Short Fiction

Time and Time Again

Blinded by the bomb-flash and numbed by the narcotic injection, he could not estimate the extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was dying. Around him, in the darkness, voices sounded as through a thick wall.

“They mighta left mosta these Joes where they was. Half of them won’t even last till the truck comes.”

“No matter; so long as they’re alive, they must be treated,” another voice, crisp and cultivated, rebuked. “Better start taking names, while we’re waiting.”

“Yes, sir.” Fingers fumbled at his identity badge. “Hartley, Allan; Captain, G5, Chem. Research AN/73/D. Serial, SO-23869403J.”

“Allan Hartley!” The medic officer spoke in shocked surprise. “Why, he’s the man who wrote Children of the Mist, Rose of Death, and Conqueror’s Road!”

He tried to speak, and must have stirred; the corpsman’s voice sharpened.

“Major, I think he’s part conscious. Mebbe I better give him ’nother shot.”

“Yes, yes; by all means, sergeant.”

Something jabbed Allan Hartley in the back of the neck. Soft billows of oblivion closed in upon him, and all that remained to him was a tiny spark of awareness, glowing alone and lost in a great darkness.

The Spark grew brighter. He was more than a something that merely knew that it existed. He was a man, and he had a name, and a military rank, and memories. Memories of the searing blue-green flash, and of what he had been doing outside the shelter the moment before, and memories of the monthlong siege, and of the retreat from the north, and memories of the days before the War, back to the time when he had been little Allan Hartley, a schoolboy, the son of a successful lawyer, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

His mother he could not remember; there was only a vague impression of the house full of people who had tried to comfort him for something he could not understand. But he remembered the old German woman who had kept house for his father, afterward, and he remembered his bedroom, with its chintz-covered chairs, and the warm-colored patch quilt on the old cherry bed, and the tan curtains at the windows, edged with dusky red, and the morning sun shining through them. He could almost see them, now.

He blinked. He could see them!

For a long time, he lay staring at them unbelievingly, and then he deliberately closed his eyes and counted ten seconds, and as he counted, terror gripped him. He was afraid to open them again, lest he find himself blind, or gazing at the filth and wreckage of a blasted city, but when he reached ten, he forced himself to look, and gave a sigh of relief. The sunlit curtains and the sun-gilded mist outside were still there.

He reached out to check one sense against another, feeling the rough monk’s cloth and the edging of maroon silk thread. They were tangible as well as visible. Then he saw that the back of his hand was unscarred. There should have been a scar, souvenir of a rough-and-tumble brawl of his cub reporter days. He examined both hands closely. An instant later, he had sat up in bed and thrown off the covers, partially removing his pajamas and inspecting as much of his body as was visible.

It was the smooth body of a little boy.

That was ridiculous. He was a man of forty-three; an army officer, a chemist, once a best-selling novelist. He had been married, and divorced ten years ago. He looked again at his body. It was only twelve years old. Fourteen, at the very oldest. His eyes swept the room, wide with wonder. Every detail was familiar: the flower-splashed chair covers; the table that served as desk and catchall for his possessions; the dresser, with its mirror stuck full of pictures of aircraft. It was the bedroom of his childhood home. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. They were six inches too short to reach the floor.

For an instant, the room spun dizzily; and he was in the grip of utter panic, all confidence in the evidence of his senses lost. Was he insane? Or delirious? Or had the bomb really killed him; was this what death was like? What was that thing, about “ye become as little children”? He started to laugh, and his juvenile larynx made giggling sounds. They seemed funny, too, and aggravated his mirth. For a little while, he was on the edge of hysteria and then, when he managed to control his laughter, he felt calmer. If he were dead, then he must be a discarnate entity, and would be able to penetrate matter. To his relief, he was unable to push his hand through the bed. So he was alive; he was also fully awake, and, he hoped, rational. He rose to his feet and prowled about the room, taking stock of its contents.

