed a counter with pencils and ball-point pens in a case. Most of them were gone—somebody hadn’t bothered to go around in back and had simply knocked the glass out—but I found one that worked and an old order pad to write on. Over by the elevators there was a store directory, so I went over and checked it, making a list of the departments worth visiting.

Office Supplies would be the typewriter. Garden & Home was a good bet—maybe I could find a little wheelbarrow to save carrying the typewriter in my arms. What I wanted was one of the big ones where all the keys are solenoid-operated instead of the cam-and-roller arrangement—that was all Arthur could operate. And those things were heavy, as I knew. That was why we had ditched the old one in the Bronx.

Sporting Goods—that would be for a gun, if there were any left. Naturally, they were about the first to go after it happened, when everybody wanted a gun. I mean everybody who lived through it. I thought about clothes—it was pretty hot in New York—and decided I might as well take a look.

Typewriter, clothes, gun, wheelbarrow. I made one more note on the pad—try the tobacco counter, but I didn’t have much hope for that. They had used cigarettes for currency around this area for a while, until they got enough bank vaults open to supply big bills. It made cigarettes scarce.

I turned away and noticed for the first time that one of the elevators was stopped on the main floor. The doors were closed, but they were glass doors, and although there wasn’t any light inside, I could see the elevator was full. There must have been thirty or forty people in the car when it happened.

I’d been thinking that, if nothing else, these New Yorkers were pretty neat—I mean if you don’t count the Bronx. But here were thirty or forty skeletons that nobody had even bothered to clear away.

You call that neat? Right in plain view on the ground floor, where everybody who came into the place would be sure to go—I mean if it had been on one of the upper floors, what difference would it have made?

I began to wish we were out of the city. But naturally that would have to wait until we finished what we came here to do—otherwise, what was the point of coming all the way here in the first place?

* * * *

The tobacco counter was bare. I got the wheelbarrow easily enough—there were plenty of those, all sizes; I picked out a nice light red-and-yellow one with rubber-tired wheel. I rolled it over to Sporting Goods on the same floor, but that didn’t work out too well. I found a 30-30 with telescopic sights, only there weren’t any cartridges to fit it—or anything else. I took the gun anyway; Engdahl would probably have some extra ammunition.

Men’s Clothing was a waste of time, too—I guess these New Yorkers were too lazy to do laundry. But I found the typewriter I wanted.

I put the whole load into the wheelbarrow, along with a couple of odds and ends that caught my eye as I passed through Housewares, and I bumped as gently as I could down the shallow steps of the motionless escalator to the ground floor.

I came down the back way, and that was a mistake. It led me right past the food department. Well, I don’t have to tell you what that was like, with all the exploded cans and the rats as big as poodles. But I found some cologne and soaked a handkerchief in it, and with that over my nose, and some fast footwork for the rats, I managed to get to one of the doors.

It wasn’t the one I had come in, but that was all right. I sized up the guard. He looked smart enough for a little bargaining, but not too smart; and if I didn’t like his price, I could always remember that I was supposed to go out the other door.

I said: “Psst!”

When he turned around, I said rapidly: “Listen, this isn’t the way I came in, but if you want to do business, it’ll be the way I come out.”

He thought for a second, and then he smiled craftily and said: “All right, come on.”

Well, we haggled. The gun was the big thing—he wanted five thousand for that and he wouldn’t come down. The wheelbarrow he was willing to let go for five hundred. And the typewriter—he scowled at the typewriter as though it were contagious.

“What you want that for?” he asked suspiciously. I shrugged.

“Well—” he scratched his head—“a thousand?”

I shook my head.

“Five hundred?”

I kept on shaking.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “Look, you take the other things for six thousand—including what you got in your pockets that you don’t think I know about, see? And I’ll throw this in. How about it?”

That was fine as far as I was concerned, but just on principle I pushed him a little further. “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll give you fifty bills for the lot, take it or leave it. Otherwise I’ll walk right down the street to Gimbel’s and—”

He guffawed.

“Whats the matter?” I demanded.

“Pal,” he said, “you kill me. Stranger in town, hey? You can’t go anyplace but here.”

“Why not?”

“Account of there ain’t anyplace else. See, the chief here don’t like competition. So we don’t have to worry about anybody taking their trade elsewhere, like—we burned all the other places down.”

That explained a couple of things. I counted out the money, loaded the stuff back in the wheelbarrow and headed for the Statler; but all the time I was counting and loading, I was talking to Big Brainless; and by the time I was actually on the way, I knew a little more about this “chief.”

And that was kind of important, because he was the man we were going to have to know very well.

II

I locked the door of the hotel room. Arthur was peeping out of the suitcase at me.

I said: “I’m back. I got your typewriter.” He waved his eye at me.

I took out the little kit of electricians’ tools I carried, tipped the typewriter on its back and began sorting out leads. I cut them free from the keyboard, soldered on a ground wire, and began taping the leads to the strands of a yard of forty-ply multiplex cable.

It was a slow and dull job. I didn’t have to worry about which solenoid lead went to which strand—Arthur could sort them out. But all the same it took an hour, pretty near, and I was getting hungry by the time I got the last connection taped. I shifted the typewriter so that both Arthur and I could see it, rolled in a sheet of paper and hooked the cable to Arthur’s receptors.

Nothing happened.

“Oh,” I said. “Excuse me, Arthur. I forgot to plug it in.”

I found a wall socket. The typewriter began to hum and then it started to rattle and type:

DURA AUK UKOO RQK MWS AQB

It stopped.

“Come on, Arthur,” I ordered impatiently. “Sort them out, will you?”

Laboriously it typed:

!!!

Then, for a time, there was a clacking and thumping as he typed random letters, peeping out of the suitcase to see what he had typed, until the sheet I had put in was used up.

I replaced it and waited, as patiently as I could, smoking one of the last of my cigarettes. After fifteen minutes or so, he had the hang of it pretty well. He typed:

YOU DAMQXXX DAMN FOOL WHUXXX WHY DID YOU LEAQNXXX LEAVE ME ALONE Q Q

“Aw, Arthur,” I said. “Use your head, will you? I couldn’t carry that old typewriter of yours all the way down through the Bronx. It was getting pretty beat-up. Anyway, I’ve only got two hands—”

YOU LOUSE, it rattled, ARE YOU TRYONXXX TRYING TO INSULT ME BECAUSE I DONT HAVE ANY Q Q

“Arthur!” I said, shocked. “You know better than that!”

The typewriter slammed its carriage back and forth ferociously a couple of times. Then he said: ALL RIGHT SAM YOU KNOW YOUVE GOT ME BY THE THROAT SO YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT TO WITH ME WHO CARES ABOUT MY FEELINGS ANYHOW

“Please don’t take that attitude,” I coaxed.

WELL

“Please?”

He capitulated. ALL RIGHT SAY HEARD ANYTHING FROM ENGDAHL Q Q

“No.”

ISNT THAT JUST LIKE HIM Q Q CANT DEPEND ON THAT MAN HE WAS THE LOUSIEST ELECTRICIANS MATE ON THE SEA SPRITE AND HE ISNT MUCH BETTER NOW SAY SAM REMEMBER WHEN WE HAD TO GET HIM OUT OF THE JUG IN NEWPORT NEWS BECAUSE

I settled back and relaxed. I might as well. That was the trouble with getting Arthur a new typewriter after a couple of days without one—he had so much garrulity stored up in his little brain, and the only person to spill it on was me.

* * * *

Apparently I fell asleep. Well, I mean I must have, because I woke up. I had been dreaming I was on guard post outside the Yard at Portsmouth, and it was night, and I looked up and there was something up there, all silvery and bad. It was a missile—and that was silly, because you never see a missile. But this was a dream.

And the thing burst, like a Roman candle flaring out, all sorts of comet-trails of light, and then the whole sky was full of bright and colored snow. Little tiny flakes of light coming down, a mist of light, radiation dropping like dew; and it was so pretty, and I took a deep breath. And my lungs burned out like slow fire, and I coughed myself to death with the explosions of the missile banging against my flaming ears….

Well, it was a dream. It probably wasn’t like that at all—and if it had been, I wasn’t there to see it, because I was tucked away safe under a hundred and twenty fathoms of Atlantic water. All of us were on the Sea Sprite.

But it was a bad dream and it bothered me, even when I woke up and found that the banging explosions of the missile were the noise of Arthur’s typewriter carriage crashing furiously back and forth.

He peeped out of the suitcase and saw that I was awake. He demanded: HOW CAN YOU FALL ASLEEP WHEN WERE IN A PLACE LIKE THIS Q Q ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN SAM I KNOW YOU DONT CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO ME BUT FOR YOUR OWN SAKE YOU SHOULDNT

“Oh, dry up,” I said.

Being awake, I remembered that I was hungry. There was still no sign of Engdahl or the others, but that wasn’t too surprising—they hadn’t known exactly when we would arrive. I wished I had thought to bring some food back to the room. It looked like long waiting and I wouldn’t want to leave Arthur alone again—after all, he was partly right.

I thought of the telephone.

On the off-chance that it might work, I picked it up. Amazing, a voice from the desk answered.

I crossed my fingers and said: “Room service?”

And the voice answered amiably enough: “Hold on, buddy. I’ll see if they answer.”

Clicking and a good long wait. Then a new voice said: “Whaddya want?”

There was no sense pressing my luck by asking for anything like a complete meal. I would be lucky if I got a sandwich.

I said: “Please, may I have a Spam sandwich on Rye Krisp and some coffee for Room Fifteen Forty-one?”

“Please, you go to hell!” the voice snarled. “What do you think this is, some damn delicatessen? You want liquor, we’ll get you liquor. That’s what room service is for!”

I hung up. What was the use of arguing? Arthur was clacking peevishly:

WHATS THE MATTER SAM YOU THINKING OF YOUR BELLY AGAIN Q Q

“You would be if you—” I started, and then I stopped. Arthur’s feelings were delicate enough already. I mean suppose that all you had left of what you were born with was a brain in a kind of sardine can, wouldn’t you be sensitive? Well, Arthur was more sensitive than you would be, believe me. Of course, it was his own foolish fault—I mean you don’t get a prosthetic tank unless you die by accident, or something like that, because if it’s disease they usually can’t save even the brain.

The phone rang again.

It was the desk clerk. “Say, did you get what you wanted?” he asked chummily.

“No.”

“Oh. Too bad,” he said, but cheerfully. “Listen, buddy, I forgot to tell you before. That Miss Engdahl you were expecting, she’s on her way up.”

I dropped the phone onto the cradle.

“Arthur!” I yelled. “Keep quiet for a while—trouble!”

He clacked once, and the typewriter shut itself off. I jumped for the door of the bathroom, cursing the fact that I didn’t have cartridges for the gun. Still, empty or not, it would have to do.

I ducked behind the bathroom door, in the shadows, covering the hall door. Because there were two things wrong with what the desk clerk had told me. Vern Engdahl wasn’t a “miss,” to begin with; and whatever name he used when he came to call on me, it wouldn’t be Vern Engdahl.

There was a knock on the door. I called: “Come in!”

The door opened and the girl who called herself Vern Engdahl came in slowly, looking around. I stayed quiet and out of sight until she was all the way in. She didn’t seem to be armed; there wasn’t anyone with her.

I stepped out, holding the gun on her. Her eyes opened wide and she seemed about to turn.

“Hold it! Come on in, you. Close the door!”

She did. She looked as though she were expecting me. I looked her over—medium pretty, not very tall, not very plump, not very old. I’d have guessed twenty or so, but that’s not my line of work; she could have been almost any age from seventeen on.

The typewriter switched itself on and began to pound agitatedly. I crossed over toward her and paused to peer at what Arthur was yacking about: SEARCH HER YOU DAMN FOOL MAYBE SHES GOT A GUN

I ordered: “Shut up, Arthur. I’m going to search her. You! Turn around!”

She shrugged and turned around, her hands in the air. Over her shoulder, she said: “You’re taking this all wrong, Sam. I came here to make a deal with you.”

“Sure you did.”

But her knowing my name was a blow, too. I mean what was the use of all that sneaking around if people in New York were going to know we were here?

I walked up close behind her and patted what there was to pat. There didn’t seem to be a gun.

“You tickle,” she complained.

I took her pocketbook away from her and went through it. No gun. A lot of money—an awful lot of money. I mean there must have been two or three hundred thousand dollars. There was nothing with a name on it in the pocketbook.

She said: “Can I put my hands down, Sam?”

“In a minute.” I thought for a second and then decided to do it—you know, I just couldn’t afford to take chances. I cleared my throat and ordered: “Take off your clothes.”

Her head jerked around and she stared at me. “What?”

“Take them off. You heard me.”

“Now wait a minute—” she began dangerously.

I said: “Do what I tell you, hear? How do I know you haven’t got a knife tucked away?”

She clenched her teeth. “Why, you dirty little man! What do you think—” Then she shrugged. She looked at me with contempt and said: “All right. What’s the difference?”

Well, there was a considerable difference. She began to unzip and unbutton and wriggle, and pretty soon she was standing there in her underwear, looking at me as though I were a two-headed worm. It was interesting, but kind of embarrassing. I could see Arthur’s eye-stalk waving excitedly out of the opened suitcase.

I picked up her skirt and blouse and shook them. I could feel myself blushing, and there didn’t seem to be anything in them.

I growled: “Okay, I guess that’s enough. You can put your clothes back on now.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said.

She looked at me thoughtfully and then shook her head as if she’d never seen anything like me before and never hoped to again. Without another word, she began to get back into her clothes. I had to admire her poise. I mean she was perfectly calm about the whole thing. You’d have thought she was used to taking her clothes off in front of strange men.

Well, for that matter, maybe she was; but it wasn’t any of my business.

Arthur was clacking distractedly, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I demanded: “All right, now who are you and what do you want?”

She pulled up a stocking and said: “You couldn’t have asked me that in the first place, could you? I’m Vern Eng—”

“Cut it out!”

She stared at me. “I was only going to say I’m Vern Engdahl’s partner. We’ve got a little business deal cooking and I wanted to talk to you about this proposition.”

Arthur squawked: WHATS ENGDAHL UP TO NOW Q Q SAM IM WARNING YOU I DONT LIKE THE LOOK OF THIS THIS WOMAN AND ENGDAHL ARE PROBABLY DOUBLECROSSING US

I said: “All right, Arthur, relax. I’m taking care of things. Now start over, you. What’s your name?”

She finished putting on her shoe and stood up. “Amy.”

“Last name?”

She shrugged and fished in her purse for a cigarette. “What does it matter? Mind if I sit down?”

“Go ahead,” I rumbled. “But don’t stop talking!”

“Oh,” she said, “we’ve got plenty of time to straighten things out.” She lit the cigarette and walked over to the chair by the window. On the way, she gave the luggage a good long look.

Arthur’s eyestalk cowered back into the suitcase as she came close. She winked at me, grinned, bent down and peered inside.

“My,” she said, “he’s a nice shiny one, isn’t he?”

The typewriter began to clatter frantically. I didn’t even bother to look; I told him: “Arthur, if you can’t keep quiet, you have to expect people to know you’re there.”

She sat down and crossed her legs. “Now then,” she said. “Frankly, he’s what I came to see you about. Vern told me you had a pross. I want to buy it.”

The typewriter thrashed its carriage back and forth furiously.

“Arthur isn’t for sale.”

“No?” She leaned back. “Vern’s already sold me his interest, you know. And you don’t really have any choice. You see, I’m in charge of materiel procurement for the Major. If you want to sell your share, fine. If you don’t, why, we requisition it anyhow. Do you follow?”

I was getting irritated—at Vern Engdahl, for whatever the hell he thought he was doing; but at her because she was handy. I shook my head.

“Fifty thousand dollars? I mean for your interest?”

“No.”

“Seventy-five?”

“No!”

“Oh, come on now. A hundred thousand?”

It wasn’t going to make any impression on her, but I tried to explain: “Arthur’s a friend of mine. He isn’t for sale.”

She shook her head. “What’s the matter with you? Engdahl wasn’t like this. He sold his interest for forty thousand and was glad to get it.”

Clatter-clatter-clatter from Arthur. I didn’t blame him for having hurt feelings that time.

Amy said in a discouraged tone: “Why can’t people be reasonable? The Major doesn’t like it when people aren’t reasonable.”

I lowered the gun and cleared my throat. “He doesn’t?” I asked, cuing her. I wanted to hear more about this Major, who seemed to have the city pretty well under his thumb.

“No, he doesn’t.” She shook her head sorrowfully. She said in an accusing voice: “You out-of-towners don’t know what it’s like to try to run a city the size of New York. There are fifteen thousand people here, do you know that? It isn’t one of your hick towns. And it’s worry, worry, worry all the time, trying to keep things going.”

“I bet,” I said sympathetically. “You’re, uh, pretty close to the Major?”

She said stiffly: “I’m not married to him, if that’s what you mean. Though I’ve had my chances…. But you see how it is. Fifteen thousand people to run a place the size of New York! It’s forty men to operate the power station, and twenty-five on the PX, and thirty on the hotel here. And then there are the local groceries, and the Army, and the Coast Guard, and the Air Force—though, really, that’s only two men—and—Well, you get the picture.”

“I certainly do. Look, what kind of a guy is the Major?”

She shrugged. “A guy.”

“I mean what does he like?”

“Women, mostly,” she said, her expression clouded. “Come on now. What about it?”

I stalled. “What do you want Arthur for?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “What do you think? To relieve the manpower shortage, naturally. There’s more work than there are men. Now if the Major could just get hold of a couple of prosthetics, like this thing here, why, he could put them in the big installations. This one used to be an engineer or something, Vern said.”

“Well … like an engineer.”

Amy shrugged. “So why couldn’t we connect him up with the power station? It’s been done. The Major knows that—he was in the Pentagon when they switched all the aircraft warning net over from computer to prosthetic control. So why couldn’t we do the same thing with our power station and release forty men for other assignments? This thing could work day, night, Sundays—what’s the difference when you’re just a brain in a sardine can?”

Clatter-rattle-bang.

She looked startled. “Oh. I forgot he was listening.”

“No deal,” I said.

She said: “A hundred and fifty thousand?”

A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I considered that for a while. Arthur clattered warningly.

“Well,” I temporized, “I’d have to be sure he was getting into good hands—”

The typewriter thrashed wildly. The sheet of paper fluttered out of the carriage. He’d used it up. Automatically I picked it up—it was covered with imprecations, self-pity and threats—and started to put a new one in.

“No,” I said, bending over the typewriter, “I guess I couldn’t sell him. It just wouldn’t be right—”

That was my mistake; it was the wrong time for me to say that, because I had taken my eyes off her.

The room bent over and clouted me.

I half turned, not more than a fraction conscious, and I saw this Amy girl, behind me, with the shoe still in her hand, raised to give me another blackjacking on the skull.

The shoe came down, and it must have weighed more than it looked, and even the fractional bit of consciousness went crashing away.

III

I have to tell you about Vern Engdahl. We were all from the Sea Sprite, of course—me and Vern and even Arthur. The thing about Vern is that he was the lowest-ranking one of us all—only an electricians’ mate third, I mean when anybody paid any attention to things like that—and yet he was pretty much doing the thinking for the rest of us. Coming to New York was his idea—he told us that was the only place we could get what we wanted.

Well, as long as we were carrying Arthur along with us, we pretty much needed Vern, because he was the one who knew how to keep the lash-up going. You’ve got no idea what kind of pumps and plumbing go into a prosthetic tank until you’ve seen one opened up. And, naturally, Arthur didn’t want any breakdowns without somebody around to fix things up.

The Sea Sprite, maybe you know, was one of the old liquid-sodium-reactor subs—too slow for combat duty, but as big as a barn, so they made it a hospital ship. We were cruising deep when the missiles hit, and, of course, when we came up, there wasn’t much for a hospital ship to do. I mean there isn’t any sense fooling around with anybody who’s taken a good deep breath of fallout.

So we went back to Newport News to see what had happened. And we found out what had happened. And there wasn’t anything much to do except pay off the crew and let them go. But us three stuck together. Why not? It wasn’t as if we had any families to go back to any more.

Vern just loved all this stuff—he’d been an Eagle Scout; maybe that had something to do with it—and he showed us how to boil drinking water and forage in the woods and all like that, because nobody in his right mind wanted to go near any kind of a town, until the cold weather set in, anyway. And it was always Vern, Vern, telling us what to do, ironing out our troubles.

It worked out, except that there was this one thing. Vern had bright ideas. But he didn’t always tell us what they were.

So I wasn’t so very surprised when I came to. I mean there I was, tied up, with this girl Amy standing over me, holding the gun like a club. Evidently she’d found out that there weren’t any cartridges. And in a couple of minutes there was a knock on the door, and she yelled, “Come in,” and in came Vern. And the man who was with him had to be somebody important, because there were eight or ten other men crowding in close behind.

I didn’t need to look at the oak leaves on his shoulders to realize that here was the chief, the fellow who ran this town, the Major.

It was just the kind of thing Vern would do.

Vern said, with the look on his face that made strange officers wonder why this poor persecuted man had been forced to spend so much time in the brig: “Now, Major, I’m sure we can straighten all this out. Would you mind leaving me alone with my friend here for a moment?”

The Major teetered on his heels, thinking. He was a tall, youngish-bald type, with a long, worried, horselike face. He said: “Ah, do you think we should?”

“I guarantee there’ll be no trouble, Major,” Vern promised.

The Major pulled at his little mustache. “Very well,” he said. “Amy, you come along.”

“We’ll be right here, Major,” Vern said reassuringly, escorting him to the door.

“You bet you will,” said the Major, and tittered. “Ah, bring that gun along with you, Amy. And be sure this man knows that we have bullets.”

They closed the door. Arthur had been cowering in his suitcase, but now his eyestalk peeped out and the rattling and clattering from that typewriter sounded like the Battle of the Bulge.

I demanded: “Come on, Vern. What’s this all about?”

Vern said: “How much did they offer you?”

Clatter-bang-BANG. I peeked, and Arthur was saying: WARNED YOU SAM THAT ENGDAHL WAS UP TO TRICKS PLEASE SAM PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HIT HIM ON THE HEAD KNOCK HIM OUT HE MUST HAVE A GUN SO GET IT AND SHOOT OUR WAY OUT OF HERE

“A hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I said.

Vern looked outraged. “I only got forty!”

Arthur clattered: VERN I APPEAL TO YOUR COMMON DECENCY WERE OLD SHIPMATES VERN REMEMBER ALL THE TIMES I

“Still,” Vern mused, “it’s all common funds anyway, right? Arthur belongs to both of us.”

I DONT DONT DONT REPEAT DONT BELONG TO ANYBODY BUT ME

“That’s true,” I said grudgingly. “But I carried him, remember.”

SAM WHATS THE MATTER WITH YOU Q Q I DONT LIKE THE EXPRESSION ON YOUR FACE LISTEN SAM YOU ARENT

Vern said, “A hundred and fifty thousand, remember.”

THINKING OF SELLING

“And of course we couldn’t get out of here,” Vern pointed out. “They’ve got us surrounded.”

ME TO THESE RATS Q Q SAM VERN PLEASE DONT SCARE ME

I said, pointing to the fluttering paper in the rattling machine: “You’re worrying our friend.”

Vern shrugged impatiently.

I KNEW I SHOULDNT HAVE TRUSTED YOU, Arthur wept. THATS ALL I MEAN TO YOU EH

Vern said: “Well, Sam? Let’s take the cash and get this thing over with. After all, he will have the best of treatment.”

It was a little like selling your sister into white slavery, but what else was there to do? Besides, I kind of trusted Vern.

“All right,” I said.

What Arthur said nearly scorched the paper.

Vern helped pack Arthur up for moving. I mean it was just a matter of pulling the plugs out and making sure he had a fresh battery, but Vern wanted to supervise it himself. Because one of the little things Vern had up his sleeve was that he had found a spot for himself on the Major’s payroll. He was now the official Prosthetic (Human) Maintenance Department Chief.

The Major said to me: “Ah, Dunlap. What sort of experience have you had?”

“Experience?”

“In the Navy. Your friend Engdahl suggested you might want to join us here.”

“Oh. I see what you mean.” I shook my head. “Nothing that would do you any good, I’m afraid. I was a yeoman.”

“Yeoman?”

“Like a company clerk,” I explained. “I mean I kept records and cut orders and made out reports and all like that.”

“Company clerk!” The eyes in the long horsy face gleamed. “Ah, you’re mistaken, Dunlap! Why, that’s just what we need. Our morning reports are in foul shape. Foul! Come over to HQ. Lieutenant Bankhead will give you a lift.”

“Lieutenant Bankhead?”

I got an elbow in my ribs for that. It was that girl Amy, standing alongside me. “I,” she said, “am Lieutenant Bankhead.”

Well, I went along with her, leaving Engdahl and Arthur behind. But I must admit I wasn’t sure of my reception.

Out in front of the hotel was a whole fleet of cars—three or four of them, at least. There was a big old Cadillac that looked like a gangsters’ car—thick glass in the windows, tires that looked like they belonged on a truck. I was willing to bet it was bulletproof and also that it belonged to the Major. I was right both times. There was a little MG with the top down, and a couple of light trucks. Every one of them was painted bright orange, and every one of them had the star-and-bar of the good old United States Army on its side.

It took me back to old times—all but the unmilitary color. Amy led me to the MG and pointed.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat. She got in the other side and we were off.

It was a little uncomfortable on account of I wasn’t just sure whether I ought to apologize for making her take her clothes off. And then she tramped on the gas of that little car and I didn’t think much about being embarrassed or about her black lace lingerie. I was only thinking about one thing—how to stay alive long enough to get out of that car.

IV

See, what we really wanted was an ocean liner.

The rest of us probably would have been happy enough to stay in Lehigh County, but Arthur was getting restless.

He was a terrible responsibility, in a way. I suppose there were a hundred thousand people or so left in the country, and not more than forty or fifty of them were like Arthur—I mean if you want to call a man in a prosthetic tank a “person.” But we all did. We’d got pretty used to him. We’d shipped together in the war—and survived together, as a few of the actual fighters did, those who were lucky enough to be underwater or high in the air when the ICBMs landed—and as few civilians did.

I mean there wasn’t much chance for surviving, for anybody who happened to be breathing the open air when it happened. I mean you can do just so much about making a “clean” H-bomb, and if you cut out the long-life fission products, the short-life ones get pretty deadly.

Anyway, there wasn’t much damage, except of course that everybody was dead. All the surface vessels lost their crews. All the population of the cities were gone. And so then, when Arthur slipped on the gangplank coming into Newport News and broke his fool neck, why, we had the whole staff of the Sea Sprite to work on him. I mean what else did the surgeons have to do?

Of course, that was a long time ago.

But we’d stayed together. We headed for the farm country around Allentown, Pennsylvania, because Arthur and Vern Engdahl claimed to know it pretty well. I think maybe they had some hope of finding family or friends, but naturally there wasn’t any of that. And when you got into the inland towns, there hadn’t been much of an attempt to clean them up. At least the big cities and the ports had been gone over, in some spots anyway, by burial squads. Although when we finally decided to move out and went to Philadelphia—

Well, let’s be fair; there had been fighting around there after the big fight. Anyway, that wasn’t so very uncommon. That was one of the reasons that for a long time—four or five years, at any rate—we stayed away from big cities.

We holed up in a big farmhouse in Lehigh County. It had its own generator from a little stream, and that took care of Arthur’s power needs; and the previous occupants had been just crazy about stashing away food. There was enough to last a century, and that took care of the two of us. We appreciated that. We even took the old folks out and gave them a decent burial. I mean they’d all been in the family car, so we just had to tow it to a gravel pit and push it in.

The place had its own well, with an electric pump and a hot-water system—oh, it was nice. I was sorry to leave but, frankly, Arthur was driving us nuts.

We never could make the television work—maybe there weren’t any stations near enough. But we pulled in a couple of radio stations pretty well and Arthur got a big charge out of listening to them—see, he could hear four or five at a time and I suppose that made him feel better than the rest of us.

He heard that the big cities were cleaned up and every one of them seemed to want immigrants—they were pleading, pleading all the time, like the TV-set and vacuum-cleaner people used to in the old days; they guaranteed we’d like it if we only came to live in Philly, or Richmond, or Baltimore, or wherever. And I guess Arthur kind of hoped we might find another pross. And then—well, Engdahl came up with this idea of an ocean liner.

It figured. I mean you get out in the middle of the ocean and what’s the difference what it’s like on land? And it especially appealed to Arthur because he wanted to do some surface sailing. He never had when he was real—I mean when he had arms and legs like anybody else. He’d gone right into the undersea service the minute he got out of school.

And—well, sailing was what Arthur knew something about and I suppose even a prosthetic man wants to feel useful. It was like Amy said: He could be hooked up to an automated factory—

Or to a ship.

* * * *

HQ for the Major’s Temporary Military Government—that’s what the sign said—was on the 91st floor of the Empire State Building, and right there that tells you something about the man. I mean you know how much power it takes to run those elevators all the way up to the top? But the Major must have liked being able to look down on everybody else.

Amy Bankhead conducted me to his office and sat me down to wait for His Military Excellency to arrive. She filled me in on him, to some degree. He’d been an absolute nothing before the war; but he had a reserve commission in the Air Force, and when things began to look sticky, they’d called him up and put him in a Missile Master control point, underground somewhere up around Ossining.

He was the duty officer when it happened, and naturally he hadn’t noticed anything like an enemy aircraft, and naturally the anti-missile missiles were still rusting in their racks all around the city; but since the place had been operating on sealed ventilation, the duty complement could stay there until the short half-life radioisotopes wore themselves out.

And then the Major found out that he was not only in charge of the fourteen men and women of his division at the center—he was ranking United States Military Establishment officer farther than the eye could see. So he beat it, fast as he could, for New York, because what Army officer doesn’t dream about being stationed in New York? And he set up his Temporary Military Government—and that was nine years ago.

If there hadn’t been plenty to go around, I don’t suppose he would have lasted a week—none of these city chiefs would have. But as things were, he was in on the ground floor, and as newcomers trickled into the city, his boys already had things nicely organized.

It was a soft touch.

* * * *

Well, we were about a week getting settled in New York and things were looking pretty good. Vern calmed me down by pointing out that, after all, we had to sell Arthur, and hadn’t we come out of it plenty okay?

And we had. There was no doubt about it. Not only did we have a fat price for Arthur, which was useful because there were a lot of things we would have to buy, but we both had jobs working for the Major.

Vern was his specialist in the care and feeding of Arthur and I was his chief of office routine—and, as such, I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.

Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for non-compliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!”

We set up in a bachelor apartment on Central Park South—the Major had the penthouse; the whole building had been converted to barracks—and the first chance we got, Vern snaffled some transportation and we set out to find an ocean liner.

See, the thing was that an ocean liner isn’t easy to steal. I mean we’d scouted out the lay of the land before we ever entered the city itself, and there were plenty of liners, but there wasn’t one that looked like we could just jump in and sail it away. For that we needed an organization. Since we didn’t have one, the best thing to do was borrow the Major’s.

Vern turned up with Amy Bankhead’s MG, and he also turned up with Amy. I can’t say I was displeased, because I was beginning to like the girl; but did you ever try to ride three people in the seats of an MG? Well, the way to do it is by having one passenger sit in the other passenger’s lap, which would have been all right except that Amy insisted on driving.

We headed downtown and over to the West Side. The Major’s Topographical Section—one former billboard artist—had prepared road maps with little red-ink Xs marking the streets that were blocked, which was most of the streets; but we charted a course that would take us where we wanted to go. Thirty-fourth Street was open, and so was Fifth Avenue all of its length, so we scooted down Fifth, crossed over, got under the Elevated Highway and whined along uptown toward the Fifties.

“There’s one,” cried Amy, pointing.

I was on Vern’s lap, so I was making the notes. It was a Fruit Company combination freighter-passenger vessel. I looked at Vern, and Vern shrugged as best he could, so I wrote it down; but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted. No, not by a long shot.

Still, the thing to do was to survey our resources, and then we could pick the one we liked best. We went all the way up to the end of the big-ship docks, and then turned and came back down, all the way to the Battery. It wasn’t pleasure driving, exactly—half a dozen times we had to get out the map and detour around impenetrable jams of stalled and empty cars—or anyway, if they weren’t exactly empty, the people in them were no longer in shape to get out of our way. But we made it.

We counted sixteen ships in dock that looked as though they might do for our purposes. We had to rule out the newer ones and the reconverted jobs. I mean, after all, U-235 just lasts so long, and you can steam around the world on a walnut-shell of it, or whatever it is, but you can’t store it. So we had to stick with the ships that were powered with conventional fuel—and, on consideration, only oil at that.

But that left sixteen, as I say. Some of them, though, had suffered visibly from being left untended for nearly a decade, so that for our purposes they might as well have been abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic; we didn’t have the equipment or ambition to do any great amount of salvage work.

The Empress of Britain would have been a pretty good bet, for instance, except that it was lying at pretty nearly a forty-five-degree angle in its berth. So was the United States, and so was the Caronia. The Stockholm was straight enough, but I took a good look, and only one tier of portholes was showing above the water—evidently it had settled nice and even, but it was on the bottom all the same. Well, that mud sucks with a fine tight grip, and we weren’t going to try to loosen it.

All in all, eleven of the sixteen ships were out of commission just from what we could see driving by.

Vern and I looked at each other. We stood by the MG, while Amy sprawled her legs over the side and waited for us to make up our minds.

“Not good, Sam,” said Vern, looking worried.

I said: “Well, that still leaves five. There’s the Vulcania, the Cristobal—”

“Too small.”

“All right. The Manhattan, the Liberté and the Queen Elizabeth.”

Amy looked up, her eyes gleaming. “Where’s the question?” she demanded. “Naturally, it’s the Queen.”

I tried to explain. “Please, Amy. Leave these things to us, will you?”

“But the Major won’t settle for anything but the best!”

“The Major?”

I glanced at Vern, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Well,” I said, “look at the problems, Amy. First we have to check it over. Maybe it’s been burned out—how do we know? Maybe the channel isn’t even deep enough to float it any more—how do we know? Where are we going to get the oil for it?”

“We’ll get the oil,” Amy said cheerfully.

“And what if the channel isn’t deep enough?”

“She’ll float,” Amy promised. “At high tide, anyway. Even if the channel hasn’t been dredged in ten years.”

I shrugged and gave up. What was the use of arguing?

We drove back to the Queen Elizabeth and I had to admit that there was a certain attraction about that big old dowager. We all got out and strolled down the pier, looking over as much as we could see.

The pier had never been cleaned out. It bothered me a little—I mean I don’t like skeletons much—but Amy didn’t seem to mind. The Queen must have just docked when it happened, because you could still see bony queues, as though they were waiting for customs inspection.

Some of the bags had been opened and the contents scattered around—naturally, somebody was bound to think of looting the Queen. But there were as many that hadn’t been touched as that had been opened, and the whole thing had the look of an amateur attempt. And that was all to the good, because the fewer persons who had boarded the Queen in the decade since it happened, the more chance of our finding it in usable shape.

Amy saw a gangplank still up, and with cries of girlish glee ran aboard.

I plucked at Vern’s sleeve. “You,” I said. “What’s this about what the Major won’t settle for less than?”

He said: “Aw, Sam, I had to tell her something, didn’t I?”

“But what about the Major—”

He said patiently: “You don’t understand. It’s all part of my plan, see? The Major is the big thing here and he’s got a birthday coming up next month. Well, the way I put it to Amy, we’ll fix him up with a yacht as a birthday present, see? And, of course, when it’s all fixed up and ready to lift anchor—”

I said doubtfully: “That’s the hard way, Vern. Why couldn’t we just sort of get steam up and take off?”

He shook his head. “That is the hard way. This way we get all the help and supplies we need, understand?”

I shrugged. That was the way it was, so what was the use of arguing?

But there was one thing more on my mind. I said: “How come Amy’s so interested in making the Major happy?”

Vern chortled. “Jealous, eh?”

“I asked a question!”

“Calm down, boy. It’s just that he’s in charge of things here so naturally she wants to keep in good with him.”

I scowled. “I keep hearing stories about how the Major’s chief interest in life is women. You sure she isn’t ambitious to be one of them?”

He said: “The reason she wants to keep him happy is so she won’t be one of them.”

V

The name of the place was Bayonne.

Vern said: “One of them’s got to have oil, Sam. It has to.”

“Sure,” I said.

“There’s no question about it. Look, this is where the tankers came to discharge oil. They’d come in here, pump the oil into the refinery tanks and—”

“Vern,” I said. “Let’s look, shall we?”

He shrugged, and we hopped off the little outboard motorboat onto a landing stage. The tankers towered over us, rusty and screeching as the waves rubbed them against each other.

There were fifty of them there at least, and we poked around them for hours. The hatches were rusted shut and unmanageable, but you could tell a lot by sniffing. Gasoline odor was out; smell of seaweed and dead fish was out; but the heavy, rank smell of fuel oil, that was what we were sniffing for. Crews had been aboard these ships when the missiles came, and crews were still aboard.

Beyond the two-part superstructures of the tankers, the skyline of New York was visible. I looked up, sweating, and saw the Empire State Building and imagined Amy up there, looking out toward us.

She knew we were here. It was her idea. She had scrounged up a naval engineer, or what she called a naval engineer—he had once been a stoker on a ferryboat. But he claimed he knew what he was talking about when he said the only thing the Queen needed to make ’er go was oil. And so we left him aboard to tinker and polish, with a couple of helpers Amy detached from the police force, and we tackled the oil problem.

Which meant Bayonne. Which was where we were.

It had to be a tanker with at least a fair portion of its cargo intact, because the Queen was a thirsty creature, drinking fuel not by the shot or gallon but by the ton.

“Saaam! Sam Dunlap!”

I looked up, startled. Five ships away, across the U of the mooring, Vern Engdahl was bellowing at me through cupped hands.

“I found it!” he shouted. “Oil, lots of oil! Come look!”

I clasped my hands over my head and looked around. It was a long way around to the tanker Vern was on, hopping from deck to deck, detouring around open stretches.

I shouted: “I’ll get the boat!”

He waved and climbed up on the rail of the ship, his feet dangling over, looking supremely happy and pleased with himself. He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the upward sweep of the rail and waited.

It took me a little time to get back to the boat and a little more time than that to get the damn motor started. Vern! “Let’s not take that lousy little twelve horse-power, Sam,” he’d said reasonably. “The twenty-five’s more what we need!” And maybe it was, but none of the motors had been started in most of a decade, and the twenty-five was just that much harder to start now.

I struggled over it, swearing, for twenty minutes or more.

The tanker by whose side we had tied up began to swing toward me as the tide changed to outgoing.

* * * *

For a moment there, I was counting seconds, expecting to have to make a jump for it before the big red steel flank squeezed the little outboard flat against the piles.

But I got it started—just about in time. I squeezed out of the trap with not much more than a yard to spare and threaded my way into open water.

There was a large, threatening sound, like an enormous slow cough.

I rounded the stern of the last tanker between me and open water, and looked into the eye of a fire-breathing dragon.

Vern and his cigarettes! The tanker was loose and ablaze, bearing down on me with the slow drift of the ebbing tide. From the hatches on the forward deck, two fountains of fire spurted up and out, like enormous nostrils spouting flame. The hawsers had been burned through, the ship was adrift, I was in its path—

And so was the frantically splashing figure of Vern Engdahl, trying desperately to swim out of the way in the water before it.

What kept it from blowing up in our faces I will never know, unless it was the pressure in the tanks forcing the flame out; but it didn’t. Not just then. Not until I had Engdahl aboard and we were out in the middle of the Hudson, staring back; and then it went up all right, all at once, like a missile or a volcano; and there had been fifty tankers in that one mooring, but there weren’t any any more, or not in shape for us to use.

I looked at Engdahl.

He said defensively: “Honest, Sam, I thought it was oil. It smelled like oil. How was I to know—”

“Shut up,” I said.

He shrugged, injured. “But it’s all right, Sam. No fooling. There are plenty of other tankers around. Plenty. Down toward the Amboys, maybe moored out in the channel. There must be. We’ll find them.”

“No,” I said. “You will.”

And that was all I said, because I am forgiving by nature; but I thought a great deal more.

Surprisingly, though, he did find a tanker with a full load, the very next day.

It became a question of getting the tanker to the Queen. I left that part up to Vern, since he claimed to be able to handle it.

It took him two weeks. First it was finding the tanker, then it was locating a tug in shape to move, then it was finding someone to pilot the tug. Then it was waiting for a clear and windless day—because the pilot he found had got all his experience sailing Star boats on Long Island Sound—and then it was easing the tanker out of Newark Bay, into the channel, down to the pier in the North River—

Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn’t have to do it.

But I had enough to keep me busy at that. I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot. There was no need for any great skill, since there weren’t going to be very many vessels to communicate with.

Things began to move.

The advantage of a ship like the Queen, for our purposes, was that the thing was pretty well automated to start out with. I mean never mind what the seafaring unions required in the way of flesh-and-blood personnel. What it came down to was that one man in the bridge or wheelhouse could pretty well make any part of the ship go or not go.

The engine-room telegraph wasn’t hooked up to control the engines, no. But the wiring diagram needed only a few little changes to get the same effect, because where in the original concept a human being would take a look at the repeater down in the engine room, nod wisely, and push a button that would make the engines stop, start, or whatever—why, all we had to do was cut out the middleman, so to speak.

Our genius of the soldering iron replaced flesh and blood with some wiring and, presto, we had centralized engine control.

The steering was even easier. Steering was a matter of electronic control and servomotors to begin with. Windjammers in the old movies might have a man lashed to the wheel whose muscle power turned the rudder, but, believe me, a big superliner doesn’t. The rudders weigh as much as any old windjammer ever did from stem to stern; you have to have motors to turn them; and it was only a matter of getting out the old soldering iron again.

By the time we were through, we had every operational facility of the Queen hooked up to a single panel on the bridge.

Engdahl showed up with the oil tanker just about the time we got the wiring complete. We rigged up a pump and filled the bunkers till they were topped off full. We guessed, out of hope and ignorance, that there was enough in there to take us half a dozen times around the world at normal cruising speed, and maybe there was. Anyway, it didn’t matter, for surely we had enough to take us anywhere we wanted to go, and then there would be more.

We crossed our fingers, turned our ex-ferry-stoker loose, pushed a button—

Smoke came out of the stacks.

The antique screws began to turn over. Astern, a sort of hump of muddy water appeared. The Queen quivered underfoot. The mooring hawsers creaked and sang.

“Turn her off!” screamed Engdahl. “She’s headed for Times Square!”

Well, that was an exaggeration, but not much of one; and there wasn’t any sense in stirring up the bottom mud. I pushed buttons and the screws stopped. I pushed another button, and the big engines quietly shut themselves off, and in a few moments the stacks stopped puffing their black smoke.

The ship was alive.

Solemnly Engdahl and I shook hands. We had the thing licked. All, that is, except for the one small problem of Arthur.

* * * *

The thing about Arthur was they had put him to work.

It was in the power station, just as Amy had said, and Arthur didn’t like it. The fact that he didn’t like it was a splendid reason for staying away from there, but I let my kind heart overrule my good sense and paid him a visit.

It was way over on the East Side, miles and miles from any civilized area. I borrowed Amy’s MG, and borrowed Amy to go with it, and the two of us packed a picnic lunch and set out. There were reports of deer on Avenue A, so I brought a rifle, but we never saw one; and if you want my opinion, those reports were nothing but wishful thinking. I mean if people couldn’t survive, how could deer?

We finally threaded our way through the clogged streets and parked in front of the power station.

“There’s supposed to be a guard,” Amy said doubtfully.

I looked. I looked pretty carefully, because if there was a guard, I wanted to see him. The Major’s orders were that vital defense installations—such as the power station, the PX and his own barracks building—were to be guarded against trespassers on a shoot-on-sight basis and I wanted to make sure that the guard knew we were privileged persons, with passes signed by the Major’s own hand. But we couldn’t find him. So we walked in through the big door, peered around, listened for the sounds of machinery and walked in that direction.

And then we found him; he was sound asleep. Amy, looking indignant, shook him awake.

“Is that how you guard military property?” she scolded. “Don’t you know the penalty for sleeping at your post?”

The guard said something irritable and unhappy. I got her off his back with some difficulty, and we located Arthur.

Picture a shiny four-gallon tomato can, with the label stripped off, hanging by wire from the flashing-light panels of an electric computer. That was Arthur. The shiny metal cylinder was his prosthetic tank; the wires were the leads that served him for fingers, ears and mouth; the glittering panel was the control center for the Consolidated Edison Eastside Power Plant No. 1.

“Hi, Arthur,” I said, and a sudden ear-splitting thunderous hiss was his way of telling me that he knew I was there.

I didn’t know exactly what it was he was trying to say and I didn’t want to; fortune spares me few painful moments, and I accept with gratitude the ones it does. The Major’s boys hadn’t bothered to bring Arthur’s typewriter along—I mean who cares what a generator-governor had to offer in the way of conversation?—so all he could do was blow off steam from the distant boilers.

Well, not quite all. Light flashed; a bucket conveyor began crashingly to dump loads of coal; and an alarm gong began to pound.

“Please, Arthur,” I begged. “Shut up a minute and listen, will you?”

More lights. The gong rapped half a dozen times sharply, and stopped.

I said: “Arthur, you’ve got to trust Vern and me. We have this thing figured out now. We’ve got the Queen Elizabeth—”

A shattering hiss of steam—meaning delight this time, I thought. Or anyway hoped.

“—and its only a question of time until we can carry out the plan. Vern says to apologize for not looking in on you—” hiss—“but he’s been busy. And after all, you know it’s more important to get everything ready so you can get out of this place, right?”

“Psst,” said Amy.

She nodded briefly past my shoulder. I looked, and there was the guard, looking sleepy and surly and definitely suspicious.

I said heartily: “So as soon as I fix it up with the Major, we’ll arrange for something better for you. Meanwhile, Arthur, you’re doing a capital job and I want you to know that all of us loyal New York citizens and public servants deeply appreciate—”

Thundering crashes, bangs, gongs, hisses, and the scream of a steam whistle he’d found somewhere.

Arthur was mad.

“So long, Arthur,” I said, and we got out of there—just barely in time. At the door, we found that Arthur had reversed the coal scoops and a growing mound of it was pouring into the street where we’d left the MG parked. We got the car started just as the heap was beginning to reach the bumpers, and at that the paint would never again be the same.

Oh, yes, he was mad. I could only hope that in the long run he would forgive us, since we were acting for his best interests, after all.

Anyway, I thought we were.

* * * *

Still, things worked out pretty well—especially between Amy and me. Engdahl had the theory that she had been dodging the Major so long that anybody looked good to her, which was hardly flattering. But she and I were getting along right well.

She said worriedly: “The only thing, Sam, is that, frankly, the Major has just about made up his mind that he wants to marry me—”

“He is married!” I yelped.

“Naturally he’s married. He’s married to—so far—one hundred and nine women. He’s been hitting off a marriage a month for a good many years now and, to tell you the truth, I think he’s got the habit Anyway, he’s got his eye on me.”

I demanded jealously: “Has he said anything?”

She picked a sheet of onionskin paper out of her bag and handed it to me. It was marked Top Secret, and it really was, because it hadn’t gone through his regular office—I knew that because I was his regular office. It was only two lines of text and sloppily typed at that:

Lt. Amy Bankhead will report to HQ at 1700 hours 1 July to carry out orders of the Commanding Officer.

The first of July was only a week away. I handed the orders back to her.

“And the orders of the Commanding Officer will be—” I wanted to know.

She nodded. “You guessed it.”

I said: “We’ll have to work fast.”