There was no calendar in sight, and he could find no newspapers or dated periodicals, but he knew that it was prior to July 18, 1946. On that day, his fourteenth birthday, his father had given him a light .22 rifle, and it had been hung on a pair of rustic forks on the wall. It was not there now, nor ever had been. On the table, he saw a boys’ book of military aircraft, with a clean, new dustjacket; the flyleaf was inscribed: To Allan Hartley, from his father, on his thirteenth birthday, 7/18/45. Glancing out the window at the foliage on the trees, he estimated the date at late July or early August, 1945; that would make him just thirteen.

His clothes were draped on a chair beside the bed. Stripping off his pajamas, he donned shorts, then sat down and picked up a pair of lemon-colored socks, which he regarded with disfavor. As he pulled one on, a church bell began to clang. St. Boniface, up on the hill, ringing for early Mass; so this was Sunday. He paused, the second sock in his hand.

There was no question that his present environment was actual. Yet, on the other hand, he possessed a set of memories completely at variance with it. Now, suppose, since his environment were not an illusion, everything else were? Suppose all these troublesome memories were no more than a dream? Why, he was just little Allan Hartley, safe in his room on a Sunday morning, badly scared by a nightmare! Too much science fiction, Allan; too many comic books!

That was a wonderfully comforting thought, and he hugged it to him contentedly. It lasted all the while he was buttoning up his shirt and pulling on his pants, but when he reached for his shoes, it evaporated. Ever since he had wakened, he realized, he had been occupied with thoughts utterly incomprehensible to any thirteen-year-old; even thinking in words that would have been so much Sanskrit to himself at thirteen. He shook his head regretfully. The just-a-dream hypothesis went by the deep six.

He picked up the second shoe and glared at it as though it were responsible for his predicament. He was going to have to be careful. An unexpected display of adult characteristics might give rise to some questions he would find hard to answer credibly. Fortunately, he was an only child; there would be no brothers or sisters to trip him up. Old Mrs. Stauber, the housekeeper, wouldn’t be much of a problem; even in his normal childhood, he had bulked like an intellectual giant in comparison to her. But his father⁠—

Now, there the going would be tough. He knew that shrewd attorney’s mind, whetted keen on a generation of lying and reluctant witnesses. Sooner or later, he would forget for an instant and betray himself. Then he smiled, remembering the books he had discovered, in his late ’teens, on his father’s shelves and recalling the character of the openminded agnostic lawyer. If he could only avoid the inevitable unmasking until he had a plausible explanatory theory.

Blake Hartley was leaving the bathroom as Allan Hartley opened his door and stepped into the hall. The lawyer was bare-armed and in slippers; at forty-eight, there was only a faint powdering of gray in his dark hair, and not a gray thread in his clipped mustache. The old Merry Widower, himself, Allan thought, grinning as he remembered the white-haired but still vigorous man from whom he’d parted at the outbreak of the War.

“Morning, Dad,” he greeted.

“Morning, son. You’re up early. Going to Sunday school?”

Now there was the advantage of a father who’d cut his first intellectual tooth on Tom Paine and Bob Ingersoll; attendance at divine services was on a strictly voluntary basis.

“Why, I don’t think so; I want to do some reading, this morning.”

“That’s always a good thing to do,” Blake Hartley approved. “After breakfast, suppose you take a walk down to the station and get me a Times.” He dug in his trouser pocket and came out with a half dollar. “Get anything you want for yourself, while you’re at it.”

Allan thanked his father and pocketed the coin.

“Mrs. Stauber’ll still be at Mass,” he suggested. “Say I get the paper now; breakfast won’t be ready till she gets here.”

“Good idea.” Blake Hartley nodded, pleased. “You’ll have three-quarters of an hour, at least.”

So far, he congratulated himself, everything had gone smoothly. Finishing his toilet, he went downstairs and onto the street, turning left at Brandon to Campbell, and left again in the direction of the station. Before he reached the underpass, a dozen half-forgotten memories had revived. Here was a house that would, in a few years, be gutted by fire. Here were four dwellings standing where he had last seen a five-story apartment building. A gasoline station and a weed-grown lot would shortly be replaced by a supermarket. The environs of the station itself were a complete puzzle to him, until he oriented himself.

He bought a New York Times, glancing first of all at the date line. Sunday, August 5, 1945; he’d estimated pretty closely. The battle of Okinawa had been won. The Potsdam Conference had just ended. There were still pictures of the B-25 crash against the Empire State Building, a week ago Saturday. And Japan was still being pounded by bombs from the air and shells from offshore naval guns. Why, tomorrow, Hiroshima was due for the Big Job! It amused him to reflect that he was probably the only person in Williamsport who knew that.

On the way home, a boy, sitting on the top step of a front porch, hailed him. Allan replied cordially, trying to remember who it was. Of course; Larry Morton! He and Allan had been buddies. They probably had been swimming, or playing Commandos and Germans, the afternoon before. Larry had gone to Cornell the same year that Allan had gone to Penn State; they had both graduated in 1954. Larry had gotten into some Government bureau, and then he had married a Pittsburgh girl, and had become twelfth vice-president of her father’s firm. He had been killed, in 1968, in a plane crash.

“You gonna Sunday school?” Larry asked, mercifully unaware of the fate Allan foresaw for him.

“Why, no. I have some things I want to do at home.” He’d have to watch himself. Larry would spot a difference quicker than any adult. “Heck with it,” he added.

“Golly, I wisht I c’ld stay home from Sunday school whenever I wanted to,” Larry envied. “How about us goin’ swimmin,’ at the Canoe Club, ’safter?”

Allan thought fast. “Gee, I wisht I c’ld,” he replied, lowering his grammatical sights. “I gotta stay home, ’safter. We’re expectin’ comp’ny; coupla aunts of mine. Dad wants me to stay home when they come.”

That went over all right. Anybody knew that there was no rational accounting for the vagaries of the adult mind, and no appeal from adult demands. The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep Larry away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.

“Aw, jeepers creepers!” he blasphemed euphemistically.

“Mebbe t’morrow,” Allan said. “If I c’n make it. I gotta go, now; ain’t had breakfast yet.” He scuffed his feet boyishly, exchanged so-longs with his friend, and continued homeward.

As he had hoped, the Sunday paper kept his father occupied at breakfast, to the exclusion of any dangerous table talk. Blake Hartley was still deep in the financial section when Allan left the table and went to the library. There should be two books there to which he wanted badly to refer. For a while, he was afraid that his father had not acquired them prior to 1945, but he finally found them, and carried them onto the front porch, along with a pencil and a ruled yellow scratch pad. In his experienced future⁠—or his past-to-come⁠—Allan Hartley had been accustomed to doing his thinking with a pencil. As reporter, as novelist plotting his work, as amateur chemist in his home laboratory, as scientific warfare research officer, his ideas had always been clarified by making notes. He pushed a chair to the table and built up the seat with cushions, wondering how soon he would become used to the proportional disparity between himself and the furniture. As he opened the books and took his pencil in his hand, there was one thing missing. If he could only smoke a pipe, now!

His father came out and stretched in a wicker chair with the Times book-review section. The morning hours passed. Allan Hartley leafed through one book and then the other. His pencil moved rapidly at times; at others, he doodled absently. There was no question, any more, in his mind, as to what or who he was. He was Allan Hartley, a man of forty-three, marooned in his own thirteen-year-old body, thirty years back in his own past. That was, of course, against all common sense, but he was easily able to ignore that objection. It had been made before: against the astronomy of Copernicus, and the geography of Columbus, and the biology of Darwin, and the industrial technology of Samuel Colt, and the military doctrines of Charles de Gaulle. Today’s common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow’s utter nonsense. What he needed, right now, but bad, was a theory that would explain what had happened to him.