* * * *

On the thirtieth of June, we invited the Major to come aboard his palatial new yacht.

“Ah, thank you,” he said gratefully. “A surprise? For my birthday? Ah, you loyal members of my command make up for all that I’ve lost—all of it!” He nearly wept.

I said: “Sir, the pleasure is all ours,” and backed out of his presence. What’s more, I meant every word.

It was a select party of slightly over a hundred. All of the wives were there, barring twenty or thirty who were in disfavor—still, that left over eighty. The Major brought half a dozen of his favorite officers. His bodyguard and our crew added up to a total of thirty men.

We were set up to feed a hundred and fifty, and to provide liquor for twice that many, so it looked like a nice friendly brawl. I mean we had our radio operator handing out highballs as the guests stepped on board. The Major was touched and delighted; it was exactly the kind of party he liked.

He came up the gangplank with his face one great beaming smile. “Eat! Drink!” he cried. “Ah, and be merry!” He stretched out his hands to Amy, standing by behind the radio op. “For tomorrow we wed,” he added, and sentimentally kissed his proposed bride.

I cleared my throat. “How about inspecting the ship, Major?” I interrupted.

“Plenty of time for that, my boy,” he said. “Plenty of time for that.” But he let go of Amy and looked around him. Well, it was worth looking at. Those Englishmen really knew how to build a luxury liner. God rest them.

The girls began roaming around.

It was a hot day and late afternoon, and the girls began discarding jackets and boleros, and that began to annoy the Major.

“Ah, cover up there!” he ordered one of his wives. “You too there, what’s-your-name. Put that blouse back on!”

It gave him something to think about. He was a very jealous man, Amy had said, and when you stop to think about it, a jealous man with a hundred and nine wives to be jealous of really has a job. Anyway, he was busy watching his wives and keeping his military cabinet and his bodyguard busy too, and that made him too busy to notice when I tipped the high sign to Vern and took off.

VI

In Consolidated Edison’s big power plant, the guard was friendly. “I hear the Major’s over on your boat, pal. Big doings. Got a lot of the girls there, hey?”

He bent, sniggering, to look at my pass.

“That’s right, pal,” I said, and slugged him.

Arthur screamed at me with a shrill blast of steam as I came in. But only once. I wasn’t there for conversation. I began ripping apart his comfy little home of steel braces and copper wires, and it didn’t take much more than a minute before I had him free. And that was very fortunate because, although I had tied up the guard, I hadn’t done it very well, and it was just about the time I had Arthur’s steel case tucked under my arm that I heard a yelling and bellowing from down the stairs.

The guard had got free.

“Keep calm, Arthur!” I ordered sharply. “We’ll get out of this, don’t you worry!”

But he wasn’t worried, or anyway didn’t show it, since he couldn’t. I was the one who was worried. I was up on the second floor of the plant, in the control center, with only one stairway going down that I knew about, and that one thoroughly guarded by a man with a grudge against me. Me, I had Arthur, and no weapon, and I hadn’t a doubt in the world that there were other guards around and that my friend would have them after me before long.

Problem. I took a deep breath and swallowed and considered jumping out the window. But it wasn’t far enough to the ground.

Feet pounded up the stairs, more than two of them. With Arthur dragging me down on one side, I hurried, fast as I could, along the steel galleries that surrounded the biggest boiler. It was a nice choice of alternatives—if I stayed quiet, they would find me; if I ran, they would hear me, and then find me.

But ahead there was—what? Something. A flight of stairs, it looked like, going out and, yes, up. Up? But I was already on the second floor.

“Hey, you!” somebody bellowed from behind me.

I didn’t stop to consider. I ran. It wasn’t steps, not exactly; it was a chain of coal scoops on a long derrick arm, a moving bucket arrangement for unloading fuel from barges. It did go up, though, and more important it went out. The bucket arm was stretched across the clogged roadway below to a loading tower that hung over the water.

If I could get there, I might be able to get down. If I could get down—yes, I could see it; there were three or four mahogany motor launches tied to the foot of the tower.

And nobody around.

I looked over my shoulder, and didn’t like what I saw, and scuttled up that chain of enormous buckets like a roach on a washboard, one hand for me and one hand for Arthur.

* * * *

Thank heaven, I had a good lead on my pursuers—I needed it. I was on the bucket chain while they were still almost a city block behind me, along the galleries. I was halfway across the roadway, afraid to look down, before they reached the butt end of the chain.

Clash-clatter. Clank! The bucket under me jerked and clattered and nearly threw me into the street. One of those jokers had turned on the conveyor! It was a good trick, all right, but not quite in time. I made a flying jump and I was on the tower.

I didn’t stop to thumb my nose at them, but I thought of it.

I was down those steel steps, breathing like a spouting whale, in a minute flat, and jumping out across the concrete, coal-smeared yard toward the moored launches. Quickly enough, I guess, but with nothing at all to spare, because although I hadn’t seen anyone there, there was a guard.

He popped out of a doorway, blinking foolishly; and overhead the guards at the conveyor belt were screaming at him. It took him a second to figure out what was going on, and by that time I was in a launch, cast off the rope, kicked it free, and fumbled for the starting button.

It took me several seconds to realize that a rope was required, that in fact there was no button; and by then I was floating yards away, but the pudgy pop-eyed guard was also in a launch, and he didn’t have to fumble. He knew. He got his motor started a fraction of a second before me, and there he was, coming at me, set to ram. Or so it looked.

I wrenched at the wheel and brought the boat hard over; but he swerved too, at the last moment, and brought up something that looked a little like a spear and a little like a sickle and turned out to be a boathook. I ducked, just in time. It sizzled over my head as he swung and crashed against the windshield. Hunks of safety glass splashed out over the forward deck, but better that than my head.

Boathooks, hey? I had a boathook too! If he didn’t have another weapon, I was perfectly willing to play; I’d been sitting and taking it long enough and I was very much attracted by the idea of fighting back. The guard recovered his balance, swore at me, fought the wheel around and came back.

We both curved out toward the center of the East River in intersecting arcs. We closed. He swung first. I ducked—

And from a crouch, while he was off balance, I caught him in the shoulder with the hook.

He made a mighty splash.

I throttled down the motor long enough to see that he was still conscious.

“Touché, buster,” I said, and set course for the return trip down around the foot of Manhattan, back toward the Queen.

* * * *

It took a while, but that was all right; it gave everybody a nice long time to get plastered. I sneaked aboard, carrying Arthur, and turned him over to Vern. Then I rejoined the Major. He was making an inspection tour of the ship—what he called an inspection, after his fashion.

He peered into the engine rooms and said: “Ah, fine.”

He stared at the generators that were turning over and nodded when I explained we needed them for power for lights and everything and said: “Ah, of course.”

He opened a couple of stateroom doors at random and said: “Ah, nice.”

And he went up on the flying bridge with me and such of his officers as still could walk and said: “Ah.”

Then he said in a totally different tone: “What the devil’s the matter over there?”

He was staring east through the muggy haze. I saw right away what it was that was bothering him—easy, because I knew where to look. The power plant way over on the East Side was billowing smoke.

“Where’s Vern Engdahl? That gadget of his isn’t working right!”

“You mean Arthur?”

“I mean that brain in a bottle. It’s Engdahl’s responsibility, you know!”

Vern came up out of the wheelhouse and cleared his throat. “Major,” he said earnestly, “I think there’s some trouble over there. Maybe you ought to go look for yourself.”

“Trouble?”

“I, uh, hear there’ve been power failures,” Vern said lamely. “Don’t you think you ought to inspect it? I mean just in case there’s something serious?”

The Major stared at him frostily, and then his mood changed. He took a drink from the glass in his hand, quickly finishing it off.

“Ah,” he said, “hell with it. Why spoil a good party? If there are going to be power failures, why, let them be. That’s my motto!”

Vern and I looked at each other. He shrugged slightly, meaning, well, we tried. And I shrugged slightly, meaning, what did you expect? And then he glanced upward, meaning, take a look at what’s there.

But I didn’t really have to look because I heard what it was. In fact, I’d been hearing it for some time. It was the Major’s entire air force—two helicopters, swirling around us at an average altitude of a hundred feet or so. They showed up bright against the gathering clouds overhead, and I looked at them with considerable interest—partly because I considered it an even-money bet that one of them would be playing crumple-fender with our stacks, partly because I had an idea that they were not there solely for show.

I said to the Major: “Chief, aren’t they coming a little close? I mean it’s your ship and all, but what if one of them takes a spill into the bridge while you’re here?”

He grinned. “They know better,” he bragged. “Ah, besides, I want them close. I mean if anything went wrong.”

I said, in a tone that showed as much deep hurt as I could manage: “Sir, what could go wrong?”

“Oh, you know.” He patted my shoulder limply. “Ah, no offense?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Well,” I said, “let’s go below.”

* * * *

All of it was done carefully, carefully as could be. The only thing was, we forgot about the typewriters. We got everybody, or as near as we could, into the Grand Salon where the food was, and right there on a table at the end of the hall was one of the typewriters clacking away. Vern had rigged them up with rolls of paper instead of sheets, and maybe that was ingenious, but it was also a headache just then. Because the typewriter was banging out:

LEFT FOUR THIRTEEN FOURTEEN AND TWENTYONE BOILERS WITH A FULL HEAD OF STEAM AND THE SAFETY VALVES LOCKED BOY I TELL YOU WHEN THOSE THINGS LET GO YOURE GOING TO HEAR A NOISE THATLL KNOCK YOUR HAT OFF

The Major inquired politely: “Something to do with the ship?”

“Oh, that,” said Vern. “Yeah. Just a little, uh, something to do with the ship. Say, Major, here’s the bar. Real scotch, see? Look at the label!”

The Major glanced at him with faint contempt—well, he’d had the pick of the greatest collection of high-priced liquor stores in the world for ten years, so no wonder. But he allowed Vern to press a drink on him.

And the typewriter kept rattling:

LOOKS LIKE RAIN ANY MINUTE NOW HOO BOY IM GLAD I WONT BE IN THOSE WHIRLYBIRDS WHEN THE STORM STARTS SAY VERN WHY DONT YOU EVER ANSWER ME Q Q ISNT IT ABOUT TIME TO TAKE OFF XXX I MEAN GET UNDER WEIGH Q Q

Some of the “clerks, typists, domestic personnel and others”—that was the way they were listed on the T/O; it was only coincidence that the Major had married them all—were staring at the typewriter.

“Drinks!” Vern called nervously. “Come on, girls! Drinks!”

* * * *

The Major poured himself a stiff shot and asked: “What is that thing? A teletype or something?”

“That’s right,” Vern said, trailing after him as the Major wandered over to inspect it.

I GIVE THOSE BOILERS ABOUT TEN MORE MINUTES SAM WELL WHAT ABOUT IT Q Q READY TO SHOVE OFF Q Q

The Major said, frowning faintly: “Ah, that reminds me of something. Now what is it?”

“More scotch?” Vern cried. “Major, a little more scotch?”

The Major ignored him, scowling. One of the “clerks, typists” said: “Honey, you know what it is? It’s like that pross you had, remember? It was on our wedding night, and you’d just got it, and you kept asking it to tell you limericks.”

The Major snapped his fingers. “Knew I’d get it,” he glowed. Then abruptly he scowled again and turned to face Vern and me. “Say—” he began.

I said weakly: “The boilers.”

The Major stared at me, then glanced out the window. “What boilers?” he demanded. “It’s just a thunderstorm. Been building up all day. Now what about this? Is that thing—”

But Vern was paying him no attention. “Thunderstorm?” he yelled. “Arthur, you listening? Are the helicopters gone?”

YESYESYES

“Then shove off, Arthur! Shove off!”

The typewriter rattled and slammed madly.

The Major yelled angrily: “Now listen to me, you! I’m asking you a question!”

But we didn’t have to answer, because there was a thrumming and a throbbing underfoot, and then one of the “clerks, typists” screamed: “The dock!” She pointed at a porthole. “It’s moving!”

* * * *

Well, we got out of there—barely in time. And then it was up to Arthur. We had the whole ship to roam around in and there were plenty of places to hide. They had the whole ship to search. And Arthur was the whole ship.

Because it was Arthur, all right, brought in and hooked up by Vern, attained to his greatest dream and ambition. He was skipper of a superliner, and more than any skipper had ever been—the ship was his body, as the prosthetic tank had never been; the keel his belly, the screws his feet, the engines his heart and lungs, and every moving part that could be hooked into central control his many, many hands.

Search for us? They were lucky they could move at all! Fire Control washed them with salt water hoses, directed by Arthur’s brain. Watertight doors, proof against sinking, locked them away from us at Arthur’s whim.

The big bull whistle overhead brayed like a clamoring Gabriel, and the ship’s bells tinkled and clanged. Arthur backed that enormous ship out of its berth like a racing scull on the Schuylkill. The four giant screws lashed the water into white foam, and then the thin mud they sucked up into tan; and the ship backed, swerved, lashed the water, stopped, and staggered crazily forward.

Arthur brayed at the Statue of Liberty, tooted good-by to Staten Island, feinted a charge at Sandy Hook and really laid back his ears and raced once he got to deep water past the moored lightship.

We were off!

Well, from there on, it was easy. We let Arthur have his fun with the Major and the bodyguards—and by the sodden, whimpering shape they were in when they came out, it must really have been fun for him. There were just the three of us and only Vern and I had guns—but Arthur had the Queen Elizabeth, and that put the odds on our side.

We gave the Major a choice: row back to Coney Island—we offered him a boat, free of charge—or come along with us as cabin boy. He cast one dim-eyed look at the hundred and nine “clerks, typists” and at Amy, who would never be the hundred and tenth.

And then he shrugged and, game loser, said: “Ah, why not? I’ll come along.”

* * * *

And why not, when you come to think of it? I mean ruling a city is nice and all that, but a sea voyage is a refreshing change. And while a hundred and nine to one is a respectable female-male ratio, still it must be wearing; and eighty to thirty isn’t so bad, either. At least, I guess that was what was in the Major’s mind. I know it was what was in mine.

And I discovered that it was in Amy’s, for the first thing she did was to march me over to the typewriter and say: “You’ve had it, Sam. We’ll dispose with the wedding march—just get your friend Arthur here to marry us.”

“Arthur?”

“The captain,” she said. “We’re on the high seas and he’s empowered to perform marriages.”

Vern looked at me and shrugged, meaning, you asked for this one, boy. And I looked at him and shrugged, meaning, it could be worse.

And indeed it could. We’d got our ship; we’d got our ship’s company—because, naturally, there wasn’t any use stealing a big ship for just a couple of us. We’d had to manage to get a sizable colony aboard. That was the whole idea.

The world, in fact, was ours. It could have been very much worse indeed, even though Arthur was laughing so hard as he performed the ceremony that he jammed up all his keys.

SURVIVAL KIT

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1957.

CHAPTER I

Mooney looked out of his window, and the sky was white.

It was a sudden, bright, cold flare and it was gone again. It had no more features than a fog, at least not through the window that was showered with snow and patterned with spray from the windy sea.

Mooney blew on his hands and frowned at the window.

“Son of a gun,” he said, and thought for a moment about phoning the Coast Guard station. Of course, that meant going a quarter of a mile in the storm to reach the only other house nearby that was occupied; the Hansons had a phone that worked, but a quarter of a mile was a long way in the face of a December gale. And it was all dark out there now. Less than twenty miles across the bay was New York, but this Jersey shore coast was harsh as the face of the Moon.

Mooney decided it was none of his business.

He shook the kettle, holding it with an old dish towel because it was sizzling hot. It was nearly empty, so he filled it again and put it back on the stove. He had all four top burners and the oven going, which made the kitchen tolerably warm—as long as he wore the scarf and the heavy quilted jacket and kept his hands in his pockets. And there was plenty of tea.

Uncle Lester had left that much behind him—plenty of tea, nearly a dozen boxes of assorted cookies and a few odds and ends of canned goods. And God’s own quantity of sugar.

It wasn’t exactly a balanced diet, but Mooney had lived on it for three weeks now—smoked turkey sausages for breakfast, and oatmeal cookies for lunch, and canned black olives for dinner. And always plenty of tea.

* * * *

The wind screamed at him as he poured the dregs of his last cup of tea into the sink and spooned sugar into the cup for the next one. It was, he calculated, close to midnight. If the damn wind hadn’t blown down the TV antenna, he could be watching the late movies now. It helped to pass the time; the last movie was off the air at two or three o’clock, and then he could go to bed and, with any luck, sleep till past noon.

And Uncle Lester had left a couple of decks of sticky, child-handled cards behind him, too, when the family went back to the city at the end of the summer. So what with four kinds of solitaire, and solo bridge, and television, and a few more naps, Mooney could get through to the next two or three A.M. again. If only the wind hadn’t blown down the antenna!

But as it was, all he could get on the cheap little set his uncle had left behind was a faint gray herringbone pattern—

He straightened up with the kettle in his hand, listening.

It was almost as though somebody was knocking at the door.

“That’s crazy,” Mooney said out loud after a moment. He poured the water over the tea bag, tearing a little corner off the paper tag on the end of the string to mark the fact that this was the second cup he had made with the bag. He had found he could get three cups out of a single bag, but even loaded with sugar, the fourth cup was no longer very good. Still, he had carefully saved all the used, dried-out bags against the difficult future day when even the tea would be gone.

That was going to be one bad day for Howard Mooney.

Rap, tap. It really was someone at the door! Not knocking, exactly, but either kicking at it or striking it with a stick.

Mooney pulled his jacket tight around him and walked out into the frigid living room, not quite so frigid as his heart.

“Damn!” he said. “Damn, damn!”

What Mooney knew for sure was that nothing good could be coming in that door for him. It might be a policeman from Sea Bright, wondering about the light in the house; it might be a member of his uncle’s family. It was even possible that one of the stockholders who had put up the money for that unfortunate venture into frozen-food club management had tracked him down as far as the Jersey shore. It could be almost anything or anybody, but it couldn’t be good.

All the same, Mooney hadn’t expected it to turn out to be a tall, lean man with angry pale eyes, wearing a silvery sort of leotard.

* * * *

“I come in,” said the angry man, and did.

Mooney slammed the door behind him. Too bad, but he couldn’t keep it open, even if it was conceding a sort of moral right to enter to the stranger; he couldn’t have all that cold air coming in to dilute his little bubble of warmth.

“What the devil do you want?” Mooney demanded.

The angry man looked about him with an expression of revulsion. He pointed to the kitchen. “It is warmer. In there?”

“I suppose so. What do—” But the stranger was already walking into the kitchen. Mooney scowled and started to follow, and stopped, and scowled even more. The stranger was leaving footprints behind him, or anyway some kind of marks that showed black on the faded summer rug. True, he was speckled with snow, but—that much snow? The man was drenched. It looked as though he had just come out of the ocean.

The stranger stood by the stove and glanced at Mooney warily. Mooney stood six feet, but this man was bigger. The silvery sort of thing he had on covered his legs as far as the feet, and he wore no shoes. It covered his body and his arms, and he had silvery gloves on his hands. It stopped at the neck, in a collar of what looked like pure silver, but could not have been because it gave with every breath the man took and every tensed muscle or tendon in his neck. His head was bare and his hair was black, cut very short.

He was carrying something flat and shiny by a molded handle. If it had been made of pigskin, it would have resembled a junior executive’s briefcase.

The man said explosively: “You will help me.”

Mooney cleared his throat. “Listen, I don’t know what you want, but this is my house and—”

“You will help me,” the man said positively. “I will pay you. Very well?”

He had a peculiar way of parting his sentences in the middle, but Mooney didn’t care about that. He suddenly cared about one thing and that was the word “pay.”

“What do you want me to do?”

The angry-eyed man ran his gloved hands across his head and sluiced drops of water onto the scuffed linoleum and the bedding of the cot Mooney had dragged into the kitchen. He said irritably: “I am a wayfarer who needs a. Guide? I will pay you for your assistance.”

The question that rose to Mooney’s lips was “How much?” but he fought it back. Instead, he asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“One moment.” The stranger sat damply on the edge of Mooney’s cot and, click-snap, the shiny sort of briefcase opened itself in his hands. He took out a flat round thing like a mirror and looked into it, squeezing it by the edges, and holding it this way and that.

Finally he said: “I must go to Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of December, at—” He tilted the little round thing again. “Brooklyn?” he finished triumphantly.

Mooney said, after a second: “That’s a funny way to put it.”

“Question?”

“I mean,” said Mooney, “I know where Brooklyn is and I know when the twenty-sixth of December is—it’s next week—but you have to admit that that’s an odd way of putting it. I mean you don’t go anywhere in time.”

The wet man turned his pale eyes on Mooney. “Perhaps you are. Wrong?”

CHAPTER II

Mooney stared at his napping guest in a mood of wonder and fear and delight.

Time traveler! But it was hard to doubt the pale-eyed man. He had said he was from the future and he mentioned a date that made Mooney gasp. He had said: “When you speak to me, you must know that my. Name? Is Harse.” And then he had curled up on the floor, surrounding his shiny briefcase like a mother cat around a kitten, and begun dozing alertly.

But not before he showed Mooney just what it was he proposed to pay him with.

Mooney sipped his cooling tea and forgot to shiver, though the drafts were fiercer and more biting than ever, now just before dawn. He was playing with what had looked at first like a string of steel ball-bearings, a child’s necklace, half-inch spheres linked together in a strand a yard long.

Wampum! That was what Harse had called the spheres when he picked the string out of his little kit, and that was what they were.

Each ball-bearing was hollow. Open them up and out come the treasures of the crown. Pop, and one of the spheres splits neatly in half, and out spills a star sapphire, as big as the ball of your finger, glittering like the muted lights of hell. Pop, and another sphere drops a ball of yellow gold into your palm. Pop for a narwhal’s tooth, pop for a cube of sugar; pop, pop, and there on the table before Harse sparkled diamonds and lumps of coal, a packet of heroin, a sphere of silver, pearls, beads of glass, machined pellets of tungsten, lumps of saffron and lumps of salt.

“It is,” said Harse, “for your. Pay? No, no!” And he headed off Mooney’s greedy fingers.

Click, click, click, and the little pellets of treasure and trash were back in the steel balls.

“No, no!” said Harse again, grinning, snapping the balls together like poppets in a string. “After you have guided me to Brooklyn and the December twenty-sixth. But I must say to you. This? That some of the balls contain plutonium and some radium. And I do not think that you can get them. Open? But if you did, you perhaps would die. Oh. Ho?” And, laughing, he began his taut nap.

* * * *

Mooney swallowed the last of his icy tea. It was full daylight outside.

Very well, castaway, he said silently to the dozing pale-eyed man, I will guide you. Oh, there never was a guide like Mooney—not when a guide’s fee can run so high. But when you are where you want to go, then we’ll discuss the price.…

A hacksaw, he schemed, and a Geiger counter. He had worn his fingers raw trying to find the little button or knob that Harse had used to open them. All right, he was licked there. But there were more ways than one to open a cat’s eye.

A hacksaw. A Geiger counter. And, Mooney speculated drowsily, maybe a gun, if the pale-eyed man got tough.

Mooney fell asleep in joy and anticipation for the first time in more than a dozen years.

* * * *

It was bright the next morning. Bright and very cold.

“Look alive!” Mooney said to the pale-eyed man, shivering. It had been a long walk from Uncle Lester’s house to the bridge, in that ripping, shuddering wind that came in off the Atlantic.

Harse got up off his knees, from where he had been examining the asphalt pavement under the snow. He stood erect beside Mooney, while Mooney put on an egg-sucking smile and aimed his thumb down the road.

The station wagon he had spotted seemed to snarl and pick up speed as it whirled past them onto the bridge.

“I hope you skid into a ditch!” Mooney bawled into the icy air. He was in a fury. There was a bus line that went where they wanted to go. A warm, comfortable bus that would stop for them if they signaled, that would drop them just where they wanted to be, to convert one of Harse’s ball-bearings into money. The gold one, Mooney planned. Not the diamond, not the pearl. Just a few dollars was all they wanted, in this Jersey shore area where the towns were small and the gossip big. Just the price of fare into New York, where they could make their way to Tiffany’s.

But the bus cost thirty-five cents apiece. Total, seventy cents. Which they didn’t have.

“Here comes another. Car?”

Mooney dragged back the corners of his lips into another smile and held out his thumb.

It was a panel truck, light blue, with the sides lettered: Chris’s Delicatessen. Free Deliveries. The driver slowed up, looked them over and stopped. He leaned toward the right-hand window.

He called: “I can take you far’s Red Ba—”

He got a good look at Mooney’s companion then and swallowed. Harse had put on an overcoat because Mooney insisted on it and he wore a hat because Mooney had told him flatly there would be trouble and questions if he didn’t. But he hadn’t taken off his own silvery leotard, which peeped through between neck and hat and where the coat flapped open.

“—ank,” finished the driver thoughtfully.

Mooney didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. “Red Bank is just where we want to go. Come on!” Already he had his hand on the door. He jumped in, made room for Harse, reached over him and slammed the door.

“Thank you very much,” he said chattily to the driver. “Cold morning, isn’t it? And that was some storm last night. Say, we really do appreciate this. Anywhere in Red Bank will be all right to drop us, anywhere at all.”

He leaned forward slightly, just enough to keep the driver from being able to get a really good look at his other passenger.

It would have gone all right, it really would, except that just past Fair Haven, Harse suddenly announced: “It is the time for me to. Eat?”

* * * *

He snip-snapped something around the edges of the gleaming sort of dispatch case, which opened. Mooney, peering over his shoulder, caught glimpses of shiny things and spinning things and things that seemed to glow. So did the driver.

“Hey,” he said, interested, “what’ve you got there?”

“My business,” said Harse, calmly and crushingly.

The driver blinked. He opened his mouth, and then he shut it again, and his neck became rather red.

Mooney said rapidly: “Say, isn’t there—uh—isn’t there a lot of snow?” He feigned fascination with the snow on the road, leaning forward until his face was nearly at the frosty windshield. “My gosh, I’ve never seen the road so snowy!”

Beside him, Harse was methodically taking things out of other things. A little cylinder popped open and began to steam; he put it to his lips and drank. A cube the size of a fist opened up at one end and little pellets dropped out into a cup. Harse picked a couple up and began to chew them. A flat, round object the shape of a cafeteria pie flipped open and something gray and doughy appeared—

“Holy heaven!”

Mooney’s face slammed into the windshield as the driver tramped on his brakes. Not that Mooney could really blame him. The smell from that doughy mass could hardly be believed; and what made it retchingly worse was that Harse was eating it with a pearly small spoon.

The driver said complainingly: “Out! Out, you guys! I don’t mind giving you a lift, but I’ve got hard rolls in the back of the truck and that smell’s going to—Out! You heard me!”

“Oh,” said Harse, tasting happily. “No.”

“No?” roared the driver. “Now listen! I don’t have to take any lip from hitchhikers! I don’t have to—”

“One moment,” said Harse. “Please.” Without hurry and without delay, beaming absently at the driver, he reached into the silvery case again. Snip, snippety-snap; a jointed metal thing wriggled and snicked into place. And Harse, still beaming, pointed it at the driver.

Pale blue light and a faint whine.

It was a good thing the truck was halted, because the whining blue light reached diffidently out and embraced the driver; and then there was no driver. There was nothing. He was gone, beyond the reach of any further lip from hitchhikers.

CHAPTER III

So there was Mooney, driving a stolen panel truck, Mooney the bankrupt, Mooney the ne’er-do-well, and now Mooney the accomplice murderer. Or so he thought, though the pale-eyed man had laughed like a panther when he’d asked.

He rehearsed little speeches all the day down U.S. One, Mooney did, and they all began: “Your Honor, I didn’t know—”

Well, he hadn’t. How could a man like Mooney know that Harse was so bereft of human compassion as to snuff out a life for the sake of finishing his lunch in peace? And what could Mooney have done about it, without drawing the diffident blue glow to himself? No, Your Honor, really, Your Honor, he took me by surprise.…

But by the time they ditched the stolen car, nearly dry of gas, at the Hoboken ferry, Mooney had begun to get his nerve back. In fact, he was beginning to perceive that in that glittering silvery dispatch case that Harse hugged to him were treasures that might do wonders for a smart man unjustly dogged by hard times. The wampum alone! But beyond the wampum, the other good things that might in time be worth more than any amount of mere money.

There was that weapon. Mooney cast a glance at Harse, blank-eyed and relaxed, very much disinterested in the crowds of commuters on the ferry.

Nobody in all that crowd would believe that Harse could pull out a little jointed metal thing and push a button and make any one of them cease to exist. Nobody would believe it—not even a jury. Corpus delicti, body of evidence—why, there would be no evidence! It was a simple, workable, foolproof way of getting any desired number of people out of the way without fuss, muss or bother—and couldn’t a smart but misfortunate man like Mooney do wonders by selectively removing those persons who stood as obstacles in his path?

And there would be more, much, much more. The thing to do, Mooney schemed, was to find out just what Harse had in that kit and how to work it; and then—who could know, perhaps Harse would himself find the diffident blue light reaching out for him before the intersection of Brooklyn and December twenty-sixth?

Mooney probed.

“Ah,” laughed Harse. “Ho! I perceive what you want. You think perhaps there is something you can use in my survival kit.”

“All right, Harse,” Mooney said submissively, but he did have reservations.

First, it was important to find out just what was in the kit. After that—

Well, even a man from the future had to sleep.

* * * *

Mooney was in a roaring rage. How dared the Government stick its bureaucratic nose into a simple transaction of citizens! But it turned out to be astonishingly hard to turn Harse’s wampum into money. The first jeweler asked crudely threatening questions about an emerald the size of the ball of his thumb; the second quoted chapter and verse on the laws governing possession of gold. Finally they found a pawnbroker, who knowingly accepted a diamond that might have been worth a fortune; and when they took his first offer of a thousand dollars, the pawnbroker’s suspicions were confirmed. Mooney dragged Harse away from there fast.

But they did have a thousand dollars.

As the cab took them across town, Mooney simmered down; and by the time they reached the other side, he was entirely content. What was a fortune more or less to a man who very nearly owned some of the secrets of the future?

He sat up, lit a cigarette, waved an arm and said expansively to Harse: “Our new home.”

The pale-eyed man took a glowing little affair with eyepieces away from in front of his eyes.

“Ah,” he said. “So.”

It was quite an attractive hotel, Mooney thought judiciously. It did a lot to take away the sting of those sordidly avaricious jewelers. The lobby was an impressively close approximation of a cathedral and the bellboys looked smart and able.

Harse made an asthmatic sound. “What is. That?” He was pointing at a group of men standing in jovial amusement around the entrance to the hotel’s grand ballroom, just off the lobby. They wore purple harem pants and floppy green hats, and every one of them carried a silver-paper imitation of a scimitar.

Mooney chuckled in a superior way. “You aren’t up on our local customs, are you? That’s a convention, Harse. They dress up that way because they belong to a lodge. A lodge is a kind of fraternal organization. A fraternal organization is—”

Harse said abruptly: “I want.”

Mooney began to feel alarm. “What?”

“I want one for a. Specimen? Wait, I think I take the big one there.”

“Harse! Wait a minute!” Mooney clutched at him. “Hold everything, man! You can’t do that.”

Harse stared at him. “Why?”

“Because it would upset everything, that’s why! You want to get to your rendezvous, don’t you? Well, if you do anything like that, we’ll never get there!”

“Why not?”

“Please,” Mooney said, “please take my word for it. You hear me? I’ll explain later!”

Harse looked by no means convinced, but he stopped opening the silvery metal case. Mooney kept an eye on him while registering. Harse continued to watch the conventioneers, but he went no further. Mooney began to breathe again.

“Thank you, sir,” said the desk clerk—not every guest, even in this hotel, went for a corner suite with two baths. “Front!”

* * * *

A smart-looking bellboy stepped forward, briskly took the key from the clerk, briskly nodded at Mooney and Harse. With the automatic reflex of any hotel bellhop, he reached for Harse’s silvery case. Baggage was baggage, however funny it looked.

But Harse was not just any old guest. The bellboy got the bag away from him, all right, but his victory was purely transitory. He yelled, dropped the bag, grabbed his fist with the other hand.

“Hey! It shocked me! What kind of tricks are you trying to do with electric suitcases?”

Mooney moaned softly. The whole lobby was looking at them—even the conventioneers at the entrance to the ballroom; even the men in mufti mingling with the conventioneers, carrying cameras and flash guns; even the very doorman, the whole lobby away. That was bad. What was worse was that Harse was obviously getting angry.

“Wait, wait!” Mooney stepped between them in a hurry. “I can explain everything. My friend is, uh, an inventor. There’s some very important material in that briefcase, believe me!”

He winked, patted the bellhop on the shoulder, took his hand with friendly concern and left in it a folded bill.

“Now,” he said confidentially, “we don’t want any disturbance. I’m sure you understand how it is, son. Don’t you? My friend can’t take any chances with his, uh, confidential material, you see? Right. Well, let’s say no more about it. Now if you’ll show us to our room—”

The bellhop, still stiff-backed, glanced down at the bill and the stiffness disappeared as fast as any truckdriver bathed in Harse’s pale blue haze. He looked up again and grinned.

“Sorry, sir—” he began.

But he didn’t finish. Mooney had let Harse get out of his sight a moment too long.

The first warning he had was when there was a sudden commotion among the lodge brothers. Mooney turned, much too late. There was Harse; he had wandered over there, curious and interested and—Harse. He had stared them up and down, but he hadn’t been content to stare. He had opened the little silvery dispatch-case and taken out of it the thing that looked like a film viewer; and maybe it was a camera, too, because he was looking through it at the conventioneers. He was covering them as Dixie is covered by the dew, up and down, back and forth, heels to head.

And it was causing a certain amount of attention. Even one of the photographers thought maybe this funny-looking guy with the funny-looking opera glasses was curious enough to be worth a shot. After all, that was what the photographer was there for. He aimed and popped a flash gun.

There was an abrupt thin squeal from the box. Black fog sprayed out of it in a greasy jet. It billowed toward Harse. It collected around him, swirled high. Now all the flashguns were popping.…

It was a clear waste of a twenty-dollar bill, Mooney told himself aggrievedly out on the sidewalk. There had been no point in buttering up the bellhop as long as Harse was going to get them thrown out anyway.

* * * *

On the other side of the East River, in a hotel that fell considerably below Mooney’s recent, brief standards of excellence, Mooney cautiously tipped a bellboy, ushered him out, locked the door behind him and, utterly exhausted, flopped on one of the twin beds.

Harse glanced at him briefly, then wandered over to the window and stared incuriously at the soiled snow outside.

“You were fine, Harse,” said Mooney without spirit. “You didn’t do anything wrong at all.”

“Ah,” said Harse without turning. “So?”

Mooney sat up, reached for the phone, demanded setups and a bottle from room service and hung up.

“Oh, well,” he said, beginning to revive, “at least we’re in Brooklyn now. Maybe it’s just as well.”

“As well. What?”

“I mean this is where you wanted to be. Now we just have to wait four days, until the twenty-sixth. We’ll have to raise some more money, of course,” he added experimentally.

Harse turned and looked at him with the pale eyes. “One thousand dollars you have. Is not enough?”

“Oh, no, Harse,” Mooney assured him. “Why, that won’t be nearly enough. The room rent in this hotel alone is likely to use that up. Besides all the extras, of course.”

“Ah.” Harse, looking bored, sat down in the chair near Mooney, opened his kit, took out the thing that looked like a film viewer and put it to his eyes.

“We’ll have to sell some more of those things. After all—” Mooney winked and dug at the pale-eyed man’s ribs with his elbow—“we’ll be needing some, well, entertainment.”

Harse took the viewer away from his eyes. He glanced thoughtfully at the elbow and then at Mooney. “So,” he said.

Mooney coughed and changed the subject. “One thing, though,” he begged. “Don’t get me in any more trouble like you did in that hotel lobby—or with that guy in the truck. Please? I mean, after all, you’re making it hard for me to carry out my job.”

Harse was thoughtfully silent.

“Promise?” Mooney urged.

Harse said, after some more consideration: “It is not altogether me. That is to say, it is a matter of defense. My picture should not be. Photographed? So the survival kit insures that it is not. You understand?”

Mooney leaned back. “You mean—” The bellboy with the drinks interrupted him; he took the bottle, signed the chit, tipped the boy and mixed himself a reasonably stiff but not quite stupefying highball, thinking hard.

“Did you say ‘survival kit’?” he asked at last.

Harse was deep in the viewer again, but he looked away from it irritably. “Naturally, survival kit. So that I can. Survive?” He went back to the viewer.

Mooney took a long, thoughtful slug of the drink.

* * * *

Survival kit. Why, that made sense. When the Air Force boys went out and raided the islands in the Pacific during the war, sometimes they got shot down—and it was enemy territory, or what passed for it. Those islands were mostly held by Japanese, though their populations hardly knew it. All the aboriginals knew was that strange birds crossed the sky and sometimes men came from them. The politics of the situation didn’t interest the headhunters. What really interested them was heads.

But for a palatable second choice, they would settle for trade goods—cloth, mirrors, beads. And so the bomber pilots were equipped with survival kits—maps, trade goods, rations, weapons, instructions for proceeding to a point where, God willing, a friendly submarine might put ashore a rubber dinghy to take them off.

Mooney said persuasively: “Harse. I’m sorry to bother you, but we have to talk.” The man with the pale eyes took them away from the viewer again and stared at Mooney. “Harse, were you shot down like an airplane pilot?”

* * * *

Harse frowned—not in anger, or at least not at Mooney. It was the effort to make himself understood. He said at last: “Yes. Call it that.”

“And—and this place you want to go to—is that where you will be rescued?”

“Yes.”

Aha, thought Mooney, and the glimmerings of a new idea began to kick and stretch its fetal limbs inside him. He put it aside, to bear and coddle in private. He said: “Tell me more. Is there any particular part of Brooklyn you have to go to?”

“Ah. The Nexus Point?” Harse put down the viewer and, snap-snap, opened the gleaming kit. He took out the little round thing he had consulted in the house by the cold Jersey sea. He tilted it this way and that, frowned, consulted a small square sparkly thing that came from another part of the case, tilted the round gadget again.

“Correcting for local time,” he said, “the Nexus Point is one hour and one minute after midnight at what is called. The Vale of Cashmere?”

Mooney scratched his ear. “The Vale of Cashmere? Where the devil is that—somewhere in Pakistan?”

“Brooklyn,” said Harse with an imp’s grimace. “You are the guide and you do not know where you are guiding me to?”

Mooney said hastily: “All right, Harse, all right. I’ll find it. But tell me one thing, will you? Just suppose—suppose, I said—that for some reason or other, we don’t make it to the what-you-call, Nexus Point. Then what happens?”

Harse for once neither laughed nor scowled. The pale eyes opened wide and glanced around the room, at the machine-made candlewick spreads on the beds, at the dusty red curtains that made a “suite” out of a long room, at the dog-eared Bible that lay on the night table.

“Suh,” he stammered, “suh—suh—seventeen years until there is another Nexus Point!”

CHAPTER IV

Mooney dreamed miraculous dreams and not entirely because of the empty bottle that had been full that afternoon. There never was a time, never will be a time, like the future Mooney dreamed of—Mooney-owned, houri-inhabited, a fair domain for a live-wire Emperor of the Eons.…

He woke up with a splitting head.

Even a man from the future had to sleep, so Mooney had thought, and it had been in his mind that, even this first night, it might pay to stay awake a little longer than Harse, just in case it might then seem like a good idea to—well, to bash him over the head and grab the bag. But the whiskey had played him dirty and he had passed out—drunk, blind drunk, or at least he hoped so. He hoped that he hadn’t seen what he thought he had seen sober.

He woke up and wondered what was wrong. Little tinkling ice spiders were moving around him. He could hear their tiny crystal sounds and feel their chill legs, so lightly, on him. It was still a dream—wasn’t it?

Or was he awake? The thing was, he couldn’t tell. If he was awake, it was the middle of the night, because there was no light whatever; and besides, he didn’t seem to be able to move.

Thought Mooney with anger and desperation: I’m dead. And: What a time to die!

But second thoughts changed his mind; there was no heaven and no hell, in all the theologies he had investigated, that included being walked over by tiny spiders of ice. He felt them. There was no doubt about it.

It was Harse, of course—had to be. Whatever he was up to, Mooney couldn’t say, but as he lay there sweating cold sweat and feeling the crawling little feet, he knew that it was something Harse had made happen.

Little by little, he began to be able to see—not much, but enough to see that there really was something crawling. Whatever the things were, they had a faint, tenuous glow, like the face of a watch just before dawn. He couldn’t make out shapes, but he could tell the size—not much bigger than a man’s hand—and he could tell the number, and there were dozens of them.

He couldn’t turn his head, but on the walls, on his chest, on his face, even on the ceiling, he could see faint moving patches of fox-fire light.

* * * *

He took a deep breath. “Harse!” he started to call; wake him up, make him stop this! But he couldn’t. He got no further than the first huff of the aspirate when the scurrying cold feet were on his lips. Something cold and damp lay across them and it stuck. Like spider silk, but stronger—he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move his lips, though he almost tore the flesh.

Oh, he could make a noise, all right. He started to do so, to snort and hum through his nose. But Mooney was not slow of thought and he had a sudden clear picture of that same cold ribbon crossing his nostrils, and what would be the use of all of time’s treasures then, when it was no longer possible to breathe at all?

It was quite apparent that he was not to make a noise.

He had patience—the kind of patience that grows with a diet of thrice-used tea bags and soggy crackers. He waited.

It wasn’t the middle of the night after all, he perceived, though it was still utterly dark except for the moving blobs. He could hear sounds in the hotel corridor outside—faintly, though: the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and it might have been a city block away; the tiniest whisper of someone laughing.

He remembered one of his drunken fantasies of the night before—little robot mice, or so they seemed, spinning a curtain across the window; and he shuddered, because that had been no fantasy. The window was curtained. And it was mid-morning, at the earliest, because the chambermaids were cleaning the halls.

Why couldn’t he move? He flexed the muscles of his arms and legs, but nothing happened. He could feel the muscles straining, he could feel his toes and fingers twitch, but he was restrained by what seemed a web of Gulliver’s cords.…

There was a tap at the door. A pause, the scratching of a key, and the room was flooded with light from the hall.

Out of the straining corner of his eye, Mooney saw a woman in a gray cotton uniform, carrying fresh sheets, standing in the doorway, and her mouth was hanging slack. No wonder, for in the light from the hall, Mooney could see the room festooned with silver, with darting silvery shapes moving about. Mooney himself wore a cocoon of silver, and on the bed next to him, where Harse slept, there was a fantastic silver hood, like the basketwork of a baby’s bassinet, surrounding his head.

It was a fairyland scene and it lasted only a second. For Harse cried out and leaped to his feet. Quick as an adder, he scooped up something from the table beside his bed and gestured with it at the door. It was, Mooney half perceived, the silvery, jointed thing he had used in the truck; and he used it again.

Pale blue light streamed out.

It faded and the chambermaid, popping eyes and all, was gone.

* * * *

It didn’t hurt as much the second time.

Mooney finally attracted Harse’s attention, and Harse, with a Masonic pass over one of the little silvery things, set it to loosening and removing the silver bonds. The things were like toy tanks with jointed legs; as they spun the silver webs, they could also suck them in. In moments, the webs that held Mooney down were gone.

He got up, aching in his tired muscles and his head, but this time the panic that had filled him in the truck was gone. Well, one victim more or less—what did it matter? And besides, he clung to the fact that Harse had not exactly said the victims were dead.

So it didn’t hurt as much the second time.

Mooney planned. He shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed. “Shut up—you put us in a lousy fix and I have to think a way out of it,” he rasped at Harse when Harse started to speak; and the man from the future looked at him with opaque pale eyes, and silently opened one of the flat canisters and began to eat.

“All right,” said Mooney at last. “Harse, get rid of all this stuff.”

“This. Stuff?”

“The stuff on the walls. What your little spiders have been spinning, understand? Can’t you get it off the walls?”

Harse leaned forward and touched the kit. The little spider-things that had been aimlessly roving now began to digest what they had created, as the ones that had held Mooney had already done. It was quick—Mooney hoped it would be quick enough. There were over a dozen of the things, more than Mooney would have believed the little kit could hold; and he had seen no sign of them before.

The silvery silk on the walls, in aimless tracing, disappeared. The thick silvery coat over the window disappeared. Harse’s bassinet-hood disappeared. A construction that haloed the door disappeared—and as it dwindled, the noises from the corridor grew louder; some sort of sound-absorbing contrivance, Mooney thought, wondering.

There was an elaborate silvery erector-set affair on the floor between the beds; it whirled and spun silently and the little machines took it apart again and swallowed it. Mooney had no notion of its purpose. When it was gone, he could see no change, but Harse shuddered and shifted his position uncomfortably.

“All right,” said Mooney when everything was back in the kit. “Now you just keep your mouth shut. I won’t ask you to lie—they’ll have enough trouble understanding you if you tell the truth. Hear me?”

Harse merely stared, but that was good enough. Mooney put his hand on the phone. He took a deep breath and held it until his head began to tingle and his face turned red. Then he picked up the phone and, when he spoke, there was authentic rage and distress in his voice.

“Operator,” he snarled, “give me the manager. And hurry up—I want to report a thief!”

* * * *

When the manager had gone—along with the assistant manager, the house detective and the ancient shrew-faced head housekeeper—Mooney extracted a promise from Harse and left him. He carefully hung a “Do Not Disturb” card from the doorknob, crossed his fingers and took the elevator downstairs.

The fact seemed to be that Harse didn’t care about aboriginals. Mooney had arranged a system of taps on the door which, he thought, Harse would abide by, so that Mooney could get back in. Just the same, Mooney vowed to be extremely careful about how he opened that door. Whatever the pale blue light was, Mooney wanted no part of it directed at him.

The elevator operator greeted him respectfully—a part of the management’s policy of making amends, no doubt. Mooney returned the greeting with a barely civil nod. Sure, it had worked; he’d told the manager that he’d caught the chambermaid trying to steal something valuable that belonged to that celebrated proprietor of valuable secrets, Mr. Harse; the chambermaid had fled; how dared they employ a person like that?

And he had made very sure that the manager and the house dick and all the rest had plenty of opportunity to snoop apologetically in every closet and under the beds, just so there would be no suspicion in their minds that a dismembered chambermaid-torso was littering some dark corner of the room. What could they do but accept the story? The chambermaid wasn’t there to defend herself, and though they might wonder how she had got out of the hotel without being noticed, it was their problem to figure it out, not Mooney’s to explain it.

They had even been grateful when Mooney offered handsomely to refrain from notifying the police.

“Lobby, sir,” sang out the elevator operator, and Mooney stepped out, nodded to the manager, stared down the house detective and walked out into the street.

So far, so good.

Now that the animal necessities of clothes and food and a place to live were taken care of, Mooney had a chance to operate. It was a field in which he had always had a good deal of talent—the making of deals, the locating of contacts, the arranging of transactions that were better conducted in private.

And he had a good deal of business to transact. Harse had accepted without question his statement that they would have to raise more money.

“Try heroin or. Platinum?” he had suggested, and gone back to his viewer.

“I will,” Mooney assured him, and he did; he tried them both, and more besides.

* * * *

Not only was it good that he had such valuable commodities to vend, but it was a useful item in his total of knowledge concerning Harse that the man from the future seemed to have no idea of the value of money in the 20th Century, chez U.S.A.

Mooney found a buyer for the drugs; and there was a few thousand dollars there, which helped, for although the quantity was not large, the drugs were chemically pure. He found a fence to handle the jewels and precious metals; and he unloaded all the ones of moderate value—not the other diamond, not the rubies, not the star sapphire.