Understanding was beginning to dawn when Mrs. Stauber came out to announce midday dinner.

“I hope you von’t mind haffin’ it so early,” she apologized. “Mein sister, Jennie, offer in Nippenose, she iss sick; I vant to go see her, dis afternoon, yet. I’ll be back in blenty time to get supper, Mr. Hartley.”

“Hey, Dad!” Allan spoke up. “Why can’t we get our own supper, and have a picnic, like? That’d be fun, and Mrs. Stauber could stay as long as she wanted to.”

His father looked at him. Such consideration for others was a most gratifying deviation from the juvenile norm; dawn of altruism, or something. He gave hearty assent:

“Why, of course, Mrs. Stauber. Allan and I can shift for ourselves, this evening; can’t we, Allan? You needn’t come back till tomorrow morning.”

“Ach, t’ank you! T’ank you so mooch, Mr. Hartley.”

At dinner, Allan got out from under the burden of conversation by questioning his father about the War and luring him into a lengthy dissertation on the difficulties of the forthcoming invasion of Japan. In view of what he remembered of the next twenty-four hours, Allan was secretly amused. His father was sure that the War would run on to mid-1946.

After dinner, they returned to the porch, Hartley père smoking a cigar and carrying out several law books. He only glanced at these occasionally; for the most part, he sat and blew smoke rings, and watched them float away. Some thrice-guilty felon was about to be triumphantly acquitted by a weeping jury; Allan could recognize a courtroom masterpiece in the process of incubation.

It was several hours later that the crunch of feet on the walk caused father and son to look up simultaneously. The approaching visitor was a tall man in a rumpled black suit; he had knobby wrists and big, awkward hands; black hair flecked with gray, and a harsh, bigoted face. Allan remembered him. Frank Gutchall. Lived on Campbell Street; a religious fanatic, and some sort of lay preacher. Maybe he needed legal advice; Allan could vaguely remember some incident⁠—

“Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Gutchall. Lovely day, isn’t it?” Blake Hartley said.

Gutchall cleared his throat. “Mr. Hartley, I wonder if you could lend me a gun and some bullets,” he began, embarrassedly. “My little dog’s been hurt, and it’s suffering something terrible. I want a gun, to put the poor thing out of its pain.”

“Why, yes; of course. How would a 20-gauge shotgun do?” Blake Hartley asked. “You wouldn’t want anything heavy.”

Gutchall fidgeted. “Why, er, I was hoping you’d let me have a little gun.” He held his hands about six inches apart. “A pistol, that I could put in my pocket. It wouldn’t look right, to carry a hunting gun on the Lord’s day; people wouldn’t understand that it was for a work of mercy.”

The lawyer nodded. In view of Gutchall’s religious beliefs, the objection made sense.

“Well, I have a Colt .38-special,” he said, “but you know, I belong to this Auxiliary Police outfit. If I were called out for duty, this evening, I’d need it. How soon could you bring it back?”

Something clicked in Allan Hartley’s mind. He remembered, now, what that incident had been. He knew, too, what he had to do.

“Dad, aren’t there some cartridges left for the Luger?” he asked.

Blake Hartley snapped his fingers. “By George, yes! I have a German automatic I can let you have, but I wish you’d bring it back as soon as possible. I’ll get it for you.”

Before he could rise, Allan was on his feet.

“Sit still, Dad; I’ll get it. I know where the cartridges are.” With that, he darted into the house and upstairs.

The Luger hung on the wall over his father’s bed. Getting it down, he dismounted it, working with rapid precision. He used the blade of his pocketknife to unlock the endpiece of the breechblock, slipping out the firing pin and buttoning it into his shirt pocket. Then he reassembled the harmless pistol, and filled the clip with 9-millimeter cartridges from the bureau drawer.

There was an extension telephone beside the bed. Finding Gutchall’s address in the directory, he lifted the telephone, and stretched his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. Then he dialed Police Headquarters.

“This is Blake Hartley,” he lied, deepening his voice and copying his father’s tone. “Frank Gutchall, who lives at⁠ ⁠… take this down”⁠—he gave Gutchall’s address⁠—“has just borrowed a pistol from me, ostensibly to shoot a dog. He has no dog. He intends shooting his wife. Don’t argue about how I know; there isn’t time. Just take it for granted that I do. I disabled the pistol⁠—took out the firing pin⁠—but if he finds out what I did, he may get some other weapon. He’s on his way home, but he’s on foot. If you hurry, you may get a man there before he arrives, and grab him before he finds out the pistol won’t shoot.”

“OK, Mr. Hartley. We’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

“And I wish you’d get my pistol back, as soon as you can. It’s something I brought home from the other War, and I shouldn’t like to lose it.”

“We’ll take care of that, too. Thank you, Mr. Hartley.”

He hung up, and carried the Luger and the loaded clip down to the porch.

“Look, Mr. Gutchall; here’s how it works,” he said, showing it to the visitor. Then he slapped in the clip and yanked up on the toggle loading the chamber. “It’s ready to shoot, now; this is the safety.” He pushed it on. “When you’re ready to shoot, just shove it forward and up, and then pull the trigger. You have to pull the trigger each time; it’s loaded for eight shots. And be sure to put the safety back when you’re through shooting.”

“Did you load the chamber?” Blake Hartley demanded.

“Sure. It’s on safe, now.”

“Let me see.” His father took the pistol, being careful to keep his finger out of the trigger guard, and looked at it. “Yes, that’s all right.” He repeated the instructions Allan had given, stressing the importance of putting the safety on after using. “Understand how it works, now?” he asked.

“Yes, I understand how it works. Thank you, Mr. Hartley. Thank you, too, young man.”

Gutchall put the Luger in his hip pocket, made sure it wouldn’t fall out, and took his departure.

“You shouldn’t have loaded it,” Hartley père reproved, when he was gone.

Allan sighed. This was it; the masquerade was over.

“I had to, to keep you from fooling with it,” he said. “I didn’t want you finding out that I’d taken out the firing pin.”

“You what?”

“Gutchall didn’t want that gun to shoot a dog. He has no dog. He meant to shoot his wife with it. He’s a religious maniac; sees visions, hears voices, receives revelations, talks with the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost probably put him up to this caper. I’ll submit that any man who holds long conversations with the Deity isn’t to be trusted with a gun, and neither is any man who lies about why he wants one. And while I was at it, I called the police, on the upstairs phone. I had to use your name; I deepened my voice and talked through a handkerchief.”

“You⁠—” Blake Hartley jumped as though bee-stung. “Why did you have to do that?”

“You know why. I couldn’t have told them, ‘This is little Allan Hartley, just thirteen years old; please, Mr. Policeman, go and arrest Frank Gutchall before he goes root-toot-toot at his wife with my pappa’s Luger.’ That would have gone over big, now, wouldn’t it?”

“And suppose he really wants to shoot a dog; what sort of a mess will I be in?”

“No mess at all. If I’m wrong⁠—which I’m not⁠—I’ll take the thump for it, myself. It’ll pass for a dumb kid trick, and nothing’ll be done. But if I’m right, you’ll have to front for me. They’ll keep your name out of it, but they’d give me a lot of cheap boy-hero publicity, which I don’t want.” He picked up his pencil again. “We should have the complete returns in about twenty minutes.”

That was a ten-minute underestimate, and it was another quarter-hour before the detective-sergeant who returned the Luger had finished congratulating Blake Hartley and giving him the thanks of the Department. After he had gone, the lawyer picked up the Luger, withdrew the clip, and ejected the round in the chamber.