He arranged to keep those without mentioning it to Harse. No point in selling them now, not when they had several thousand dollars above any conceivable expenses, not when some future date would do as well, just in case Harse should get away with the balance of the kit.

Having concluded his business, Mooney undertook a brief but expensive shopping tour of his own and found a reasonably satisfactory place to eat. After a pleasantly stimulating cocktail and the best meal he had had in some years—doubly good, for there was no reek from Harse’s nauseating concoctions to spoil it—he called for coffee, for brandy, for the day’s papers.

The disappearance of the truck driver made hardly a ripple. There were a couple of stories, but small and far in the back—amnesia, said one; an underworld kidnaping, suggested another; but the story had nothing to feed on and it would die.

Good enough, thought Mooney, waving for another glass of that enjoyable brandy; and then he turned back to the front page and saw his own face.

There was the hotel lobby of the previous day, and a pillar of churning black smoke that Mooney knew was Harse, and there in the background, mouth agape, expression worried, was Howard Mooney himself.

He read it all very, very carefully.

Well, he thought, at least they didn’t get our names. The story was all about the Loyal and Beneficent Order of Exalted Eagles, and the only reference to the picture was a brief line about a disturbance outside the meeting hall. Nonetheless, the second glass of brandy tasted nowhere near as good as the first.

* * * *

Time passed. Mooney found a man who explained what was meant by the Vale of Cashmere. In Brooklyn, there is a very large park—the name is Prospect Park—and in it is a little planted valley, with a brook and a pool; and the name of it on the maps of Prospect Park is the Vale of Cashmere. Mooney sent out for a map, memorized it; and that was that.

However, Mooney didn’t really want to go to the Vale of Cashmere with Harse. What he wanted was that survival kit. Wonders kept popping out of it, and each day’s supply made Mooney covet the huger store that was still inside. There had been, he guessed, something like a hundred separate items that had somehow come out of that tiny box. There simply was no room for them all; but that was not a matter that Mooney concerned himself with. They were there, possible or not, because he had seen them.

Mooney laid traps.

The trouble was that Harse did not care for conversation. He spent endless hours with his film viewer, and when he said anything at all to Mooney, it was to complain. All he wanted was to exist for four days—nothing else.

Mooney laid conversational traps, tried to draw him out, and there was no luck. Harse would turn his blank, pale stare on him, and refuse to be drawn.

At night, however hard Mooney tried, Harse was always awake past him; and in his sleep, always and always, the little metal guardians strapped Mooney tight. Survival kit? But how did the little metal things know that Mooney was a threat?

It was maddening and time was passing. There were four days, then only three, then only two. Mooney made arrangements of his own.

He found two girls—lovely girls, the best that money could buy, and he brought them to the suite with a wink and a snigger. “A little relaxation, eh, Harse? The red-haired one is named Ginger and she’s partial to men with light-colored eyes.”

Ginger smiled a rehearsed and lovely smile. “I certainly am, Mr. Harse. Say, want to dance?”

But it came to nothing, though the house detective knocked deferentially on the door to ask if they could be a little more quiet, please. It wasn’t the sound of celebration that the neighbors were objecting to. It was the shrill, violent noise of Harse’s laughter. First he had seemed not to understand, and then he looked as astonished as Mooney had ever seen him. And then the laughter.

Girls didn’t work. Mooney got rid of the girls.

All right, Mooney was a man of infinite resource and sagacity—hadn’t he proved that many a time? He excused himself to Harse, made sure his fat new pigskin wallet was in his pocket, and took a cab to a place on Brooklyn’s waterfront where cabs seldom go. The bartender had arms like beer kegs and a blue chin.

“Beer,” said Mooney, and made sure he paid for it with a twenty-dollar bill—thumbing through a thick wad of fifties and hundreds to find the smallest. He retired to a booth and nursed his beer.

After about ten minutes, a man stood beside him, blue-chinned and muscular enough to be the bartender’s brother—which, Mooney found, he was.

“Well,” said Mooney, “it took you long enough. Sit down. You don’t have to roll me; you can earn this.”

Girls didn’t work? Okay, if not girls, then try boys…well, not boys exactly. Hoodlums. Try hoodlums and see what Harse might do against the toughest inhabitants of the area around the Gowanus Canal.

* * * *

Harse, sloshing heedlessly through melted snow, spattering Mooney, grumbled: “I do not see why we. Must? Wander endlessly across the face of this wretched slum.”

Mooney said soothingly: “We have to make sure, Harse. We have to be sure it’s the right place.”

“Huff,” said Harse, but he went along. They were in Prospect Park and it was nearly dark.

“Hey, look,” said Mooney desperately, “look at those kids on sleds!”

Harse glanced angrily at the kids on sleds and even more angrily at Mooney. Still, he wasn’t refusing to come and that was something. It had been possible that Harse would sit tight in the hotel room and it had taken all of the persuasive powers Mooney prided himself on to get him out. But Mooney was able to paint a horrible picture of getting to the wrong place, missing the Nexus Point, seventeen long years of waiting for the next one.

They crossed the Sheep Meadow, crossed the walk, crossed an old covered bridge; and they were at the head of a flight of shallow steps.

“The Vale of Cashmere!” cried Mooney, as though he were announcing a miracle.

Harse said nothing.

Mooney licked his lips, glancing at the kit Harse carried under an arm, glancing around. No one was in sight.

Mooney coughed. “Uh. You’re sure this is the place you mean?”

“If it is the Vale of Cashmere.” Harse looked once more down the steps, then turned.

“No, wait!” said Mooney frantically. “I mean—well, where in the Vale of Cashmere is the Nexus Point? This is a big place!”

Harse’s pale eyes stared at him for a moment. “No. Not big.”

“Oh, fairly big. After all—”

Harse said positively: “Come.”

Mooney swore under his breath and vowed never to trust anyone again, especially a bartender’s brother; but just then it happened. Out of the snowy bushes stepped a man in a red bandanna, holding a gun. “This is a stickup! Gimme that bag!”

Mooney exulted.

There was no chance for Harse now. The man was leaping toward him; there would be no time for him to open the bag, take out the weapon.…

But he didn’t have to. There was a thin, singing, whining sound from the bag. It leaped out of Harse’s hand, leaped free as though it had invisible wings, and flew at the man in the red bandanna. The man stumbled and jumped aside, the eyes incredulous over the mask. The silvery flat metal kit spun round him, whining. It circled him once, spiraled up. Behind it, like a smoke trail from a destroyer, a pale blue mist streamed backward. It surrounded the man and hid him.

The bag flew back into Harse’s hand.

The violet mist thinned and disappeared.

And the man was gone, as utterly and as finally as any chambermaid or driver of a truck.

There was a moment of silence. Mooney stared without belief at the snow sifting down from the bushes that the man had hid in.

Harse looked opaquely at Mooney. “It seems,” he said, “that in these slums are many. Dangers?”

* * * *

Mooney was very quiet on the way back to the hotel. Harse, for once, was not gazing into his viewer. He sat erect and silent beside Mooney, glancing at him from time to time. Mooney did not relish the attention.

The situation had deteriorated.

It deteriorated even more when they entered the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk called to Mooney.

Mooney hesitated, then said to Harse: “You go ahead. I’ll be up in a minute. And listen—don’t forget about my knock.”

Harse inclined his head and strode into the elevator. Mooney sighed.

“There’s a gentleman to see you, Mr. Mooney,” the desk clerk said civilly.

Mooney swallowed. “A—a gentleman? To see me?”

The clerk nodded toward the writing room. “In there, sir. A gentleman who says he knows you.”

Mooney pursed his lips.

In the writing room? Well, that was an advantage. The writing room was off the main lobby; it would give Mooney a chance to peek in before whoever it was could see him. He approached the entrance cautiously.…

“Howard!” cried an accusing familiar voice behind him.

Mooney turned. A small man with curly red hair was coming out of a door, marked “Men.”

“Why—why, Uncle Lester!” said Mooney. “What a p-pleasant surprise!”

Lester, all of five feet tall, wispy red hair surrounding his red plump face, looked up at him belligerently.

“No doubt!” he snapped. “I’ve been waiting all day, Howard. Took the afternoon off from work to come here. And I wouldn’t have been here at all if I hadn’t seen this.”

He was holding a copy of the paper with Mooney’s picture, behind the pillar of black fog. “Your aunt wrapped my lunch in it, Howard. Otherwise I might have missed it. Went right to the hotel. You weren’t there. The doorman helped, though. Found a cab driver. Told me where he’d taken you. Here I am.”

“That’s nice,” lied Mooney.

“No, it isn’t. Howard, what in the world are you up to? Do you know the Monmouth County police are looking for you? Said there was somebody missing. Want to talk to you.” The little man shook his head angrily. “Knew I shouldn’t let you stay at my place. Your aunt warned me, too. Why do you make trouble for me?”

“Police?” Mooney asked faintly.

“At my age! Police coming to the house. Who was that fella who’s missing, Howard? Where did he go? Why doesn’t he go home? His wife’s half crazy. He shouldn’t worry her like that.”

* * * *

Mooney clutched his uncle’s shoulder. “Do the police know where I am? You didn’t tell them?”

“Tell them? How could I tell them? Only I saw your picture while I was eating my sandwich, so I went to the hotel and—”

“Uncle Lester, listen. What did they come to see you for?”

“Because I was stupid enough to let you stay in my house, that’s what for,” Lester said bitterly. “Two days ago. Knocking on my door, hardly eight o’clock in the morning. They said there’s a man missing, driving a truck, found the truck empty. Man from the Coast Guard station knows him, saw him picking up a couple of hitchhikers at a bridge someplace, recognized one of the hitchhikers. Said the hitchhiker’d been staying at my house. That’s you, Howard. Don’t lie; he described you. Pudgy, kind of a squinty look in the eyes, dressed like a bum—oh, it was you, all right.”

“Wait a minute. Nobody knows you’ve come here, right? Not even Auntie?”

“No, course not. She didn’t see the picture, so how would she know? Would’ve said something if she had. Now come on, Howard, we’ve got to go to the police and—”

“Uncle Lester!”

The little man paused and looked at him suspiciously. But that was all right; Mooney began to feel confidence flow back into him. It wasn’t all over yet, not by a long shot.

“Uncle Lester,” he said, his voice low-pitched and persuasive, “I have to ask you a very important question. Think before you answer, please. This is the question: Have you ever belonged to any Communist organization?”

The old man blinked. After a moment, he exploded. “Now what are you up to, Howard? You know I never—”

“Think, Uncle Lester! Please. Way back when you were a boy—anything like that?”

“Of course not!”

“You’re sure? Because I’m warning you, Uncle Lester, you’re going to have to take the strictest security check anybody ever took. You’ve stumbled onto something important. You’ll have to prove you can be trusted or—well, I can’t answer for the consequences. You see, this involves—” he looked around him furtively—“Schenectady Project.”

“Schenec—”

“Schenectady Project.” Mooney nodded. “You’ve heard of the atom bomb? Uncle Lester, this is bigger!”

“Bigger than the at—”

“Bigger. It’s the molecule bomb. There aren’t seventy-five men in the country that know what that so-called driver in the truck was up to, and now you’re one of them.”

Mooney nodded soberly, feeling his power. The old man was hooked, tied and delivered. He could tell by the look in the eyes, by the quivering of the lips. Now was the time to slip the contract in his hand; or, in the present instance, to—

“I’ll tell you what to do,” whispered Mooney. “Here’s my key. You go up to my room. Don’t knock—we don’t want to attract attention. Walk right in. You’ll see a man there and he’ll explain everything. Understand?”

“Why—why, sure, Howard. But why don’t you come with me?”

Mooney raised a hand warningly. “You might be followed. I’ll have to keep a lookout.”

Five minutes later, when Mooney tapped on the door of the room—three taps, pause, three taps—and cautiously pushed it open, the pale blue mist was just disappearing. Harse was standing angrily in the center of the room with the jointed metal thing thrust out ominously before him.

And of Uncle Lester, there was no trace at all.

CHAPTER V

Time passed; and then time was all gone, and it was midnight, nearly the Nexus Point.

In front of the hotel, a drowsy cab-driver gave them an argument. “The Public Liberry? Listen, the Liberry ain’t open this time of night. I ought to—Oh, thanks. Hop in.” He folded the five-dollar bill and put the cab in gear.

Harse said ominously: “Liberry, Mooney? Why do you instruct him to take us to the Liberry?”

Mooney whispered: “There’s a law against being in the Park at night. We’ll have to sneak in. The Library’s right across the street.”

Harse stared, with his luminous pale eyes. But it was true; there was such a law, for the parks of the city lately had become fields of honor where rival gangs contended with bottle shards and zip guns, where a passerby was odds-on to be mugged.

“High Command must know this,” Harse grumbled. “Must proceed, they say, to Nexus Point. But then one finds the aboriginals have made laws! Oh, I shall make a report!”

“Sure you will,” Mooney soothed; but in his heart, he was prepared to bet heavily against it.

Because he had a new strategy. Clearly he couldn’t get the survival kit from Harse. He had tried that and there was no luck; his arm still tingled as the bellboy’s had, from having seemingly absent-mindedly taken the handle to help Harse. But there was a way.

Get rid of this clown from the future, he thought contentedly; meet the Nexus Point instead of Harse and there was the future, ripe for the taking! He knew where the rescuers would would be—and, above all, he knew how to talk. Every man has one talent and Mooney’s was salesmanship.

All the years wasted on peddling dime-store schemes like frozen-food plans! But this was the big time at last, so maybe the years of seasoning were not wasted, after all.

“That for you, Uncle Lester,” he muttered. Harse looked up from his viewer angrily and Mooney cleared his throat. “I said,” he explained hastily, “we’re almost at the—the Nexus Point.”

* * * *

Snow was drifting down. The cab-driver glanced at the black, quiet library, shook his head and pulled away, leaving black, wet tracks in the thin snow.

The pale-eyed man looked about him irritably. “You!” he cried, waking Mooney from a dream of possessing the next ten years of stock-market reports. “You! Where is this Vale of Cashmere?”

“Right this way, Harse, right this way,” said Mooney placatingly.

There was a wide sort of traffic circle—Grand Army Plaza was the name of it—and there were a few cars going around it. But not many, and none of them looked like police cars. Mooney looked up and down the broad, quiet streets.

“Across here,” he ordered, and led the time traveler toward the edge of the park. “We can’t go in the main entrance. There might be cops.”

“Cops?”

“Policemen. Law-enforcement officers. We’ll just walk down here a way and then hop over the wall. Trust me,” said Mooney, in the voice that had put frozen-food lockers into so many suburban homes.

The look from those pale eyes was anything but a look of trust, but Harse didn’t say anything. He stared about with an expression of detached horror, like an Alabama gentlewoman condemned to walk through Harlem.

“Now!” whispered Mooney urgently.

And over the wall they went.

They were in a thicket of shrubs and brush, snow-laden, the snow sifting down into Mooney’s neck every time he touched a branch, which was always; he couldn’t avoid it. They crossed a path and then a road—long, curving, broad, white, empty. Down a hill, onto another path. Mooney paused, glancing around.

“You know where you are. Going?”

“I think so. I’m looking for cops.” None in sight. Mooney frowned. What the devil did the police think they were up to? They passed laws; why weren’t they around to enforce them?

Mooney had his landmarks well in mind. There was the Drive, and there was the fork he was supposed to be looking for. It wouldn’t be hard to find the path to the Vale. The only thing was, it was kind of important to Mooney’s hope of future prosperity that he find a policeman first. And time was running out.

He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch—self-winding, shockproof, non-magnetic; the man in the hotel’s jewelry shop had assured him only yesterday that he could depend on its time-keeping as on the beating of his heart. It was nearly a quarter of one.

“Come along, come along!” grumbled Harse.

Mooney stalled: “I—I think we’d better go along this way. It ought to be down there—”

He cursed himself. Why hadn’t he gone in the main entrance, where there was sure to be a cop? Harse would never have known the difference. But there was the artist in him that wanted the thing done perfectly, and so he had held to the pretense of avoiding police, had skulked and hidden. And now—

“Look!” he whispered, pointing.

Harse spat soundlessly and turned his eyes where Mooney was pointing.

Yes. Under a distant light, a moving figure, swinging a night-stick.

Mooney took a deep breath and planted a hand between Harse’s shoulder blades.

“Run!” he yelled at the top of his voice, and shoved. He sounded so real, he almost convinced himself. “Well have to split up—I’ll meet you there. Now run!”

CHAPTER VI

Oh, clever Mooney! He crouched under a snowy tree, watching the man from the future speed effortlessly away…in the wrong direction.

The cop was hailing him; clever cop! All it had taken was a couple of full-throated yells and at once the cop had perceived that someone was in the park. But cleverer than any cop was Mooney.

Men from the future. Why, thought Mooney contentedly, no Mrs. Meyerhauser of the suburbs would have let me get away with a trick like that to sell her a freezer. There’s going to be no problem at all. I don’t have to worry about a thing. Mooney can take care of himself!

By then, he had caught his breath—and time was passing, passing.

He heard a distant confused yelling. Harse and the cop? But it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to the Nexus Point at one minute past one.

He took a deep breath and began to trot. Slipping in the snow, panting heavily, he went down the path, around the little glade, across the covered bridge.

He found the shallow steps that led down to the Vale.

And there it was below him: a broad space where walks joined, and in the space a thing shaped like a dinosaur egg, rounded and huge. It glowed with a silvery sheen.

Confidently, Mooney started down the steps toward the egg and the moving figures that flitted soundlessly around it. Harse was not the only time traveler, Mooney saw. Good, that might make it all the simpler. Should he change his plan and feign amnesia, pass himself off as one of their own men?

Or—

A movement made him look over his shoulder.

Somebody was standing at the top of the steps. “Hell’s fire,” whispered Mooney. He’d forgotten all about that aboriginal law; and here above him stood a man in a policeman’s uniform, staring down with pale eyes.

No, not a policeman. The face was—Harse’s.

Mooney swallowed and stood rooted.

“You!” Harse’s savage voice came growling. “You are to stand. Still?”

Mooney didn’t need the order; he couldn’t move. No twentieth-century cop was a match for Harse, that was clear; Harse had bested him, taken his uniform away from him for camouflage—and here he was.

Unfortunately, so was Howard Mooney.

The figures below were looking up, pointing and talking; Harse from above was coming down. Mooney could only stand, and wish—wish that he were back in Sea Bright, living on cookies and stale tea, wish he had planned things with more intelligence, more skill—perhaps even with more honesty. But it was too late for wishing.

Harse came down the steps, paused a yard from Mooney, scowled a withering scowl—and passed on.

He reached the bottom of the steps and joined the others waiting about the egg. They all went inside.

The glowing silvery colors winked and went out. The egg flamed purple, faded, turned transparent and disappeared.

Mooney stared and, yelling a demand for payment, ran stumbling down the steps to where it had been. There was a round thawed spot, a trampled patch—nothing else.

They were gone.…

Almost gone. Because there was a sudden bright wash of flame from overhead—cold silvery flame. He looked up, dazzled. Over him, the egg was visible as thin smoke, hovering. A smoky, half-transparent hand reached out of a port. A thin, reedy voice cried: “I promised you. Pay?”

And the silvery dispatch-case sort of thing, the survival kit, dropped soundlessly to the snow beside Mooney.

When he looked up again, the egg was gone for good.

* * * *

He was clear back to the hotel before he got a grip on himself—and then he was drunk with delight. Honest Harse! Splendidly trustable Harse! Why, all this time, Mooney had been so worried, had worked so hard—and the whole survival kit was his, after all!

He had touched it gingerly before picking it up but it didn’t shock him; clearly the protective devices, whatever they were, were off.

He sweated over it for an hour and a half, looking for levers, buttons, a slit that he might pry wider with the blade of a knife. At last he kicked it and yelled, past endurance: “Open up, damn you!”

It opened wide on the floor before him.

“Oh, bless your heart!” cried Mooney, falling to his knees to drag out the string of wampum, the little mechanical mice, the viewing-machine sort of thing. Treasures like those were beyond price; each one might fetch a fortune, if only in the wondrous new inventions he could patent if he could discover just how they worked.

But where were they?

Gone! The wampum was gone. The goggles were gone. Everything was gone—the little flat canisters, the map instruments, everything but one thing.

There was, in a corner of the case, a squarish, sharp-edged thing that Mooney stared at blindly for a long moment before he recognized it. It was a part—only a part—of the jointed construction that Harse had used to rid himself of undesirables by bathing them in blue light.

What a filthy trick! Mooney all but sobbed to himself.

He picked up the squarish thing bitterly. Probably it wouldn’t even work, he thought, the world a ruin around him. It wasn’t even the whole complete weapon.

Still—

There was a grooved, saddle-shaped affair that was clearly a sort of trigger; it could move forward or it could move back. Mooney thought deeply for a while.

Then he sat up, held the thing carefully away from him with the pointed part toward the wall and pressed, ever so gently pressed forward on the saddle-shaped thumb-trigger.

The pale blue haze leaped out, swirled around and, not finding anything alive in its range, dwindled and died.

* * * *

Aha, thought Mooney, not everything is lost yet! Surely a bright young man could find some use for a weapon like this which removed, if it did not kill, which prevented any nastiness about a corpse turning up, or a messy job of disposal.

Why not see what happened if the thumb-piece was moved backward?

Well, why not? Mooney held the thing away from him, hesitated, and slid it back.

There was a sudden shivering tingle in his thumb, in the gadget he was holding, running all up and down his arm. A violet haze, very unlike the blue one, licked soundlessly forth—not burning, but destroying as surely as flame ever destroyed; for where the haze touched the gadget itself, the kit, everything that had to do with the man from the future, it seared and shattered. The gadget fell into white crystalline powder in Mooney’s hand and the case itself became a rectangular shape traced in white powder ridges on the rug.

Oh, no! thought Mooney, even before the haze had gone. It can’t be!

The flame danced away like a cloud, spreading and rising. While Mooney stared, it faded away, but not without leaving something behind.

Mooney threw his taut body backward, almost under the bed. What he saw, he didn’t believe; what he believed filled him with panic.

No wonder Harse had laughed so when Mooney asked if its victims were dead. For there they were, all of them. Like djinn out of a jar, human figures jelled and solidified where the cloud of violet flame had not at all diffidently rolled.

They were alive, as big as life, and beginning to move—and so many of them! Three—five—six:

The truck-driver, yes, and a man in long red flannel underwear who must have been the policeman, and Uncle Lester, and the bartender’s brother, and the chambermaid, and a man Mooney didn’t know.

They were there, all of them; and they came toward him, and oh! but they were angry!

PREFERRED RISK (written with Lester del Rey)

Originally published as a 3-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction, June to August 1955.

CHAPTER I

The liner from Port Lyautey was comfortable and slick, but I was leaning forward in my seat as we came in over Naples. I had been on edge all the way across the Atlantic. Now as the steward came through the compartments to pick up our Blue Plate ration coupons for the trip, I couldn’t help feeling annoyed that I hadn’t eaten the food they represented. For the Company wanted everyone to get the fullest possible benefit out of his policies—not only the food policies, but Blue Blanket, Blue Bolt and all the others.

We whooshed in to a landing at Carmody Field, just outside of Naples. My baggage was checked through, so I didn’t expect to have any difficulty clearing past the truce-team Customs inspectors. It was only a matter of turning over my baggage checks, and boarding the rapido that would take me into Naples.

But my luck was low. The man before me was a fussbudget who insisted on carrying his own bags, and I had to stand behind him a quarter of an hour, while the truce-teams geigered his socks and pajamas.

While I fidgeted, though, I noticed that the Customs shed had, high up on one wall, a heroic-sized bust of Millen Carmody himself. Just standing there, under that benevolent smile, made me feel better. I even managed to nod politely to the traveler ahead of me as he finally got through the gate and let me step up to the uniformed Company expediter who checked my baggage tickets.

And the expediter gave me an unexpected thrill. He leafed through my papers, then stepped back and gave me a sharp military salute. “Proceed, Adjuster Wills,” he said, returning my travel orders. It hadn’t been like that at the transfer point at Port Lyautey—not even back at the Home Office in New York. But here we were in Naples, and the little war was not yet forgotten; we were under Company law, and I was an officer of the Company.

It was all I needed to restore my tranquility. But it didn’t last.

* * * *

The rapido took us through lovely Italian countryside, but it was in no hurry to do it. We were late getting into the city itself, and I found myself almost trotting out of the little train and up into the main waiting room where my driver would be standing at the Company desk.

I couldn’t really blame the Neapolitans for the delay—it wasn’t their fault that the Sicilians had atomized the main passenger field at Capodichino during the war, and the rapido wasn’t geared to handling that volume of traffic from Carmody Field. But Mr. Gogarty would be waiting for me, and it wasn’t my business to keep a Regional Director waiting.

I got as far as the exit to the train shed. There was a sudden high, shrill blast of whistles and a scurrying and, out of the confusion of persons milling about, there suddenly emerged order.

At every doorway stood three uniformed Company expediters; squads of expediters formed almost before my eyes all over the train shed; single expediters appeared and took up guard positions at every stairwell and platform head. It was a triumph of organization; in no more than ten seconds, a confused crowd was brought under instant control.

But why?

There was a babble of surprised sounds from the hurrying crowds; they were as astonished as I. It was reasonable enough that the Company’s expediter command should conduct this sort of surprise raid from time to time, of course. The Company owed it to its policyholders; by insuring them against the hazards of war under the Blue Bolt complex of plans, it had taken on the responsibility of preventing war when it could. And ordinarily it could, easily enough.

How could men fight a war without weapons—and how could they buy weapons, particularly atomic weapons, when the Company owned all the sources and sold only to whom it pleased, when it pleased, as it pleased? There were still occasional outbreaks—witness the recent strife between Sicily and Naples itself—but the principle remained… Anyway, surprise raids were well within the Company’s rights.

I was mystified, though—I could not imagine what they were looking for here in the Naples railroad terminal; with geigering at Carmody Field and every other entry point to the Principality of Naples, they should have caught every fissionable atom coming in, and it simply did not seem reasonable that anyone in the principality itself could produce nuclear fuel to make a bomb.

Unless they were not looking for bombs, but for people who might want to use them. But that didn’t tie in with what I had been taught as a cadet at the Home Office.

* * * *

There was a crackle and an unrecognizable roar from the station’s public-address system. Then the crowd noises died down as people strained to listen, and I began to understand the words: “…where you are in an orderly fashion until this investigation is concluded. You will not be delayed more than a few minutes. Do not, repeat, do not attempt to leave until this man has been captured. Attention! Attention! All persons in this area! Under Company law, you are ordered to stop all activities and stand still at once. An investigation is being carried out in this building. All persons will stand still and remain where you are in an orderly fashion until this investigation…”

The mounting babble drowned the speaker out again, but I had heard enough.

I suppose I was wrong, but I had been taught that my duty was to serve the world, by serving the Company, in all ways at all times. I walked briskly toward the nearest squad of expediters, who were already breaking up into detachments and moving about among the halted knots of civilians, peering at faces, asking questions.

I didn’t quite make it; I hadn’t gone more than five yards when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder, and a harsh voice snarled in the Neapolitan dialect, “Halt, you! Didn’t you hear the orders?”

I spun, staggering slightly, to face an armed expediter-officer. I stood at attention and said crisply, “Sorry. I’m Thomas Wills, Claims Adjuster. I thought I might be able to help.”

The officer stared at me for a moment. His cheeks moved; I had the impression that, under other circumstances, he would have spat on the floor at my feet. “Papers!” he ordered.

I passed him my travel orders. He looked them over briefly, then returned them. Like the Customs expediter at Carmody Field, he gave me a snap salute, militarily precise and, in a way I could not quite define, contemptuous. “You should just stay here, Adjuster Wills,” he advised—in a tone that made it a command. “This will be over in a moment.”

He was gone, back to his post. I stood for a moment, but it was easier to listen to his orders than to obey them; the Neapolitan crowd didn’t seem to take too well to discipline, and though there was no overt resistance to the search squads, there was a sort of Brownian movement of individuals in the throng that kept edging me back and away from where I had been standing. It made me a little uncomfortable; I was standing close to the edge of a platform, and a large poster announced that the Milan Express was due to arrive on that track at any moment. In fact, I could hear the thin, effeminate whistle of its Diesel locomotive just beyond the end of the platform. I tried to inch my way from the edge. I dodged around an electric baggage-cart, and trod heavily on someone’s foot.

* * * *

“Excuse me,” I said quickly, looking at the man. He glared back at me. There was a bright spark in his eyes; I could tell little about his expression because, oddly enough in that country of clean-shaven faces, he wore a heavy, ragged, clipped beard. He wore the uniform of a porter. He mumbled something I could not quite catch, and moved as if to push me away. I suppose I put up my arm. My papers, with the Company seal bright gold upon them, were still in my hand, and the bearded man caught sight of them.

If there had been anger in his eyes before, there was now raging fury. He shrilled, “Beast! Animal!” He thrust at me blindly and leaped past me, out of the shelter of the bags; he went spinning furiously through the crowd, men and women ricocheting off him.

I heard a harsh bellow: “There he goes! Zorchi! Zorchi!” And I could hear the bearded man shrieking curses as he hurtled up the platform, up toward the oncoming train, over to the edge—and off the platform to the tracks!

He fell less than a yard in front of the slim nose of the Diesel. I don’t suppose the speed of the train was even five miles an hour, but the engineer hadn’t a chance in the world to stop.

While I watched, struck motionless, along with all the others on that platform, the engine passed over the huddled form. The brakes were shrieking, but it was much, much too late. Even in that moment I thought he would not be killed—not instantly, at least, unless he died of loss of blood. The trunk of his body was safely in the well between the tracks. But his legs were sprawled over a rail. And the slow click-click of the wheels didn’t stop until his uniformed body was far out of sight.

It was shocking, sickening, unbelievable.

And it didn’t stop there. A strange thing happened. When the man had dived into the path of the train, there was a sudden fearful hush; it had happened too suddenly for anyone to cry out. And when the hush ended, there was only a momentary, instinctive gasp of horror. Then there was a quick, astonished babble of voices—and then cheers! And applause, and ringing bravos!

I didn’t understand.

The man had thrown himself deliberately under the train. I was sure of it.

Was that something to cheer?

* * * *

I finally made it to where the Regional Director was waiting for me—nearly an hour late.

It was at a hotel overlooking the Bay, and the sight was thrilling enough to put the unpleasant accident I had seen out of my mind for a moment. There was nothing so beautiful in all the world, I thought, as the Bay of Naples at sunset. It was not only my own opinion; I had seen it described many times in the travel folders I had pored over, while my wife indulgently looked over my shoulder, back in those remote days of marriage. “La prima vista del mundo,” the folders had called it—the most beautiful sight of the world. They had said: “See Naples, and die.”

I hadn’t known, of course, that Marianna would die first…

But that was all behind me. After Marianna’s death, a lot of things had happened, all in a short time, and some of them very bad. But good or bad, I had laid down a law for myself: I would not dwell on them. I had started on a new life, and, I was going to put the past in a locked compartment in my mind. I had to!

I was no longer an ordinary civilian, scraping together his Blue Heaven premiums for the sake of a roof over his head, budgeting his food policies, carrying on his humdrum little job. I was a servant of the human race and a member of the last surviving group of gentleman-adventurers in all the world: I was an Insurance Claims Adjuster for the Company!

All the same, I couldn’t quite forget some of the bad things that had happened, as I walked into the hotel dining room to meet the Regional Director.

* * * *

Regional Director Gogarty was a huge, pale balloon of a man. He was waiting for me at a table set for four. As he greeted me, his expression was sour. “Glad to meet you, Wills. Bad business, this. Bad business. He got away with it again.”

I coughed. “Sir?” I asked.

“Zorchi!” he snapped. And I remembered the name I had heard on the platform. The madman! “Zorchi, Luigi Zorchi, the human jellyfish. Wills, do you know that that man has just cashed in on his twelfth disability policy? And not a thing we could do to stop him! You were there. You saw it, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Thought so. The twelfth! And your driver said on the phone it was both legs this time. Both legs—and on a common carrier. Double indemnity!” He shook his enormous head. “And with a whole corps of expediters standing by to stop him!”

I said with some difficulty, “Sir, do you mean that the man I saw run over by the train was—”

“Luigi Zorchi. That’s who he was. Ever hear of him, Wills?”

“Can’t say I have.”

Gogarty nodded his balloonlike head. “The Company has kept it out of the papers, of course, but you can’t keep anything from being gossiped about around here. This Zorchi is practically a national hero in Naples. He’s damn near a millionaire by now, I guess, and every lira of it has come right out of the Company’s indemnity funds. And do you think we can do anything about it? Not a thing! Not even when we’re tipped off ahead of time—when, what, and where!

“He just laughs at us. I know for a fact,” Gogarty said bitterly, “that Zorchi knew we found out he was going to dive in front of that express tonight. He was just daring us to stop him. We should have! We should have figured he might disguise himself as a porter. We should—”

I interrupted, “Mr. Gogarty, are you trying to tell me this man deliberately maims himself for the accident insurance?” Gogarty nodded sourly. “Good heavens,” I cried, “that’s disloyal!”

Gogarty laughed sharply and brought me up standing. There was a note to the way he laughed that I didn’t like; for a moment there, I thought he was thinking of my own little—well, indiscretion. But he said only, “It’s expensive, too.” I suppose he meant nothing by it. But I was sensitive on the subject.

Before I could ask him any more questions, the massive face smoothed out in a smile. He rose ponderously, greeting someone. “Here they are, Wills,” he said jovially. “The girls!”

The headwaiter was conducting two young ladies toward us. I remembered my manners and stood up, but I confess I was surprised. I had heard that discipline in the field wasn’t the same as at the Home Office, but after all—Gogarty was a Regional Director!

It was a little informal of him to arrange our first meeting at dinner, in the first place. But to make a social occasion of it was—in the straitlaced terms of the Home Office where I had been trained—almost unthinkable.

And it was apparent that the girls were mere decoration. I had a hundred eager questions to ask Gogarty—about this mad Zorchi, about my duties, about Company policy here in the principality of Naples—but it would be far out of line to bring up Company matters with these females present. I was not pleased, but I managed to be civil.

The girls were decorative enough, I had to admit.

Gogarty said expansively, all trace of ill humor gone, “This is Signorina dell’Angela and Miss Susan Manchester. Rena and Susan, this is Tom Wills.”

I said stiffly, “Delighted.”

Susan was the blonde one, a small plump girl with the bubbly smile of a professional model. She greeted Gogarty affectionately. The other was dark and lovely, but with a constant shadow, almost glowering, in her eyes.

So we had a few drinks. Then we had a few more. Then the captain appeared with a broad menu, and I found myself in an embarrassing position. For Gogarty waved the menu aside with a gesture of mock disgust. “Save it for the peasants,” he ordered. “We don’t want that Blue Plate slop. We’ll start with those little baby shrimps like I had last night, and then an antipasto and after that—”

I broke in apologetically, “Mr. Gogarty, I have only a Class-B policy.”

Gogarty blinked at me. “What?”

I cleared my throat. “I have only Class-B coverage on my Blue Plate policy,” I repeated. “I, uh, I never went in much for such—”

He looked at me incredulously. “Boy,” he said, “this is on the Company. Now relax and let me order. Blue Plate coverage is for the peasants; I eat like a human being.”

It shook me a little. Here was a Regional Director talking about the rations supplied under the Company’s Blue Plate coverage as “slop.” Oh, I wasn’t naive enough to think that no one talked that way. There were a certain number of malcontents anywhere. I’d heard that kind of talk, and even worse, once in a while from the Class-D near-uninsurables, the soreheads with a grudge against the world who blamed all their troubles on the Company and bleated about the “good old days.” Mostly they did their bleating when it was premium time, I’d noticed.

But I certainly never expected it from Gogarty.

Still—it was his party. And he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I had to allow him the defects of his virtues, I decided. If he was less reverent to the Company than he should have been, at least by the same token he was friendly and democratic. He had at least twenty years seniority on me, and back at the Home Office a mere Claims Adjuster wouldn’t have been at the same table with a Regional Director.

And here he was feeding me better than I had ever eaten in my life, talking as though we were equals, even (I reminded myself) seeing to it that we had the young ladies to keep us company.

* * * *

We were hours at dinner, hours and endless glasses of wine, and we talked continually. But the conversation never came close to official business.

The girl Rena was comfortable to be with, I found. There was that deep, eternal sadness in her eyes, and every once in a while I came up against it in the middle of a laugh; but she was soft-voiced and pleasant, and undeniably lovely. Marianna had been prettier, I thought, but Marianna’s voice was harsh Midwest while Rena’s—

I stopped myself.

When we were on our after-dinner liqueurs, Rena excused herself for a moment and, after a few minutes, I spotted her standing by a satin-draped window, looking wistfully out over a balcony. Gogarty winked.

I got up and, a little unsteadily, went over to her. “Shall we look at this more closely?” I asked her. She smiled and we stepped outside.

Again I was looking down on the Bay of Naples—a scene painted in moonlight this time, instead of the orange hues of sunset. It was warm, but the Moon was frosty white in the sky. Even its muddled reflection in the slagged waters was grayish white, not yellow. There was a pale orange halo over the crater of Mount Vesuvius, to our left; and far down the coast a bluish phosphorescence, over the horizon, marked Pompeii. “Beautiful,” I said.

She looked at me strangely. All she said was, “Let’s go back inside.”

Gogarty greeted us. “Looking at the debris?” he demanded jovially. “Not much to see at night. Cheer up, Tom. You’ll see all the damage you want to see over the next few days.”

I said, “I hope so, sir.”

Gogarty shook his head reprovingly. “Not ‘sir,’ Tom. Save that for the office. Call me Sam.” He beamed. “You want to know what it was like here during the war? You can ask the girls. They were here all through. Especially Susan—she was with the Company’s branch here, even before I took over. Right, Susan?”

“Right, Sam,” she said obediently.

Gogarty nodded. “Not that Rena missed much either, but she was out of town when the Sicilians came over. Weren’t you?” he demanded, curiously intent. Rena nodded silently. “Naples sure took a pasting,” Gogarty went on. “It was pretty tough for a while. Did you know that the Sicilians actually made a landing right down the coast at Pompeii?”

“I saw the radioactivity,” I said.

“That’s right. They got clobbered, all right. Soon’s the barges were in, the Neapolitans let them have it. But it cost them. The Company only allowed them five A-bombs each, and they had to use two more to knock out Palermo. And—well, they don’t like to tell this on themselves, but one of the others was a dud. Probably the only dud A-bomb in history, I guess.”

He grinned at Rena. Astonishingly, Rena smiled back.

She was, I thought, a girl of many astonishing moments; I had not thought that she would be amused at Gogarty’s heavy-handed needling.

* * * *

Gogarty went on and on. I was interested enough—I had followed the Naples-Sicily war in the papers and, of course, I’d been briefed at the Home Office before coming over—but the girls seemed to find it pretty dull. By the time Gogarty finished telling me about the Sicilian attempt to trigger Mt. Vesuvius by dropping an A-bomb into its crater, Rena was frankly bored and even Susan was yawning behind her palm.

We finally wound up under the marquee of the restaurant. Gogarty and the blonde politely said good night, and disappeared into a cab. It was clearly up to me to take Rena home.

I hailed a cab. When I made up my new insurance schedule at the Home Office before coming over, I splurged heavily on transportation coverage. Perhaps I was making up for the luxuries of travel that life with Marianna hadn’t allowed me. Anyway, I’d taken out Class AA policies. And as the cab driver clipped my coupons he was extremely polite.

Rena lived a long way from the hotel. I tried to make small talk, but she seemed to have something on her mind. I was in the middle of telling her about the terrible “accident” I had seen that evening at the station—suitably censored, of course—when I observed she was staring out the window.

She hadn’t been paying attention while I talked, but she noticed the silence when I stopped. She gave a little shake of the head and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wills,” she said. “I am being rude.”

“Not at all,” I said gallantly.

“Yes.” She nodded and smiled, but it was a thoughtful, almost a sad, smile. “You are too polite, you gentlemen of the Company. Is that part of your training?”

“It’s easy to be polite to you, Miss dell’Angela,” I said by rote. Yes, it was part of our training: A Claims Adjuster is always courteous. But what I said was true enough, all the same. She was a girl that I enjoyed being polite to.

“No, truly,” she persisted. “You are an important officer in the Company, and you must have trained long for the post. What did they teach you?”

“Well—” I hesitated—“just the sort of thing you’d expect, I guess. A little statistical mathematics—enough so we can understand what the actuaries mean. Company policies, business methods, administration. Then, naturally, we had a lot of morale sessions. A Claims Adjuster—” I cleared my throat, feeling a little self-conscious—“a Claims Adjuster is supposed to be like Caesar’s wife, you know. He must always set an example to his staff and to the public. I guess that sounds pretty stuffy. I don’t mean it to be. But there is a lot of emphasis on tradition and honor and discipline.”

She asked, rather oddly, “And is there a course in loyalty?”

“Why, I suppose you might say that. There are ceremonies, you know. And it’s a matter of cadet honor to put the Company ahead of personal affairs.”

“And do all Claims Adjusters live by this code?”

For a moment I couldn’t answer. It was like a blow in the face. I turned sharply to look at her, but there was no expression on her face, only a mild polite curiosity.

I said with difficulty, “Miss dell’Angela, what are you getting at?”

“Why, nothing!” Her face was as angelic as her name.

“I don’t know what you mean or what you may have heard about me, Miss dell’Angela, but I can tell you this, if you are interested. When my wife died, I went to pieces. I admit it. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have, and some of them may have reflected against the Company. I’m not trying to deny that but, you understand, I was upset at the time. I’m not upset now.” I took a deep breath. “To me, the Company is the savior of humanity. I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but I am loyal to the Company, to the extent of putting it ahead of my personal affairs, to the extent of doing whatever job the Company assigns to me. And, if necessary, to the extent of dying for it if I have to. Is that clear?”

Well, that was a conversation-stopper, of course. I hadn’t meant to get all wound up about it, but it hurt to find out that there had been gossip. The dell’Angela girl merely said: “Quite clear.”

We rode in silence for a while. She was staring out the window again, and I didn’t especially want to talk just then. Maybe I was too sensitive. But there was no doubt in my mind that the Company was the white hope of the world, and I didn’t like being branded a traitor because of what I’d said after Marianna died. I was, in a way, paying the penalty for it—it had been made pretty clear to me that I was on probation. That was enough.

As I said, she lived a long way from the Gran Reale. I had plenty of time for my flare-up, and for brooding, and for getting over it.

But we never did get around to much idle conversation on that little trip. By the time I had simmered down, I began to have disturbing thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was a man, and she was a girl, and we were riding in a cab.

I don’t know how else to say it. At one moment I was taking her home from a dinner; and at the next, I was taking her home from a date. Nothing had changed—except the way I looked at it.

All of a sudden, I began to feel as though I were fourteen years old again. It had been quite a long time since I had had the duty of escorting a beautiful girl—and by then I realized this was a really beautiful girl—home at the end of an evening. And I was faced with the question that I had thought would never bother me again at least a decade before. Should I kiss her good night?

It was a problem, and I thought about it, feeling a little foolish but rather happy about it. But all my thinking came to nothing. She decided for me.

The cab stopped in front of a white stucco wall. Like so many of the better Italian homes, the wall enclosed a garden, and the house was in the middle of the garden. It was an attractive enough place—Class A at least, I thought—though it was hard to tell in the moonlight.

I cleared my throat and sort of halfway leaned over to her.

Then she turned and was looking up at me, and the moonlight glinted brightly off what could only have been tears in her eyes.

I stared.

She didn’t say a word. She shook her head briefly, opened the door and was gone behind the gate.

It was a puzzlement. Why had she been crying? What had I done?

I reviewed my conduct all the way back to the hotel, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps I had been brusque—but brusque enough to bring tears? I couldn’t believe it.

Curious new life! I fell asleep with the pale moon shining in the window, brooding about the life I was just beginning, and about the old life behind me that was buried in the same grave with Marianna.

CHAPTER II

The Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a galleria, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the galleria had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness.

I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk.

I pushed open the swinging gate.

Gogarty looked at me icily. “You’re late,” he said.

He had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, “Sorry, I’m—”

“Never mind. Just don’t let it happen again.” It was clear that, in the office, business was business; the fact that we had been drinking together the night before would not condone liberties the morning after. Gogarty said, “Your desk is over there, Wills. Better get started.”

I felt considerably deflated as I sat down at my desk and stared unhappily at the piles of blue and yellow manifolds before me.

The Company had trained me well. I didn’t need to be coached in order to get through the work; it was all a matter of following established techniques and precedents. I checked the coverage, reduced the claim to tape-code, fed the tapes into a machine.

If the claim was legitimate, the machine computed the amounts due and issued a punch-card check. If there was anything wrong, the machine flashed a red light and spat the faulty claim out into a hopper.

And there were plenty of claims. Every adult in Naples, of course, carried the conventional War-and-Disaster policy—the so-called Blue Bolt coverage. Since few of them had actually been injured in the war, the claims were small—mostly for cost of premiums on other policies, under the disability clauses. (For if war prevented a policyholder from meeting his Blue Plate premiums, for instance, the Company itself under Blue Bolt would keep his policies paid—and the policyholder fed.)

But there were some big claims, too. The Neapolitan government had carried the conventional Blue Bolt policies and, though the policy had been canceled by the Company before hostilities broke out—thus relieving the Company of the necessity of paying damages to the principality of Naples itself—still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government’s bureaus and departments, almost every one of them non-canceling.

It amounted to billions and billions of lire. Just looking at the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though that would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us.

However, the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Sicily, with less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Company’s reserves back hundreds of millions of dollars.

And to think that some people didn’t like the Company! Why, without it, the whole peninsula of Italy would have been in financial ruin, the solvent areas dragged down with the combatants!

Naturally, the Regional Office was understaffed for this volume of work—which is why they had flown in new Adjusters like myself.

* * * *

I looked up from my desk, surprised. Susan was standing next to me, an aspirin and a paper cup of water in her hand. “You look like you might need this,” she whispered. She winked and was gone.

I swallowed it gratefully, although my hangover was almost gone. I was finding in these dry papers all the romance and excitement I had joined the Company’s foreign service for. Here before me were human lives, drama, tragedy, even an occasional touch of human-interest comedy.

For the Company was supporting most of Naples and whatever affected a Neapolitan life showed up somehow in the records of the Company.

It was a clean, dedicated feeling to work for the Company. The monks of the Middle Ages might have had something of the same positive conviction that their work in the service of a mighty churchly empire was right and just, but surely no one since.

I attacked the mountain of forms with determination, taking pleasure in the knowledge that every one I processed meant one life helped by the Company.

It was plain in history, for all to see. Once the world had been turbulent and distressed, and the Company had smoothed it out. It had started with fires and disease. When the first primitive insurance companies—there were more than one, in the early days—began offering protection against the hazards of fire, they had found it wise to try to prevent fires. There were the advertising campaigns with their wistful-eyed bears pleading with smokers not to drop their lighted cigarettes in the dry forest; the technical bureaus like the Underwriter’s Laboratory, testing electrical equipment, devising intricate and homely gimmicks like the underwriter’s knot; the Fire Patrol in the big cities that followed up the city-owned Fire Department; the endless educational sessions in the schools… And fires decreased.

Then there was life insurance. Each time a death benefit was paid, a digit rang up on the actuarial scoreboard. Was tuberculosis a major killer? Establish mobile chest X-rays; alert the people to the meaning of a chronic cough. Was it heart disease? Explain the dangers of overweight, the idiocy of exercise past forty. People lived longer.

Health insurance followed the same pattern. It had begun by paying for bills incurred during sickness, and ended by providing full medical sickness prevention and treatment for all. Elaborate research programs reduced the danger of disease to nearly nothing. Only a few rare cases, like that of Marianna…

I shook myself away from the thought. Anyway, it was neither fire nor health insurance that concerned me now, but the Blue Bolt anti-war complex of the Company’s policies. It was easy enough to see how it had come about. For with fire and accident and disease ameliorated by the strong protecting hand of the Company, only one major hazard remained—war.

And so the Company had logically and inevitably resolved to wipe out war.

* * * *

I looked up. It was Susan again, this time with a cardboard container of coffee.

“You’re an angel,” I said. She set the coffee down and turned to go. I looked quickly around to make sure that Gogarty was busy, and stopped her. “Tell me something?”

“Sure.”

“About this girl, Rena. Does she work for the Company?”

Susan giggled. “Heavens, no. What an idea!”

“What’s so strange about it?”

She straightened out her face. “You’d better ask Sam—Mr. Gogarty, that is. Didn’t you have a chance to talk to her last night? Or were you too busy with other things?”

“I only want to know how she happened to be with you.”

Susan shrugged. “Sam thought you’d like to meet her, I guess. Really, you’ll have to ask him. All I know is that she’s been in here quite a lot about some claims. But she doesn’t work here, believe me.” She wrinkled her nose in amusement. “And I won’t work here either, if I don’t get back to my desk.”

I took the hint. By lunch time, I had got through a good half of the accumulation on my desk. I ate briefly and not too well at a nearby trattoria with a “B” on the Blue Plate medallion in its window. After the dinner of the night before, I more than half agreed with Gogarty’s comments about the Blue Plate menus.

Gogarty called me over when I got back to the office. He said, “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about Luigi Zorchi.”

I nodded eagerly. I had been hoping for some explanations.

Gogarty went on, “Since you were on the scene when he took his dive, you might as well follow up. God knows you can’t do worse than the rest of us.”

I said dubiously, “Well, I saw the accident, if that’s what you mean.”

“Accident! What accident? This is the twelfth time he’s done it, I tell you.” He tossed a file folder at me. “Take a look! Loss of limbs—four times. Internal injuries—six times. Loss of vision, impaired hearing, hospitalization and so on—good lord, I can’t count the number of separate claims. And, every one, he has collected on. Go ahead, look it over.”

I peered at the folder. The top sheet was a field report on the incident I had watched, when the locomotive of the Milan express had severed both legs. The one below it, dated five weeks earlier, was for flash burns suffered in the explosion of a stove, causing the loss of the right forearm nearly to the elbow.

Curious, I thought, I hadn’t noticed anything when I saw the man on the platform. Still, I hadn’t paid too much attention to him at first, and modern prosthetic devices were nearly miraculous. I riffled through the red-bordered sheets. The fifth claim down, nearly two years before, was—

I yelped, “Mr. Gogarty! This is a fraud!”

“What?”

“Look at this! ‘On 21st October, the insured suffered severe injuries while trapped in a rising elevator with faulty safety equipment, resulting in loss of both legs above knees, multiple lacerations of—’ Well, never mind the rest of it. But look at that, Mr. Gogarty! He already lost both legs! He can’t lose them twice, can he?”

Gogarty sat back in his chair, looking at me oddly. “You startled me,” he complained. “Wills, what have I been trying to tell you? That’s the whole point, boy! No, he didn’t lose his legs twice. It was five times!”

I goggled at him. “But—”

“But, but. But he did. Wait a minute—” he held up a hand to stop my questions—“just take a look through the folder. See for yourself.” He waited while, incredulously, I finished going through the dossier. It was true. I looked at Gogarty wordlessly.

He said resentfully, “You see what we’re up against? And none of the things you are about to say would help. There is no mistake in the records—they’ve been double and triple-checked. There is no possibility that another man, or men, substituted for Zorchi—fingerprints have checked every time. The three times he lost his arms, retina-prints checked. There is no possibility that the doctors were bribed, or that he lost a little bit more of his leg, for instance, in each accident—the severed sections were recovered, and they were complete. Wills, this guy grows new arms and legs like a crab!”

I looked at him in a daze. “What a fantastic scientific discovery!” I said.

He snorted. “Fantastic pain in the neck! Zorchi can’t go on like this; he’ll bankrupt the Company. We can’t stop him. Even when we were tipped off this time—we couldn’t stop him. And I’ll tell you true, Wills, that platform was loaded with our men when Zorchi made his dive. You weren’t the only Adjuster of the Company there.”

He picked a folded sheet of paper out of his desk. “Here. Zorchi is still in the hospital; no visitors allowed today. But I want you to take these credentials and go to see him tomorrow. You came to us with a high recommendation from the Home Office, Wills—” That made me look at him sharply, but his expression was innocent. “You’re supposed to be a man of intelligence and resourcefulness. See if you can come up with some ideas on dealing with that situation. I’d handle it myself, but I’ve got—” he grimaced—“certain other minor administrative difficulties to deal with. Oh, nothing important, but you might as well know that there appears to be a little, well, popular underground resentment toward the Company around here.”

“Incredible!” I said.

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” he said, “it’s quitting time. See you in the morning.”

I had a lonely dinner at the same cheap restaurant where I’d had my lunch. I spent an hour in my room with my Company-issued Adjuster’s Handbook, looking for some precedent that had some sort of bearing on the case of a man who could grow new arms and legs. There wasn’t anything, of course. I went out for a walk…and still it wasn’t nearly time for me to retire to bed.

So I did what I had been avoiding doing. I looked in the phone book for Rena dell’Angela’s number. There was, it developed, a Benedetto dell’Angela at the address she’d given the cab driver; but the phone was disconnected.

So I wandered around some more, and then I went to sleep, dreaming about Benedetto dell’Angela. I saw him as a leather-faced, white-bearded and courtly old gentleman. Rena’s father, surely. Possibly even her elder brother. Certainly not her husband.

It was a dull finish to the first full day of my rich, exciting new life…

* * * *

The “minor administrative difficulties” got major. So I didn’t get to see Zorchi the next day, after all.

A Junior Adjuster named Hammond—he was easily sixty, but the slow-moving, unenterprising type that would stay junior till the day he died—came white-faced into the office a few minutes after opening and huddled with Gogarty for a quarter of an hour.

Then Gogarty called me over. He said, “We’re having a spot of trouble. Hammond needs a little help; you’re elected. Draw what you need, take a couple of expediters along, report back to me this evening.”

Hammond and I stopped at the cashier’s office to draw three dispatch-cases full of lira-notes. Outside, an armored car was waiting for us, with a full crew of six uniformed expediters. We raced off down the narrow streets with the sirens wailing, climbing the long hill road past the radioactive remains of Capodichino, heading out toward the farmlands.

Hammond worriedly filled me in on the way. He had got in early to his branch office that morning, but no earlier than the first of a long line of policyholders. There had, it appeared, been some kind of rumor spread that the Company was running out of money. It was preposterous on the face of it—after all, who printed the money?—but you can’t argue with a large group of people and, before the official hour of opening the branch, there were more than a hundred in the knotted line outside the door.

Hammond had rushed into the Naples office for help, leaving his staff to do the best they could. He said gloomily, staring out through the view-slits at the farmlands and vineyards we were passing through, “I just hope we still have a branch office. This is a bad spot, Wills. Caserta. It got bombed out, you know; the whole southern end of the town is radioactive. And it has a long history of trouble. Used to be the summer royal seat of the old Italian monarchy; then the Americans used it for a command headquarters in the war Mussolini got into—the first atom war. It’s been fought over time and again.”

I said reasonably, “But don’t they know the Company has all the resources in the world?”

“Sure they do—when they’re thinking. Right now they’re not thinking. They’ve got it in their heads that the Company isn’t going to pay off. They’re scared. You can’t tell them anything. You can’t even give them checks—they want cash on the line.”

I said, “That’s pretty silly, isn’t it? I mean—ugh!” I retched, as I suddenly got a whiff of the most unpleasant and penetrating odor I had ever encountered in my life. It was like death and destruction in gaseous form; a sickly sweet, clinging stink that oozed in through the pores of my skin to turn my stomach. “Wow!” I said, gasping.

Hammond looked at me in bewilderment; then he grinned sourly. “New here, aren’t you?” he inquired. “That’s hemp. They grow the stuff for the fibers; and to get the fibers out, they let it get good and rotten. You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

I tried. I tried pretty hard to get used to it; I hardly heard a word he said all the rest of the way in to Caserta, I was trying so hard. But I didn’t get used to it.

Then I had my mind taken off my troubles. The branch was still doing business when we got there, though there were easily three or four hundred angrily shouting policyholders milling around in front of it. They scattered before us as the armored car came racing in; we skidded to a stop, siren blasting, and the expediters leaped out with their weapons at the ready.

Hammond and I climbed out of the armored car with our bags of money. There was an audible excitement in the crowd as the word spread back that the Company had brought in enormous stores of lire, more than any man had ever seen, to pay off the claims. We could hear the chatter of many voices, and we almost could feel the tension slack off.

It looked like the trouble was over.

Then there was a shrill whistle. It sounded very much like the alarm whistle of one of our expediters but, thinking back, I have never been sure.

Perhaps it was a nervous expediter, perhaps it was an agent provocateur in the crowd. But, whoever pulled the trigger, the explosion went off.

There was a ragged yell from the crowd, and rocks began whizzing through the air. The pacifists in the mob began heading for the doorways and alleys around; women screamed, men shouted and bellowed, and for a moment it looked like we would be swamped. For not very many of them were pacifists, and there were at least a hundred screaming, gesticulating men lunging at us.

One cobblestone shattered the theoretically unbreakable windshield of the truck next to my head; then the expediters, gas guns spitting, were ringing around us to protect the money.

It was a short fight but vicious. By the time the first assault was repulsed there were at least fifty persons lying motionless in the street.

I had never seen that sort of violence before. It did something to my stomach. I stood weaving, holding to the armored car, while the expediters circled the area around the branch office, firing hurry-up shots at the running rioters. Hammond looked at me questioningly.

“That smell,” I said apologetically.

He said only, “Sure.” True, the fetid aroma from the hemp fields was billowing all around us, but he knew as well as I that it was not the smell that was bothering me.

In a few moments, as we were locking the bags of money into the office safe, red-crossed vehicles bearing the Company insignia appeared in the street outside, and medics began tending to the victims. Each one got a shot of something—an antidote to the sleep-gas from the expediters’ guns, I guessed—and was loaded unceremoniously into the ambulances.

Hammond appeared beside me. “Ready for business?” he asked. “They’ll be back any minute now, the ones that can still walk. We’ll be paying off until midnight, the way it looks.”

I said, “Sure. That—that gas doesn’t hurt them any, does it? I mean, after they go to the hospital they’ll be all right, won’t they?”

Hammond, twirling a pencil in his fingers, stared broodingly at the motionless body of one policyholder. He was a well-dressed man of fifty or so, with a reddish mustache, unusual in that area, and shattered rimless glasses. Not at all the type I would expect to see in a street fight; probably, I thought, a typical innocent bystander.

Hammond said absently, “Oh, sure. They’ll be all right. Never know what hit them.” There was a tiny sharp crack and the two halves of the pencil fell to the floor. He looked at it in surprise. “Come on, Wills. Let’s get to work.”

CHAPTER III

Of course I still believed in the Company.

But all the same, it was the first time since I went to work for the Company that I had even had to ask myself that question.

That long, long day in Hammond’s puny little branch office, sweltering in the smell of the hemp fields, pushing across the mountains of lire to the grimfaced policyholders left me a little less sure of things. Nearly all of the first hundred or so to pass my desk had been in the crowd that the expediters had fired on. A few had fresh bandages to show where stones had missed the expediters, but found targets all the same. Nearly all of them were hostile. There was no casual conversation, very few “Grazies” as they received their payments.

But at last the day was at an end. Hammond snapped an order to one of the clerks, who shoved his way through the dwindling line to close the door and bang down the shutters. I put through the last few applications, and we were through.

It was hot and muggy out in the streets of New Caserta. Truce teams of expediters were patrolling the square, taken off their regular assignments of enforcing the peace between Naples and Sicily to keep down Caserta’s own mobs. Hammond suggested dinner, and we went to a little Blue Plate in the palace itself.

Hammond held Class-A food policies, but he was politeness itself; he voluntarily led the way to the Class-B area. We presented our policy-cards to the waiter for canceling, and sat back to enjoy the air conditioning.

I was still troubled over the violence. I said, “Has there been any trouble around here before?”

Hammond said ruefully, “Plenty. All over Europe, if you want my opinion. Of course, you never see it in the papers, but I’ve heard stories from field workers. They practically had a revolution in the Sudeten strip after the Prague-Vienna affair.” He stopped talking as the waiter set his Meal-of-the-Day in front of him. Hammond looked at it sourly. “Oh, the hell with it, Wills,” he said. “Have a drink with me to wash this stuff down.”

* * * *

We ordered liquor, and Hammond shoved his Class-A card at the waiter. I am not a snoop, but I couldn’t help noticing that the liquor coupons were nearly all gone; at his present rate, Hammond would use up his year’s allotment by the end of the summer, and be paying cash for his drinks.

Dinner was dull. Hammond made it dull, because he was much more interested in his drinking than in me. Though I was never much of a drinker, I’d had a little experience in watching others tank up; Hammond I classified as the surly and silent type. He wasn’t quite rude to me, but after the brandy with his coffee, and during the three or four straight whiskies that followed that, he hardly spoke to me at all.

We left the Blue Plate in a strained silence and, after the cooled restaurant, the heat outside was painful. The air was absolutely static, and the odor from the hemp fields soaked into our clothes like a bath in a sewer.

Overhead it was nearly dark, and there were low black clouds. “We’d better get going,” I ventured. “Looks like rain.”

Hammond said nothing, only grunted. He lurched ahead of me toward the narrow street that led back to the branch office, where our transport was waiting.

The distance was easily half a mile. Now I am not terribly lazy, and even in the heat I was willing enough to walk. But I didn’t want to get caught in a rain. Maybe it was superstition on my part—I knew that the danger was really slight—but I couldn’t forget that three separate atomic explosions had gone off in the area around Caserta and Naples within only a few months, and there was going to be a certain amount of radioactivity in every drop of rain that fell for a hundred miles around.

I started to tell Hammond about it, but he made a disgusted noise and stumbled ahead.

It wasn’t as if we had to walk. Caserta was not well equipped with cabs, but there were a few; and both Hammond and myself ranked high enough in the Company to have been able to get a lift from one of the expediter cars that were cruising about.

There was a flare of lightning over the eastern mountains and, in a moment, the pounding roll of thunder. And a flat globule of rain splattered on my face.

I said, “Hammond, let’s wait here for a lift.”

Surprisingly he came along with me.

If he hadn’t, I would have left him in the street.

* * * *

We were in a street of tenements. It was almost deserted; I rapped on the nearest door. No answer, no sound inside. I rapped again, then tried the door. It was locked.

The next door—ancient and rickety as the first—was also locked, and no one answered. The third door, no one answered. By then it was raining hard; the knob turned under my fingers, and we stepped inside.

We left the door ajar, on the chance that a squad car or cab might pass, and for light. It was almost dark outside, apart from the light from the lightning flashes, but even so it was darker within. There was no light at all in the narrow, odorous hall; not even a light seeping under the apartment doors.

In the lightning flare, Hammond’s face was pale. He was beginning to sober up, and his manner was uneasy.

We were there perhaps half an hour in that silent hall, watching the rain sleet down and the lightning flare and listening to the thunder. Two or three times, squad cars passed, nosing slowly down the drenched streets, but though Hammond looked longingly at them, I still didn’t want to get wet.

Then the rain slowed and almost simultaneously a civilian cab appeared at the head of the block. “Come on,” I said, tugging at his arm.

He balked. “Wait for a squad car,” he mumbled.

“Why? Come on, Hammond, it may start to pour again in a minute.”

“No!”

His behavior was exasperating me. Clearly it wasn’t that he was too niggardly to pay for the cab; it was almost as if he were delaying going back to the branch office for some hidden reason. But that was ridiculous, of course.

I said, “Look, you can stay here if you want to, but I’m going.” I jumped out of the doorway just in time to flag the cab; it rolled to a stop, and the driver backed to where I was standing. As I got in, I looked once more to the doorway where Hammond was standing, his face unreadable.

He made a gesture of some sort, but the lightning flashed again and I skipped into the cab. When I looked again he was invisible inside the doorway, and I told the driver to take me to the branch office of the Company.

Curious; but it was not an end to curious things that night. At the branch office, my car was waiting to take me back to Naples.

I surrendered my travel coupons to the cab driver and jumped from one vehicle to the other.

Before my driver could start, someone appeared at the window of the car and a sharp voice said, “Un momento, Signore ’Ammond!”

I stared at the man, a rather badly dressed Neapolitan. I said angrily, “Hammond isn’t here!”

The man’s expression changed. It had been belligerent; it now became astonished and apologetic. “A thousand times excuse me,” he said. “The Signore ’Ammond, can you say where he is?”

I hesitated, but only for a moment. I didn’t like the little man peering in my window, however humble and conciliatory he had become. I said abruptly, “No.” And my driver took off, leaving the man standing there.

I turned to look back at him as we drove off.

It was ridiculous, but the way he was standing as we left, holding one hand in his pocket, eyes narrowed and thoughtful, made me think that he was carrying a gun.

But, of course, that was impossible. The Company didn’t permit lethal weapons, and who in all the world would challenge a rule of the Company?

* * * *

When I showed up in the Naples office the next morning, Susan had my coffee ready and waiting for me. I said gratefully, “Bless you.”

She chuckled. “That’s not all,” she said. “Here’s something else you might like. Just remember though, if anyone asks, you got it out of the files yourself.”

She slipped a folder under the piles of forms on my desk and disappeared. I peered at it curiously. It was labeled: “Policy BNT-3KT-890776, Blue Bolt Comprehensive. Insuree: Renata dell’Angela”

I could have been no more grateful had she given me the Company Mint.

But I had no chance to examine it. Gogarty was calling for me. I hastily swallowed my coffee and reported for orders.

They were simple enough. The appointment with Zorchi that I hadn’t been able to keep the day before was set up for right then. I was already late and I had to leave without another glance at Rena’s file.

The hospital Zorchi honored with his patronage was a marble-halled palace on the cliffs that rimmed the southern edge of the Bay of Naples. It was a luxurious, rich man’s hospital, stuffy with its opulence; but the most opulent of all was the plush-lined three-room suite where Zorchi was.

A white-robed sister of some religious order led me into a silent elevator and along a statued hall. She tapped on a door, and left me in the care of a sharp-faced young man with glasses who introduced himself as Mr. Zorchi’s secretary.

I explained my business. He contemptuously waved me to a brocaded chair, and left me alone for a good half hour.

By the time Zorchi was ready to see me, I was boiling. Nobody could treat a representative of the Company like an errand boy! I did my best to take into consideration the fact that he had just undergone major surgery—first under the wheels of the train, then under the knives of three of Naples’ finest surgeons.

I said as pleasantly as I could, “I’m glad to see you at last.”

The dark face on the pink embroidered pillow turned coldly toward me. “Che volete?” he demanded. The secretary opened his mouth to translate.

I said quickly, “Scusí; parlo un po’ la lingua. Non bisogno un traduttore.”

Zorchi said languidly in Italian, “In that case, Mario, you may go. What do you want with me, Weels?”

I explained my duties as a Claims Adjuster for the Company, pointing out that it was my task, indeed my privilege, to make settlement for injuries covered by Company policies. He listened condescendingly. I watched him carefully while I talked, trying to estimate the approach he might respond to if I was to win his confidence.

He was far from an attractive young man, I thought. No longer behind the shabby porter’s uniform he had worn on the platform of the station, he still had an unkempt and slipshod appearance, despite the heavy silken dressing gown he wore and the manifest costliness of his room. The beard was still on his face; it, at least, had not been a disguise. It was not an attractive beard. It had been weeks, at the least, since any hand had trimmed it to shape and his hair was just as shaggy.

Zorchi was not impressed with my friendly words. When I had finished, he said coldly, “I have had claims against the Company before, Weels. Why is it that this time you make speeches at me?”

I said carefully, “Well, you must admit you are a rather unusual case.”

“Case?” He frowned fiercely. “I am no case, Weels. I am Zorchi, if you please.”

“Of course, of course. I only mean to say that—”

“That I am a statistic, eh?” He bobbed his head. “Surely. I comprehend. But I am not a statistic, you see. Or, at best, I am a statistic which will not fit into your electronic machines, am I not?”

I admitted, “As I say, you are a rather unusual ca—a rather unusual person, Mr. Zorchi.”

He grinned coldly. “Good. We are agreed. Now that we have come to that understanding, are we finished with this interview?”

I coughed. “Mr. Zorchi, I’ll be frank with you.” He snorted, but I went on, “According to your records, this claim need not be paid. You see, you already have been paid for total disability, both a lump sum and a continuing settlement. There is no possibility of two claims for the loss of your legs, you must realize.”

He looked at me with a touch of amusement. “I must?” he asked. “It is odd. I have discussed this, you understand, with many attorneys. The premiums were paid, were they not? The language of the policy is clear, is it not? My legs—would you like to observe the stumps yourself?”

He flung the silken covers off. I averted my eyes from the white-bandaged lower half of his torso, hairy and scrawny and horribly less than a man’s legs should be.

I said desperately, “Perhaps I spoke too freely. I do not mean, Mr. Zorchi, that we will not pay your claim. The Company always lives up to the letter of its contracts.”

He covered himself casually. “Very well. Give the check to my secretary, please. Are you concluded?”

“Not quite.” I swallowed. I plunged right in. “Mr. Zorchi, what the hell are you up to? How do you do it? There isn’t any fraud, I admit it. You really lost your legs—more than once. You grew new ones. But how? Don’t you realize how important this is? If you can do it, why not others? If you are in some way pecu—that is, if the structure of your body is in some way different from that of others, won’t you help us find out how so that we can learn from it? It isn’t necessary for you to live as you do, you know.”

He was looking at me with a hint of interest in his close-set, dull eyes. I continued, “Even if you can grow new legs, do you enjoy the pain of having them cut off? Have you ever stopped to think that someday, perhaps, you will miscalculate, and the wheels of the train, or the truck, or whatever you use, may miss your legs and kill you? That’s no way for a man to live, Mr. Zorchi. Why not talk freely to me, let me help you? Why not take the Company into your confidence, instead of living by fraud and deceit and—”

I had gone too far. Livid, he snarled, “Ass! That will cost your Company, I promise. Is it fraud for me to suffer like this? Do I enjoy it, do you think? Look, ass!” He flung the covers aside again, ripped at the white bandages with his hands— Blood spurted. He uncovered the raw stumps and jerked them at me.

I do not believe any sight of my life shocked me as much as that; it was worse than the Caserta hemp fields, worse than the terrible gone moment when Marianna died, worse than anything I could imagine.

He raved, “See this fraud, look at it closely! Truly, I grow new legs, but does that make it easier to lose the old? It is the pain of being born, Weels, a pain you will never know! I grow legs, I grow arms, I grow eyes. I will never die! I will live on like a reptile or a fish.”

His eyes were staring. Ignoring the blood spurting from his stumps, ignoring my attempts to say something, he pounded his abdomen. “Twelve times I have been cut—do you see even a scar? My appendix, it is bad; it traps filth, and the filth makes me sick. And I have it cut out—and it grows again; and I have it cut out again, and it grows back. And the pain, Weels, the pain never stops!” He flung the robe open, slapped his narrow, hairy chest.

I gasped. Under the scraggly hair was a rubble of boils and wens, breaking and matting the hair as he struck himself in frenzy. “Envy me, Weels!” he shouted. “Envy the man whose body defends itself against everything! I will live forever, I promise it, and I will always be in pain, and someone will pay for every horrible moment of it! Now get out, get out!”

I left under the hating eyes of the sharp-faced secretary who silently led me to the door.

* * * *

I had put Zorchi through a tantrum and subjected myself to as disagreeable a time as I’d ever had. And I hadn’t accomplished a thing. I knew that well enough. And if I hadn’t known it by myself, I would have found out.

Gogarty pointed it out to me, in detail. “You’re a big disappointment to me,” he moaned sourly. “Ah, the hell with it. What were you trying to accomplish, anyway?”

I said defensively, “I thought I might appeal to his altruism. After all, you didn’t give me very explicit instructions.”

“I didn’t tell you to remember to wipe your nose either,” he said bitterly. He shook his head, the anger disappearing. “Well,” he said disconsolately, “I don’t suppose we’re any worse off than we were. I guess I’d better try this myself.” He must have caught a hopeful anticipatory gleam in my eye, because he said quickly, “Not right now, Wills. You’ve made that impossible. I’ll just have to wait until he cools off.”

I said nothing; just stood there waiting for him to let me go. I was sorry things hadn’t worked out but, after all, he had very little to complain about. Besides, I wanted to get back to my desk and the folder about Rena dell’Angela. It wasn’t so much that I was interested in her as a person, I reminded myself. I was just curious…

Once again, I had to stay curious for a while. Gogarty had other plans for me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my way out of the office again, this time to visit another Neapolitan hospital, where some of the severely injured in the recent war were waiting final settlement of their claims. It was a hurry-up matter, which had been postponed too many times already; some of the injured urgently required major medical treatment, and the hospital was howling for approval of their claims before they’d begin treatment.

This one was far from a marble palace. It had the appearance of a stucco tenement, and all of the patients were in wards. I was a little surprised to see expediters guarding the entrance.

I asked one of them, “Anything wrong?”

He looked at me with a flicker of astonishment, recognizing the double-breasted Claim Adjuster uniform, surprised, I think, at my asking him a question. “Not as long as we’re here, sir,” he said.

“I mean, I was wondering what you were doing here.”

The surprise became overt. “Vaults,” he said succinctly.

I prodded no further. I knew what he meant by vaults, of course. It was part of the Company’s beneficent plan for ameliorating the effects of even such tiny wars as the Naples-Sicily affair that those who suffered radiation burns got the best treatment possible. And the best treatment, of course, was suspended animation. The deadly danger of radiation burns lay in their cumulative effect; the first symptoms were nothing, the man was well and able to walk about. Degeneration of the system followed soon, the marrow of the bone gave up on its task of producing white corpuscles, the blood count dropped, the tiny radiant poisons in his blood spread and worked their havoc. If he could be gotten through the degenerative period he might live. But, if he lived, he would still die. That is, if his life processes continued, the radiation sickness would kill him. The answer was to stop the life process, temporarily, by means of the injections and deep-freeze in the vaults. It was used for more than radiation, of course. Marianna, for instance—

Well, anyway, that was what the vaults were. These were undoubtedly just a sort of distribution point, where local cases were received and kept until they could be sent to the main Company vaults up the coast at Anzio.

I wasn’t questioning the presence of vaults there; I was only curious why the Company felt they needed guarding.

I found myself so busy, though, that I had no time to think about it. A good many of the cases in this shabby hospital really needed the Company’s help. But a great many of them were obvious attempts at fraud.

There was a woman, for instance, in the maternity ward. During the war, she’d had to hide out after the Capodichino bombing and hadn’t been able to reach medical service. So her third child was going to be a girl, and she was asking indemnity under the gender-guarantee clause. But she had only Class-C coverage and her first two had been boys; a daughter was permissive in any of the first four pregnancies. She began swearing at me before I finished explaining these simple facts to her.

I walked out of the ward, hot under the collar. Didn’t these people realize we were trying to help them? They didn’t appear to be aware of it. Only the terribly injured, the radiation cases, the amputees, the ones under anesthetic—only these gave me no arguments, mainly because they couldn’t talk.

Most of them were on their way to the vaults, I found. My main job was revision of their policies to provide for immobilization. Inevitably, there are some people who will try to take advantage of anything.

The retirement clause in the basic contract was the joker here. Considering that the legal retirement age under the universal Blue Heaven policy was seventy-five years—calendar years, not metabolic years—there were plenty of invalids who wanted a few years in the vaults for reasons that had nothing to do with health. If they could sleep away two or three decades, they could, they thought, emerge at a physical age of forty or so and live idly off the Company the rest of their lives.

They naturally didn’t stop to think that if any such practice became common the Company would simply be unable to pay claims. And they certainly didn’t think, or care that, if the Company went bankrupt, the world as we knew it would end.

It was a delicate problem; we couldn’t deny them medical care, but we couldn’t permit them the vaults unless they were either in clearly urgent need, or were willing to sign an extension waiver to their policies…

I saw plenty of that, that afternoon. The radiation cases were the worst, in that way, because they still could talk and argue. Even while they were being loaded with drugs, even while they could see with their own eyes the blood-count graph dipping lower and lower, they still complained at being asked to sign the waiver.

There was even some fear of the vaults themselves—though every living human had surely seen the Company’s indoctrination films that showed how the injected drugs slowed life processes and inhibited the body’s own destructive enzymes; how the apparently lifeless body, down to ambient air temperature, would be slipped into its hermetic plastic sack and stacked away, row on row, far underground, to sleep away the months or years or, if necessary, the centuries. Time meant nothing to the suspendees. It was hard to imagine being afraid of as simple and natural a process as that!

Although I had to admit that the vaults looked a lot like morgues…

I didn’t enjoy it. I kept thinking of Marianna. She had feared the vaults too, in the childish, unreasoning, feminine way that was her characteristic. When the Blue Blanket technicians had turned up the diagnosis of leukemia, they had proposed the sure-thing course of putting her under suspension while the slow-acting drugs—specially treated to operate even under those conditions—worked their cure, but she had refused. There had been, they admitted, a ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent prospect of a cure without suspension…

It just happened that Marianna was in the forlorn one-tenth that died.

I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The cases who protested or whined or pleaded or shrieked that they were being tortured and embalmed alive didn’t help. I was glad when the afternoon was over and I could get back to the office.

* * * *

As I came in the door, Gogarty was coming in, too, from the barbershop downstairs. He was freshly shaved and beaming.

“Quitting time, Tom,” he said amiably, though his eyes were memorizing the pile of incomplete forms on my desk. “All work and no play, you know.” He nudged me. “Not that you need reminding, eh? Still, you ought to tell your girl that she shouldn’t call you on office time, Tom.”

“Call me? Rena called me?”

He nodded absently, intent on the desk. “Against Company rules, you know. Say, I don’t like to push you, but aren’t you running a little behind here?”

I said with some irritation, “I don’t have much chance to catch up, the way I’ve been racing around the country, you know. And there’s plenty to be done.”

He said soothingly, “Now, take it easy, Tom. I was only trying to say that there might be some easier way to handle these things.” He speared a form, glanced over it casually. He frowned. “Take this, for instance. The claim is for catching cold as a result of exposure during the evacuation of Cerignola. What would you do with that one?”

“Why—pay it, I suppose.”

“And put in the paper work? Suppose it’s a phony, Tom? Not one case of coryza in fifty is genuine.”

“What would you do?” I asked resentfully.

He said without hesitation, “Send it back with Form CBB-23A192. Ask for laboratory smear-test reports.”

I looked over the form. A long letter was attached; it said in more detail than was necessary that there had been no laboratory service during the brief war, at least where the policyholder happened to be, and therefore he could submit only the affidavits of three registered physicians. It looked like a fair claim to me. If it was up to me, I would have paid it automatically.

I temporized. “Suppose it’s legitimate?”

“Suppose it is? Look at it this way, Tom. If it’s phony, this will scare him off, and you’d be saving the Company the expense and embarrassment of paying off a fraudulent claim. If it’s legitimate, he’ll resubmit it—at a time when, perhaps, we won’t be so busy. Meanwhile that’s one more claim handled and disposed of, for our progress reports to the Home Office.”

I stared at him unbelievingly. But he looked back in perfect calm, until my eyes dropped. After all, I thought, he was right in a way. The mountain of work on my desk was certainly a logjam, and it had to be broken somehow. Maybe rejecting this claim would work some small hardship in an individual case, but what about the hundreds and thousands of others waiting for attention? Wasn’t it true that no small hardship to an individual was as serious as delaying all those others?

It was, after all, that very solicitude for the people at large that the Company relied on for its reputation—that, and the ironclad guarantee of prompt and full settlement.

I said, “I suppose you’re right.”

He nodded, and turned away. Then he paused. “I didn’t mean to bawl you out for that phone call, Tom,” he said. “Just tell her about the rule, will you?”

“Sure. Oh, one thing.” He waited. I coughed. “This girl, Rena. I don’t know much about her, you know. Is she, well, someone you know?”

He said, “Heavens, no. She was making a pest out of herself around here, frankly. She has a claim, but not a very good one. I don’t know all the details, because it’s encoded, but the machines turned it down automatically. I do know that she, uh—” he sort of half winked—“wants a favor. Her old man is in trouble. I’ll look it up for you some time, if you want, and get the details. I think he’s in the cooler—that is, the clinic—up at Anzio.”

He scratched his plump jowls. “I didn’t think it was fair to you for me to have a girl at dinner and none for you; Susan promised to bring someone along, and this one was right here, getting in the way. She said she liked Americans, so I told her you would be assigned to her case.” This time he did wink. “No harm, of course. You certainly wouldn’t be influenced by any, well, personal relationship, if you happened to get into one. Oh, a funny thing. She seemed to recognize your name.”

That was a jolt. “She what?”

Gogarty shrugged. “Well, she reacted to it. ‘Thomas Wills,’ I said. She’d been acting pretty stand-offish, but she warmed up quick. Maybe she just likes the name, but right then is when she told me she liked Americans.”

I cleared my throat. “Mr. Gogarty,” I said determinedly, “please get me straight on something. You say this girl’s father is in some kind of trouble, and you imply she knows me. I want to know if you’ve ever had any kind of report, or even heard any kind of rumor, that would make you think that I was in the least sympathetic to any anti-Company groups? I’m aware that there were stories—”

He stopped me. “I never heard any, Tom,” he said definitely.

I hesitated. It seemed like a good time to open up to Gogarty; I opened my mouth to start, but I was too late. Susan called him off for what she claimed was an urgent phone call and, feeling let-down, I watched him waddle away.

Because it was, after all, time that I took down my back hair with my boss.

* * * *

Well, I hadn’t done anything too terribly bad—anyway, I hadn’t meant to do anything bad. And the circumstances sort of explained it, in a way. And it was all in the past, and—

And nothing. I faced the facts. I had spent three solid weeks getting blind drunk, ranting and raving and staggering up to every passerby who would listen and whining to him that the Company was evil, the Company was murderous, the Company had killed my wife.

There was no denying it. And I had capped it all off one bleary midnight, with a brick through the window of the Company branch office that served my home. It was only a drunken piece of idiocy, I kept telling myself. But it was a drunken piece of idiocy that landed me in jail, that had been permanently indorsed on every one of my policies, that was in the confidential pages of my Company service record. It was a piece of idiocy that anyone might have done. But it would have meant deep trouble for me, if it hadn’t been for the intercession of my wife’s remote relative, Chief Underwriter Defoe.

It was he who had bailed me out. He had never told me how he had found out that I was in jail. He appeared, read the riot-act to me and got me out. He put me over the coals later, yes, but he’d bailed me out. He’d told me I was acting like a child—and convinced me of it, which was harder. And when he was convinced I had snapped out of it, he personally backed me for an appointment to the Company’s school as a cadet Claims Adjuster.

I owed a considerable debt of gratitude to my ex-remote-in-law, Chief Underwriter Defoe.

* * * *

While I still was brooding, Gogarty came back. He looked unhappy. “Hammond,” he said bitterly. “He’s missing. Look, was he drunk when you left him last night?” I nodded. “Thought so. Never showed up for work. Not at his quarters. The daily ledger’s still open at his office, because there’s no responsible person to sign it. So naturally I’ve got to run out to Caserta now, and what Susan will say—” He muttered away.

I remembered the file that was buried under the papers on my desk, when he mentioned Susan’s name.

As soon as he was out of the office, I had it open.

And as soon as I had it open, I stared at it in shock.

The title page of the sheaf inside was headed: Signorina Renata dell’Angela. Age 22; daughter of Benedetto dell’Angela; accepted to general Class-AA; no employment. There were more details.

But across all, in big red letters, was a rubber stamp: Policy Canceled. Reassigned Class-E.

It meant that the sad-eyed Rena was completely uninsurable.

CHAPTER IV

Phone or no phone, I still had her address.

It was still daylight when I got out of the cab, and I had a chance for a good look at the house. It was a handsome place by day; the size of the huge white stucco wall didn’t fit the uninsurable notation on Rena’s claim. That wall enclosed a garden; the garden could hardly hold less than an AA house. And Class-Es were ordinarily either sent to public hostels—at the Company’s expense, to be sure—or existed on the charity of friends or relatives. And Class-Es seldom had friends in Class-AA houses.

I knocked at the gate. A fat woman, age uncertain but extreme, opened a little panel and peered at me. I asked politely, “Miss dell’Angela?”

The woman scowled. “Che dice?”

I repeated: “May I see Miss dell’Angela? I’m a Claims Adjuster for the Company. I have some business with her in connection with her policies.”

“Ha!” said the woman. She left it at that for a moment, pursing her lips and regarding me thoughtfully. Then she shrugged apathetically. “Momento,” she said wearily, and left me standing outside the gate.

From inside there was a muttering of unfamiliar voices. I thought I heard a door open, and the sound of steps, but when the fat woman came back she was alone.

Silently she opened the door and nodded me in. I started automatically up the courtyard toward the enclosed house, but she caught my arm and motioned me toward another path. It led down a flowered lane through a grape arbor to what might, at one time, have been a caretaker’s hut.

I knocked on the door of the hut, comprehending where Rena dell’Angela lived as a Class-E uninsurable.

Rena herself opened it, her face flushed, her expression surprised—apprehensive, almost, I thought at first. It was the first time I had seen her by daylight. She was—oh, there was no other word. She was lovely.

She said quickly, “Mr. Wills! I didn’t expect you.”

I said, “You phoned me. I came as soon as I could.”

She hesitated. “I did,” she admitted. “It was—I’m sorry, Mr. Wills. It was an impulse. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“What was it, Rena?”

She shook her head. “I am sorry. It doesn’t matter. But I am a bad hostess; won’t you come in?”

The room behind the door was long and narrow, with worn furniture and a door that led, perhaps, to another room behind. It seemed dusty and, hating myself as a snooping fool, I took careful note that there was a faint aroma of tobacco. I had been quite sure that she didn’t smoke, that evening we had met.

She gestured at a chair—there only were two, both pulled up to a crude wooden table, on which were two poured cups of coffee. “Please sit down,” she invited.

I reminded myself that it was, after all, none of my business if she chose to entertain friends—even friends who smoked particularly rancid tobacco. And if they preferred not to be around when I came to the door, why, that was their business, not mine. I said cautiously, “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“Interrupt me?” She saw my eyes on the cups. “Oh—oh, no, Mr. Wills. That other cup is for you, you see. I poured it when Luisa told me you were at the gate. It isn’t very good, I’m afraid,” she said apologetically.

I made an effort to sip the coffee; it was terrible. I set it down. “Rena, I just found out about your policies. Believe me, I’m sorry. I hadn’t known about it, when we had dinner together; I would have— Well, I don’t know what I would have done. There isn’t much I can do, truthfully; I don’t want you thinking I have any great power. But I wish I had known—I might not have made you cry, at any rate.”

She smiled an odd sort of smile. “That wasn’t the reason, Mr. Wills.”

“Please call me Tom. Well, then, why did you cry?”

“It is of no importance. Please.”

I coughed and tried a different tack. “You understand that I do have some authority. And I would like to help you if I can—if you’ll let me.”

“Let you? How could I prevent it?”

Her eyes were deep and dark. I shook myself and pulled the notes I’d made on her policies from my pocket. In the most official voice I could manage, I said, “You see, there may be some leeway in interpreting the facts. As it stands, frankly, there isn’t much hope. But if you’ll give me some information—”

“Certainly.”

“All right. Now, your father—Benedetto dell’Angela. He was a casualty of the war with Sicily; he got a dose of radiation, and he is at present in a low-metabolism state in the clinic at Anzio, waiting for the radiogens to clear out of his system. Is that correct?”

“It is what the Company’s report said,” she answered.

Her tone was odd. Surely she wasn’t doubting a Company report!

“As his dependent, Rena, you applied for subsistence benefits on his Blue Blanket policies, as well as war-risk benefits under the Blue Bolt. Both applications were refused; the Blue Blanket because your father is technically not hospitalized; the Blue Bolt, as well as all your other personal policies, was cancelled, because of—” I stuttered over it—“of activities against the best interest of the Company. Specifically, giving aid and comfort to a known troublemaker whose name is given here as Slovetski.” I showed her the cancellation sheet I had stolen from the files.

She shrugged. “This much I know, Tom,” she said.

“Why?” I demanded. “This man is believed to have been instrumental in inciting the war with Sicily!”

She flared, “Tom, that’s a lie! Slovetski is an old friend of my father’s—they studied together in Berlin, many years ago. He is utterly, completely against war—any war!”

I hesitated. “Well, let’s put that aside. But you realize that, in view of this, the Company can maintain—quite properly in a technical sense—that you contributed to the war, and therefore you can’t collect Blue Bolt compensation for a war you helped bring about. You were warned, you see. You can’t even say that you didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Tom,” Rena’s voice was infinitely patient and sad. “I knew what I was doing.”

“In that case, Rena, you have to admit that it seems fair enough. Still, perhaps we can get something for you—even if only a refund of your premiums. The Company doesn’t always follow the letter of the law, there are always exceptions, so—”

Her expression stopped me. She was smiling, but it was the tortured smile of Prometheus contemplating the cosmic jest that was ripping out his vitals.

I asked uncertainly, “Don’t you believe me?”

“Believe you, Tom? Indeed I do.” She laughed out loud that time. “After what happened to my father, I assure you, Tom, I am certain that the Company doesn’t always follow the law.”

I shook my head quickly. “No, you don’t understand. I—”

“I understand quite well.” She studied me for a moment, then patted my hand. “Let us talk of something else.”

“Won’t you tell me why your policy was cancelled?”

She said evenly, “It’s in the file. Because I was a bad girl.”

“But why? Why—”

“Because, Tom. Please, no more. I know you are trying to be just as helpful as you can, but there is no help you can give.”

“You don’t make it easy, Rena.”

“It can’t be easy! You see, I admit everything. I was warned. I helped an old friend whom the Company wanted to—shall we say—treat for radiation sickness? So there is no question that my policy can be cancelled. All legal. It is not the only one of its kind, you know. So why discuss it?”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

Her expression softened. “Because—because we do not agree. And never shall.”

I stared at her blankly. She was being very difficult. Really, I shouldn’t be bothering with her, someone I barely knew, someone I hadn’t even heard of until—

That reminded me. I said, “Rena, how did you know my name?”

Her eyes went opaque. “Know your name, Tom? Why, Mr. Gogarty introduced us.”

“No. You knew of me before that. Come clean, Rena. Please.”

She said flatly, “I don’t know what you mean.” She was beginning to act agitated. I had seen her covertly glancing at her watch several times; now she held it up openly—ostentatiously, in fact. “I am sorry, but you’d better go,” she said with a hint of anxiety in her voice. “Please excuse me.”

Well, there seemed no good reason to stay. So I went—not happily; not with any sense of accomplishment; and fully conscious of the figure I cut to the unseen watcher in the other room, the man whose coffee I had usurped.

Because there was no longer a conjecture about whether there had been such a person or not. I had heard him sneeze three times.

* * * *

Back at my hotel, a red light was flashing on the phone as I let myself in. I unlocked the playback with my room key and got a recorded message that Gogarty wanted me to phone him at once.

He answered the phone on the first ring, looking like the wrath of God. It took me a moment to recognize the symptoms; then it struck home.

The lined gray face, the jittery twitching of the head, the slow, tortured movements; here was a man with a classic textbook case of his ailment. The evidence was medically conclusive. He had been building up to a fancy drinking party, and something made him stop in the middle.

There were few tortures worse than a grade-A hangover, but one of those that qualified was the feeling of having the drink die slowly, going through the process of sobering up without the anesthetic of sleep.

He winced as the scanning lights from the phone hit him. “Wills,” he said sourly. “About time. Listen, you’ve got to go up to Anzio. We’ve got a distinguished visitor, and he wants to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“You! He knows you—his name is Defoe.”

The name crashed over me; I hadn’t expected that, of all things. He was a member of the Council of Underwriters! I thought they never ventured far from the Home Office. In fact, I thought they never had a moment to spare from the awesome duties of running the Company.

Gogarty explained. “He appeared out of nowhere at Carmody Field. I was still in Caserta! Just settling down to a couple of drinks with Susan, and they phoned me to say Chief Underwriter Defoe is on my doorstep!”

I cut in, “What does he want?”

Gogarty puffed his plump cheeks. “How do I know? He doesn’t like the way things are going, I guess. Well, I don’t like them either! But I’ve been twenty-six years with the Company, and if he thinks… Snooping and prying. There are going to be some changes in the office, I can tell you. Somebody’s been passing on all kinds of lying gossip and—” He broke off and stared at me calculatingly as an idea hit him.

Then he shook his head. “No. Couldn’t be you, Wills, could it? You only got here, and Defoe’s obviously been getting this stuff for weeks. Maybe months. Still— Say, how did you come to know him?”

It was none of his business. I said coldly, “At the Home Office. I guess I’ll take the morning plane up to Anzio, then.”

“The hell you will. You’ll take the night train. It gets you there an hour earlier.” Gogarty jerked his head righteously—then winced and clutched his temple. He said miserably, “Oh, damn. Tom, I don’t like all of this. I think something happened to Hammond.”

I repeated, “Happened? What could happen to him?”

“I don’t know. But I found out a few things. He’s been seen with some mighty peculiar people in Caserta. What’s this about somebody with a gun waiting at the office for him when you were there?”

It took a moment for me to figure out what he was talking about. “Oh,” I said, “you mean the man at the car? I didn’t know he had a gun, for certain.”

“I do,” Gogarty said shortly. “The expediters tried to pick him up today, to question him about Hammond. He shot his way out.”

I told Gogarty what I knew, although it wasn’t much. He listened abstractedly and, when I had finished, he sighed. “Well, that’s no help,” he grumbled. “Better get ready to catch your train.”

I nodded and reached to cut off the connection. He waved half-heartedly. “Oh, yes,” he added, “give my regards to Susan if you see her.”

“Isn’t she here?”

He grimaced. “Your friend Defoe said he needed a secretary. He requisitioned her.”

* * * *

I boarded the Anzio train from the same platform where I had seen Zorchi dive under the wheels. But this was no sleek express; it was an ancient three-car string that could not have been less than fifty years out of date. The cars were not even air-conditioned.

Sleep was next to impossible, so I struck up a conversation with an expediter-officer. He was stand-offish at first but, when he found out I was a Claims Adjuster, he mellowed and produced some interesting information.

It was reasonable that Defoe would put aside his other duties and make a quick visit to Anzio, because Anzio seemed to need someone to do something about it pretty badly. My officer was part of a new levy being sent up there; the garrison was being doubled; there had been trouble. He was vague about what kind of “trouble” it had been, but it sounded like mob violence. I mentioned Caserta and the near-riot I had been in; the officer’s eyes hooded over, and about five minutes after that he pointedly leaned back and pulled his hat over his eyes. Evidently it was not good form to discuss actual riots.

I accepted the rebuke, but I was puzzled in my mind as I tried to get some sleep for myself.

What kind of a place was this Naples, where mobs rioted against the Company and even intelligent-seeming persons like Renata dell’Angela appeared to have some reservations about it?

CHAPTER V

I slept, more or less, for an hour or so in that cramped coach seat. I was half asleep when the train-expediter nudged my elbow and said, “Anzio.”

It was early—barely past daybreak. It was much too early to find a cab. I got directions from a drowsing stationmaster and walked toward the vaults.

The “clinic,” as the official term went, was buried in the feet of the hills just beyond the beaches. I was astonished at the size of it. Not because it was so large; on the contrary. It was, as far as I could see, only a broad, low shed.

Then it occurred to me that the vaults were necessarily almost entirely underground, for the sake of economy in keeping them down to the optimum suspendee temperature. It was safe enough and simple enough to put a man in suspended animation but, as I understood it, it was necessary to be sure that the suspendees never got much above fifty degrees temperature for any length of time. Above that, they had an unwelcome tendency to decay.

This was, I realized, the first full-scale “clinic” I had ever seen. I had known that the Company had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them scattered all over the world.

I had heard that the Company had enough of them, mostly in out-of-the-way locations, to deep-freeze the entire human race at once, though that seemed hardly reasonable.

I had even heard some ugly, never-quite-made-clear stories about why the Company had so many clinics…but when people began hinting at such ridiculous unpleasantness, I felt it was my duty to make it clear that I wanted to hear no subversive talk. So I had never got the details—and certainly would never have believed them for a moment if I had.

* * * *

It was very early in the morning, as I say, but it seemed that I was not the first to arrive at the clinic. On the sparse grass before the main entrance, half a dozen knots of men and women were standing around apathetically. Some of them glared at me as I came near them, for reasons I did not understand; others merely stared.

I heard a hoarse whisper as I passed one group of middle-aged women. One of them was saying, “Benedetto non é morte.” She seemed to be directing it to me; but it meant nothing. The only comment that came to my somewhat weary mind was, “So what if Benedetto isn’t dead?”

A huge armed expediter, yawning and scratching, let me in to the executive office. I explained that I had been sent for by Mr. Defoe. I had to wait until Mr. Defoe was ready to receive me and was finally conducted to a suite of rooms.

This might have once been an authentic clinic; it had the aseptic appearance of a depressing hospital room. One for, say, Class-Cs with terminal myasthenia. Now, though, it had been refitted as a private guest suite, with an attempt at luxurious drapes and deep stuffed armchairs superimposed on the basic adjustable beds and stainless steel plumbing.

I hadn’t seen Defoe in some time, but he hadn’t changed at all. He was, as always, the perfect model of a Company executive of general-officer rank. He was formal, but not unyielding. He was tall, distinguished-gray at the temples, spare, immaculately outfitted in the traditional vest and bow tie.

I recalled our first meeting. He was from the side of Marianna’s family that she talked about, and she fluttered around for three whole days, checking our Blue Plate policies for every last exotic dish we could squeeze out to offer him, planning the television programs allowed under our entertainment policies, selecting the most respectable of our friends—“acquaintances” would be a better description; Marianna didn’t make friends easily—to make up a dinner party. He’d arrived at the stroke of the hour he was due, and had brought with him what was undoubtedly his idea of a princely gift for newlyweds—a paid-up extra-coverage maternity benefit rider on our Blue Blanket policies.

We thanked him effusively. And, for my part, sincerely. That was before I had known Marianna’s views on children; she had no intentions of raising a family.

* * * *

As I walked in on Defoe in his private suite at the clinic, he was standing with his back to me, at a small washstand, peering at his reflection in a mirror. He appeared to have finished shaving. I rubbed my own bristled chin uneasily.

He said over his shoulder, “Good morning, Thomas. Sit down.”

I sat on the edge of an enormous wing chair. He pursed his lips, stretched the skin under his chin and, when he seemed perfectly satisfied the job was complete, he said as though he were continuing a conversation, “Fill me in on your interview with Zorchi, Thomas.”

It was the first I’d known he’d ever heard of Zorchi. I hesitantly began to tell him about the meeting in the hospital. It did not, I knew, do me very much credit, but it simply didn’t occur to me to try to make my own part look better. I suppose that if I thought of the matter at all, I simply thought that Defoe would instantly detect any attempt to gloss things over. He hardly seemed to be paying attention to me, though; he was preoccupied with the remainder of his morning ritual—carefully massaging his face with something fragrant, brushing his teeth with a maddening, old-fashioned insistence on careful strokes, combing his hair almost strand by strand.

Then he took a small bottle with a daub attached to the stopper and touched it to the distinguished gray at his temples.

I spluttered in the middle of a word; I had never thought of the possibility that the handsomely grayed temples of the Company’s senior executives, as inevitable as the vest or the watch chain, were equally a part of the uniform! Defoe gave me a long inquiring look in the mirror; I coughed and went on with a careful description of Zorchi’s temper tantrum.

Defoe turned to me and nodded gravely. There was neither approval nor disapproval. He had asked for information and the information had been received.

He pressed a communicator button and ordered breakfast. The microphone must have been there, but it was invisible. He sat down at a small, surgical-looking table, leaned back and folded his hands.

“Now,” he said, “tell me what happened in Caserta just before Hammond disappeared.”

Talking to Defoe had something of the quality of shouting down a well. I collected my thoughts and told him all I knew on the riot at the branch office.

While I was talking, Defoe’s breakfast arrived. He didn’t know I hadn’t eaten anything, of course—I say “of course” because I know he couldn’t have known, he didn’t ask. I looked at it longingly, but all my looking didn’t alter the fact that there was only one plate, one cup, one set of silverware.

He ate his breakfast as methodically as he’d brushed his teeth. I doubt if it took him five minutes. Since I finished the Caserta story in about three, the last couple of minutes were in dead silence, Defoe eating, me sitting mute as a disconnected jukebox.

Then he pushed the little table away, lit a cigarette and said, “You may smoke if you wish, Thomas. Come in, Susan.”

He didn’t raise his voice; and when, fifteen seconds later, Susan Manchester walked in, he didn’t look at all impressed with the efficiency of his secretary, his intercom system, or himself. The concealed microphone, it occurred to me, had heard him order breakfast and request his secretary to walk in. It had undoubtedly heard—and most probably recorded—every word I had said.

How well they did things on the upper echelon of the Company!

Susan looked—different. She was as blonde and pretty as ever. But she wasn’t bubbly. She smiled at me in passing and handed Defoe a typed script, which he scanned carefully.

He asked, “Nothing new on Hammond?”

“No, sir,” she said.

“All right. You may leave this.” She nodded and left. Defoe turned back to me. “I have some news for you, Thomas. Hammond has been located.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Not too badly hung over, I hope.”

He gave me an arctic smile. “Hardly. He was found by a couple of peasants who were picking grapes. He’s dead.”

CHAPTER VI

Hammond dead! He had had his faults, but he was an officer of the Company and a man I had met. Dead!

I asked, “How? What happened?”

“Perhaps you can tell me that, Thomas,” said Defoe.

I sat startledly erect, shocked by the significance of the words. I said hotly, “Damn it, Mr. Defoe, you know I had nothing to do with this! I’ve been all over the whole thing with you and I thought you were on my side! Just because I said a lot of crazy things after Marianna died doesn’t mean I’m anti-Company—and it certainly doesn’t mean I’d commit murder. If you think that, then why the devil did you put me in cadet school?”

Defoe merely raised his hand by bending the wrist slightly; it was enough to stop me, though. “Gently, Thomas. I don’t think you did it—that much should be obvious. And I put you in cadet school because I had work for you.”

“But you said I knew something I was holding back.”

Defoe waggled the hand reprovingly. “I said you might be able to tell me who killed Hammond. And so you might—but not yet. I count heavily on you for help in this area, Thomas. There are two urgent tasks to be done. Hammond’s death—” he paused and shrugged, and the shrug was all of Hammond’s epitaph—“is only an incident in a larger pattern; we need to work out the pattern itself.”

He glanced again at the typed list Susan had handed him. “I find that I can stay in the Naples area for only a short time; the two tasks must be done before I leave. I shall handle one myself. The other I intend to delegate to you.

“First we have the unfortunate situation in regard to the state of public morale. Unfortunate? Perhaps I should say disgraceful. There is quite obviously a nucleus of troublemakers at work, Thomas, and Gogarty has not had the wit to find them and take the appropriate steps. Someone else must. Second, this Zorchi is an unnecessary annoyance. I do not propose to let the Company be annoyed, Thomas. Which assignment would you prefer?”

I said hesitantly, “I don’t know if Mr. Gogarty would like me to—”

“Gogarty is an ass! If he had not blundered incessantly since he took over the district, I should not have had to drop important work to come here.”

I thought for a second. Digging out an undercover ring of troublemakers didn’t sound particularly easy. On the other hand, I had already tried my luck with Zorchi.

“Perhaps you’d better try Zorchi,” I said.

“Try?” Defoe allowed himself to look surprised. “As you wish. I think you will learn something from watching me handle it, Thomas. Shall we join Signore Zorchi now?”

“He’s here?”

Defoe said impatiently, “Of course, Thomas. Come along.”

* * * *

Zorchi’s secretary was there, too. He was in a small anteroom, sitting on a hard wooden chair; as we passed him, I saw the hostility in his eyes. He didn’t say a word.

Beyond him, in an examination room, was Zorchi, slim, naked and hideous, sitting on the edge of a surgical cot and trying not to look ill at ease. He had been shaved from head to knee stumps. Esthetically, at least, it had been a mistake. I never saw such a collection of skin eruptions on a human.

He burst out, faster than my language-school Italian could follow, in a stream of argument and abuse. Defoe listened icily for a moment, then shut him up in Italian as good as his own, “Answer questions; otherwise keep quiet. I will not warn you again.”

I don’t know if even Defoe could have stopped Zorchi under normal conditions. But there is something about being naked in the presence of fully dressed opponents that saps the will; and I guessed, too, that the shaving had made Zorchi feel nakeder than ever before in his life. I could see why he’d worn a beard and I wished he still had it.

“Dr. Lawton,” said Defoe, “have you completed your examination of the insured?”

A youngish medical officer of the Company said, “Yes, sir. I have the slides and reports right here; they just came up from the laboratory.” He handed a stapled collection of photographic prints and papers to Defoe, who took his own good time to examine them while the rest of us stood and waited.

Defoe finally put the papers down and nodded. “In a word, this bears out our previous discussion.”

Lawton nodded. “If you will observe his legs, you will see that the skin healing is complete; already a blastema has formed and—”

“I know,” Defoe said impatiently. “Signore Zorchi, I regret to say that I have bad news for you.”

Zorchi waved his hand defiantly. “You are the bad news.”

Defoe ignored him. “You have a grave systemic imbalance. There is great danger of serious ill effects.”

“To what?” snarled Zorchi. “The Company’s bank account?”

“No, Zorchi. To your life.” Defoe shook his head. “There are indications of malignancy.”

“Malignancy?” Zorchi looked startled. “What kind? Do you mean cancer?”

“Exactly.” Defoe patted his papers. “You see, Zorchi, healthy human flesh does not grow like a salamander’s tail.”

The phone rang; impeccable in everything, Defoe waited while Dr. Lawton nervously answered it. Lawton said a few short words, listened for a moment and hung up, looking worried.

He said: “The crowd outside is getting rather large. That was the expediter-captain from the main gate. He says—”

“I presume he has standing orders,” Defoe said. “We need not concern ourselves with that, need we?”

“Well—” The doctor looked unhappy.

“Now, Zorchi,” Defoe went on, dismissing Lawton utterly, “do you enjoy life?”

“I despise it!” Zorchi spat to emphasize how much.

“But you cling to it. You would not like to die, would you? Worse still, you would not care to live indefinitely with carcinoma eating you piece by piece.”

Zorchi just glowered suspiciously.

“Perhaps we can cure you, however,” Defoe went on reflectively. “It is by no means certain. I don’t want to raise false hopes. But there is the possibility—”

“The possibility that you will cure me of collecting on my policies, eh?” Zorchi demanded belligerently. “You are crazy, Defoe. Never!”

Defoe looked at him for a thoughtful moment. To Lawton, he said: “Have you this man’s claim warranty? It has the usual application for medical treatment, I presume?” He nodded as Lawton confirmed it. “You see, Mr. Zorchi? As a matter of routine, no claim can be paid unless the policyholder submits to our medical care. You signed the usual form, so—”

“One moment! You people never put me through this before! Did you change the contract on me?”

“No, Signore Zorchi. The same contract, but this time we will enforce it. I think I should warn you of something, though.”

He riffled through the papers and found a photographic print to show Zorchi. “This picture isn’t you, Signore. It is a picture of a newt. The doctor will explain it to you.”

The print was an eight-by-ten glossy of a little lizard with something odd about its legs. Puzzled, Zorchi held it as though the lizard were alive and venomous. But as the doctor spoke, the puzzlement turned into horror and fury.

“What Mr. Defoe means,” said Lawton, “is that totipotency—that is, the ability to regenerate lost tissues, as you can, even when entire members are involved—is full of unanswered riddles. We have found, for instance, that X-ray treatment on your leg helps a new leg to form rapidly, just as it does on the leg of the salamanders. The radiation appears to stimulate the formation of the blastema, which—well, never mind the technical part. It speeds things up.”

His eyes gleamed with scientific interest. “But we tried the experiment of irradiating limbs that had not been severed. It worked the same way, oddly enough. New limbs were generated even though the old ones were still there. That’s why the salamander in the photo has four hands on one of its limbs—nine legs altogether, counting that half-formed one just beside the tail. Curious-looking little beast, isn’t it?”

Defoe cleared his throat. “I only mention, Signore, that the standard treatment for malignancy is X-radiation.”

Zorchi’s eyes flamed—rage battling it out with terror. He said shrilly, “But you can’t make a laboratory animal out of me! I’m a policyholder!”

“Nature did it, Signore Zorchi, not us,” Defoe said.

Zorchi’s eyes rolled up in his head and closed; for a moment, I thought he had fainted and leaped forward to catch him rather than let his legless body crash to the floor. But he hadn’t fainted. He was muttering, half aloud, sick with fear, “For the love of Mary, Defoe! Please, please, I beg you! Please!”

It was too much for me. I said, shaking with rage, “Mr. Defoe, you can’t force this man to undergo experimental radiation that might make a monster out of him! I insist that you reconsider!”

Defoe threw his head back. “What, Thomas?” he snapped.

I said firmly, “He has no one here to advise him—I’ll take the job. Zorchi, listen to me! You’ve signed the treatment application and he’s right enough about that—you can’t get out of it. But you don’t have to take this treatment! Every policyholder has the right to refuse any new and unguaranteed course of treatment, no matter what the circumstances. All you’ve got to do is agree to go into suspension in the va—in the clinic here, pending such time as your condition can be infallibly cured. Do it, man! Don’t let them make you a freak—demand suspension! What have you got to lose?”

I never saw a man go so to pieces as Zorchi, when he realized how nearly Defoe had trapped him into becoming a guinea pig. Whimpering thanks to me, he hastily signed the optional agreement for suspended animation and, as quickly as I could, I left him there.

Defoe followed me. We passed the secretary in the anteroom while Dr. Lawton was explaining the circumstances to him; the man was stricken with astonishment, almost too paralyzed to sign the witnessing form Defoe had insisted on. I knew the form well—I had been about to sign one for Marianna when, at the last moment, she decided against the vaults in favor of the experimental therapy that hadn’t worked.

Outside in the hall, Defoe stopped and confronted me. I braced myself for the blast to end all blasts.

I could hardly believe my eyes. The great stone face was smiling!

“Thomas,” he said inexplicably, “that was masterful. I couldn’t have done better myself.”

CHAPTER VII

We walked silently through the huge central waiting room of the clinic.

There should have been scores of relatives of suspendees milling around, seeking information—there was, I knew, still a steady shipment of suspendees coming in from the local hospitals; I had seen it myself. But there were hardly more than a dozen or so persons in sight, with a single clerk checking their forms and answering their questions.

It was too quiet. Defoe thought so, too; I saw his frown.

Now that I had had a few moments to catch my breath, I realized that I had seen a master judoist at work. It was all out of the textbooks—as a fledgling Claims Adjuster, I had had the basic courses in handling difficult cases—but not one man in a million could apply textbook rules as skillfully and successfully as Defoe did with Zorchi.

Push a man hard and he will lunge back; push him hard enough and persistently enough, and he will lunge back farther than his vision carries him, right to the position you planned for him in the first place. And I, of course, had been only a tool in Defoe’s hand; by interceding for Zorchi, I had tricked the man into the surrender Defoe wanted.

And he had complimented me for it!

I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether the compliment Defoe gave me was part of some still subtler scheme…

Defoe nodded curtly to the expediter-captain at the door, who saluted and pressed the teleswitch that summoned Defoe’s limousine.

Defoe turned to me. “I have business in Rome and must leave at once. You will have to certify Zorchi’s suspension this afternoon; since I won’t be here, you’ll have to come back to the clinic for it. After that, Thomas, you can begin your assignment.”

I said uncertainly, “What—where shall I begin?”

One eyebrow lifted a trifle. “Where? Wherever you think proper, Thomas. Or must I handle this myself?”

The proper answer, and the one I longed to make, was “Yes.” Instead I said, “Not at all, Mr. Defoe. It’s only that I didn’t even know there was an undercover group until you told me about it a few moments ago; I don’t know exactly where to start. Gogarty never mentioned—”

“Gogarty,” he cut in, “is very likely to be relieved as District Administrator before long. I should like to replace him with someone already on the scene—” he glanced at me to be sure I understood—“provided, that is, that I can find someone of proven competence. Someone who has the ability to handle this situation without the necessity of my personal intervention.”

The limousine arrived then, with an armed expediter riding beside the chauffeur. Defoe allowed me to open the door for him and follow him in.

“Do you understand me?” he asked as the driver started off.

“I think so,” I said.

“Good. I do not suppose that Gogarty has given you any information about the malcontents in this area.”

“No.”

“It may be for the best; his information is clearly not good.” Defoe stared broodingly out the window at the silent groups of men and women on the grass before the clinic. “Your information is there,” he said as they passed out of sight. “Learn what you can. Act when you know enough. And, Thomas—”

“Yes?”

“Have you given thought to your future?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I’ve only been a Claims Adjuster a little while, you know. I suppose that perhaps I might eventually get promoted, even become a District Administrator—”

He looked at me impersonally. “Dream higher,” he advised.

* * * *

I stood watching after Defoe’s limousine, from the marquee of the hotel where he had left me to take a room and freshen up. Dream higher. He had the gift of intoxication.

Higher than a District Administrator! It could mean only—the Home Office.

Well, it was not impossible, after all. The Home Office jobs had to go to someone; the supermen who held them now—the Defoes and the Carmodys and the dozen or more others who headed up departments or filled seats on the Council of Underwriters—couldn’t live forever. And the jobs had to be filled by someone.

Why not me? Only one reason, really. I was not a career man. I hadn’t had the early academy training from adolescence on; I had come to the service of the Company itself relatively late in life. The calendar legislated against me.

Of course, I thought to myself, I was in a pretty good position, in a way, because of Defoe’s evident interest in me. With him helping and counseling me, it might be easier.

I thought that and then I stopped myself, shocked. I was thinking in terms of personal preferment. That was not the Company way! If I had learned anything in my training, I had learned that Advancement was on merit alone.

Advancement had to be on merit alone…else the Company became an oligarchy, deadly and self-perpetuating.

Shaken, I sat in the dingy little hotel room that was the best the town of Anzio had for me and opened my little Black Book. I thumbed through the fine-printed pages of actuarial tables and turned to the words of Millen Carmody, Chief Underwriter, in the preface. They were the words that had been read to me and the others at our graduation at the Home Office, according to the tradition:

Remember always that the Company serves humanity, not the reverse. The Company’s work is the world’s work. The Company can end, forever, the menace of war and devastation; but it must not substitute a tyranny of its own. Corruption breeds tyrants. Corruption has no place in the Company.

They were glorious words. I read them over again, and stared at the portrait of Underwriter Carmody that was the frontispiece of the handbook. It was a face to inspire trust—wise and human, grave, but with warmth in the wide-spaced eyes.

Millen Carmody was not a man you could doubt. As long as men like him ran the Company—and he was the boss of them all, the Chief Underwriter, the highest position the Company had to offer—there could be no question of favoritism or corruption.

* * * *

After eating, I shaved, cleaned up a little and went back to the clinic.

There was trouble in the air, no question of it. More expediters were in view, scattered around the entrance, a dozen, cautious yards away from the nearest knots of civilians. Cars with no official company markings, but with armor-glass so thick that it seemed yellow, were parked at the corners. And people were everywhere.

People who were quiet. Too quiet. There were some women—but not enough to make the proportion right. And there were no children.

I could almost feel the thrust of their eyes as I entered the clinic.

Inside, the aura of strain was even denser. If anything, the place looked more normal than it had earlier; there were more people. The huge waiting room was packed and a dozen sweating clerks were interviewing long lines of persons. But here, as outside, the feeling was wrong; the crowds weren’t noisy enough; they lacked the nervous boisterousness they should have had.

Dr. Lawton looked worried. He greeted me and showed me to a small room near the elevators. There was a cocoon of milky plastic on a wheeled table; I looked closer, and inside the cocoon, recognizable through the clear plastic over the face, was the waxlike body of Luigi Zorchi. The eyes were closed and he was completely still. I would have thought him dead if I had not known he was under the influence of the drugs used in the suspension of life in the vaults.

I said: “Am I supposed to identify him or something?”

“We know who he is,” Lawton snorted. “Sign the commitment, that’s all.”

I signed the form he handed me, attesting that Luigi Zorchi, serial number such-and-such, had requested and was being granted immobilization and suspension in lieu of cash medical benefits. They rolled the stretcher-cart away, with its thick foam-plastic sack containing the inanimate Zorchi.

“Anything else?” I asked. Lawton shook his head moodily. “Nothing you can help with. I told Defoe this was going to happen!”

“What?”

He glared at me. “Man, didn’t you just come in through the main entrance? Didn’t you see that mob?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a mob,” I began.

“You wouldn’t now,” he broke in. “But you will soon enough. They’re working themselves up. Or maybe they’re waiting for something. But it means trouble, I promise, and I warned Defoe about it. And he just stared at me as if I was some kind of degenerate.”

I said sharply, “What are you afraid of? Right outside, you’ve got enough expediters to fight a war.”

“Afraid? Me?” He looked insulted. “Do you think I’m worried about my own skin, Wills? No, sir. But do you realize that we have suspendees here who need protection? Eighty thousand of them. A mob like that—”

“Eighty thousand?” I stared at him. The war had lasted only a few weeks!

“Eighty thousand. A little more, if anything. And every one of them is a ward of the Company as long as he’s suspended. Just think of the damage suits, Wills.”

I said, still marveling at the enormous number of casualties out of that little war, “Surely the suspendees are safe here, aren’t they?”

“Not against mobs. The vaults can handle anything that might happen in the way of disaster. I don’t think an H-bomb right smack on top of them would disturb more than the top two or three decks at most. But you never know what mobs will do. If they once get in here— And Defoe wouldn’t listen to me!”

As I went back into the hall, passing the main entrance, the explosion burst.

I stared out over the heads of the dreadfully silent throng in the entrance hall, looking toward the glass doors, as was everyone else inside. Beyond the doors, an arc of expediters was retreating toward us; they paused, fired a round of gas-shells over the heads of the mob outside, and retreated again.

Then the mob was on them, in a burst of screaming fury. Hidden gas guns appeared, and clubs, and curious things that looked like slingshots. The crowd broke for the entrance. The line of expediters wavered but held. There was a tangle of hand-to-hand fights, each one a vicious struggle. But the expediters were professionals; outnumbered forty to one, they savagely chopped down their attackers with their hands, their feet and the stocks of their guns. The crowd hesitated. No shot had yet been fired, except toward the sky.

The air whined and shook. From low on the horizon, a needle-nosed jet thundered in. A plane! Aircraft never flew in the restricted area over the Company’s major installations. Aircraft didn’t barrel in at treetop height, fast and low, without a hint of the recognition numbers every aircraft had to carry.

From its belly sluiced a silvery milt of explosives as it came in over the heads of the mob, peeled off and up and away, then circled out toward the sea for another approach. A hail of tiny blasts rattled in the clear space between the line of expediters and the entrance. The big doors shook and cracked.

* * * *

The expediters stared white-faced at the ship. And the crowd began firing. An illegal hard-pellet gun peppered the glass of the doors with pockmarks. The guarding line of expediters was simply overrun.

Inside the waiting room, where I stood frozen, hell broke out. The detachment of expediters, supervising the hundreds inside leaped for the doors to fight back the surging mob. But the mob inside the doors, the long orderly lines before the interviewing clerks, now split into a hundred screaming, milling centers of panic. Some rushed toward the doors; some broke for the halls of the vaults themselves. I couldn’t see what was going on outside any more. I was swamped in a rush of women panicked out of their senses.

Panic was like a plague. I saw doctors and orderlies struggling against the tide, a few scattered expediters battling to turn back the terrified rush. But I was swept along ahead of them all, barely able to keep my feet. An expediter fell a yard from me. I caught up his gun and began striking out. For this was what Lawton had feared—the mob loose in the vaults!

I raced down a side corridor, around a corner, to the banked elevators that led to the deeps of the clinic. There was fighting there, but the elevator doors were closed. Someone had had the wit to lock them against the mob. But there were stairs; I saw an emergency door only a few yards away. I hesitated only long enough to convince myself, through the fear, that my duty was to the Company and to the protection of its helpless wards below. I bolted through the door and slammed it behind me, spun the levers over and locked it. In a moment, I was running down a long ramp toward the cool immensities of the vaults.

If Lawton had not mentioned the possible consequences of violence to the suspendees, I suppose I would have worried only about my own skin. But here I was. I stared around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a sort of plexus of hallways, an open area with doors on all sides leading off to the vaults. I was alone; the noise from above and outside was cut off completely.

No, I was not alone! I heard running footsteps, light and quick, from another ramp. I turned in time to see a figure speed down it, pause only a second at its base, and disappear into one of the vaults. It was a woman, but not a woman in nurse’s uniform. Her back had been to me, yet I could see that one hand held a gas gun, the other something glittering and small.

I followed, not quite believing what I had seen. For I had caught only a glimpse of her face, far off and from a bad angle—but I was as sure as ever I could be that it was Rena dell’Angela!

She didn’t look back. She was hurrying against time, hurrying toward a destination that obsessed her thoughts. I followed quietly enough, but I think I might have thundered like an elephant herd and still been unheard.

We passed a strange double-walled door with a warning of some sort lettered on it in red; then she swung into a side corridor where the passage was just wide enough for one. On either side were empty tiers of shelves waiting for suspendees. I speeded up to reach the corner before she could disappear.

But she wasn’t hurrying now. She had come to a bay of shelves where a hundred or so bodies lay wrapped in their plastic sacks, each to his own shelf. Dropping to her knees, she began checking the tags on the cocoons at the lowest level.

She whispered something sharp and imploring. Then, straightening abruptly, she dropped the gas gun and took up the glittering thing in her other hand. Now I could see that it was a hypodermic kit in a crystal case. From it she took a little flask of purplish liquid and, fingers shaking, shoved the needle of the hypodermic into the plastic stopper of the vial.

Moving closer, I said: “It won’t work, Rena.”

She jumped and swung to face me, holding the hypodermic like a stiletto. Seeing my face, she gasped and wavered.

I stepped by her and looked down at the tag on the cocooned figure. Benedetto dell’Angela, Napoli, it said, and then the long string of serial numbers that identified him.

It was what I had guessed.

“It won’t work,” I repeated. “Be smart about this, Rena. You can’t revive him without killing him.”

Rena half-closed her eyes. She whispered, “Would death be worse than this?”

I hadn’t expected this sort of superstitious nonsense from her. I started to answer, but she had me off guard. In a flash, she raked the glittering needle toward my face and, as I stumbled back involuntarily, her other hand lunged for the gas gun I had thrust into my belt.

Only luck saved me. Not being in a holster, the gun’s front sight caught and I had the moment I needed to cuff her away. She gasped and spun up against the tiers of shelves. The filled hypodermic shattered against the floor, spilling the contents into a purple, gleaming pool of fluorescence.

Rena took a deep breath and stood erect. There were tears in her eyes again.

She said in a detached voice: “Well done, Mr. Wills.”

“Are you crazy?” I crackled. “This is your father. Do you want to kill him? It takes a doctor to revive him. You’re an educated woman, Rena, not a witch-ridden peasant! You know better than this!”

She laughed—a cold laugh. “Educated! A peasant woman would have kicked you to death and succeeded. I’m educated, all right! Two hundred men, a plane, twenty women risking themselves up there to get me through the door. All our plans—and I can’t remember a way to kill you in time. I’m too educated to hate you, Claims Adjuster Wills!” She choked on the words. Then she shook her head dully. “Go ahead, turn me in and get it over with.”

I took a deep breath. Turn her in? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. True, that was the obvious thing to do; she had confessed that the whole riot outside was a diversion to get her down in the vaults, and anyone who could summon up that sort of organized anti-Company violence was someone who automatically became my natural enemy.

But perhaps I was too educated and too soft as well. There had been tears on her face, over her father’s body. I could not remember having heard that conspirators cried.

And I sympathized a little. I had known what it was like to weep over the body of someone I loved. Despite our difficulties, despite everything, I would have done anything in the world to bring Marianna back to life. I couldn’t. Rena—she believed—could revive her father.

I didn’t want to turn her in.

I shouldn’t turn her in. It was my duty not to turn her in, for hadn’t Defoe himself ordered me to investigate the dissident movement of which she was clearly a part? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to win her confidence, and trick her into revealing its secrets, than to have her arrested?

The answer, in all truth, was No. She was not a trickable girl, I was sure. But it was, at least, a rationale, and I clung to it.

I coughed and said: “Rena, will you make a bargain?”

She stared drearily. “Bargain?”

“I have a room at the Umberto. If I get you out of here, will you go to my room and wait for me there?”

Her eyes narrowed sharply for a second. She parted her lips to say something, but only nodded.

“Your word, Rena? I don’t want to turn you in.”

She looked helplessly at the purple spilled pool on the floor, and wistfully at the sack that held her father. Then she said, “My word on it. But you’re a fool, Tom!”

“I know it!” I admitted.

I hurried her back up the ramp, back toward the violence upstairs. If it was over, I would have to talk her out of the clinic, somehow cover up the fact that she had been in the vaults. If it was still going on, though—

It was.

We blended ourselves with the shouting, rioting knots. I dragged her into the main waiting room, saw her thrust through the doors. Things were quieting even then. And I saw two women hastening toward her through the fight, and I do not think it was a coincidence that the steam went out of the rioters almost at once.

I stayed at the clinic until everything was peaceful again, though it was hours.

I wasn’t fooling myself. I didn’t have a shred of real reason for not having her arrested. If she had information to give, I was not the type to trick it out of her—even if she really was waiting at the Umberto, which was, in itself, not likely. If I had turned her in, Defoe would have had the information out of her in moments; but not I.

She was an enemy of the Company.

And I was unable to betray her.

CHAPTER VIII

Dr. Lawton, who seemed to be Chief Medical Officer for Anzio Clinic, said grimly: “This wasn’t an accident. It was planned. The question is, why?”

The expediters had finished driving the rioters out of the clinic itself, and gas guns were rapidly dispersing the few left outside the entrance. At least thirty unconscious forms were scattered around—and one or two that were worse than unconscious.

I said, “Maybe they were hoping to loot the clinic.” It wasn’t a very good lie. But then, I hadn’t had much practice in telling lies to an officer of the Company.

Lawton pursed his lips and ignored the suggestion. “Tell me something, Wills. What were you doing down below?”

I said quickly, “Below? You mean a half an hour ago?”

“That’s what I mean.” He was gentle, but—well, not exactly suspicious. Curious.

I improvised: “I—I thought I saw someone running down there. One of the rioters. So I chased after her—after him.” I corrected, swallowing the word just barely in time.

He nodded. “Find anything?”

It was a tough question. Had I been seen going in or coming out? If it was coming out—Rena had been with me.

I took what we called a “calculated risk”—that is, I got a firm grip on my courage and told a big fat and possibly detectable lie. I said, “Nobody that I could find. But I still think I heard something. The trouble is, I don’t know the vaults very well. I was afraid I’d get lost.”

Apparently it was on the way in that I had been spotted, for Lawton said thoughtfully, “Let’s take a look.”

We took a couple of battered expediters with us—I didn’t regard them as exactly necessary, but I couldn’t see how I could tell Lawton that. The elevators were working again, so we came out in a slightly different part of the vaults than I had seen before; it was not entirely acting on my part when I peered around.

Lawton accepted my statement that I wasn’t quite sure where I had heard the noises, without argument. He accepted it all too easily; he sent the expediters scouring the corridors at random.

And, of course, one of them found the pool of spilled fluorescence from the hypodermic needle I had knocked out of Rena’s hand.

We stood there peering at the smear of purplish color, the shattered hypodermic, Rena’s gas gun.

Lawton mused, “Looks like someone’s trying to wake up some of our sleepers. That’s our standard antilytic, if I’m not mistaken.” He scanned the shelves. “Nobody missing around here. Take a look in the next few sections of the tiers.”

The expediters saluted and left.

“They won’t find anyone missing,” Lawton predicted, “And that means we have to take a physical inventory of the whole damn clinic. Over eighty thousand suspendees to check.” He made a disgusted noise.

I said, “Maybe they were scared off before they finished.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have to check, that’s all.”

“Are you sure that stuff is to revive the suspendees?” I persisted. “Couldn’t it just have been someone wandering down here by mistake during the commotion and—”

“And carrying a hypodermic needle by mistake, and armed with a gas gun by mistake. Sure, Wills.”

The expediters returned and Lawton looked at them sourly.

They shook their heads. He shrugged. “Tell you what, Wills,” he said. “Let’s go back to the office and—”

He stopped, peering down the corridor. The last of our expediters was coming toward us—not alone.

“Well, what do you know!” said Lawton. “Wills, it looks like he’s got your fugitive!”

The expediter was dragging a small writhing figure behind him; we could hear whines and pleading. For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was Rena, against all logic.

But it wasn’t. It was a quavery ancient, a bleary-eyed wreck of a man, long past retirement age, shabbily dressed and obviously the sort who cut his pension policies to the barest minimum—and then whined when his old age was poverty-stricken.

Lawton asked me: “This the man?”

“I—I couldn’t recognize him,” I said.

Lawton turned to the weeping old man. “Who were you after?” he demanded. All he got was sobbing pleas to let him go; all he was likely to get was more of the same. The man was in pure panic.

We got him up to one of the receiving offices on the upper level, half carried by the expediters. Lawton questioned him mercilessly for half an hour before giving up. The man was by then incapable of speech.

He had said, as nearly as we could figure it out, only that he was sorry he had gone into the forbidden place, he didn’t mean to go into the forbidden place, he had been sleeping in the shadow of the forbidden place when fighting began and he fled inside.

It was perfectly apparent to me that he was telling the truth—and, more, that any diversionary riot designed to get him inside with a hypodermic and gas gun would have been planned by maniacs, for I doubted he could have found the trigger of the gun. But Lawton seemed to think he was lying.

It was growing late. Lawton offered to drive me to my hotel, leaving the man in the custody of the expediters. On the way, out of curiosity, I asked: “Suppose he had succeeded? Can you revive a suspendee as easily as that, just by sticking a needle in his arm?”

Lawton grunted. “Pretty near, that and artificial respiration. One case in a hundred might need something else—heart massage or an incubator, for instance. But most of the time an antilytic shot is enough.”

Then Rena had not been as mad as I thought.

I said: “And do you think that old man could have accomplished anything?”

Lawton looked at me curiously. “Maybe.”

“Who do you suppose he was after?”

Lawton said off-handedly. “He was right near Bay 100, wasn’t he?”

“Bay 100?” Something struck a chord; I remembered following Rena down the corridor, passing a door that was odd in some way. Was the number 100 on that door? “Is that the one that’s locked off, with the sign on it that says anybody who goes in is asking for trouble?”

“That’s the one. Though,” he added, “nobody is going to get in. That door is triple-plate armor; the lock opens only to the personal fingerprint pattern of Defoe and two or three others.”

“What’s inside it that’s so important?”

He said coldly, “How would I know? I can’t open the door.” And that was the end of the conversation. I knew he was lying.

* * * *

I had changed my bet with myself on the way. I won it. Rena was in the room waiting for me. She was sound asleep, stretched out on the bed. She looked as sober-faced and intent in her sleep as a little girl—a look I had noticed in Marianna’s sleeping face once.

It was astonishing how little I thought about Marianna anymore.

I considered very carefully before I rang for a bellboy, but it seemed wisest to let her sleep and take my chances with the house detective, if any. There was none, it turned out. In fact, the bellboy hardly noticed her—whether out of indifference or because he was well aware that I had signed for the room with an official travel-credit card of the Company, it didn’t much matter. He succeeded in conveying, without saying a word, that the Blue Sky was the limit.

I ordered dinner, waving away the menu and telling him to let the chef decide. The chef decided well. Among other things, there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice.

Rena woke up slowly at first, and then popped to a sitting position, eyes wide. I said quickly, “Everything’s all right. No one saw you at the clinic.”

She blinked once. In a soft voice, she said, “Thank you.” She sighed a very small sigh and slipped off the bed.

I realized as Rena was washing up, comparisons were always odious, but— Well, if a strange man had found Marianna with her dress hitched halfway up her thigh, asleep on his bed, he’d have been in for something. What the “something” would be might depend on circumstances; it might be a raging order to knock before he came in, it might only be a storm of blushes and a couple of hours of meticulously prissy behavior. But she wouldn’t just let it slide. And Rena, by simply disregarding it, was as modest as any girl could be.

After all, I told myself, warming to the subject, it wasn’t as if I were some excitable adolescent. I could see a lovely girl’s legs without getting all stirred up. For that matter, I hardly even noticed them, come to think of it. And if I did notice them, it was certainly nothing of any importance; I had dismissed it casually, practically forgotten it, in fact.

She came back and said cheerfully, “I’m hungry!” And so, I realized, was I.

We started to eat without much discussion, except for the necessary talk of the table. I felt very much at ease sitting across from her, in spite of the fact that she had placed herself in opposition to the Company. I felt relaxed and comfortable; nothing bothered me. Certainly, I went on in my mind, I was as free and easy with her as with any man; it didn’t matter that she was an attractive girl at all. I wasn’t thinking of her in that way, only as someone who needed some help.

I came to. She was looking at me with friendly curiosity. She said, “Is that an American idiom, Tom, when you said, ‘Please pass the legs’?”

* * * *

We didn’t open the champagne: it didn’t seem quite appropriate. We had not discussed anything of importance while we were eating, except that I had told her about the old man; she evidently knew nothing about him. She was concerned, but I assured her he was safe with the Company—what did she think they were, barbarians? She didn’t answer.

But after dinner, with our coffee, I said: “Now let’s get down to business. What were you doing in the clinic?”

“I was trying to rescue my father,” she said.

“Rescue, Rena? Rescue from what?”

“Tom, please. You believe in the Company, do you not?”

“Of course!”

“And I do not. We shall never agree. I am grateful to you for not turning me in, and I think perhaps I know what it cost you to do it. But that is all, Tom.”

“But the Company—”

“When you speak of the Company, what is it you see? Something shining and wonderful? It is not that way with me; what I see is—rows of my friends, frozen in the vaults or the expediters and that poor old man you caught.”

There was no reasoning with her. She had fixed in her mind that all the suspendees were the victims of some sinister brutality. Of course, it wasn’t like that at all.

Suspension wasn’t death; everyone knew that. In fact, it was the antithesis of death. It saved lives by taking the maimed and sick and putting them mercifully to sleep, until they could be repaired.

True, their bodies grew cold, the lungs stopped pumping, the heart stopped throbbing; true, no doctor could tell, on sight, whether a suspendee was “alive” or “dead.” The life processes were not entirely halted, but they were slowed enormously—enough so that chemical diffusion in the jellylike blood carried all the oxygen the body needed. But there was a difference: The dead were dead, whereas the suspendees could be brought back to life at any moment the Company chose.

But I couldn’t make her see that. I couldn’t even console her by reminding her that the old man was a mere Class E. For so was she.

I urged reasonably: “Rena, you think something is going on under the surface. Tell me about it. Why do you think your father was put in suspension?”

“To keep him out of the way. Because the Company is afraid of him.”

I played a trump card: “Suppose I told you the real reason he’s in the vaults.”

She was hit by that, I could tell. She was staring at me with wonder in her eyes.

“You don’t have to speculate about it, Rena. I looked up his record, you see.”

“You—you—”

I nodded. “It’s right there in black and white. They’re trying to save his life. He has radiation poisoning. He was a war casualty. It’s standard medical practice in cases like his to put them in suspension for a while, until the level of radioactivity dies down and they can safely be revived. Now what do you say?”

She merely stared at me.

I pressed on persuasively: “Rena, I don’t mean to call your beliefs superstitions or anything like that. Please understand me. You have your own cultural heritage and—well, I know that it looks as though he is some kind of ‘undead,’ or however you put it, in your folk stories. I know there are legends of vampires and zombies and so on, but—”

She was actually laughing. “You’re thinking of Central Europe, Tom, not Naples. And anyway—” she was laughing only with her eyes now—“I do not believe that the legends say that vampires are produced by intravenous injections of chlorpromazine and pethidine in a lytic solution—which is, I believe, the current technique at the clinics.”

I flared peevishly: “Damn it, don’t you want him saved?”

The laughter was gone. She gently touched my hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a shrew and that remark wasn’t kind. Must we discuss it?”

“Yes!”

“Very well.” She faced me, chin out and fierce. “My father does not have radiation poisoning, Tom.”

“He does.”

“He does not! He is a prisoner, not a patient. He loved Naples. That’s why he was put to sleep—for fifty years, or a hundred, until everything he knew and loved grows away from him and nobody cares what he has to say anymore. They won’t kill him—they don’t have to! They just want him out of the way, because he sees the Company for what it is.”

“And what is that?”

“Tyranny, Tom,” she said quietly.

I burst out, “Rena, that’s silly! The Company is the hope of the world. If you talk like that, you’ll be in trouble. That’s dangerous thinking, young lady. It attacks the foundations of our whole society!”

“Good! I was hoping it would!”

We were shouting at each other like children. I took time to remember one of the priceless rules out of the Adjusters’ Handbook: Never lose your temper; think before you speak. We glared at each other in furious silence for a moment before I forced myself to simmer down.

Only then did I remember that I needed to know something she might be able to tell me. Organization, Defoe had said—an organization that opposed the Company, that was behind Hammond’s death and the riot at the clinic and more, much more.

“Rena, why did your friends kill Hammond?”

Her poise was shaken. “Who?” she asked.

“Hammond. In Caserta. By a gang of anti-Company hoodlums.”

Her eyes flashed, but she only said: “I know nothing of any killings.”

“Yet you admit you belong to a subversive group?”

“I admit nothing,” she said shortly.

“But you do. I know you do. You said as much to me, when you were prevented from reviving your father.”

She shrugged.

I went on: “Why did you call me at the office, Rena? Was it to get me to help you work against the Company?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said: “It was. And would you like to know why I picked you?”

“Well, I suppose—”

“Don’t suppose, Tom.” Her nostrils were white. She said coldly: “You seemed like a very good bet, as far as we could tell. I will tell you something you don’t know. There is a memorandum regarding you in the office of the Chief of Expediters in Naples. I do not choose to tell you how I know of it, but even your Mr. Gogarty doesn’t know it exists. It is private and secret, and it says of you, ‘Loyalty doubtful. Believed in contact with underground movement. Keep under close but secret surveillance’.”

That one rocked me, I admit. “But that’s all wrong!” I finally burst out. “I admit I went through a bad time after Marianna died, but—”

She was smiling, though still angry. “Are you apologizing to me?”

“No, but—” I stopped. That was a matter to be taken up with Defoe, I told myself, and I was beginning to feel a little angry, too.

“All right,” I said. “There’s been a mistake; I’ll see that it’s straightened out. But even if it was true, did you think I was the kind of man to join a bunch of murderers?”

“We are not murderers!”

“Hammond’s body says different.”

“We had nothing to do with that, Tom!”

“Your friend Slovetski did.” It was a shot in the dark. It missed by a mile.

She said loftily: “If he is such a killer, how did you escape? When I had my interview with you, and it became apparent that the expediters were less than accurate, the information came a little late. You could easily have given us trouble—Slovetski was in the next room. Why didn’t he shoot you dead?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to be bothered with my body.”

“And maybe you are all wrong about us!”

“No! If you’re against the Company, I can’t be wrong. The Company is the greatest blessing the world has ever known—it’s made the world a paradise!”

“It has?” She made a snorting sound. “How?”

“By bringing countless blessings to all of us. Countless!”

She was shaking with the effort of controlling her temper. “Name one!”

I swore in exasperation. “All right,” I said. “It ended war.”

She nodded—not a nod of agreement, but because she had expected that answer. “Right out of the textbooks and propaganda pieces, Tom. Tell me, why is my father in the vaults?”

“Because he has radiation poisoning!”

“And how did he get this radiation poisoning?”

“How?” I blinked at her. “You know how, Rena. In the war between Naples and—the war—”

Rena said remorselessly, “That’s right, Tom, the war. The war that couldn’t have existed, because the Company ended war—everybody knows that. Ah, Tom! For God, tell me, why is the world blind? Everyone believes, no one questions. The Company ended war—it says so itself. And the blind world never sees the little wars that rage, all the time, one upon the heels of another. The Company has ended disease. But how many deaths are there? The Company has abolished poverty. But am I living in riches, Tom? Was the old man who ran into the vaults?”

I stammered, “But—but, Rena, the statistical charts show very clearly—”

“No, Tom,” she said, gentle again. “The statistical charts show less war, not no war. They show less disease.”

She rubbed her eyes wearily—and even then I thought: Marianna wouldn’t have dared; it would have smeared her mascara.

“The trouble with you, Tom, is that you’re an American. You don’t know how it is in the world, only in America. You don’t know what it was like after the Short War, when America won and the flying squads of Senators came over and the governments that were left agreed to defederate. You’re used to a big and united country, not little city-states. You don’t have thousands of years of intrigue and tyranny and plot behind you, so you close your eyes and plunge ahead, and if the charts show things are getting a little better, you think they are perfect.”

She shook her head. “But not us, Tom. We can’t afford that. We walk with eyes that dart about, seeking danger. Sometimes we see ghosts, but sometimes we see real menace. You look at the charts and you see that there are fewer wars than before. We—we look at the charts and we see our fathers and brothers dead in a little war that hardly makes a ripple on the graph. You don’t even see them, Tom. You don’t even see the disease cases that don’t get cured—because the techniques are ‘still experimental,’ they say. You don’t—Tom! What is it?”

I suppose I showed the pain of remembrance. I said with an effort, “Sorry, Rena. You made me think of something. Please go on.”

“That’s all of it, Tom. You in America can’t be blamed. The big lie—the lie so preposterous that it cannot be questioned, the thing that proves itself because it is so unbelievable that no one would say it if it weren’t true—is not an American invention. It is European, Tom. You aren’t inoculated against it. We are.”

I took a deep breath. “What about your father, Rena? Do you really think the Company is out to get him?”

She looked at me searchingly, then looked hopelessly away. “Not as you mean it, Tom,” she said at last. “No, I am no paranoid. I think he is—inconvenient. I think the Company finds him less trouble in the deepfreeze than he would be walking around.”

“But don’t you agree that he needs treatment?”

“For what? For the radiation poisoning that he got from the atomic explosion he was nowhere near, Tom? Remember, he is my father! I was with him in the war—and he never stirred a kilometer from our home. You’ve been there, the big house where my aunt Luisa now lives. Did you see bomb craters there?”

“That’s a lie!” I had to confess it to myself: Rena was beginning to mean something to me. But there were emotional buttons that even she couldn’t push. If she had been a man, any man, I would have had my fist in her face before she had said that much; treason against the Company was more than I could take. “You can’t convince me that the Company deliberately falsifies records. Don’t forget, Rena, I’m an executive of the Company! Nothing like that could go on!” Her eyes flared, but her lips were rebelliously silent.

I said furiously: “I’ll hear no more of that. Theoretical discussions are all right; I’m as broadminded as the next man. But when you accuse the Company of outright fraud, you—well, you’re mistaken.”

We glowered at each other for a long moment. My eyes fell first.

I said sourly, “I’m sorry if I called you a liar. I—I didn’t mean to be offensive.”

“Nor I, Tom.” She hesitated. “Will you remember that I asked you not to make me discuss it?”

She stood up. “Thank you very much for a dinner. And for listening. And most of all, for giving me another chance to rescue my father.”

I looked at my watch automatically—and incredulously. “It’s late, Rena. Have you a place to stay?”

She shrugged. “N—yes, of course, Tom. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be all right”

“Are you sure?”

“Very sure.”

Her manner was completely confident—so much so that I knew it for an act.

I said: “Please, Rena, you’ve been through a tough time and I don’t want you wandering around. You can’t get back to Naples tonight.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

“Well what, Tom?” she said. “I won’t lie to you—I haven’t a place to go to here. I would have had, this afternoon, if I had succeeded. But by now, everything has changed. They—that is, my friends will assume that I have been captured by the Company. They won’t be where I could find them, Tom. Say they are silly if you wish. But they will fear that the Company might—request me to give their names.”

I said crisply, “Stay here, Rena. No—listen to me. You stay here. I’ll get another room.”

“Thank you, Tom, but you can’t. There isn’t a room in Anzio; there are families of suspendees sleeping in the grass tonight.”

“I can sleep in the grass if I have to.”

She shook her head. “Thank you,” she repeated.

I stood between her and the door. “Then we’ll both stay here. I’ll sleep on the couch. You can have the bed.” I hesitated, then added, “You can trust me, Rena.”

She looked at me gravely for a moment. Then she smiled. “I’m sure I can, Tom. I appreciate your offer. I accept.”

* * * *

I am built too long for a hotel-room couch, particularly a room in a Mediterranean coastal fleabag. I lay staring into the white Italian night; the Moon brightened the clouds outside the window, and the room was clearly enough illuminated to show me the bed and the slight, motionless form in it. Rena was not a restless sleeper, I thought. Nor did she snore.

Rena was a most self-possessed girl, in fact. She had overruled me when I tried to keep the bellboy from clearing away the dinner service. “Do you think no other Company man ever had a girl in his room?” she innocently asked. She borrowed a pair of the new pajamas Defoe’s thoughtful expediters had bought and put in the bureau. But I hadn’t expected that, while the bellboy was clearing away, she would be softly singing to herself in the bath.

He had seemed not even to hear.

He had also leaped to conclusions—not that it was much of a leap, I suppose. But he had conspicuously not removed the bottle of champagne and its silver bucket of melting ice.

It felt good, being in the same room with Rena.

I shifted again, hunching up my torso to give my legs a chance to stretch out. I looked anxiously to see if the movement had disturbed her.

There is a story about an animal experimenter who left a chimpanzee in an empty room. He closed the door on the ape and bent to look through the keyhole, to see what the animal would do. But all he saw was an eye—because the chimp was just as curious about the experimenter.

In the half-light, I saw a sparkle of moonlight in Rena’s eye; she was watching me. She half-giggled, a smothered sound.

“You ought to be asleep,” I accused.

“And you, Tom.”

I obediently closed my eyes, but I didn’t stop seeing her.

If only she weren’t a fanatic.

And if she had to be a fanatic, why did she have to be the one kind that was my natural enemy, a member of the group of irresponsible troublemakers that Defoe had ordered me to “handle”?

What, I wondered, did he mean by “handle”? Did it include chlorpromazine in a lytic solution and a plastic cocoon?

I put that thought out of my mind; there was no chance whatever that her crazy belief, that the Company was using suspension as a retaliatory measure, was correct. But thinking of Defoe made me think of my work. After all, I told myself, Rena was more than a person. She was a key that could unlock the whole riddle. She had the answers—if there was a movement of any size, she would know its structure.

I thought for a moment and withdrew the “if.” She had admitted the riot of that afternoon was planned. It had to be a tightly organized group.

And she had to have the key.

* * * *

At last, I had been getting slightly drowsy, but suddenly I was wide awake.

There were two possibilities. I faced the first of them shakily—she might be right. Everything within me revolted against the notion, but I accepted it as a theoretical possibility. If so, I would, of course, have to revise some basic notions.

On the other hand, she might be wrong. I was certain she was wrong. But I was equally certain she was no raddled malcontent and if she was wrong, and I could prove it to her, she herself might make some revisions.

Propped on one elbow, I peered at her. “Rena?” I whispered questioningly.

She stirred. “Yes, Tom?”

“If you’re not asleep, can we take a couple more minutes to talk?”

“Of course.” I sat up and reached for the light switch, but she said, “Must we have the lights? The Moon is very bright.”

“Sure.” I sat on the edge of the couch and reached for a cigarette. “Can I offer you a deal, Rena?”

“What sort of deal?”

“A horse trade. You think the Company is corrupt and your father is not a casualty, right?”

“Correct, Tom.”

“And I think the Company is not corrupt and your father has radiation poisoning. One of us has to be wrong, right?”

“Correct, Tom.”

“Let’s find out. There are ways of testing for radiation sickness. I’ll go into the clinic in the morning and get the answer.”

She also lifted up on one elbow, peering at me, her long hair braided down her back. “Will you?”

“Sure. And we’ll make bets on it, Rena. If you are wrong—if your father has radiation poisoning—I want you to tell me everything there is to tell about the riot today and the people behind it. If I’m wrong—” I swallowed—“if I’m wrong, I’ll get your father out of there for you. Somehow. I promise it, Rena.”

There was absolute silence for a long time. Then she swung out of the bed and hurried over to me, her hands on mine. She looked at me and again I saw tears. “Will you do that, Tom?” she asked, hardly audible.

“Why, sure,” I said awkwardly. “But you have to promise—”

“I promise!”

She was staring at me, at arm’s length. And then something happened. She wasn’t staring and she wasn’t at arm’s length.

Kissing her was like tasting candied violets; and the Moon made her lovelier than anything human; and the bellboy had not been so presumptuous, after all, when he left us the champagne.

CHAPTER IX

Dr. Lawton was “away from his desk” the next morning. That was all to the good. I was not a hardened enough conspirator to seek out chances to make mistakes, and although I had a perfectly good excuse for wanting to go down into the vaults again, I wasn’t anxious to have to use it. The expediter-officer in charge, though, didn’t even ask for reasons. He furnished me with what I wanted—a map of the vaults and a radiation-counter—and turned me loose.

Looking at the map, I was astonished at the size of this subterranean pyramid. Lawton had said we had eighty-odd thousand sleepers filed away and that had surprised me, but by the chart I held in my hand, there was space for perhaps ten times that many. It was beyond belief that so much space was really needed, I thought—unless there was some truth to Rena’s belief that the Company used the clinics for prisons…

I applied myself to the map. And, naturally, I read it wrong. It was very simple; I merely went to the wrong level, that was all.

It looked wrong as soon as I stepped out of the elevator. An elderly, officious civilian with a British accent barred my way. “You aren’t one of us, are you?”

I said, “I doubt it.”

“Then would you mind?” he asked politely, and indicated a spot on the side of the hall. Perhaps I was suggestible, but I obeyed his request without question. It was just as well, because a sort of procession rounded a bend and came down the corridor. There was a wheeled stretcher, with three elderly civilians puttering around it, and a bored medic following with a jar of something held aloft, feeding through a thin plastic tube into the arm of the man on the stretcher, as well as half a dozen others of more nondescript types.

The man who had stopped me nearly ran to meet the stretcher. He stared into the waxy face and whispered, “It’s he! Oh, absolutely, it is he!”

I looked and the face was oddly familiar. It reminded me of my childhood; it had a link with school days and the excitement of turning twelve. By the way the four old men were carrying on, however, it meant more than that to them. It meant, if not the Second Coming, at least something close to it.

By then I had figured out that this was that rare event in the day of a clinic—a revival. I had never seen one. I suppose I could have got out of the way and gone about my conspiratorial business, and it is no credit to me as a conspirator that I did not. But I was fascinated.

Too fascinated to wonder why revivals were so rare…

* * * *

The medic looked at his watch and, with careless efficiency, plucked the tube out of the waxy man’s arm.

“Two minutes,” he said to one of the civilians. “Then he’ll be as good as he ever was. You’ve got his clothes and release papers?”

“Oh, definitely,” said the civilian, beaming.

“Okay. And you understand that the Company takes no responsibility beyond the policy covering? After all, he was one of the first men suspended. We think we can give him another year or so—which is a year more than he would have had, at that—but he’s not what you’d call a Grade A risk.”

“Certainly,” agreed the civilian. “Can we talk to him now?”

“As soon as he opens his eyes.”

The civilian bent over the man, who no longer looked waxy. His face was now a mottled gray and his eyelids were flickering. He had begun to breathe heavily and irregularly, and he was mumbling something I couldn’t understand. The civilian whispered in his ear and the revived man opened his eyes and looked at him.

It was like seeing the dead come to life. It was exactly that, in fact; twenty minutes before, no chemical test, no stethoscope or probing thumb in the eye socket could have detected the faint living glow in the almost-dead cells. And yet—now he looked, he breathed, he spoke.

“I made it,” were his first understandable words.

“Indeed you did!” crowed the civilian in charge, while all of the others murmured happily to each other. “Sir, it is my pleasure to welcome you back to us. You are in Anzio, Italy. And I am Thomas Welbourne, at your service.”

The faint eyes sparkled. Dead, near-dead or merely decrepit, this was a man who wanted to enjoy life. Minutes out of the tomb, he said: “No! Not young Tommy Welbourne!”

“His grandson, sir,” said the civilian.

I had it just then—that face had watched me through a whole year of school. It had been in a frame at the front of the room, with half a dozen other faces. It had a name under it, which, try as I might, I couldn’t recall; but the face was there all the same. It was an easy one to keep in mind—strong though sunken, ancient but very much alive.

He was saying, in a voice as confident as any youth’s, “Ah, Tommy, I’ve lived to see it! Tell me, have you been to Mars? What is on the other side of the Moon? And the Russians—what are the Russians up to these days?”

The civilian coughed and tried to interrupt, but the figure on the stretcher went on heedlessly: “All those years gone—what wonders must we have. A tunnel under the Atlantic, I’ll wager! And ships that fly a hundred times the speed of sound. Tell me, Tommy Welbourne! Don’t keep an old man waiting!”

The civilian said reluctantly, but patiently, “Perhaps it will take a little explaining, sir. You see, there have been changes—”

“I know it, boy! That’s what I’m asking you!”

“Well, not that sort of changes, sir. We’ve learned new virtues since your time—patience and stability, things of that sort. You see—”

The interesting part was over and the glances of the others in the party reminded me that I didn’t belong here. I stole off, but not before the man on the stretcher noticed me and made a sort of clumsy two-fingered salute of hail and farewell as I left. It was exactly like the gesture in his picture on that schoolroom wall, up next to the presidents and the greatest of kings.

I found a staircase and climbed to another level of the boxlike clinic.

The local peasants called the vaults “coolers” or “ice cubes.” I suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were cool and rectangular, on the whole—perhaps because, like icebergs, the great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of hundreds scattered all over the world.

It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company’s concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster—even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once—the affected population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures.

To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race.

It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid, and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father.

The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as death itself. I couldn’t blame Rena for weeping.

I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly. There was nothing complicated about the device—fortunately, because I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn’t change. I pointed it up and pointed it down; it didn’t change.

I held it to the radiation-seared body of Benedetto dell’Angela.

And it didn’t change.

Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell’Angela had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive byproduct was gone!

Rena was right!

* * * *

I worked like a machine, hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and down the aisle.

Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave readings from “mild” to “lethal”—but all in the danger area.

Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself.

It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to affect the counter. I didn’t see how, but it was worth a thought. Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this than the one Rena had given!

There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge.

I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its identification tag was the cross-hatched red one that marked “radiation.” I brought the counter close to the shriveled face—

But I didn’t read the dial, not at first. I didn’t have to. For I recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults.

He had no radiation poisoning…unless a bomb had exploded in these very vaults in the past twelve hours.

It wasn’t pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were designed for the single purpose of saving human life—and to wonder how many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners.

And it wasn’t even tolerable to think the thought that followed. If the Company was corrupt, and I had worked to do the Company’s business, how much of this guilt was mine?

The Company, I had said and thought and tried to force others to agree, was the hope of humanity—the force that had permanently ended war (almost), driven out disease (nearly), destroyed the threat to any human of hunger or homelessness (in spite of the starving old man who slept in the shadow of the crypt, and others like him).

But I had to face the facts that controverted the Big Lie. If war was ended, what about Naples and Sicily, and Prague and Vienna, and all the squabbles in the Far East? If there was no danger from disease, why had Marianna died?

Rena had said that if there was no danger of disaster, no one would have paid their premiums. Obviously the Company could not have wanted that, but why had I never seen it before? Sample wars, sample deaths—the Company needed them. And no one, least of all me, fretted about how the samples felt about it.

Well, that was behind me. I’d made a bet with Rena, and I’d lost, and I had to pay off.

I opened the cased hypodermic kit Rena had given me and examined it uncomfortably. I had never used the old-fashioned sort of needle hypodermic; I knew a little something about the high-pressure spray type that forced its contents into the skin without leaving a mark, but I was very far from sure that I could manage this one without doing something wrong. Besides, there wasn’t much of the fluid left, only the few drops left in the bottom of the bottle after Rena had loaded the needle that had been smashed.

I hurried back along the corridor toward Benedetto dell’Angela. I neared again the red-labeled door marked Bay 100, glanced at it in passing—and stopped.

This was the door that only a handful of people could open. It was labeled in five languages: “Entrance Strictly Prohibited. Experimental Section.”

Why was it standing ajar?

And I heard a faint whisper of a moan: “Aiutemi, aiutemi.”

Someone inside was calling for help!

If I had been a hardened conspirator, I would never have stopped to investigate. But, of course, I wasn’t. I pushed the door aside, against resistance, and peered in.

And that was my third major shock in the past quarter of an hour, because, writhing feebly just inside the door, staring up at me with an expression of pain and anger, was Luigi Zorchi.

He propped himself up on his hands, the rags of his plastic cocoon dangling from his shoulders.

“Oho,” he said faintly. “The apprentice assassin again.”

I found water for him at a bubble-fountain by the ramp; he drank at least a quart before I made him stop. Then he lay back, panting, staring at me. Except for the shreds of plastic and the bandages around the stumps of his legs, he was nude, like all the other suspendees inside their sacks. The luxuriant hair had already begun to grow back.

He licked his lips. More vigorous now, he snarled: “The plan fails, does it not? You think you have Zorchi out of the way, but he will not stay there.”

I said, “Zorchi, I’m sorry about all this. I—I know more now than I did yesterday.”

He gaped. “Yesterday? Only yesterday?” He shook his head. “I would have thought a month, at the least. I have been crawling, assassin. Crawling for days, I thought.” He tried to shrug—not easy, because he was leaning on his elbows. “Very well, Weels. You may take me back to finish the job now. Sticking me with a needle and putting me on ice will not work. Perhaps you should kill me outright.”

“Listen, Zorchi, I said I was sorry. Let’s let it go at that for a moment. I—I admit you shouldn’t be here. The question is, how do you come to be awake?”

“How not? I am Zorchi, Weels. Cut me and I heal; poison me and I cure myself.” He spat furiously. “Starve me, however, and I no doubt will die, and it is true that you have come very near to starving me down here.” He glowered at the shelves of cocooned bodies in the locked bay. “A pity, with all this pork and beef on the rack, waiting for me, but I find I am not a monster, Weels. It is a weakness; I do not suppose it would stop any Company man for a moment.”

“Look, Zorchi,” I begged, “take my word for it—I want to help you. You might as well believe me, you know. You can’t be any worse off than you are.”

He stared at me sullenly for a moment. Then, “True enough,” he admitted. “What then, Weels?”

I said hesitantly, “Well, I’d like to get you out of here…”

“Oh, yes. I would like that, too. How shall we do it?”

I rubbed the back of my neck thoughtfully, staring at him. I had had a sort of half-baked, partly worked out plan for rescuing Benedetto. Wake him up with the needle; find a medical orderly’s whites somewhere; dress him; and walk him out.

It wasn’t the best of all possible plans, but I had rank enough, particularly with Defoe off in Rome, to take a few liberties or stop questions if it became necessary. And besides, I hadn’t really thought I’d have to do it. I had fully expected—as recently as half an hour ago!—that I would find Benedetto raddled with gamma rays, a certainty for death if revived before the half-life period of the radioelements in his body had brought the level down to safety.

That plan might work for Benedetto. But Zorchi, to mention only one possible obstacle, couldn’t walk. And Benedetto, once I took off his beard with the razor Rena had insisted I bring for that purpose, would not be likely to be recognized by anyone.

Zorchi, on the other hand, was very nearly unforgettable.

I said honestly, “I don’t know.”

He nodded! “Nor do I, Weels. Take me then to your Defoe.” His face wrinkled in an expression of fury and fear. “Die I can, if I must, but I do not wish to starve. It is good to be able to grow a leg, but do you understand that the leg must come from somewhere? I cannot make it out of air, Weels—I must eat. When I am in my home at Naples, I eat five, six, eight times a day; it is the way my body must have it. So if Defoe wishes to kill me, we will let him, but I must leave here now.”

I shook my head. “Please understand me, Zorchi—I can’t even do that for you. I can’t have anybody asking me what I was doing down in this level.” I hesitated only briefly; then, realizing that I was already in so deeply that secrecy no longer mattered, I told him about Benedetto dell’Angela, and the riot that failed, and my promise.

His reaction was incredulity. “You did not know, Weels? The arms and legs of the Company do not know what thoughts pass through its brain? Truly, the Company is a wonderful thing! Even the peasants know this much—the Company will do anything it must.”

“I admit I never guessed. Now what?”

“That is up to you, Weels. If you try to take the two of us out, it endangers you. It is for you to decide.”

So, of course, I could decide only one way.

I hid the hypodermic behind one of the bodies in Bay 100; it was no longer useful to me. I persuaded Zorchi to lie quietly in one of the tiers near Benedetto, slammed the heavy door to Bay 100, and heard the locks snap. That was the crossing of the Rubicon. You could open that door easily enough from inside—that was to protect any personnel who might be caught in there. But only Defoe and a couple of others could open it from without, and the hypodermic was now as far out of reach as the Moon.

I opened Benedetto dell’Angela’s face mask and shaved him, then sealed it again. I found another suspendee of about the same build, made sure the man was not radioactive, and transferred them. I switched tags: Benedetto dell’Angela was now Elio Barletteria. Then I walked unsteadily to the ramp, picked up the intercom and ordered the medical officer in charge to come down.

* * * *

It was not Dr. Lawton who came, fortunately, but one of his helpers who had seen me before. I pointed to the pseudo-Barletteria. “I want this man revived.”

He sputtered, “You—you can’t just take a suspendee out of his trance, Mr. Wills. It’s a violation of medical ethics! These men are sick. They—”

“They’ll be sicker still if we don’t get some information from this one,” I said grimly. “Are you going to obey Mr. Defoe’s orders or not?”

He sputtered some more, but he gave in. His orderlies took Benedetto to the receiving station at the foot of the vault; one of them stood by while the doctor worriedly went through his routine. I sat and smoked, watching the procedure.

It was simple enough. One injection, a little chafing of the hands and feet by the bored orderly while the doctor glowered and I stonily refused to answer his questions, and a lot of waiting. And then the “casualty” stirred and moaned.

All the stand-by apparatus was there—the oxygen tent and the pulmotor and the heart stimulator and so on. But none of it was needed.

I said: “Fine, Doctor. Now send the orderly to have an ambulance standing by at the main entrance, and make out an exit pass for this casualty.”

“No!” the doctor shouted. “This is against every rule, Mr. Wills. I insist on calling Dr. Lawton—”

“By all means,” I said. “But there isn’t much time. Make out the pass and get the ambulance, and we’ll clear it with Dr. Lawton on the way out.” He was all ready to say no again when I added: “This is by direct order of Mr. Defoe. Are you questioning his orders?”

He wasn’t—not as long as I was going to clear it with Dr. Lawton. He did as I asked. One of the advantages of the Company’s rigid regulations was that it was hard to enforce strict security on its personnel. If you didn’t tell the staff that they were working for something needing covering up, you couldn’t expect them to be constantly on guard.

When the orderly was gone and the doctor had scrawled out the pass, I said cordially, “Thank you, Doctor. Now would you like to know what all the fuss was about?”

“I certainly would,” he snapped. “If you think—”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Come over here and take a look at this man.”

I juggled the radiation counter in my hand as he stalked over. “Take a look at his eyes,” I invited.

“Are you trying to tell me that this is a dangerously radioactive case? I warn you, Mr. Wills—”

“No, no,” I said. “See for yourself. Look at the right eye, just beside the nose.”

He bent over the awakening body, searchingly.

I clonked him with the radiation counter on the back of the head. They must have retired that particular counter from service after that; it wasn’t likely to be very accurate any more.

The orderly found me bending over the doctor’s body and calling for help. He bent, too, and he got the same treatment. Benedetto by then was awake; he listened to me and didn’t ask questions. The blessings of dealing with conspirators—it was not necessary to explain things more than once.

And so, with a correctly uniformed orderly, who happened to be Benedetto dell’Angela, pushing the stretcher, and with myself displaying a properly made out pass to the expediter at the door, we rolled the sham-unconscious body of Luigi Zorchi out to a waiting ambulance.

I felt my pulse hammering as we passed the expediter at the door. I had thrown my coat over the place where legs should have been on “Barletteria,” and Benedetto’s old plastic cocoon, into which we had squeezed Zorchi, concealed most of him.

* * * *

I needn’t have worried. The expediter not only wasn’t suspicious, he wasn’t even interested.

Benedetto and I lifted Zorchi into the ambulance. Benedetto climbed in after him and closed the doors, and I went to the front. “You’re dismissed,” I told the driver. “I’ll drive.”

As soon as we were out of sight of the clinic, I found a phone, got Rena at the hotel, told her to meet me under the marquee. In five minutes, she was beside me and we were heading for the roads to the north.

“You win,” I told her. “Your father’s in back—along with somebody else. Now what? Do we just try to get lost in the hills somewhere?”

“No, Tom,” she said breathlessly. “I—I have made arrangements.” She giggled. “I walked around the square and around, until someone came up to me. You do not know how many gentlemen came before that! But then one of my—friends showed up, to see if I was all right, and I arranged it. We go up the Rome highway two miles and there will be a truck.”

“Fine,” I said, stepping on the gas. “Now do you want to climb back and tell your father—”

I stopped in the middle of the word. Rena peered at me. “Tom,” she asked anxiously, “is something wrong?”

I swallowed, staring after a disappearing limousine in the rearview mirror. “I—hope not,” I said. “But your friends had better be there, because we don’t have much time. I saw Defoe in the back of that limousine.”

CHAPTER X

Rena craned her neck around the door and peered into the nave of the church. “He’s kissing the Book,” she reported. “It will be perhaps twenty minutes yet.”

Her father said mildly, “I am in no hurry. It is good to rest here. Though truthfully, Mr. Wills, I thought I had been rested sufficiently by your Company.”

I think we were all grateful for the rest. It had been a hectic drive up from Anzio. Even though Rena’s “friends” were thoughtful people, they had not anticipated that we would have a legless man with us.

They had passports for Rena and myself and Benedetto; for Zorchi they had none. It had been necessary for him to hide under a dirty tarpaulin in the trunk of the ancient charcoal-burning car, while Rena charmed the Swiss Guards at the border. And it was risky. But the Guards charmed easily, and we got through.

Zorchi did not much appreciate it. He swore a ragged blue streak when we stopped in the shade of an olive grove and lugged him to the front seat again, and he didn’t stop swearing until we hit the Appian Way. When the old gas-generator limped up a hill, he swore at its slowness; when it whizzed along the downgrades and level stretches, he swore at the way he was being bounced around.

I didn’t regret rescuing Zorchi from the clinic—it was a matter of simple justice since I had helped trick him into it. But I did wish that it had been some more companionable personality that I had been obligated to.

Benedetto, on the other hand, shook my hand and said: “For God, I thank you,” and I felt well repaid. But he was in the back seat being brought up to date by his daughter; I had the honor of Zorchi’s company next to me…

There was a long Latin period from the church, a response from the altar boy, and then the final Ite, missa est. We heard the worshipers moving out of the church.

The priest came through the room we were waiting in, his robes swirling. He didn’t look around, or give any sign that he knew we were there, though he almost stepped on Zorchi, sitting propped against a wall.

A moment later, another man in vaguely clerical robes entered and nodded to us. “Now we go below,” he ordered.

Benedetto and I flanked Zorchi and carried him, an arm around each of our necks. We followed the sexton, or whatever he was, back into the church, before the altar—Benedetto automatically genuflected with the others, nearly making me spill Zorchi onto the floor—to a tapestry-hung door. He pushed aside the tapestry, and a cool, musty draft came up from darkness.

The sexton lit a taper with a pocket cigarette lighter and led us down winding, rickety steps. There was no one left in the church to notice us; if anyone had walked in, we were tourists, doing as countless millions of tourists had done before us over the centuries.

We were visiting the Catacombs.

Around us were the bones of the Christians of a very different Rome. Rena had told me about them: How they rambled under the modern city, the only entrances where churches had been built over them. How they had been nearly untouched for two thousand years. I even felt a little as though I really were a tourist as we descended, she had made me that curious to see them.

But I was disappointed. We lugged the muttering Zorchi through the narrow, musty corridors, with the bones of martyrs at our elbows, in the flickering light of the taper, and I had the curious feeling that I had been there before.

As, in a way, I had: I had been in the vaults of the Company’s clinic at Anzio, in some ways very closely resembling these Catacombs—

Even to the bones of the martyrs.

I was almost expecting to see plastic sacks.

We picked our way through the warrens for several minutes, turning this way and that. I was lost in the first minute. Then the sexton stopped before a flat stone that had a crude, faded sketch of a fish on it; he leaned on it, and the stone discovered itself to be a door. We followed him through it into a metal-walled, high-ceilinged tunnel, utterly unlike the meandering Catacombs. I began to hear sounds; we went through another door, and light struck at our eyes.

I blinked and focused on a long room, half a dozen yards wide, almost as tall, at least fifty yards long. It appeared to be a section of an enormous tunnel; it appeared to be, and it was. Benedetto and I set Zorchi—still cursing—down on the floor and stared around.

There were people in the tunnel, dozens of them. There were desks and tables and file cabinets; it looked almost like any branch of the Company, with whirring mimeographs and clattering typewriters.

The sexton pinched out the taper and dropped it on the floor, as people came toward us.

“So now you are in our headquarters in Rome,” said the man dressed as a sexton. “It is good to see you again, Benedetto.”

“And it is much better to see you, Slovetski,” the old man answered warmly.

* * * *

This man Slovetski—I do not think I can say what he looked like.

He was, I found, the very leader of the “friends,” the monarch of this underground headquarters. But he was a far cry from the image I had formed of a bearded agitator. There was a hint of something bright and fearful in his eyes, but his voice was warm and deep, his manner was reassuring, his face was friendly. Still—there was that cat-spark in his eyes.

Slovetski, that first day, gave me an hour of his time. He answered some of my questions—not all. The ones he smiled at, and shook his head, were about numbers and people. The ones he answered were about principles and things.

He would tell me, for instance, what he thought of the Company—endlessly. But he wouldn’t say how many persons in the world were his followers. He wouldn’t name any of the persons who were all around us. But he gladly told me about the place itself.

“History, Mr. Wills,” he said politely. “History tells a man everything he needs to know. You look in the books, and you will learn of Mussolini, when this peninsula was all one state; he lived in Rome, and he started a subway. The archives even have maps. It is almost all abandoned now. Most of it was never finished. But the shafts are here, and the wiring that lights us still comes from the electric mains.”

“And the only entrance is through the Catacombs?”

The spark gleamed bright in his eye for a second. Then he shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I tell you? No. There are several others, but they are not all convenient.” He chuckled. “For instance, one goes through a station on the part of the subway that is still in operation. But it would not have done for you, you see; Rena could not have used it. It goes through the gentlemen’s washroom.”

We chuckled, Slovetski and I. I liked him. He looked like what he once had been: a history teacher in a Company school, somewhere in Europe. We talked about History, and Civilization, and Mankind, and all the other capitalized subjects. He was very didactic and positive in what he said, just like a history teacher. But he was understanding. He made allowances for my background; he did not call me a fool. He was a patient monk instructing a novice in the mysteries of the order, and I was at ease with him.

But there was still that spark in his eye.

Rena disappeared almost as soon as we were safely in the tunnels. Benedetto was around, but he was as busy as Slovetski, and just as mysterious about what occupied him. So I had for company Zorchi.

We had lunch. “Food!” he said, and the word was an epithet. “They offer this to me for food! For pigs, Weels. Not for Zorchi!” He pushed the plate away from him and stared morosely at the table.

We were given a room to share, and one of Slovetski’s men fixed up a rope-and-pulley affair so Zorchi could climb into his bed unaided. He was used to the help of a valet; the first time he tried it, he slipped and fell on the stumps of his legs. It must have hurt.

He shrieked, “Assassins! All of them! They put me in a kennel with the apprentice assassin, and the other assassins make a guillotine for me to kill myself on!”

We had a long talk with Slovetski, on the ideals and principles of his movement. Zorchi stared mutinously at the wall. I found the whole thing very interesting—shocking, but interesting. But Zorchi was immune to shock—“Perhaps it is news to you, Weels, that the Company is a big beast?”—and he was interested in nothing in all the world but Zorchi.

By the end of the second day I stopped talking to him entirely. It wasn’t kind. He disliked me, but he hated everyone else in the tunnel, so he had no one to talk to. But it was either that or hit him in the face, and—although many of my mores had changed overnight—I still did not think I could strike a man without legs.

And besides, the less I saw of Zorchi, the more time I had to think about Rena.

* * * *

She returned on the third day, without a word of explanation to me of where she had been or what she had done. She greeted me and disappeared again, this time only for hours. Then she came back and said, “Now I am through, for a time. How have you liked our little hideaway?”

I said, “It gets lonesome.”

“Lonesome?” Her brown eyes were wide and perfectly serious. “I had thought it would be otherwise, Tom. So many of us in this little space, how could you be lonesome?”

I took her hand. “I’m not lonesome now,” I told her. We found a place to sit in a corner of the communal dining hall. Around us the life of the underground movement buzzed and swirled. It was much like a branch of the Company, as I have said; the work of this secret section seemed to be mostly a record-keeping depot for the activities that took place on the surface. But no one paid much attention to Rena and me.

What did we talk about? What couples have always talked about: Each other, and everything, and nothing. The only thing we did not talk about was my basic beliefs in regard to the Company. For I was too troubled in my mind to talk about them, and Rena sensitive enough not to bring them up.

For I had, with all honor, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Company; and I had not kept it.

I could not, even then, see any possibility of a world where the Company did not exist. For what the Company said of itself was true: Before the Company existed, men lived like beasts. There was always the instant danger of war and disease. No plan could be made, no hope could be held, that could not be wiped out by blind accident.

And yet, were men better off today? I could not doubt the truths I had been told. The Company permitted wars—I had seen it. The Company permitted disease—my own wife had died.

Somewhere there was an answer, but I couldn’t find it. It was not, I was sure, in Slovetski’s burning hatred of everything the Company stood for. But it could not be, either, in the unquestioning belief that I had once given.

But my views, it turned out, hardly mattered anymore; the die was cast. Benedetto appeared in the entrance to the dining hall, peering about. He saw us and came over, his face grave.

“I am sorry, Mr. Wills,” he said. “I have been listening to Radio Napoli. It has just come over the air: A description of you, and an order for your arrest. The charge is—murder!”

I gaped at him, hardly believing. “Murder! But that’s not true; I certainly never—”

Benedetto laid a hand on my shoulder. “Of course not, Mr. Wills. It is a fiction of the Company’s, beyond doubt. But it is a fiction that may cause your death if you are discovered, do not doubt that.”

I swallowed. “Who—whom did I murder?”

Benedetto shrugged. “I do not know who he is. The name they gave was Elio Barletteria.”

That was the suspendee whose place Zorchi had usurped. I sat back, bewildered. It was true, at least, that I had had some connection with the man. But—kill him? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the mere act of taking him out of his plastic sack endangered his life? I doubted it, but still—

I asked Benedetto. He frowned. “It is—possible,” he admitted at last. “We do not know much about the suspendees, Mr. Wills. The Company has seen to that. It is my opinion—only an opinion, I am afraid—that if this man Barletteria is dead, it had nothing to do with anything you did. Still—” he shrugged—“what difference does it make? If the Company calls you a murderer, you must be one, for the Company is always right. Is that not so?”

We left it at that, but I was far from easy in my mind. The dining hall filled, and we ate our evening meal, but I hardly noticed what I ate and I took no part in the conversation. Rena and her father considerately left me alone; Zorchi was, it seemed, sulking in our room, for he did not appear. But I was not concerned with him, for I had troubles of my own. I should have been…

After dinner was over, I excused myself and went to the tiny cubicle that had been assigned to Zorchi and myself. He wasn’t there. Then I began to think: Would Zorchi miss a meal?

The answer was unquestionably no. With his metabolism, he needed many times the food of an ordinary person; his performance at table, in fact, was spectacular.

Something was wrong. I was shaken out of my self-absorption; I hurried to find Benedetto dell’Angela, and told him that Zorchi was gone.

It didn’t take long for us to find the answer. The underground hideout was not large; it had only so many exits. It was only a matter of moments before one of the men Benedetto had ordered to search returned with an alarmed expression.

The exit that led through the subway station was ajar. Somehow Zorchi had hitched himself, on his stumps, down the long corridor and out the exit. It had to be while we were eating; he could never have made it except when everyone was in one room.

How he had done it did not matter. The fact remained that Zorchi was gone and, with him, the secrecy of our hiding place.

CHAPTER XI

We had to move. There was no way out of it.

“Zorchi hates the Company,” I protested. “I don’t think he’ll go to them and—”

“No, Wills.” Slovetski patiently shook his head. “We can’t take a chance. If we had been able to recapture him, then we could stay here. But he got clean away.” There was admiration in his eyes. “What a conspirator he would have made! Such strength and determination! Think of it, Wills, a legless man in the city of Rome. He cannot avoid attracting attention. He can barely move by himself. And yet, our men track him into the subway station, to a telephone…and that is all. Someone picks him up. Who? A friend, one supposes—certainly not the Company, or they would have been here before this. But to act so quickly, Wills!”

Benedetto dell’Angela coughed. “Perhaps more to the point, Slovetski, is how quickly we ourselves shall now act.”

Slovetski grinned. “All is ready,” he promised. “See, evacuation already has begun!”

Groups of men were quickly placing file folders into cartons and carrying them off. They were not going far, I found later, only to a deserted section of the ancient Roman Catacombs, from which they could be retrieved and transported, little by little, at a later date.

By sundown, Rena and I were standing outside the little church which contained the entrance to the Catacombs. The two of us went together; only two. It would look quite normal, it was agreed, for a young man and a girl to travel together, particularly after my complexion had been suitably stained and my Company clothes discarded and replaced with a set of Rome’s best ready-to-wears.

It did not occur to me at the time, but Rena must have known that her own safety was made precarious by being with me. Rena alone had nothing to fear, even if she had been caught and questioned by an agent of the Company. They would suspect her, because of her father, but suspicion would do her no harm. But Rena in the company of a wanted “murderer”—and one traveling in disguise—was far less safe…

We found an ancient piston-driven cab and threaded through almost all of Rome. We spun around the ancient stone hulk of the Colosseum, passed the balcony where a sign stated the dictator, Mussolini, used to harangue the crowds, and climbed a winding, expensive-looking street to the Borghese Gardens.

Rena consulted her watch. “We’re early,” she said. We had gelati in an open-air pavilion, listening to the wheezing of a sweating band; then, in the twilight, we wandered hand in hand under trees for half an hour.

Then Rena said, “Now it is time.” We walked to the far end of the Gardens where a small copter-field served the Class-A residential area of Rome. A dozen copters were lined up at the end of the take-off hardstand. Rena led me to the nearest of them.

I looked at it casually, and stopped dead.

“Rena!” I whispered violently. “Watch out!” The copter was black and purple; it bore on its flank the marking of the Swiss Guard, the Roman police force.

She pressed my hand. “Poor Tom,” she said. She walked boldly up to one of the officers lounging beside the copter and spoke briefly to him, too low for me to hear.

It was only when the big vanes overhead had sucked us a hundred yards into the air, and we were leveling off and heading south, that she said: “These are friends too, you see. Does it surprise you?”

I swallowed, staring at the hissing jets at the ends of the swirling vanes. “Well,” I said, “I’m not exactly surprised, but I thought that your friends were, well, more likely to be—”

“To be rabble?” I started to protest, but she was not angry. She was looking at me with gentle amusement. “Still you believe, Tom. Deep inside you: An enemy of the Company must be, at the best, a silly zealot like my father and me—and at the worst, rabble.” She laughed as I started to answer her. “No, Tom, if you are right, you should not deny it; and if you are wrong—you will see.”

I sat back and stared, disgruntled, at the purple sunset over the Mediterranean. I never saw such a girl for taking the wind out of your sails.

* * * *

Once across the border, the Guards had no status, and it was necessary for them to swing inland, threading through mountains and passes, remaining as inconspicuous as possible.

It was little more than an hour’s flight until I found landmarks I could recognize. To our right was the bright bowl of Naples; far to our left, the eerie glow that marked bombed-out New Caserta. And ahead, barely visible, the faint glowing plume that hung over Mount Vesuvius.

Neither Rena nor the Guards spoke, but I could feel in their tense attitudes that this was the danger-point. We were in the lair of the enemy. Undoubtedly we were being followed in a hundred radars, and the frequency-pattern would reveal our copter for what it was—a Roman police plane that had no business in that area. Even if the Company let us pass, there was always the chance that some Neapolitan radarman, more efficient, or more anxious for a promotion, than his peers would alert an interceptor and order us down. Certainly, in the old days, interception would have been inevitable; for Naples had just completed a war, and only short weeks back an unidentified aircraft would have been blasted out of the sky.

But we were ignored.

And that, I thought to myself, was another facet to the paradox. For when, in all the world’s years before these days of the Company, was there such complacency, such deep-rooted security, that a nation just out of a war should have soothed its combat-jangled nerves overnight? Perhaps the Company had not ended wars. But the fear of wars was utterly gone.

We fluttered once around the volcano, and dipped in to a landing on a gentle hump of earth halfway up its slope, facing Naples and the Bay. We were a few hundred yards from a cluster of buildings—perhaps a dozen, in all.

I jumped out, stumbling and recovering myself. Rena stepped lightly into my arms. And without a word, the Guards fed fuel to the jets, the rotor whirled, and the copter lifted away from us and was gone.

Rena peered about us, getting her bearings. There was a sliver of a moon in the eastern sky, enough light to make it possible to get about. She pointed to a dark hulk of a building far up the slope. “The Observatory. Come, Tom.”

* * * *

The volcanic soil was rich, but not very useful to farmers. It was not only the question of an eruption of the cone, for that sort of hazard was no different in kind than the risk of hailstorm or drought. But the mountain sides did not till easily, its volcanic slopes being perhaps steeper than those of most mountains.

The ground under our feet had never been in cultivation. It was pitted and rough, and grown up in a tangle of unfamiliar weeds. And it was also, I discovered with considerable shock, warm to the touch.

I saw a plume of vapor, faintly silver in the weak light, hovering over a hummock. Mist, I thought. Then it occurred to me that there was too much wind for mist. It was steam! I touched the soil. Blood heat, at least.

I said, with some difficulty, “Rena, look!”

She laughed. “Oh, it is an eruption, Tom. Of course it is. But not a new one. It is lava, you see, from the little blast the Sicilians touched off. Do not worry about it…”

We clambered over the slippery cogs of a funicular railway and circled the ancient stone base of the building she had pointed to. There was no light visible; but Rena found a small door, rapped on it and presently it opened.

Out of the darkness came Slovetski’s voice: “Welcome.”

Once this building had been the Royal Vulcanological Observatory of the Kingdom of Italy. Now it was a museum on the surface, and underneath another of the hideouts of Rena’s “friends.”

But this was a hideout somewhat more important than the one in the Roman Catacombs, I found. Slovetski made no bones about it.

He said, “Wills, you shouldn’t be here. We don’t know you. We can’t trust you.” He held up a hand. “I know that you rescued dell’Angela. But that could all be an involved scheme of the Company. You could be a Company spy. You wouldn’t be the first, Wills. And this particular installation is, shall I say, important. You may even find why, though I hope not. If we hadn’t had to move so rapidly, you would never have been brought here. Now you’re here, though, and we’ll make the best of it.” He looked at me carefully, then, and the glinting spark in the back of his eyes flared wickedly for a moment. “Don’t try to leave. And don’t go anywhere in this building where Rena or dell’Angela or I don’t take you.”

And that was that. I found myself assigned to the usual sort of sleeping accommodations I had come to expect in this group. Underground—cramped—and a bed harder than the Class-C Blue Heaven minimum.

* * * *

The next morning, Rena breakfasted with me, just the two of us in a tower room looking down over the round slope of Vesuvius and the Bay beneath. She said: “The museum has been closed since the bomb landed near, so you can roam around the exhibits if you wish. There are a couple of caretakers, but they’re with us. The rest of us will be in conference. I’ll try to see you for lunch.”

And she conducted me to an upper level of the Observatory and left me by myself. I had my orders—stay in the public area of the museum. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t used to being treated like a small boy, left by his mother in a Company day nursery while she busied herself with the important and incomprehensible affairs of adults.

Still, the museum was interesting enough, in a way. It had been taken over by the Company, it appeared, and although the legend frescoed around the main gallery indicated that it was supposed to be a historical museum of the Principality of Naples, it appeared by examination of the exhibits that the “history” involved was that of Naples vis-a-vis the Company.

Not, of course, that such an approach was entirely unfair. If it had not been for the intervention of the Company, after the Short War, it is more than possible that Naples as an independent state would never have existed.

It was the Company’s insistence on the dismantling of power centers (as Millen Carmody himself had described it) that had created Naples and Sicily and Prague and Quebec and Baja California and all the others.

Only the United States had been left alone—and that, I think, only because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one states…

The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors. It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so. There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room, with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, spraying DDT into the bedding. There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue Heaven modern allotment—with a certain amount of poetic license; few Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and autocooks.

It was the section on warfare, however, that was most impressive. It was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, even the tank, was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn’t quite placed—an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint of evil under its lacquered sheen…

It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days.

I looked at it again, shuddering.

Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-60, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal.

Score one for the Company. They’d put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need—and no principality would risk the Company’s wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company’s credit than anything else.

Maybe it was possible that in this controversy both sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary.

I continued my wandering, looking at the exhibits, the rubble of the museum’s previous history. The cast of the Pompeiian gladiator, caught by the cinder-fall in full flight, his straining body reproduced to every contorted line by the incandescent ashes that had encased him. The carefully chipped and labeled samples from the lava flows of the past two centuries. The awe-inspiring photographs of Vesuvius in eruption.

But something about the bomb casing kept bothering me. I wandered around a bit longer and then turned back to the main exhibit. The big casing stretched upward and downward, with narrow stairs leading down to the lower level at its base. It was on the staircase I’d noticed something before. Now I hesitated, trying to spot whatever it was. There was a hint of something down there. Finally, I shrugged and went down to inspect it more closely.

Lying at the base was a heavy radiation glove. A workman’s glove, used and dirty with grease. And as my eyes darted up, I could see that the bolts on the lower servicing hatches were half-unscrewed.

Radiation gloves and tampering with the casing!

There were two doors to the pit for the bomb casing, but either one was better than risking the stairs again where someone might see me. Or so I figured. If they found I’d learned anything…

I grabbed for the nearer door, threw it open. I knew it was a mistake when the voice reached my ears.

“—after hitting the Home office with a Thousand-kiloton bomb. It’s going to take fast work. Now the schedule I’ve figured out so far—God’s damnation! How did you get in here, Wills?”

It was Slovetski, leaning across a table, staring at me. Around the table were Benedetto and four or five others I did not recognize. All of them looked at me as though I were the Antichrist, popped out of the marble at St. Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday.

The spark was a raging flame in Slovetski’s eyes. Benedetto dell’Angela said sharply, “Wait!” He strode over to me, half shielding me from Slovetski. “Explain this, Thomas,” he demanded.

“I thought this was the hall door,” I stammered, spilling the first words I could while I tried to find any excuse…

“Wills! I tell you, answer me!”

I said, “Look, did you expect me to carry a bell and cry unclean? I didn’t mean to break in. I’ll go at once…”

In a voice that shook, Slovetski said: “Wait one moment.” He pressed a bell-button on the wall; we all stood there silent, the five of them staring at me, me wishing I was dead.

There was a patter of feet outside, and Rena peered in. She saw me and her hand went to her heart.

“Tom! But—”

Slovetski said commandingly, “Why did you permit him his liberty?”

Rena looked at him wide-eyed. “But, please, I asked you. You suggested letting him study the exhibits.”

Benedetto nodded. “True, Slovetski,” he said gravely. “You ordered her to attend until our—conference was over.”

The flame surged wildly in Slovetski’s eyes—not at me. But he got it under control. He said, “Take him away.” He did not do me the courtesy of looking my way again. Rena took me by the hand and led me off, closing the door behind us.

As soon as we were outside, I heard a sharp babble of argument, but I could make out no words through the door. I didn’t need to; I knew exactly what they were saying.

This was the proposition: Resolved, that the easiest thing to do is put Wills out of the way permanently. And with Slovetski’s fiery eyes urging the positive, what eager debater would say him nay?

* * * *

Rena said: “I can’t tell you, Tom. Please don’t ask me!”

I said, “This is no kid’s game, Rena! They’re talking about bombing the Home Office!”

She shook her head. “Tom, Tom. You must have misunderstood.”

“I heard them!”

“Tom, please don’t ask me any more questions.”

I slammed my hand down on the table and swore. It didn’t do any good. She didn’t even look up from the remains of her dinner.

It had been like that all afternoon. The Great Ones brooded in secret. Rena and I waited in her room, until the museum’s public visiting hours were over and we could go up into the freer atmosphere of the reception lounge. And then we waited there.

I said mulishly: “Ever since I met you, Rena, I’ve been doing nothing but wait. I’m not built that way!”

No answer.

I said, with all of my patience: “Rena, I heard them talking about bombing the Home Office. Do you think I am going to forget that?”

Leadenly: “No, Tom.”

“So what does it matter if you tell me more? If I cannot be trusted, I already know too much. If I can be trusted, what does it matter if I know the rest?”

Again tears. “Please don’t ask me!”

I yelled: “At least you can tell me what we’re waiting for!”

She dabbed at her eyes. “Please, Tom, I don’t know much more than you do. Slovetski, he is like this sometimes. He gets, I suppose you would say, thoughtful. He concentrates so very much on one thing, you see, that he forgets everything around him. It is possible that he has forgotten that we are waiting. I don’t know.”

I snarled, “I’m tired of this. Go in and remind him!”

“No, Tom!” There was fright in her voice; and I found that she had told me one of the things I wanted to know. If it was not wise to remind Slovetski that I was waiting his pleasure, the probability was that it would not be pleasant for me when he remembered.

I said, “But you must know something, Rena. Don’t you see that it could do no harm to tell me?”

She said miserably, “Tom, I know very little. I did not—did not know as much as you found out.” I stared at her. She nodded. “I had perhaps a suspicion, it is true. Yes, I suspected. But I did not really think, Tom, that there was a question of bombing. It is not how we were taught. It is not what Slovetski promised, when we began.”

“You mean you didn’t know Slovetski was planning violence?”

She shook her head. “And even now, I think, perhaps you heard wrong, perhaps there was a mistake.”

I stood up and leaned over her. “Rena, listen to me. There was no mistake. They’re working on that casing. Tell me what you know!”

She shook her head, weeping freely.

I raged: “This is asinine! What can there be that you will not tell? The Company supply base that Slovetski hopes to raid to get a bomb? The officers he plans to bribe, to divert some other nation’s quota of plutonium?”

She took a deep breath. “Not that, Tom.”

“Then what? You don’t mean to say that he has a complete underground separator plant—that he is making his own plutonium!”

She was silent for a long time, looking at me. Then she sighed. “I will tell you, Tom. No, he does not have a plant. He doesn’t need one, you see. He already has a bomb.”

I straightened. “That’s impossible.”

She was shaking her head. I protested, “But the—the quotas, Rena. The Company tracks every milligram of fissionable material from the moment it leaves the reactor! The inspections! Expediters with Geiger counters cover every city in the world!”

“Not here, Tom. You remember that the Sicilians bombed Vesuvius? There is a high level of radioactivity all up and down the mountain. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to mask a buried bomb.” She closed her eyes. “And—well, you are right, Tom. I might as well tell you. In that same war, you see, there was a bomb that did not explode. You recall?”

“Yes, but—”

“But it couldn’t explode, Tom. It was a dummy. Slovetski is a brilliant man. Before that bomb left the ground, he had diverted it. What went up was a hollow shell. What is left—the heart of the bomb—is buried forty feet beneath us.”

I stared at her, the room reeling. I was clutching at straws. I whispered, “But that was only a fission bomb, Rena. Slovetski—I heard him—he said a Thousand-kiloton bomb. That means hydrogen, don’t you see? Surely he hasn’t tucked one of those away.”

Rena’s face was an agony of regret. “I do not understand all these things, so you must bear with me. I know this; there has been secret talk about the Milanese generators, and I know that the talk has to do with heavy water. And I am not stupid altogether, I know that from heavy water one can get what is used in a hydrogen bomb. And there is more, of course—lithium, perhaps? But he has that. You have seen it, I think. It is on a pedestal in this building.”

I sat down hard. It was impossible. But it all fell into place. Given the fissionable core of the bomb—plus the deuterium, plus the lithium-bearing shell—it was no great feat to put the parts together and make a Hell-bomb.

The mind rejected it; it was too fantastic. It was frightful and terrifying, and worst of all was that something lurking at the threshold of memory, something about that bomb on display in the museum…

And, of course, I remembered.

“Rena!” I said, struggling for breath. I nearly could not go on, it was too dreadful to say. “Rena! Have you ever looked at that bomb? Have you read the placard on it? That bomb is cobalt!”

CHAPTER XII

From the moment I had heard those piercing words from Slovetski’s mouth, I had been obsessed with a vision. A Hell-bomb on the Home Office. America’s eastern seaboard split open. New York a hole in the ocean, from Kingston to Sandy Hook; orange flames spreading across Connecticut and the Pennsylvania corner.

That was gone—and in its place was something worse.

Radiocobalt bombing wouldn’t simply kill locally by a gout of flaring radiation. It would leave the atmosphere filled with colloidal particles of deadly, radioactive Cobalt-60. A little of that could be used to cure cancers and perform miracles. The amount released from the sheathing of cobalt—normal, “safe” cobalt—around a fissioning hydrogen bomb could kill a world. A single bomb of that kind could wipe out all life on Earth, as I remembered my schooling.

I’m no physicist; I didn’t know what the quantities involved might mean, once the equations came off the drafting paper and settled like a ravening storm on the human race. But I had a glimpse of radioactive dust in every breeze, in every corner of every land. Perhaps a handful of persons in Cambodia or Vladivostok or Melbourne might live through it. But there was no question in my mind: If that bomb went off, it was the end of our civilization.

I saw it clearly.

And so, having betrayed the Company to Slovetski’s gang, I came full circle.

Even Judas betrayed only One.

* * * *

Getting away from the Observatory was simple enough, with Rena shocked and confused enough to look the other way. Finding a telephone near Mount Vesuvius was much harder.

I was two miles from the mountain before I found what I was looking for—a Blue Wing fully-automatic filling station. The electronic scanners clucked worriedly, as they searched for the car I should have been driving, and the policy-punching slot glowed red and receptive, waiting for my order. I ignored them.

What I wanted was inside the little unlocked building—a hushaphone-booth with vision attachment. The important thing was to talk direct to Defoe and only to Defoe. In the vision screen, impedance mismatch would make the picture waver if there was anyone uninvited listening in.

But I left the screen off while I put through my call. The office servo-operator (it was well after business hours) answered blandly, and I said: “Connect me with Defoe, crash priority.”

It was set to handle priority matters on a priority basis; there was neither fuss nor argument, though a persistent buzzing in the innards of the phone showed that, even while the robot was locating Defoe for me, it was double-checking the connection to find out why there was no vision on the screen.

It said briskly, “Stand by, sir,” and I was connected with Defoe’s line—on a remote hookup with the hotel where he was staying, I guessed. I flicked the screen open.

But it wasn’t Defoe on the other end of the line. It was Susan Manchester, with that uncharacteristic, oddly efficient look she had shown at the vaults.

She said crisply, and not at all surprised: “Tom Wills.”

“That’s right,” I said, thinking quickly. Well, it didn’t much matter. I should have realized that Defoe’s secretary, howsoever temporary, would be taking his calls. I said rapidly: “Susan, I can’t talk to you. It has to be Defoe. Take my word for it, it’s important. Please put him on.”

She gave me no more of an argument than the robot had.

In a second, Defoe was on the screen, and I put Susan out of my mind. She must have said something to him, because the big, handsome face was unsurprised, though the eyes were contracted. “Wills!” he snapped. “You fool! Where are you?”

I said, “Mr. Defoe, I have to talk to you. It’s a very urgent matter.”

“Come in and do it, Wills! Not over the telephone.”

I shook my head. “No, sir. I can’t. It’s too, well, risky.”

“Risky for you, you mean!” The words were icily disgusted. “Wills, you have betrayed me. No man ever got away with that. You’re imposing on me, playing on my family loyalty to your dead wife, and I want to tell you that you won’t get away with it. There’s a murder charge against you, Wills! Come in and talk to me—or else the police will pick you up before noon.”

I said with an effort, “I don’t mean to impose on any loyalty, but, in common decency, you ought to hear—”

“Decency!” His face was cold. “You talk about decency! You and that dell’Angela traitor you joined. Decency! Wills, you’re a disgrace to the memory of a decent and honest woman like Marianna. I can only say that I am glad—glad, do you hear me?—that she’s dead and rid of you.”

I said, “Wait a minute, Defoe! Leave Marianna out of this. I only—”

“Don’t interrupt me! God, to think a man I trusted should turn out to be Judas himself! You animal, the Company has protected you from the day you were born, and you try to destroy it. Why, you pitiful idiot, you aren’t fit to associate with the dogs in the kennel of a decent human being!”

There was more. Much, much more. It was a flow of abuse that paralyzed me, less because of what he said than because of who was saying it. Suave, competent Defoe, ranting at me like a wounded Gogarty! I couldn’t have been more astonished if the portrait of Millen Carmody had whispered a bawdy joke from the frontispiece of the Handbook.

I stood there, too amazed to be furious, listening to the tirade from the midget image in the viewplate. It must have lasted for three or four minutes; then, almost in mid-breath, Defoe glanced at something outside my range of vision, and stopped his stream of abuse. I started to cut in while I could, but he held up one hand quickly.

He smiled gently. Very calmly, as though he had not been damning me a moment before, he said: “I shall be very interested to hear what you have to say.”

That floored me. It took me a second to shake the cobwebs out of my brain before I said waspishly, “If you hadn’t gone through all that jabber, you would have heard it long ago.”

The midget in the scanner shrugged urbanely. “True,” he conceded. “But then, Thomas, I wouldn’t have had you.”

And he reached forward and clicked off the phone. Tricked! Tricked and trapped! I cursed myself for stupidity. While he kept me on the line, the call was being traced—there was no other explanation. And I had fallen for it!

I slapped the door of the booth open and leaped out.

I got perhaps ten feet from the booth.

Then a rope dropped over my shoulders. Its noose yanked tight around my arms, and I was being dragged up, kicking futilely. I caught a glimpse of the broad Latin faces gaping at me from below, then two men on a rope ladder had me.

I was dragged in through the bottom hatch of a big helicopter with no markings. The hatch closed. Facing me was a lieutenant of expediters.

The two men tumbled in after me and reeled in the rope ladder, as the copter dipped and swerved away. I let myself go limp as the rope was loosened around me; when my hands were free I made my bid.

I leaped for the lieutenant; my fist caught him glancingly on the throat, sending him reeling and choking backward. I grabbed for the hard-pellet gun at his hip—he was pawing at it—and we tumbled across the floor.

It was, for one brief moment, a chance. I was no copter pilot, but the gun was all the pilot I’d need—if only I got it out.

But the expediters behind me were no amateurs. I ducked as the knotted end of the rope whipped savagely toward me. Then one of the other expediters was on my back; the gun came out, and flew free. And that was the end of that.

I had, I knew, been a fool to try it. But I wasn’t sorry. They had too much rough-and-tumble training for me to handle. But that one blow had felt good.

It didn’t seem as worthwhile a few moments later. I was fastened to a seat, while the wheezing lieutenant gave orders in a strangled voice. “Not too many marks on him,” he was saying. “Try it over the kidneys again…”

I never even thought of maintaining a heroic silence. They had had plenty of experience with the padded club, too, and I started to black out twice before finally I went all the way down.

* * * *

I came to with a light shining in my eyes.

There was a doctor putting his equipment away. “He’ll be all right, Mr. Defoe,” he said, and snapped his bag shut and left the circle of light.

I felt terrible, but my head was clearing.

I managed to focus my eyes. Defoe was there, and a couple of other men. I recognized Gogarty, looking sick and dejected, and another face I knew—it was out of my Home Office training—an officer whose name I didn’t recall, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general of expediters. That meant at least an expediter corps in Naples!

I said weakly, “Hi.”

Defoe stood over me. He said, “I’m very glad to see you, Thomas. Coffee?”

He steadied my hands as I gulped it. When I had managed a few swallows, he took the cup away.

“I did not think you would resist arrest, Thomas,” he said in a parental tone.

I said, “Damn it, you didn’t have to arrest me! I came down here of my own free will!”

“Down?” His eyebrows rose. “Down from where do you mean, Thomas?”

“Down from Mount—” I hesitated, then finished. “All right. Down from Mount Vesuvius. The museum, where I was hiding out with the ringleaders of the anti-Company movement. Is that what you want to know?”

Defoe crackled: “Manning!” The lieutenant-general saluted and left the room. Defoe said, “That was the first thing I wanted, yes. But now I want much more. Please begin talking, Thomas. I will listen.”

I talked. There was nothing to stop me. Even with my body a mass of aches and pains from the tender care of the Company’s expediters, I still had to side with the Company in this. For the Cobalt-bomb ended all loyalties.

I left nothing important out, not even Rena. I admitted that I had taken Benedetto from the clinic, how we had escaped to Rome, how we had fled to Vesuvius…and what I had learned. I made it short, skipping a few unimportant things like Zorchi.

And Defoe sat sipping his coffee, listening, his warm eyes twinkling.

I stopped. He pursed his lips, considering.

“Silly,” he said at last.

“Silly? What’s silly!”

He said, “Thomas, I don’t care about your casual affairs. And I would have excused your—precipitousness—since you have brought back certain useful information. Quite useful. I don’t deny it. But I don’t like being lied to, Thomas.”

“I haven’t lied!”

He said sharply, “There is no way to get fissionable material except through the Company!”

“Oh, hell!” I shook my head. “How about a dud bomb, Defoe?”

For the first time he looked puzzled. “Dud bomb?”

Gogarty looked sick. “There’s—there’s a report on your desk, Mr. Defoe,” he said worriedly. “We—well—figured the half-masses just got close enough to boil instead of to explode. We—”

“I see.” Defoe looked at him for a long moment. Then, disregarding Gogarty, he turned back to me, shoved the coffee at me. “All right, Thomas. They’ve got the warhead. Hydrogen? Cobalt? What about fuel?”

I told him what I knew. Gogarty, listening, licked his lips. I didn’t envy him. I could see the worry in him, the fear of Defoe’s later wrath. For in Defoe, as in Slovetski, there was that deadly fire. It blazed only when it was allowed to; but what it touched withered and died. I had not seen Defoe as tightly concentrated, as drivingly intent, before. I was sorry for Gogarty when at last, having drained me dry, Defoe left. But I was glad for me.

* * * *

He was gone less than an hour—just time for me to eat a Class-C meal a silent expediter brought.

He thrust the door open and stared at me with whitely glaring eyes. “If I thought you were lying, Thomas…” His voice was cracking with suppressed emotion.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“Don’t you know?” He stood trembling, staring at me. “You told the truth—or part of the truth. There was a hideout on Vesuvius. But an hour ago they got away—while you were wasting time. Was it a stall, Thomas? Did you know they would run?”

I said, “Defoe, don’t you see, that’s all to the good? If they had to run, they couldn’t possibly take the bomb with them. That means—”

He was shaking his head. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Thomas. According to the director of the albergo down the hill, three skyhook helicopters came over—big ones. They peeled the roof off, as easy as you please, and they lifted the bomb out and then flew away.”

I said stupidly, “Where?”

He nodded. There was no emotion in his voice, only in his eyes. He might have been discussing the weather. “Where? That is a good question. I hope we will find it out, Thomas. We’re checking the radar charts; they can’t hide for long. But how did they get away at all? Why did you give them the time?”

He left me. Perversely, I was almost glad. It was part of the price of switching allegiance, I was learning, that shreds and tatters of loyalties cling to you and carry over. When I went against the Company to rescue Benedetto, I still carried with me my Adjusters’ Handbook. And I confess that I never lost the habit of reading a page or two in it, even in the Catacombs, when things looked bad. And when I saw the murderous goal that Slovetski’s men were marching toward, and I returned to Defoe, I still could feel glad that Benedetto, at least, had got away.

But not far.

It was only a few hours, but already broad daylight when Gogarty, looking shaken, came into the room. He said testily, “Damn it, Wills, I wish I’d never seen you! Come on! Defoe wants you with us.”

“Come on where?” I got up as he gestured furiously for haste.

“Where do you think? Did you think your pals would be able to stay out of sight forever? We’ve got them pinpointed, bomb and all.”

He was almost dragging me down the corridor, toward a courtyard. I limped out into the bright morning and blinked. The court was swarming with armed expediters, clambering into personnel-carrying copters marked with the vivid truce-team insignia of the Company. Gogarty hustled me into the nearest and the jets sizzled and we leaped into the air.

I shouted, over the screaming of the jets, “Where are we going?”

Gogarty spat and pointed down the long purple coastline. “To their hideout—Pompeii!”

CHAPTER XIII

No one discussed tactics with me, but it was clear that this operation was carefully planned. Our copter was second in a long string of at least a dozen that whirled down the coastline, past the foothills of Vesuvius, over the clusters of fishing villages and vineyards.

I had never seen Pompeii, but I caught a glimpse of something glittering and needle-nosed, upthrust in the middle of a cluster of stone buildings that might have been the ruins.

Then the first ten of the copters spun down to a landing, while two or three more flew a covering mission overhead.

The expediters, hard-pellet guns at the ready, leaped out and formed in a skirmish line. Gogarty and a pair of expediters stayed close by me, behind the line of attack; we followed the troops as they dog-trotted through a field of some sort of grain, around fresh excavations, down a defile into the shallow pit that held the ruins of first-century Pompeii.

I had no time for archeology, but I remember tripping over wide, shallow gutters in the stone-paved streets, and cutting through a tiny villa of some sort whose plaster walls still were decorated with faded frescoes.

Then we heard the spatter of gunfire and Gogarty, clutching at me, skidded to a halt. “This is specialist work,” he panted. “Best thing we can do is stay out of it.”

I peered around a column and saw a wide open stretch. Beyond it was a Roman arch and the ruined marble front of what once had been a temple of some sort; in the open ground lay the three gigantic copters Defoe had mentioned.

The vanes of one of them were spinning slowly, and it lurched and quivered as someone tried to get it off the ground under fire. But the big thing was in the middle of the area: The bomb, enormous and terrifying as its venomous nose thrust up into the sky. By its side was a tank truck, the side of it painted with the undoubtedly untrue legend that it contained crude olive oil. Hydrazine, more likely!

Hoses connected it with the base of the guided-missile bomb; and a knot of men were feverishly in action around it, some clawing desperately at the fittings of the bomb, some returning the skirmish fire of the expediters.

We had the advantage of surprise, but not very much of that. From the top of the ancient temple a rapid-fire pellet gun sprayed into the flank of the skirmish line, which immediately broke up as the expediters leaped for cover.

One man fell screaming out of the big skyhook copter, but someone remained inside, for it lurched and dipped and roared crazily across the field in as ragged a takeoff as I ever saw, until its pilot got it under control. It bobbed over the skirmish line under fire, but returning the fire as whatever few persons were inside it leaned out and strafed the expediters. Then the skyhook itself came under attack as the patrol copters swooped in.

The big ship staggered toward the nearest of them. It must have been intentional: We could see the faint flare of muzzle-blast as the two copters fired on each other; they closed, and there was a brutal rending noise as they collided. They were barely a hundred feet in the air; they crashed in a breath, and flames spread out from the wreckage.

And Slovetski’s resources still had not run out. There was a roar and a screech of metal, and a one-man cobra tank slithered out of one of the buildings and came rapidly across the field toward the expediters.

Gogarty, beside me, was sobbing with fear; that little tank carried self-loading rockets. It blasted a tiny shrine into rubble, spun and came directly toward us.

We ran. I didn’t even see the second expediter aircraft come whirling in and put the cobra tank out of action with its heavy weapons. I heard the firing, but it was swallowed up in a louder screaming roar.

Gogarty stared at me from the drainage trench we had flung ourselves into. We both leaped up and ran back toward the open field.

There was an explosion as we got there—the fake “olive-oil” truck, now twenty yards from the bomb, had gone up in a violent blast. But we hardly noticed. For at the base of the bomb itself red-purple fire was billowing out. It screamed and howled and changed color to a blinding blue as the ugly squat shape danced and jiggled. The roar screamed up from a bull-bass to a shrieking coloratura and beyond as the bomb lifted and gained speed and, in the blink of an eye, was gone.

I hardly noticed that the sound of gunfire died raggedly away. We were not the only ones staring unbelievingly at the sky where that deadly shape had disappeared. Of the scores of men on both sides in that area, not a single eye was anywhere else.

The bomb had been fueled; we were too late. Its servitors, perhaps at the cost of their own lives, had torched it off. It was on its way.

The cobalt bomb—the single weapon that could poison the world and wipe out the human race—was on its way.

CHAPTER XIV

What can you do after the end? What becomes of any plot or plan, when an indigo-gleaming missile sprays murder into the sky and puts a period to planning?

I do not think there ever was a battlefield as abruptly quiet as that square in old Pompeii. Once the bomb had gone, there was not a sound. The men who had been firing on each other were standing still, jaws hanging, eyes on the sky.

But it couldn’t last. For one man was not surprised; one man knew what was happening and was ready for it.

A crouching figure at the top of the ruined temple gesticulated and shouted through a power-megaphone: “Give it up, Defoe! You’ve lost, you’ve lost!” It was Slovetski, and beside him a machine-gun crew sighted in on the nearest knot of expediters.

Pause, while the Universe waited. And then his answer came; it was a shot that screamed off a cracked capital, missing him by millimeters. He dropped from sight, and the battle was raging.

Human beings are odd. Now that the cause of the fight was meaningless, it doubled in violence. There were fewer than a hundred of Slovetski’s men involved, and not much more than that many expediters. But for concentrated violence I think they must have overmatched anything in the Short War’s ending.

I was a non-combatant; but the zinging of the hard-pellet fire swarmed all around me. Gogarty, in his storm sewer, was safe enough, but I was more exposed. While the rapid-fire weapons pattered all around me, I jumped up and zigzagged for the shelter of a low-roofed building.

The walls were little enough protection, but at least I had the illusion of safety. Most of all, I was out of sight.

I wormed my way through a gap in the wall to an inner chamber. It was as tiny a room as ever I have been in; less than six feet in its greatest dimension—length—and with most of its floor area taken up by what seemed to be a rude built-in bed. Claustrophobia hit me there; the wall on the other side was broken too, and I wriggled through.

The next room was larger; and it was occupied.

A man lay, panting heavily, in a corner. He pushed himself up on an elbow to look at me. In a ragged voice he said: “Thomas!” And he slumped back, exhausted by the effort, blood dripping from his shirt.

I leaped over to the side of Benedetto dell’Angela. The noise of the battle outside rose to a high pitch and dwindled raggedly away.

* * * *

I suppose it was inertia that kept me going—certainly I could see with my mind’s vision no reason to keep struggling. The world was at an end. There was no reason to try again to escape from the rubber hoses of the expediters—and, after I had seen the resistance end, and an expediter-officer appeared atop the temple where Slovetski had shouted his defiance, no possibility of rejoining the rebels.

Without Slovetski, they were lost.

But I kept on.

Benedetto helped. He knew every snake-hole entrance and exit of all the hideouts of Slovetski’s group. They had not survived against the strength of the Company without acquiring skill in escape routes; and here, too, they had a way out. It required a risky dash across open ground but, even with Benedetto on my back, I made it.

And then we were in old Pompeii’s drainage sewer, the arched stone tunnel that once had carried sewage from the Roman town to the sea. It was a hiding place, and then a tunnel to freedom, for the two of us.

We waited there all of that day, Benedetto mumbling almost inaudibly beside me. In lucid moments, he told me the name of the hotel where Rena had gone when the Observatory was abandoned, but there seemed few lucid moments. Toward evening, he began to recover.

We found our way to the seashore just as darkness fell. There was a lateen-rigged fishing vessel of some sort left untended. I do not suppose the owner was far away, but he did not return in time to stop us.

Benedetto was very weak. He was muttering to himself, words that I could hardly understand. “Wasted, wasted, wasted,” was the burden of his complaint. I did not know what he thought was wasted—except, perhaps, the world.

We slipped in to one of the deserted wharves under cover of darkness, and I left Benedetto to find a phone. It was risky, but what risk mattered when the world was at an end?

Rena was waiting at the hotel. She answered at once. I did not think the call had been intercepted—or that it would mean anything to anyone if it had. I went back to the boat to wait with Benedetto for Rena to arrive, in a rented car. We didn’t dare chance a cab.

Benedetto was sitting up, propped rigidly against the mast, staring off across the water. Perhaps I startled him as I came to the boat; he turned awkwardly and cried out weakly.

Then he saw that it was I. He said something I could not understand and pointed out toward the west, where the Sun had gone down long before.

But there was still light there—though certainly not sunset.

Far off over the horizon was a faint glow! I couldn’t understand at first, since I was sure the bomb had been zeroed-in on the Home Offices in New York; but something must have happened. From that glow, still showing in the darkness so many hours after the explosion as the dust particles gleamed bluely, it must have gone off over the Atlantic.

There was no doubt in my mind any longer. The most deadly weapon the world had ever known had gone off!

CHAPTER XV

The hotel was not safe, of course, but what place was when the world was at an end? Rena and I, between us, got her father, Benedetto, upstairs into her room without attracting too much attention. We put him on the bed and peeled back his jacket.

The bullet had gone into his shoulder, a few inches above the heart. The bone was splintered, but the bleeding was not too much. Rena did what she could and, for the first time in what seemed like years, we had a moment’s breathing space.

I said, “I’ll phone for a doctor.”

Benedetto said faintly, “No, Thomas! The Company!”

I protested, “What’s the difference? We’re all dead, now. You’ve seen—” I hesitated and changed it. “Slovetski has seen to that. There was cobalt in that bomb.”

He peered curiously at me. “Slovetski? Did you suppose it was Slovetski who planned it so?” He shook his head—and winced at the pain. He whispered, “Thomas, you do not understand. It was my project, not Slovetski’s. That one, he proposed to destroy the Company’s Home Office; it was his thought that killing them would bring an end to evil. I persuaded him there was no need to kill—only to gamble.”

I stared at him. “You’re delirious!”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head and succeeded in a tiny smile. “Do you not see it, Thomas? The great explosion goes off, the world is showered with particles of death. And then—what then?”

“We die!”

“Die? No! Have you forgotten the vaults of the clinics?”

It staggered me. I’d been reciting all the pat phrases from early schooling about the bomb! If it had gone off in the Short War, of course, it would have ended the human race! But I’d been a fool.

The vaults had been built to handle the extreme emergencies that couldn’t be foreseen—even one that knocked out nearly the whole race. They hadn’t expected that a cobalt-cased bomb would ever be used. Only the conspirators would have tried, and how could they get fissionables? But they were ready for even that. I’d been expecting universal doom.

“The clinics,” Benedetto repeated as I stared at him.

It was the answer. Even radio-poisons of cobalt do not live forever. Five years, and nearly half of them would be gone; eleven years, and more than three-quarters would be dissipated. In fifty years, the residual activity would be down to a fraction of one per cent—and the human race could come back to the surface.

“But why?” I demanded. “Suppose the Company can handle the population of the whole world? Granted, they’ve space enough and one year is the same as fifty when you’re on ice. But what’s the use?”

He smiled faintly. “Bankruptcy, Thomas,” he whispered. “So you see, we do not wish to fall into the Company’s hands right now. For there is a chance that we will live…and perhaps the very faintest of chances that we will win!”

* * * *

It wasn’t even a faint chance—I kept telling myself that.

But, if anything could hurt the Company, the area in which it was vulnerable was money. Benedetto had been intelligent in that. Bombing the Home Office would have been an inconvenience, no more. But to disrupt the world’s work with a fifty-year hiatus, while the air purged itself of the radioactive cobalt from the bomb, would mean fifty years while the Company lay dormant; fifty years while the policies ran their course and became due.

For that was the wonder of Benedetto’s scheme: The Company insured against everything. If a man were to be exposed to radiation and needed to be put away, he automatically went on “disability” benefits, while his policy paid its own premiums!

Multiply this single man by nearly four billion. The sum came out to a bankrupt Company.

It seemed a thin thread with which to strangle a monster. And yet, I thought of the picture of Millen Carmody in my Adjuster’s Manual. There was the embodiment of honor. Where a Defoe might cut through the legalities and flout the letter of the agreements, Carmody would be bound by his given word. The question, then, was whether Defoe would dare to act against Carmody.

Everything else made sense. Even exploding the bomb high over the Atlantic: It would be days before the first fall-out came wind-borne to the land, and in those days there would be time for the beginnings of the mass migration to the vaults.

Wait and see, I told myself. Wait and see. It was flimsy, but it was hope, and I had thought all hope was dead.

We could not stay in the hotel, and there was only one place for us to go. Slovetski captured, the Company after our scalps, the whole world about to be plunged into confusion—we had to get out of sight.

* * * *

It took time. Zorchi’s hospital gave me a clue; I tracked it down and located the secretary.

The secretary spat at me over the phone and hung up, but the second time I called him he grudgingly consented to give me another number to call. The new number was Zorchi’s lawyer. The lawyer was opaque and uncommunicative, but proposed that I call him back in a quarter of an hour. In a quarter of an hour, I was on the phone. He said guardedly: “What was left in Bay 100?”

“A hypodermic and a bottle of fluid,” I said promptly.

“That checks,” he confirmed, and gave me a number.

And on the other end of that number I reached Zorchi.

“The junior assassin,” he sneered. “And calling for help? How is that possible, Weels? Did my avocatto lie?”

I said stiffly, “If you don’t want to help me, say so.”

“Oh—” he shrugged. “I have not said that. What do you want?”

“Food, a doctor, and a place for three of us to hide for a while.”

He pursed his lips. “To hide, is it?” He frowned. “That is very grave, Weels. Why should I hide you from what is undoubtedly your just punishment?”

“Because,” I said steadily, “I have a telephone number. Which can be traced. Defoe doesn’t know you’ve escaped, but that can be fixed!”

He laughed angrily. “Oh-ho. The assassin turns to blackmail, is that it?”

I said furiously, “Damn you, Zorchi, you know I won’t turn you in. I only point out that I can—and that I will not. Now, will you help us or not?”

He said mildly, “Oh, of course. I only wished you to say ‘please’—but it is not a trick you Company men are good at. Signore, believe me, I perish with loneliness for you and your two friends, whoever they may be. Listen to me, now.” He gave me an address and directions for finding it. And he hung up.

Zorchi’s house was far outside the city, along the road to New Caserta. It lay at the bend of the main highway, and I suppose I could have passed it a hundred thousand times without looking inside, it was so clearly the white-stuccoed, large but crumbling home of a mildly prosperous peasant. It was large enough to have a central court partly concealed from the road.

The secretary, spectacles and all, met us at the door—and that was a shock. “You must have roller skates,” I told him.

He shrugged. “My employer is too forgiving,” he said, with ice on his voice. “I had hoped to reach him before he made an error. As you see, I was too late.”

We lifted Benedetto off the seat; he was just barely conscious by now, and his face was ivory under the Mediterranean tan. I shook the secretary off and held Benedetto carefully in my arms as Rena held the door before me.

The secretary said, “A moment. I presume the car is stolen. You must dispose of it at once.”

I snarled over my shoulder, “It isn’t stolen, but the people that own it will be looking for it all right. You get rid of it.”

He spluttered and squirmed, but I saw him climbing into the seat as I went inside. Zorchi was there waiting, in a fancy motorized wheelchair. He had legs! Apparently they were not fully developed as yet, but in the short few days since I had rescued him something had grown that looked like nearly normal limbs. He had also grown, in that short time, a heavy beard.

The sneer, however, was the same.

I made the error of saying, “Signore Zorchi, will you call a doctor for this man?”

The thick lips writhed under the beard. “Signore it is now, is it? No longer the freak Zorchi, the case Zorchi, the half-man? God works many miracles, Weels. See the greatest of them all—it has transmuted the dog into a signore!”

I grated, “For God’s sake, Zorchi, call a doctor!”

He said coldly, “You mentioned this over the phone, did you not? If you would merely walk on instead of bickering, you would find the doctor already here.”

* * * *

Plasma and antibiotics: They flowed into Benedetto from half a dozen plastic tubes like oil into the hold of a tanker. And I could see, in the moments when I watched, the color come back into his face, and the sunken eyes seem to come back to life.

The doctor gave him a sedative that made him sleep, and explained to us that Benedetto was an old man for such goings-on. But if he could be kept still for three or four weeks, the doctor said, counting the lire Zorchi’s secretary paid him, there was no great danger.

If he could be kept still for three or four weeks. In scarcely ten days, the atmosphere of the planet would be death to breathe! Many things might happen to Benedetto in that time, but remaining still was not one of them.

Zorchi retired to his own quarters once the doctor was gone, and Rena and I left Benedetto to sleep.

We found a television set and turned it on, listening for word of the cobalt-bomb. We got recorded canzoni sung by a reedy tenor. We dialed, and found the Neapolitan equivalent of a soap opera, complete with the wise, fat old mother and the sobbing new daughter-in-law. It was like that on all the stations, while Rena and I stared at each other in disbelief.

Finally, at the regular hourly newscast, we got a flicker: “An unidentified explosion,” the announcer was saying, “far out at sea, caused alarm to many persons last night. Although the origins are not known, it is thought that there is no danger. However, there has been temporary disturbance to all long-lines communications, and air travel is grounded while the explosion is being investigated.”

We switched to the radio: it was true. Only the UHF television bands were on the air.

I said, “I can’t figure that. If there’s enough disturbance to ruin long-distance transmission, it ought to show up on the television.”

Rena said doubtfully, “I do not remember for sure, Tom, but is there not something about television which limits its distance?”

“Well—I suppose so, yes. It’s a line of sight transmission, on these frequencies at any rate. I don’t suppose it has to be, except that all the television bands fall in VHF or UHF channels.”

“Yes. And then, is it not possible that only the distance transmission is interrupted? On purpose, I mean?”

I slammed my hand on the arm of the chair. “On purpose! The Company—they are trying to keep this thing localized. But the idiots, don’t they know that’s impossible? Does Defoe think he can let the world burn up without doing anything to stop it—just by keeping the people from knowing what happened?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Tom.”

I didn’t know either, but I suspected—and so did she. It was out of the question that the Company, with its infinite resources, its nerve-fibers running into every part of the world, should not know just what that bomb was, and what it would do. And what few days the world had—before the fallout became dangerous—were none too many.

Already the word should have been spread, and the first groups alerted for movement into the vaults, to wait out the day when the air would be pure again. If it was being delayed, there could be no good reason for it.

The only reason was Defoe. But what, I asked myself miserably, was Millen Carmody doing all this while? Was he going to sit back and placidly permit Defoe to pervert every ideal of the Company?

I could not believe it. It was not possible that the man who had written the inspiring words in the Handbook could be guilty of genocide.

Rena excused herself to look in on her father. Almost ashamed of myself, I took the battered book from my pocket and opened it to check on Millen Carmody’s own preface.

It was hard to reconcile the immensely reassuring words with what I had seen. And, as I read them, I no longer felt safe and comforted.

* * * *

There seemed to be no immediate danger, and Rena needed to get out of that house. There was nothing for Benedetto to do but wait, and Zorchi’s servants could help him when it was necessary.

I took her by the arm and we strolled out into the garden, breathing deeply. That was a mistake. I had forgotten, in the inconspicuous air conditioning of Zorchi’s home, that we were in the center of the hemp fields that had nearly cost me my dinner, so long ago, with Hammond. I wondered if I ever would know just why Hammond was killed. Playing both ends against the middle, it seemed—he had undoubtedly been in with Slovetski’s group. Rena had admitted as much, and I was privately certain that he had been killed by them.

But of more importance was the stench in our nostrils. “Perhaps,” said Rena, “across the road, in the walnut grove, it will not be as bad.”

I hesitated, but it felt safe in the warm Italian night, and so we tried it. The sharp scent of the walnut trees helped a little; what helped even more was that the turbinates of the nostril can stand just so much, and when their tolerance is exceeded they surrender. So that it wasn’t too long before, though the stench was as strong as ever, we hardly noticed it.

We sat against the thick trunk of a tree, and Rena’s head fitted naturally against my shoulder. She was silent for a time, and so was I—it seemed good to have silence, after violent struggle and death.

Then she said: “Strange man.”

“Me?”

“No. Oh, yes, Tom, if it comes to that, you, too. But I was thinking just now of Zorchi. Is it true, what you told me of his growing legs and arms so freely?”

“I thought everyone in Naples knew that. I thought he was a national hero.”

“Of course, but I have never really known that the stories were true. How does it happen, Tom?”

I shrugged. “Heaven knows, I don’t. I doubt if even Zorchi knows. His parents might have been involved in some sort of atomic business and got radiated, and so they produced a mutation. It’s perfectly possible, you know.”

“I have heard so, Tom.”

“Or else it just happened. Something in his diet, in the way his glands responded to a sickness, some sort of medicine. No one knows.”

“Cannot scientists hope to tell?”

“Well—” it was beginning to sound like the seeds of one of our old arguments—“well, I suppose so. Pure research isn’t much encouraged these days.”

“But it should be, you think?”

“Of course it should. The only hope of the world—” I trailed off. Through the trees was a bright, distant glare, and I had just remembered what it was.

“Is what, Tom?”

“There isn’t any,” I said, but only to myself. She didn’t press me; she merely burrowed into my arm.

Perhaps the wind shifted, and the smell of the hemp fields grew stronger; perhaps it was only the foul thought that the glaring sky had triggered that contaminated my mood. But where I had been happy and relaxed—the C-bomb completely out of my mind for the moment—now I was too fully aware of what was ahead for all of us.

“Let’s go back, Rena,” I said. She didn’t ask why. Perhaps she, too, was feeling the weight of our death sentence.

* * * *

We caught the evening newscast; its story varied little from the early ones.

Benedetto still slept, but Zorchi joined us as we watched it.

The announcer, face stamped with the careful blend of gravity and confidence that marks telecasters all over the world, was saying: “Late word on the bomb exploded over the North Atlantic indicates that there is some danger that radioactive ash may be carried to this area. The danger zones are now being mapped and surveyed, and residents of all such sections will be evacuated or placed in deep sleep until the danger is over.

“Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all hazards from this explosion. I repeat, Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all hazards from this explosion. Check your policies and be sure of your status. There is absolutely no risk for any person carrying the basic Blue Bolt minimum coverage or better.”

I clicked off the set. “I wonder what the people in Shanghai are hearing tonight,” I said.

Zorchi had only listened without comment, when I told him about the bomb that afternoon; he listened without comment now.

Rena said: “Tom, I’ve been wondering. You know, I—I don’t have any insurance. Neither has my father, since we were canceled. And we’re not the only ones without it, either.”

I patted her hand. “We’ll straighten this out,” I promised. “You’ll get your coverage back.”

She gave me a skeptical look, but shook her head. “I don’t mean just about father and me. What about all of the uninsurables, all over the world? The bomb goes off, and everybody with a policy files down into the vaults, but what about the others?”

I explained, “There are provisions for them. Some of them can be cared for under the dependency clauses in the policies of their next of kin. Others have various charitable arrangements—some localities, for instance, carry blanket floater policies for their paupers and prisoners and so on. And—well, I don’t suppose it would ever come to that, but if someone turned up who had no coverage at all, he could be cared for out of the loss-pool that the Company carries for such contingencies. It wouldn’t be luxurious, but he’d live. You see,” I went on, warming to my subject, “the Company is set up so the actual premiums paid are meaningless. The whole objective of the Company is service; the premiums are only a way to that goal. The Company has no interest other than the good of the world, and—”

I stopped, feeling like a fool. Zorchi was laughing raucously.

I said resentfully, “I guess I asked for that, Zorchi. Well, perhaps what I said sounds funny. But, before God, Zorchi, that’s the way the Company is set up. Here—” I picked the Handbook from the end table beside me and tossed it to him—“read what Millen Carmody says. I won’t try to convince you. Just read it.”

He caught it expertly and dropped it on the floor before him. “So much for your Chief Assassin,” he remarked pleasantly. “The words are no doubt honied, Weels, but I am not at this moment interested to read them.”

I shrugged. It was peculiar how even a reasonable man—I have always thought of myself as a reasonable man—could make a fool of himself. It was no sin that habit had betrayed me into exalting the Company; but it was, at the least, quite silly of me to take offense when my audience disagreed with me.

I said, in what must have been a surly tone, “I don’t suppose you are—why should you? You hate the Company from the word go.”

He shook his head mildly. “I? No, Weels. Believe me, I am the Company’s most devoted friend. Without it, how would I feed my five-times-a-day appetite?”

I sneered at him. “If you’re a friend to the Company, then my best buddy is a tapeworm.”

“Meaning that Zorchi is a parasite?” His eyes were furious. “Weels, you impose on me too far! Be careful! Is it the act of a tapeworm that I bleed and die, over and over? Is it something I chose, did I pray to the saints, before my mother spawned me, that I should be born a monster? No, Weels! We are alike, you gentlemen of the Company and I—we live on blood money, it is true. But the blood I live on, man—it is my own!”

I said mollifyingly, “Zorchi, I’ve had a hard day. I didn’t mean to be nasty. I apologize.”

“Hah!”

“No, really.”

He shrugged, abruptly quiet. “It is of no importance,” he said. “If I wished to bear you a grudge, Weels, I would have more than that to give me cause.” He sighed. “It all looked quite simple twenty-four hours ago, Weels. True, I had worked my little profession in this area as far as it might go—with your help, of course. But the world was before me—I had arranged to fly next week to the Parisian Anarch, to change my name and, perhaps within a month, with a new policy, suffer a severe accident that would provide me with francs for my hobbies. Why is it that you bring bad news always?”

I said, “Wasn’t I of some little assistance to you at one time?”

“In helping me from the deepfreeze? Oh, yes, perhaps. But didn’t you help me into it in the first place, as well? And surely you have already had sufficient credit for aiding my escape—I observe the young lady looking at you with the eyes of one who sees a hero.”

I said in irritation, “You’re infuriating, Zorchi. I suppose you know that. I never claimed any credit for helping you out of the clinic. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever mentioned it. Everyone assumed that I had just happened to bring you along—no one questioned it.”

He flared, “You let them assume, Weels? You let them assume that Zorchi was as helpless a side of pork as those other dead ones—you let them guess that you stuck me with a needle, so that it would seem how brave you were? Is it not true that I had revived by myself, Weels?”

I felt myself growing angry. “Of course! But I just didn’t see any reason to—”

“To divide the credit, is that it, Weels? No, say no more; I have closed the subject. However, I point out that there is a difference between the rescue of a helpless hulk and the mere casual assistance one may be invited to give to a Zorchi.”

I let it go at that. There was no point in arguing with that man, ever.

So I left the room—ostensibly to look in on Benedetto, actually to cool off a little. Benedetto seemed fine—that is, the dressings were still in place, he had not moved, his breath and pulse were slow and regular. I took my time before I went back to the room where Zorchi still sat waiting.

He had taken advantage of the time to improve his mind. The man’s curiosity was insatiable; the more he denied it, the more it stuck out all over him. He had thrown the Handbook on the floor when I gave it to him, but as soon as I was out of sight he was leafing through it. He had it open on his lap, face down, as he faced me.

“Weels.” There was, for once, no sardonic rasp to his voice. And his face, I saw, was bone-white. “Weels, permit me to be sure I understand you. It is your belief that this intelligent plan of seeding the world with poison to make it well will succeed, because you believe that a Signore Carmody will evict Defoe from power?”

I said, “Well, not exactly—”

“But almost exactly? That is, you require this Millen Carmody for your plan?”

“It wasn’t my plan. But you’re right about the other.”

“Very good.” He extended the Handbook to me. “There is here a picture which calls itself Millen Carmody. Is that the man?”

I glanced at the familiar warm eyes on the frontispiece. “That’s right. Have you seen him?”

“I have, indeed.” The shaggy beard was twitching—I did not know whether with laughter or the coming of tears. “I saw him not long ago, Weels. It was in what they call Bay 100—you remember? He was in a little bag like the pasta one carries home from a store. He was quite sound asleep, Weels, in the shelf just below the one I woke up in.”

CHAPTER XVI

So now at last I knew why Millen Carmody had permitted Defoe to turn the Company into a prison cell for the world. He couldn’t forbid it, because the dead can forbid nothing, and Carmody was sleeping with the dead. No wonder Defoe was so concerned with the Naples sector!

How long? How long had Carmody been quietly out of the way, while Defoe made his plans and took his steps, and someone in a little room somewhere confected “statements” with Millen Carmody’s signature on them and “interviews” that involved only one man?

It could not have been less than five or six years, I thought, counting back to the time when Defoe’s name first began to register with me as an ordinary citizen, before I had married his cousin. Six years. That was the date of the Prague-Vienna war. And the year following, Hanoi clashed with Cebu. And the year after that, Auckland and Adelaide.

What in God’s name was Defoe’s plan? Nothing as simple as putting Carmody out of the way so that he could loot the Company. No man could wish to be that rich! It was meaningless…

Defoe could be playing for only one thing—power.

But it didn’t matter; all that mattered was that now I knew that Carmody was an enemy to Defoe. He was therefore an ally to Rena and to me, and we needed allies. But how might we get Carmody out of Bay 100?

There weren’t any good answers, though Rena and I, with the help of grumbling comments from Zorchi, debated it until the morning light began to shine. Frontal assault on the clinic was ridiculous. Even a diversionary raid such as Rena had staged to try to rescue her father—only ten days before!—would hardly get us in through the triple-locked door of Bay 100. Even if Slovetski’s movement had still been able to muster the strength to do it, which was not likely.

It was maddening. I had hidden the hypodermic Rena had brought in Bay 100 to get it out of the way. Undoubtedly it was there still—perhaps only a few yards from Millen Carmody. If fifty cubic centimeters of a watery purplish liquid could have been plucked from the little glass bottle and moved the mere inches to the veins of his arms, the problem would be solved—for he could open the door from inside as easily as Zorchi had, and certainly once he was that far we could manage to get him out.

But the thing was impossible, no matter how we looked at it.

* * * *

I suppose I fell asleep sitting in that chair, because I woke up in it. It was in the middle of a crazy nightmare about an avenging angel with cobalt-blue eyes burning at me out of heaven; and I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen by a little man with a hypodermic of ice. I woke up, and I was facing the television set. Someone—Rena, I suppose—had covered me with a light spread. The set was blaring a strident tenor voice. Zorchi was hunched over, watching some opera; I might as well have been a thousand miles away.

I lay blearily watching the tiny figures flickering around the screen, not so much forgetting all the things that were on my mind as knowing what they were and that they existed, but lacking the strength to pick them up and look at them. The opera seemed to concern an Egyptian queen and a priest of some sort; I was not very interested in it, though it seemed odd that Zorchi should watch it so eagerly.

Perhaps, after all, there was something to his maudlin self-pity—perhaps I really did think of him as a monster or a dog, for I was as uneasy to see him watching an opera as I would have been to see an ape play the flute.

I heard trucks going by on the highway. By and by it began to penetrate through the haze that I was hearing a lot of trucks going by on the highway. I had no idea how heavily traveled the Naples-Caserta road might be, but from the sound, they seemed nearly bumper to bumper, whizzing along at seventy or eighty miles an hour.

I got up stiffly and walked over to the window.

I had not been far wrong. There was a steady stream of traffic in both directions—not only trucks but buses and private cars, everything from late-model gyromaxions to ancient piston-driven farm trucks.

Zorchi heard me move, and turned toward me with a hooded expression. I pointed to the window.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He said levelly, “The end of the world. It is now official; it has been on the television. Oh, they do not say it in just so many words, but it is there.”

I turned to the television set and flicked off the tape-relay switch—apparently the opera had been recorded. Zorchi glared, but didn’t try to stop me as I hunted on the broadcast bands for a news announcer.

I didn’t have far to hunt. Every channel was the same: The Company was issuing orders and instructions. Every man, woman and child was to be ready within ten days for commitment to the clinic…

I tried to imagine the scenes of panic and turmoil that would be going on in downtown Naples at that moment.

* * * *

The newscaster was saying: “Remember, if your Basic Blue Bolt policy number begins with the letters A, B or C—if it begins with the letters A, B or C—you are to report to the local first aid or emergency post at six hundred hours tomorrow. There is no danger. I repeat, there is no danger. This is merely a precaution taken by the Company for your protection.” He didn’t really look as though there were no danger, however. He looked like a man confronted by a ghost.

I switched to another channel. An equally harried-looking announcer: “—reported by a team of four physicists from the Royal University to have produced a serious concentration of radioactive byproducts in the upper atmosphere. It is hoped that the cloud of dangerous gases will veer southward and pass harmlessly through the Eastern Mediterranean; however, strictly as a precautionary measure, it is essential that every person in this area be placed in a safety zone during the danger period, the peak of which is estimated to come within the next fourteen days. If there is any damage, it will be only local and confined to livestock—for which you will be reimbursed under your Blue Bolt coverage.”

I switched to another channel. Local damage! Local to the face of the Earth!

I tried all the channels; they were all the same.

The Company had evidently decided to lie to the human race. Keep them in the dark—make each little section believe that only it was affected—persuade them that they would be under for, at most, a few weeks or months.

Was that, I wondered, Defoe’s scheme? Was he planning to try somehow to convince four billion people that fifty years were only a few weeks? It would never work—the first astronomer to look at a star, the first seaman to discover impossible errors in his tide table, would spot the lie.

More likely he was simply proceeding along what must always have been his basic assumption: The truth is wasted on the people.

Zorchi said with heavy irony, “If my guest is quite finished with the instrument, perhaps he will be gracious enough to permit me to resume Aïda.”

* * * *

I woke Rena and told her about the evacuation. She said, yawning, “But of course, Tom. What else could they do?” And she began discussing breakfast.

I went with her, but not to eat; in the dining hall was a small television set, and on it I could listen to the same repeat broadcasts over and over to my heart’s content. It was—in a way—a thrilling sight. It is always impressive to see a giant machine in operation, and there was no machine bigger than the Company.

The idea of suspending a whole world, even piecemeal, was staggering. But if there had been panic at first in the offices of the Company, none of it showed. The announcers were harried and there was bustle and strain, but order presided.

Those long lines of vehicles outside the window; they were going somewhere; they were each one, I could see by the medallion slung across each radiator front, on the payroll of the Company.

Perhaps the trick of pretending to each section that only it would be affected was wise—I don’t know. It was working, and I suppose that is the touchstone of wisdom. Naples knew that something was going on in Rome, of course, but was doubtful about the Milanese Republic. The Romans were in no doubt at all about Milan, but weren’t sure about the Duchy of Monaco, down the Riviera shore. And the man on the street, if he gave it a thought at all, must have been sure that such faraway places as America and China were escaping entirely.

I suppose it was clever—there was no apparent panic. The trick took away the psychological horror of world catastrophe and replaced it with only a local terror, no different in kind than an earthquake or a flood. And there was always the sack of gold at the end of every catastrophe: Blue Bolt would pay for damage, with a free and uncounting hand.

Except that this time, of course, Blue Bolt would not, could not, pay at all.

* * * *

By noon, Benedetto was out of bed.

He shouldn’t have been, but he was conscious and we could not make him stay put—short of chains.

He watched the television and then listened as Rena and I brought him up to date. Like me, he was shocked and then encouraged to find that Millen Carmody was in the vaults—encouraged because it was at least a handle for us to grasp the problem with; if we could get at Carmody, perhaps we could break Defoe’s usurped power. Without him, Defoe would simply use the years while the world slept to forge a permanent dictatorship.

We got the old man to lie down, and left him. But not for long. Within the hour he came tottering to where we were sitting, staring at the television. He waved aside Rena’s quick protest.

“There is no time for rest, my daughter,” he said. “Do not scold me. I have a task.”

Rena said worriedly, “Dear, you must stay in bed. The doctor said—”

“The doctor,” Benedetto said formally, “is a fool. Shall I allow us to die here? Am I an ancient idiot, or am I Benedetto dell’Angela who with Slovetski led twenty thousand men?”

Rena said, “Please! You’re sick!”

“Enough.” Benedetto wavered, but stood erect. “I have telephoned. I have learned a great deal. The movement—” he leaned against the wall for support—“was not planned by fools. We knew there might be bad days; we do not collapse because a few of us are put out of service by the Company. I have certain emergency numbers to call; I call them. And I find—” he paused dramatically—“that there is news. Slovetski has escaped!”

I said, “That’s impossible! Defoe wouldn’t let him go!”

“Perhaps Slovetski did not consult him,” Benedetto said with dignity. “At any rate, he is free and not far from here. And he is the answer we have sought, you understand.”

“How?” I demanded. “What can he do that we can’t?”

Benedetto smiled indulgently, though the smile was strained. His wound must have been giving him hell; it had had just enough time to stiffen up. He said, “Leave that to Slovetski, Thomas. It is his métier, not yours. I shall go to him now.”

Well, I did what I could; but Benedetto was an iron-necked old man. I forbade him to leave and he laughed at me. I begged him to stay and he thanked me—and refused. Finally I abandoned him to Rena and Zorchi.

Zorchi gave up almost at once. “A majestic man!” he said admiringly, as he rolled into the room where I was waiting, on his little power cart. “One cannot reason with him.”

And Rena, in time, gave up, too. But not easily. She was weeping when she rejoined me.

* * * *

She had been unable even to get him to let her join him, or to consider taking someone else with him; he said it was his job alone. She didn’t even know where he was going. He had said it was not permissible, in so critical a situation, for him to tell where Slovetski was.

Zorchi coughed. “As to that,” he said, “I have already taken the liberty of instructing one of my associates to be ready. If the Signore has gone to meet Slovetski, my man is following him…”

So we waited, while the television announcers grew more and more grim-lipped and imperative.

I listened with only half my mind. Part of my thoughts were with Benedetto, who should have been in a hospital instead of wandering around on some dangerous mission. And partly I was still filled with the spectacle that was unfolding before us.

It was not merely a matter of preserving human lives. It was almost as important to provide the newly awakened men and women, fifty years from now, with food to eat and the homes and tools and other things that would be needed.

Factories and transportation gear—according to the telecasts—were being shut down and sealed to stand up under the time that would pass—“weeks,” according to the telecast, but who needed to seal a tool in oil for a few weeks? Instructions were coming hourly over the air on what should be protected in each home, and how it was to be done. Probably even fifty years would not seriously damage most of the world’s equipment—if the plans we heard on the air could be efficiently carried out.

But the farms were another matter. The preserving of seeds was routine, but I couldn’t help wondering what these flat Italian fields would look like in fifty untended years. Would the radiocobalt sterilize even the weeds? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t know. If not, would the Italian peninsula once again find itself covered with the dense forests that Caesar had marched through, where Spartacus and his runaway slaves had lurked and struck out against the Senators?

And how many millions would die while the forests were being cleared off the face of the Earth again to make way for grain? Synthetic foods and food from the sea might solve that—the Company could find a way. But what about the mines—three, four and five thousand feet down—when the pumps were shut off and the underground water seeped in? What about the rails that the trains rode on? You could cosmoline the engines, perhaps, but how could you protect a million miles of track from the rains of fifty years?

So I sat there, watching the television and waiting. Rena was too nervous to stay in one place. Zorchi had mysterious occupations of his own. I sat and stared at the cathode screen.

Until the door opened behind me, and I turned to look.

Rena was standing there. Her face was an ivory mask. She clutched the door as her father had a few hours before; I think she looked weaker and sicker than he.

I said, for the first time, “Darling!” She stood silent, staring at me. I asked apprehensively, “What is it?”

The pale lips opened, but it was a moment before she could frame the words. Then her voice was hard to hear. “My father,” she said. “He reached the place where he was meeting Slovetski, but the expediters were there before him. They shot him down in the street. And they are on their way here.”

CHAPTER XVII

It was quick and brutal. Somehow Benedetto had been betrayed; the expediters had known where he had come from. And that was the end of that.

They came swarming down on us in waves, at least a hundred of them, to capture a man, a girl and a cripple—Zorchi’s servants had deserted us, melting into the hemp fields like roaches into a garbage dump. Zorchi had a little gun, a Beretta; he fired it once and wounded a man.

The rest was short and unpleasant.

They bound us and gagged us and flew us, trussed like game for the spit, to the clinic. I caught a glimpse of milling mobs outside the long, low walls as we came down. Then all I could see was the roof of the copter garage.

We were brought to a tiny room where Defoe sat at a desk. The Underwriter was smiling. “Hello, Thomas,” he said, his eyes studying the bruise on my cheek. He turned toward Rena consideringly. “So this is your choice, eh, Thomas?” He studied Rena coolly. “Hardly my type. Still, by sticking with me, you could have had a harem.”

Bound as I was, I started forward. Something hit me in the back at my first step, driving a hot rush of agony up from my kidneys. Defoe watched me catch my breath without a change of expression.

“My men are quite alert, Thomas. Please do not try that again. Once is amusing, but twice would annoy me.” He sighed. “I seem to have been wrong about you, Thomas. Perhaps because I needed someone’s help, I overestimated you. I thought long ago that beneath your conditioning you had brains. Manning is a machine, good for taking orders. Dr. Lawton is loyal, but not intelligent. And between loyalty and intelligence, I’ll take brains. Loyalty I can provide for myself.” He nodded gravely at the armed expediters.

Zorchi spat. “Kill us, butcher,” he ordered. “It is enough I die without listening to your foolish babbling.”

Defoe considered him. “You interest me, Signore. A surprise, finding you revived and with Wills. Before we’re finished, you must tell me about that.”

I saw Zorchi bristle and open his mouth, but a cold, suddenly calculating idea made me interrupt. “To get dell’Angela out as an attendant, I needed a patient for him to wheel. Zorchi had money, and I expected gratitude when I revived him later. It wasn’t hard getting Lawton’s assistant to stack his cocoon near Benedetto’s.”

“Lawton!” Defoe grimaced, but seemed to accept the story. He smiled at me suddenly. “I had hopes for you, then. That escape was well done—simple, direct. A little crude, but a good beginning. You could have been my number one assistant, Thomas. I thought of that when I heard of the things you were saying after Marianna died—I thought you might be awaking.”

I licked my lips. “And when you picked me up after Marianna’s death, and bailed me out of jail, you made sure the expediter corps had information that I was possibly not reliable. You made sure the information reached the underground, so they would approach me and I could spy for you. You wanted a patsy!”

The smile was gleaming this time. “Naturally, until you could prove yourself. And of course, I had you jailed for the things you said because I wanted it that way. A pity all my efforts were wasted on you, Thomas. I’m afraid you’re not equipped to be a spy.”

It took everything I had, but this time I managed to smile back. “On which side, Defoe? How many spies know you’ve got Millen Carmody down in Bay—”

That hit him. But I didn’t have time to enjoy it. He made a sudden gesture, and the expediters moved. This time, when they dragged me down, it was very bad.

* * * *

When I came to, I was in another room. Zorchi and Rena were with me, but not Defoe. It was a preparation chamber, racked with instruments, furnished with surgical benches.

A telescreen was flickering and blaring unheeded at one end of the room. I caught a glimpse of scenes of men, women and children standing in line, going in orderly queues through the medical inspections, filing into the clinic and its local branch stations for the sleep drug. The scenes were all in Naples; but they must have been, with local variations, on every telescreen on the globe.

Dr. Lawton appeared. He commanded coldly: “Take your clothes off.”

I think that was the most humiliating moment of all.

It was, of course, only a medical formality. I knew that the suspendees had to be nude in their racks. But the very impersonality of the proceeding made it ugly. Reluctantly I began to undress, as did Rena, silent and withdrawn, and Zorchi, sputtering anger and threats. My whole body was a mass of redness; in a few hours the red would turn to purple and black, where the hoses of the expediters had caressed me.

Or did a suspendee bruise? Probably not. But it was small satisfaction.

Lawton was looking smug; no doubt he had insisted on the privilege of putting us under himself after I’d blamed him for Zorchi’s escape. I couldn’t blame him; I would have returned the favor with great joy.

Well, I had wanted to reach Millen Carmody, and Defoe was granting my wish. We might even lie on adjacent racks in Bay 100. After what I’d told Defoe, we should rate such reserved space!

Lawton approached with the hypospray, and a pair of expediters grabbed my arms. He said: “I want to leave one thought with you, Wills. Maybe it will give you some comfort.” His smirk told me that it certainly would not. “Only Defoe and I can open Bay 100,” he reminded me. “I don’t think either of us will; and I expect you will stay there a long, long time.”

He experimentally squirted a faint mist from the tip of the hypospray and nodded satisfaction. He went on: “The suspension is effective for a long time—several hundred years, perhaps. But not forever. In time the enzymes of the body begin to digest the body itself.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I don’t know if the sleeping brain knows it is pain or not. If it does, you’ll know what it feels like to dissolve in your own gutwash…”

He smiled. “Good night,” he crooned, and bent over my arm.

The spray from the end of the hypo felt chilly, but not at all painful. It was as though I had been touched with ice; the cold clung, and spread.

I was vaguely conscious of being dumped on one of the surgical tables, even more vaguely aware of seeing Rena slumping across another.

The light in the room yellowed, flickered and went out.

I thought I heard Rena’s voice…

Then I heard nothing. And I saw nothing. And I felt nothing, except the penetrating cold, and then even the cold was gone.

CHAPTER XVIII

My nerves throbbed with the prickling of an infinity of needles. I was cold—colder than I had ever been. And over everything else came the insistent, blurred voice of Luigi Zorchi.

“Weels! Weels!”

At first it was an annoyance. Then, abruptly, full consciousness came rushing back, bringing some measure of triumph with it. It had worked! My needling of Defoe and my concealing of Zorchi’s ability to revive himself had succeeded in getting us all put into Bay 100, where the precious hypodermic and fluid were hidden. After being pushed from pillar to post and back, even that much success was enough to shock me into awareness.

My heart was thumping like a rusty cargo steamer in a high sea. My lungs ached for air and burned when they got it. But I managed to open my eyes to see Zorchi bending over me. Beyond him, I saw the blue-lighted sterilizing lamps, the door that opened from inside, and the racked suspendees of Bay 100.

“It is time! But now finally you awake, you move!” Zorchi grumbled. “The body of Zorchi does not surrender to poisons; it throws them off. But then because of these small weak legs, I must wait for you! Come, Weels, no more dallying! We have still work to do to escape this abomination!”

I sat up clumsily, but the drugs seemed to have been neutralized. I was on the bottom tier, and I managed to locate the floor with my legs and stand up. “Thanks, Zorchi,” I told him, trying to avoid looking at his ugly, naked body and the things that were almost his legs.

“Thanks are due,” he admitted. “I am a modest man who expects no praise, but I have done much. I cannot deny it. It took greatness to crawl through this bay to find you. On my hands and these baby knees, Weels, I crawled. Almost, I am overcome with wonder at so heroic— But I digress. Weels, waste no more time in talking. We must revive the others who are above my reach. Then let us, for God, go and find food.”

Somehow, though I was still weak, I managed to follow Zorchi and drag down the sacks containing Rena and Carmody. And while waiting for them to revive, I began to realize how little chance we would have to escape this time, naked and uncertain of what state affairs were in. I also realized what might happen if Lawton or Defoe decided to check up on Bay 100 now!

For the few minutes while Rena revived and recognized me, and while I explained how I’d figured it out, it was worth any risk. Then finally, Carmody stirred and sat up. Maybe we looked enough like devils in a blue hell to justify his first expression.

He wasn’t much like my mental image of the great Millen Carmody. His face was like his picture, but it was an older face and haggard under the ugly light. Age was heavy on him, and he couldn’t have been a noble figure at any time. Now he was a pot-bellied little man with scrawny legs and a faint tremble to his hands.

But there was no fat in his mind as he tried to absorb our explanations while he answered our questions in turn. He’d come to Naples, bringing his personal physician, Dr. Lawton. His last memory was of Lawton giving him a shot to relieve his indigestion.

It must have been rough to wake up here after that and find what a mess had been made of the world. But he took it, and his questions became sharper as he groped for the truth. Finally he sat back, nodding sickly. “Defoe!” he said bitterly. “Well, what do we do now, Mr. Wills?”

It shook me. I’d unconsciously expected him to take over at once. But the eyes of Rena and Zorchi also turned to me. Well, there wasn’t much choice. We couldn’t stay here and risk discovery. Nor could we hide anywhere in the clinic; when Defoe found us gone, no place would be safe.

“We pray,” I decided. “And if prayers help, maybe we’ll find some way out.”

“I can help,” Carmody offered. He grimaced. “I know this place and the combination to the private doors. Would it help if we reached the garage?”

I didn’t know, but the garage was half a mile beyond the main entrance. If we could steal a car, we might make it. We had to try.

There were sounds of activity when we opened the door, but the section we were in seemed to be filled, and the storing of suspendees had moved elsewhere.

We shut and relocked the door and followed Carmody through the seemingly endless corridors, with Zorchi hobbling along, leaning on Rena and me and sweating in agony. We offered to carry him, but he would have none of that. We moved further and further back, while the sight of Carmody’s round, bare bottom ahead ripped my feeling of awe for him into smaller and smaller shreds.

He stopped at a door I had almost missed and his fingers tapped out something on what looked like an ornamental pattern. The door opened to reveal stairs that led down two flights, winding around a small elevator shaft. At the bottom was a long corridor that must be the one leading underground to the garage. Opposite the elevator was another door, and Carmody worked its combination to reveal a storeroom, loaded with supplies the expediters might need.

He ripped a suit of the heavy gray coveralls off the wall and began donning them. “Radiation suits,” he explained. They were ugly things, but better than nothing. Anyone seeing us in them might think we were on official business. Zorchi shook off our help and somehow got into a pair. Then he grunted and began pulling hard-pellet rifles and bandoliers of ammunition off the wall.

* * * *

“Now, Weels, we are prepared. Let them come against us. Zorchi is ready!”

“Ready to kill yourself!” I said roughly. “Those things take practice!”

“And again I am the freak—the case who can do nothing that humans can do, eh, Weels?” He swore thickly, and there was something in his voice that abruptly roughened it. “Never Zorchi the man! There are Sicilians who would tell you different, could they open dead mouths to speak of their downed planes!”

“He was the best jet pilot Naples had,” Rena said quietly.

It was my turn to curse. He was right; I hadn’t thought of him as a man, or considered that he could do anything but regrow damaged tissues. “I’m sorry, Luigi!”

“No matter.” He sighed, and then shrugged. “Come, take arms and ammunition and let us be out of this place. Even the nose of Zorchi can stand only so much of the smell of assassins!”

We moved down the passage, staggering along for what seemed to be hours, expecting every second to run into some official or expediter force. But apparently the passage wasn’t being used much during the emergency. We finally reached stairs at the other end and headed up, afraid to attract attention by taking the waiting elevator.

At the top, Carmody frowned as he studied the side passages and doors. “Here, I guess,” he decided. “This may still be a less used part of the garage.” He reached for the door.

I stopped him. “Wait a minute. Is there any way back in, once we leave?”

“The combination will work—the master combination used by the Company heads. Otherwise, these doors are practically bomb-proof!” He pressed the combination and opened the door a crack.

Outside, I could see what seemed to be a small section of the Company car pool. There were sounds of trucks, but none were moving nearby. I saw a few men working on trucks a distance from us. Maybe luck was on our side.

I pointed to the nearest expediter patrol wagon—a small truck, really, enclosed except for the driver’s seat. “That one, if there’s fuel. We’ll have to act as if we had a right to it, and hope for the best. Zorchi, can you manage it that far?”

“I shall walk like a born assassin,” he assured me, but sweat began popping onto his forehead at what he was offering. Yet there was no sign of the agony he must have felt as he followed and managed to climb into the back with Rena and Carmody.

The fuel gauge was at the half mark and, as yet, there was no cry of alarm. I gunned the motor into life, watching the nearest workmen. They looked up casually, and then went back to their business. Ahead, I could see a clear lane toward the exit, with a few other trucks moving in and out. I headed for it, my hair prickling at the back of my neck.

We reached the entrance, passed through it, and were soon blending into the stream of cars that were passing the clinic on their way out for more suspension cases.

The glass doors of the entrance were gone now, and workmen were putting up huge steel ones in their place, even while a steady stream of cases were hobbling or being carried into the clinic. Most of them were old or shabby, I noticed. The class-D type. The last ones to be admitted. We must have spent more time in the vault than I’d thought, and zero hour was drawing near.

Beyond the clinic, the whole of Anzio was a mass of abandoned cars that seemed to stretch for miles, and the few buildings not boarded up were obviously class-D dwellings, too poor to worry about. I cursed my way through a jam-up of trucks, and managed to find one of the side roads.

Then I pressed down on the throttle as far as I dared without attracting attention, until I could find a safe place to turn off with no other cars near to see me.

“Where to?” I asked. We couldn’t go back to Zorchi’s, since any expediter investigation would start there. Maybe we’d never be missed, but I couldn’t risk it. If we had to, we could use some abandoned villa and hide out, but I was hoping for a better suggestion.

Zorchi looked blank, and Rena shrugged. “If we could only find Nikolas—” she suggested doubtfully.

I shook my head. I’d had a chance to think about that a little while the expediters took us to see Defoe, and I didn’t like it. The leader of the revolution had apparently been captured by Defoe. According to Benedetto dell’Angela, he’d escaped. Yet Defoe hadn’t tried to pump us about him. And when Benedetto set out to meet him, the expediters had descended at once.

It made an ugly picture. I had no wish to go looking for the man.

“There’s my place,” Carmody said finally. “I had places all over the world, kept ready for me and stocked. If Defoe let it be thought that I had retired, he must have kept them all up as I’d have done. Wait, let me orient myself. Up that road.”

Places all over the world, with food that was wasted, and with servants who might never see their master! And I’d been brought up believing that the Underwriters were men of quiet, simple tastes! Carmody’s clay feet were beginning to crumble up to the navel!

* * * *

The villa was surrounded by trees, on a low hill that overlooked an artificial lake. It had been sealed off, but the combination lock yielded to Carmody’s touch. There were beds made up and waiting, freezers stocked with food that sent Zorchi into ecstasy, and even a complete file of back issues of the Company paper. Carmody headed for those, with the look of a man hunting his lost past. He had a lot of catching up to do.

But it was the television set that interested me. It was still working, with taped material being broadcast. The appeal had been stepped up, asking for order and cooperation; I recognized the language as being pitched toward the lower classes now, though. And the clicking of a radiation-counter sounded as a constant background, with occasional shots of its meter, the needle well into the danger area.

Zorchi joined me and Rena, dribbling crumbs of meat down his beard. He snorted as he caught sight of the counter. “There is a real one in the other room, and it registers higher,” he said. “It is interesting. For me, of no import. Doctors whom I trust have said Defoe is wrong; my body can resist damage from radiation—and perhaps even from old age. But for you and the young lady…”

He shut up at my expression, but the tape cut off and a live announcer came on before I could say anything. “A bulletin just in,” he said, “shows that the government of Naples has unanimously passed a moratorium on all contracts, obligations and indebtedness for the duration of the emergency. The Company has just followed this with a declaration that it will extend the moratorium to include all crimes against the Company. During the emergency, the clinics will be available to all without prejudice, Director Defoe said today.”

“A trap,” Rena guessed. “We wouldn’t have a chance, anyhow. But, Tom, does the other mean that—”

“It means your father was wrong,” I answered. “As of right now—and probably in every government at the same time—the Company has been freed from any responsibility.”

It didn’t make any difference, of course. Benedetto had expected that everyone must secretly hate the Company as he did; he hadn’t realized that men who have just been saved from the horrible danger of radiation death aren’t going to turn against the agency that saved them. And damn it, the Company was saving them, after its opponents had risked annihilation of the race. Defoe would probably make sure the suspendees were awakened at a rate where he could keep absolute power, but not from any danger of bankruptcy.

* * * *

Carmody had come out and listened, attracted by the broadcast radiation clicking, apparently. Now he asked enough questions to discover Benedetto’s idea, and shook his head.

“It wouldn’t work,” he agreed with me. “Even if I still had control, I couldn’t permit such a thing. What good would it do? Could money payments make food for a revived world, Miss dell’Angela? Would bankrupting the only agency capable of rebuilding the Earth be a thing of honor? Besides, even with what I’ve read, I can see no hope. There’s nothing we can do.”

“But if you can arouse the other Underwriters against Defoe,” she insisted, “at least you can prevent his type of world!”

He shook his head. “How? All communications are in his hands. Even if I could fly to the Home Office, most of the ones I could trust—and there apparently are a few Defoe hasn’t been able to retire—would be scattered, out of my reach. A week ago, there might have been a chance. Now, it’s impossible. Impossible.”

He shook his head sadly and wandered back toward the library. I could see that in his secret thoughts, he was wishing we’d left him safely in the vault. Maybe it would have been just as well.

“Cheer up,” I told Rena. “Carmody’s an old man—too old to think in terms of direct action, even when it’s necessary. Defoe doesn’t own the world yet!”

But later, when I located the books I wanted in the library and went out into the vine-covered bower in the formal garden, I wasn’t as confident as I’d pretended.

Thinking wasn’t a pleasant job, after all the years when I’d let others do my thinking for me. But now I had to do it for myself. Otherwise, the only alternative was to plan some means of quick death for us all before the radiation got too intense. And I couldn’t accept that.

Rena had managed something Marianna couldn’t have conceived—she’d quietly relinquished her fate into my hands, gambling on me with everything she had. Whether I wanted to or not, I’d taken the responsibility. Carmody was an old man; one who hadn’t been able to keep Defoe from taking over in the first place. And Zorchi—well, he was Zorchi.

That night, the radiation detector suddenly took a sharp lift, its needle crossing over into the red. It was probably only a local rise. But it didn’t make my thinking any more comfortable.

* * * *

It was at breakfast that next morning when I finally took it up with Carmody. “Just what will the situation be at the clinic after they close down? How many will be kept awake? And what about their defenses?”

He frowned, trying to see my idea. Then he shrugged. “Too many, Tom. We had plotted out a course for such things as this a number of times in Planning. And our mob psychologists warned that there’d inevitably be a few who for one reason or another wouldn’t come in in time, but who would then grow desperate and try to break in. Outlaws, looters, procrastinators, fanatics. That sort. So for some time, there should be at least twenty guards kept alert. And that’s enough to defend a clinic. Atomic cannon at every entrance, of course, and the clinics are bombproof.”

“Twenty, eh? And how about Defoe and Lawton? Will they sleep?” It seemed logical that they couldn’t stay out of suspension for the whole fifty years or so. There’d be no profit to gaining a world after they were too old to use it.

“Not at first. There’s a great deal of final administrative work to be done. There’s a chamber equipped to keep a hundred or so men awake with radiation washed from the air, and containing adequate supplies, in cable contact with other clinics. They’ll be there. Later, they’ll take shifts, with only a couple of men awake at a time, I suppose. They may age a little that way, but not much.”

He frowned again, and then slowly nodded. “It could be done, if we had some way to wait safely for six months. Getting back in is no problem for me.”

“It’s going to be done,” I told him. “And a lot sooner. Are you willing to take the chance?”

“Have I any choice?” He shrugged again. “Do you think I haven’t been sick at the idea of a man like Defoe in command of the Company for as long as he lives? Tom, my family started the Company. I’ve got an obligation to restore it to its right course. If there’s any chance of keeping Defoe from being emperor of the world, I’ve got to take it. If you can put me in a position where I can get the honest Underwriters together again, where we can set up the Company as it was—”

“Why? So this will happen all over again?”

He looked shocked at Rena’s question. “I don’t blame you for being bitter, Miss dell’Angela. But with Defoe gone—”

“The Company made Defoe possible. In fact, it made him and Slovetski inevitable,” I told him flatly. “That’s its one great crime. Whenever you take power completely out of the hands of the many, it winds up in fewer and fewer hands. Those histories I was reading last night prove that. Carmody, what do you know about your own Company? Or the world? Leave the consolidation of power in Company hands out of it, and what has happened to progress?”

He frowned. “Well, we’ve leveled off a bit. We had to. We couldn’t risk—”

“Exactly. You couldn’t risk research that would lead to increased longevity—too many pensioners. You couldn’t risk going to Mars—unpredictable dangers. You had to make the world fit actuarial charts. I remember seeing one of the first suspendees awakened. He expected things we could have done fifty years ago—and never will do. How many men today work their way out of their class? And why have classes so rigidly stratified? I’ve been reading your own speeches of nearly fifty years ago. I’ve got them here, together with some tables. Like to see them?”

He took the papers silently and began going through them, his shock giving way to a grudging realization. Maybe without the jolt of his awakening, he’d have laughed them off, but nothing was easy to dismiss with the hell brewing outside. At last he looked up.

“Tom, I’ll admit the many times when I’ve been worried. I’ve considered starting research again countless times. I’ve been aware that dependence was growing too heavy on the Company. But we can’t just toss it aside. It did bring an end to major war, when such a war would have ruined the Earth completely. It showed that nobody had to starve—that hardly anyone had to lack for any necessity, or die for lack of care. You can’t throw that away.”

“You can throw away its unrelated power.” I knew I didn’t have the answers. All this had been growing slowly in my mind since I’d first found Benedetto a political prisoner, but a lifetime wasn’t enough to think it out, even with the books I’d found.

But I had to try. “In the middle ages, they had morality and politics tied into one bundle, Carmody. The church ruled. It wasn’t good and they finally had to divorce church and state. Maybe the same applies to administrative politics and economics. The Company has shown what can be done economically. The church has survived as a great moral force outside material power. Now let’s see if we can’t put things in perspective.

“There’s a precedent. The United States—the old government—was set up on the idea of balance of power: an elected Congress for the people to handle legislative tasks, a selected President to handle executive affairs, and a Judiciary mostly independent. On a world scale, as it can be done today—since the Company has really made it one world—the same can be done, with something like the Company to insure economics.”

“I suppose every man who had any idealism has thought the same,” Carmody said slowly. He sighed softly. “I remember trying to preach it to my father when I was just out of college. You’re right. But can you set up such a perfect government? Can I? Tell me how, Tom, and I’ll give you your chance, if I can.”

Zorchi laughed cynically, but that was what I’d hoped Carmody might say.

“All right,” I told him. “We can’t do it. No one man is fit to rule, ever, or to establish rule. Oh, I had wish-dreams, a few days ago, I suppose, about what I’d do, if! But men have set out to establish new systems before, and done good jobs of it. Read the Constitution—a system put together artificially by expert political thinkers, and good for two hundred years, at least! And they didn’t have our opportunities. For the first time, the world has to wait. Get the best minds you can, Carmody. Give them twenty-five years to work it out. They can come up with an answer. And then, when the world is awakened, you can start with it, fresh, without upsetting any old order. Is that your answer?”

“Most of it.” There was a sudden light in his old eyes. “Yes, the sleep does make the chance possible. But how are you going to get the experts and assemble them?”

I pointed to Zorchi. “Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He’s a jet pilot who can get all over the world. And he can move outside, without needing to worry about radiation.”

“So?” Zorchi snorted again. “So, I am now your messenger, Weels! Do you think I would trouble myself so much for all of you, Weels?”

I grinned at him. “You defiantly speak of being a man. That makes you part of the human race. I’m simply taking you at your word.”

“So?” he repeated, his face wooden. “Such a messenger would have much power, Weels. Suppose I choose to be Zorchi the ruler?”

“Not while Zorchi the man is also Zorchi the freak,” I said with deliberate cruelty. “Go look at yourself.”

And suddenly he smiled, his lips drawing back from his teeth. “Weels, for the first time you are honest. And for that as well as that I am a man, I will be Zorchi the messenger. But first, should we not decide on a plan of action? Or do we first rule and then conquer?”

“We wait first,” I told him.

On the wall, the radiation indicator clicked steadily, its needle moving further into the red.

CHAPTER XIX

The second day, the television went off the air with the final curt announcement that anyone not inside the clinics at noon would be left outside permanently. Then the set went dead, leaving only the clucking and beeping of our own radiation indicator. I’d thrown it out twice and brought it back both times.

Civilization had ended on the third day, though all the conveniences in the villa went on smoothly, except for the meter reading that told us nothing could be smooth. It was higher than the predictions I had heard, though I still hoped that was only a sporadic local phenomenon that would level out later. In the face of that, it was hard to believe that even a few men would remain outside the clinics, though I was counting on it.

We waited another twenty-four hours, forcing ourselves to sit in the villa, discussing plans, when our nerves were yelling for action. We had only an estimate to go on. If we got there too soon, there would be more awake than we could handle. Too late and we’d be radiation cases, good for nothing but the vaults.

It was a relief to leave at last, taking our weapons in the truck. We were wearing the radiation suits, hoping they’d protect us, and Zorchi spent the last two days devising pads and straps to cushion and strengthen his developing legs.

The world was dead. Cars had been abandoned in the middle of the road, making driving difficult.

The towns and villas were deserted, boarded up or simply abandoned. We might have been the last men on Earth, and we felt that we were as we headed for Anzio. This wasn’t just a road, or Naples—or all of Italy. It was the world.

Then Rena pointed. Ahead, a boy was walking beside a dog, the animal’s left rear leg bound and splintered as if it had been broken. I started to slow, then forced myself to drive on. As we passed, I saw that the boy was about fourteen, and his face was dirty and tear-streaked. He shook one fist at us, and came trudging on.

“If we win, we’ll have the door open when he gets there,” Rena said. “For him and his dog! If not, it won’t matter how long it takes him. You couldn’t stop, Tom.”

It didn’t make me feel any better. But now dusk was falling, and we slowed, waiting until it was dark to park quietly near the garage. In front of the entrance, I could see a small ring of fires, and by their light a few figures moving about. They were madmen, of course—and yet, probably less mad than others who must be prowling through the towns, looting for things they could never use.

It seemed incredible that anyone could be outside, but the psychologists had apparently been right. These were determined men, willing to wait for the forlorn chance that some miracle might give them a futile, even more forlorn chance to try battering down the great doors. Maybe somewhere in the world, such a group might succeed. But not here. As I watched, there was a crackle of automatic gunfire from the entrance. The guards were awake, all right, and not taking chances on any poor devil getting too close.

* * * *

There were no guards in the vault garage. We were prepared in case someone might be stationed inside the private entrance, as much prepared as we could be; since Carmody had been listed as still living, an ordinary guard who recognized him would probably let us in first and then try to report—giving us time to handle him. But we were lucky. The door opened to Carmody’s top-secret combination.

“We designed such combinations into a few doors in case of internal revolution locally while no Underwriters were around. We never considered having an Underwriter lead a revolution from outside,” he whispered to us.

The underground passage was deserted, and this time Carmody led through another corridor, to a stairs that seemed to wind up forever. Zorchi groaned, then caught himself.

“It leads to the main reception room,” Carmody said.

With the men outside, most of the guards who still remained awake might be there. But we had to chance it. We stopped when we reached the top, catching our breath while Zorchi sank to the floor, writhing silently.

Then Rena threw back the door, Zorchi’s rifle poked through, and I was leaping for the main door controls, hoping the memory I had was accurate. I was nearly to them when the two guards standing beside them turned.

They yelled, just as my rifle spat. At that range, I couldn’t miss. And behind, I heard Zorchi’s gun spit. The second guard slumped sickly to the floor, holding his stomach. I grabbed for the controls, while other yells sounded, and feet began pounding toward me.

There was no time to look back. The doors were slowly moving apart and Carmody was beside me, smashing a maul from the storeroom onto the electronic controls of the atomic cannon. I twisted between the opening doors.

“We’ve seized the vaults,” I shouted. “We need help. Any man who joins us will be saved!”

I couldn’t wait to watch, but I heard a hoarse, answering shout, and the sound of feet.

Carmody’s maul had ruined the door controls. But the other guards were nearly on us. I saw two more sprawled on the floor. Zorchi hadn’t missed. Then Carmody’s fingers had found another of the private doors that looked like simple panels here. Rena and Carmody were through, and I yanked Zorchi after me, just as a bullet whined over his head. Behind us, I heard uncontrolled yelling as men from outside began pouring in.

It was our only hope. They had to take care of the guards, who were still probably shocked at finding us inside. We headed for the private quarters where Defoe would be, praying that there would be only a few there.

* * * *

This passage was useless to us, though. It led from office to office for the doctors who superintended here. We came out into an office, watching our chance for the hall we had to take. I could see the men who had been outside in action now. A few had guns of some kind, but the clubs in the hands of the others were just as deadly in such a desperation attack; men who had seen themselves already dead weren’t afraid of chances. About a score of the expediter guards were trying to hold off at least twice their number.

Then the hall seemed clear and we leaped into it. Suddenly gongs began ringing everywhere. Some guard had finally reached or remembered the alarm system. Carmody cursed, and tried to move faster.

The small private vault for the executives lay through the administration quarters and down several levels, before it was entered through a short passageway. Carmody had mapped it for me often enough. But he knew it by physical memory, which was better than my training. He’d also taught me the combination, but I left the door to his practiced fingers when we came to it.

The elevator wasn’t up. We couldn’t wait. We raced down the stairs that circled it. Here Carmody’s age told against him, and he fell behind. Rena and I were going down neck and neck with Zorchi throwing himself along with us. He had dropped his rifle and picked up a submachine gun from one of the fallen guards, and he clung to it now, using only one hand on the rail.

It was a reflection on a gun-barrel that saved us. The picked expediters were hidden in the dark mouth of the passageway, waiting for us to turn the stairs. But I caught a gleam of metal, and threw up my gun. Instantly, Zorchi was beside me, the submachine spitting as quickly as I could fire the first shot. “Aim for the wall. Ricochet!”

The ambushers had counted too much on surprise. They weren’t ready to have the tables turned, nor for the trick Zorchi had suggested. Here we couldn’t fire directly, but the bouncing shots worked almost as well. There were screams of men being hit, and the crazed pandemonium of others suddenly afraid.

Shots came toward us, but the wall that protected them—or was supposed to—ruined their shooting.

Zorchi abruptly dropped, landing with a thud on his side. I grunted sickly, thinking he was hit.

Then I saw the submachine gun point squarely into the passageway. It began spitting out death. By the time we could reach him, the expediters were dead or dying. There had been seven of them.

Zorchi staggered into the passage, through the bodies, crying something. I jumped after him, blinking my eyes to make out what he had seen. Then I caught sight of a door at the back being silently closed. It was a thick, massive slab, like the door to a bank vault.

Zorchi made a final leap that brought a sob of anguish as he landed on his weak legs, but his gun barrel slapped into the slit of opening. The door ground against it, strained and stopped. Zorchi pulled the trigger briefly.

For a second, then, there was silence. A second later, Defoe’s voice came out through the thin slit. “You win. Dr. Lawton and I are alone and unarmed. We’re coming out.”

The door began opening again, somewhat jerkily this time. I watched it, expecting a trick, but there was none.

Inside the vault, the first room was obviously for guards and for the control of the equipment needed to wash all contamination out of the air and to provide the place with security for a century, even if all the rest of the Earth turned into a radioactive hell.

Lawton was slumped beside the controls, his head cradled in his arms. But at the sight of us, he stood up groggily, his mouth open, and shock on his face.

Defoe’s eyes widened a trifle, but he stood quietly, and the bleak smile never faltered. “Congratulations, Thomas,” he said. “My one fault again—I underrated the opposition. I wasn’t expecting miracles. Hello, Millen. Fancy meeting you here.”

“Search the place,” I ordered.

Carmody went past the two without looking at them, with Rena close behind. A minute later, I heard a triumphant shout. They came back with a cringing man who seemed totally unlike the genial Sam Gogarty who had first introduced me to fine food and to Rena. His eyes were on Carmody, and his skin was gray white. He started to babble incoherently.

Carmody grinned at him. “You’ve got things twisted, Gogarty. Tom Wills is in charge of this affair.” He turned toward one of the smaller offices. “As I remember it, there should be a transmitting setup in here. I want to make sure it works. If it does, some of the Underwriters are going to get a surprise, unless they’re suspended.”

Gogarty watched him go, and then sank slowly to a chair, shaking his head as he looked up at me. His lips twisted into bitter resignation. “You wouldn’t understand, Tom. All my life, worked for things. Class-C, digging in a mine, eating Class-D, getting no fun, so I could buy Class-B employment. Then Class-A. Not many can do it, but I sweated it out. Thirty years living like a dog and killing myself with work and study. Not even a real woman until I met Susan, and she went to Defoe. But I wanted it easier for the young men. I wanted everybody to have a good life. No harm to anyone. Pull together, and forget the tough times. Then you had to come and blow the roof off…”

* * * *

I felt sick. It was probably all true, and few men could make it. But if that’s what it took to advance under the Company rules, it was justification enough for our fight. “You’ll be all right, Sam,” I told him. “You’ll go to sleep with the others. And when you wake up, you may have to work like hell again, but it’ll be to rebuild the Earth, not to ruin it. Maybe there’ll even be a chance with Susan again.”

Defoe laughed sardonically. “Very nice, Thomas. And I suppose you mean it. What’s in the future for me?”

“Suspension until the new government gets organized and can decide your case. I’d like to vote now for permanent suspension.”

His face lost some of his amusement. Then he shrugged. “All right, I suppose I knew that. But now will you satisfy my curiosity? Just how did you work the business with Bay 100?”

“What happened to Slovetski?” I asked. I couldn’t be sure about some of my suspicions over Benedetto’s death, but I couldn’t take chances that the man might still be loose somewhere, or else hiding out here until we were off guard.

He shook his head. “I can answer, but I’m waiting for a better offer.”

“Sam?” I asked.

Gogarty nodded slowly. “All right, Tom. I guess you’re the boss now. And I think I’m even glad of it. I always liked you. I’ll answer about Slovetski.”

Defoe snarled and swung, then saw my rifle coming up, and straightened again. “You win once more, Thomas. Your great international rebel cooperated with us very nicely after we caught him. We arranged for him to receive all calls to his most secret hideout right here in this room. It netted us his fellow conspirators—including your father, Miss dell’Angela!”

She gasped faintly, but her head came up at once. “Nikolas was no traitor. You’re lying!”

“Why should I lie?” he asked. “With the right use of certain drugs, any man can become a traitor. And Dr. Lawton is an expert on drugs.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

He shrugged. “How should I know? He wanted a radioactive world, so I let him enjoy it. We put him outside just before we closed the doors permanently.”

Gogarty nodded confirmation. I turned it over. He might even have been one of the men waiting outside. But it wouldn’t matter. Without his organization and with a world where life outside was impossible, Slovetski’s power was finished.

I turned to Zorchi. “The men who broke in will be going crazy soon,” I told him. “While Rena finds the paging system and reassures them they’ll all be treated in the reception room, how about getting Lawton to locate and revive a couple of the doctors you know and trust?”

* * * *

Rena came back from the paging system, and Zorchi prodded Lawton with the gun, heading him toward the files that would show the location of the doctors. Gogarty stood up doubtfully, but I shook my head. Zorchi was able to handle a man of Lawton’s type, even without full use of his legs, and I couldn’t trust Gogarty yet.

“You can give me a hand with Defoe, Sam,” I suggested. “We’d better strap him down first.”

Gogarty nodded, and then suddenly let out a shocked cry, and was cringing back!

In the split second when both Rena and I had looked away, Defoe had whipped out an automatic and was now covering us, his teeth exposed in a taut smile. “Never underestimate an opponent, Thomas,” he said. “And never believe what he says. You should have searched me, you know.”

The gun was centered on Rena, and he waited, as if expecting me to make some move. All I could do was stand there, cursing myself. I’d thought of everything—except the obvious!

Defoe backed toward the door and slipped around it, drawing its heavy weight slowly shut until only a crack showed. Then he laughed. “Give my love to Millen,” he said, and laughed softly.

I jumped for the door, but his feet were already moving out of the passage. The door began opening again, but I knew it was too late. Then, it was open. And amazingly, Defoe stood not ten feet away.

At the other end of the passage, a ragged bloody figure was standing, swaying slowly from side to side, holding a rifle. I took a second look to recognize Nikolas Slovetski. He was moving slowly toward Defoe. And now Defoe jerked back and began frantically digging for the automatic he must have pocketed.

Slovetski leaped, tossing the gun aside in a way that indicated it must have been empty. A bullet from Defoe’s automatic caught his shoulder in mid-leap, but it couldn’t stop him. He crashed squarely on Defoe, swinging a knife as the other went down. It missed, ringing against the hard floor.

I’d come unfrozen by then. I kicked the knife aside and grabbed the gun from Defoe’s hands. Slovetski lay limp on him, and I rolled the smaller man aside.

Defoe was out cold from the blow of his head hitting the floor. Gogarty had come out behind me and now began binding him up. He opened his eyes slowly, blinked, and tried to grin as he stared at the bonds. He swung his head to the figure on the floor beside him. “Shall we go quietly, Nikolas?” he asked, as Gogarty picked him up and carried him back to the private vault.

But his sarcasm was wasted on Slovetski. The man must have been dying as he stumbled and groped his way toward the place where he knew Defoe must be. And the bullet in the shoulder had finished him. Rena bent over him, a faint sob on her lips.

Surprisingly, he fought his way back to consciousness, staring up at her. “Rena,” he said weakly. “Benedetto! I loved him. I—” Then his head rolled toward me. “At least, I lived to die in a revolution, Thomas. Dirty business, revolution. When in the course of human events, it becomes—” He died before he could finish. I went looking for Lawton, to make sure Defoe was suspended at once. He’d be the last political suspendee, if I had anything to do with it, but there would be a certain pleasure in watching Lawton do the job.

CHAPTER XX

The doors of the reception hall were closed again, but there was no lock now. One of the two doctors whom Zorchi had trusted was there now, waiting for the stragglers who came in slowly as a result of our broadcast. We couldn’t reach them all, of course, but some could be saved. The men who had fought with us were treated and suspended. Even the boy and his dog had finally reached us and been put away.

In the main room of the executive vault, Carmody was waiting for Rena and me as we came in, haggard from lack of sleep, but somehow younger-looking than he had been since we had first revived him.

He stood up, managing a tired smile. “The first work’s done, Tom,” he said. “It wasn’t too hard, once they learned Defoe was suspended; a lot of the others were afraid of him, I guess. So far, I’ve only contacted the ones I can trust, but it’s a beginning. I’ve gotten tapes of their delegation of authority to you as acting assistant Chief Underwriter. I guess the factor that influenced them most was your willingness to give up all hopes of suspension for the emergency. And having Zorchi was a help, too—one man like him is worth an army now. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”

He stumbled out, heading toward the sleeping quarters.

Well, I had the chance I’d wanted. And I had his promise to put off suspension until things were running properly. With time to develop a small staff, and with a chance to begin the work of locating the men to study the problems that had to be solved, I couldn’t ask for much more.

Zorchi grinned at me. “Emperor Weels!” he mocked.

I grinned back. “If you ever say that seriously, Luigi, I want you to say it with a bullet through my brain. I’ve seen enough cases of power corrupting.”

For a second, he studied me. “If that day should come, then there shall be the bullet. But now, even I must sleep,” he said.

Then he glanced at Rena. “I have left orders that a priest should be wakened.”

She colored faintly.

“You’ll be best man, I suppose?” I asked.

This time, even his beard couldn’t conceal his amusement. “Is Zorchi not always the best man?” he asked as he left us alone.

I stared at the vault that would be my home for the next twenty-five or fifty years—until I was an old man, and the rest of the world was ready to be awakened. “It’s a lousy place to spend a honeymoon,” I told Rena.

She leaned against me. “But perhaps a good place to bring up children,” she said. “A place to teach them that their children will have a good world, Tom. That’s all a woman ever wants, I guess.”

I drew her to me. It was a good way to think of the future, whatever happened. And it would be a better world, where the virtues of the Company could be used.

Probably it wouldn’t be perfect.

Even the best form of government all the experts could devise couldn’t offer a permanent solution. But it could give men a chance to fight their way to a still better world.

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A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

PLAGUE OF PYTHONS

THE DAY OF THE BOOMER DUKES

MY LADY GREENSLEEVES

THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD

PYTHIAS

SEARCH THE SKY (written with C. M. Kornbluth)

THE HATED

THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR

SURVIVAL KIT

PREFERRED RISK (written with Lester del Rey)