“Well,” he told his son, “you were right. You saved that woman’s life.” He looked at the automatic, and then handed it across the table. “Now, let’s see you put that firing pin back.”

Allan Hartley dismantled the weapon, inserted the missing part, and put it together again, then snapped it experimentally and returned it to his father. Blake Hartley looked at it again, and laid it on the table.

“Now, son, suppose we have a little talk,” he said softly.

“But I explained everything.” Allan objected innocently.

“You did not,” his father retorted. “Yesterday you’d never have thought of a trick like this; why, you wouldn’t even have known how to take this pistol apart. And at dinner, I caught you using language and expressing ideas that were entirely outside anything you’d ever known before. Now, I want to know⁠—and I mean this literally.”

Allan chuckled. “I hope you’re not toying with the rather medieval notion of possession,” he said.

Blake Hartley started. Something very like that must have been flitting through his mind. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it abruptly.

“The trouble is, I’m not sure you aren’t right,” his son continued. “You say you find me⁠—changed. When did you first notice a difference?”

“Last night, you were still my little boy. This morning⁠—” Blake Hartley was talking more to himself than to Allan. “I don’t know. You were unusually silent at breakfast. And come to think of it, there was something⁠ ⁠… something strange⁠ ⁠… about you when I saw you in the hall, upstairs.⁠ ⁠… Allan!” he burst out, vehemently. “What has happened to you?”

Allan Hartley felt a twinge of pain. What his father was going through was almost what he, himself, had endured, in the first few minutes after waking.

“I wish I could be sure, myself, Dad,” he said. “You see, when I woke, this morning, I hadn’t the least recollection of anything I’d done yesterday. August 4, 1945, that is,” he specified. “I was positively convinced that I was a man of forty-three, and my last memory was of lying on a stretcher, injured by a bomb explosion. And I was equally convinced that this had happened in 1975.”

“Huh?” His father straightened. “Did you say nineteen seventy-five?” He thought for a moment. “That’s right; in 1975, you will be forty-three. A bomb, you say?”

Allan nodded. “During the siege of Buffalo, in the Third World War,” he said, “I was a captain in G5⁠—Scientific Warfare, General Staff. There’d been a transpolar air invasion of Canada, and I’d been sent to the front to check on service failures of a new lubricating oil for combat equipment. A week after I got there, Ottawa fell, and the retreat started. We made a stand at Buffalo, and that was where I copped it. I remember being picked up, and getting a narcotic injection. The next thing I knew, I was in bed, upstairs, and it was 1945 again, and I was back in my own little thirteen-year-old body.”

“Oh, Allan, you just had a nightmare to end nightmares!” his father assured him, laughing a trifle too heartily. “That’s all!”

“That was one of the first things I thought of. I had to reject it; it just wouldn’t fit the facts. Look; a normal dream is part of the dreamer’s own physical brain, isn’t it? Well, here is a part about two thousand percent greater than the whole from which it was taken. Which is absurd.”

“You mean all this Battle of Buffalo stuff? That’s easy. All the radio commentators have been harping on the horrors of World War III, and you couldn’t have avoided hearing some of it. You just have an undigested chunk of H. V. Kaltenborn raising hell in your subconscious.”

“It wasn’t just World War III; it was everything. My four years at high school, and my four years at Penn State, and my seven years as a reporter on the Philadelphia Record. And my novels: Children of the Mist, Rose of Death, and Conqueror’s Road. They were no kid stuff. Why, yesterday I’d never even have thought of some of the ideas I used in my detective stories, that I published under a nom-de-plume. And my hobby, chemistry; I was pretty good at that. Patented a couple of processes that made me as much money as my writing. You think a thirteen-year-old just dreamed all that up? Or, here; you speak French, don’t you?” He switched languages and spoke at some length in good conversational slang-spiced Parisian. “Too bad you don’t speak Spanish, too,” he added, reverting to English. “Except for a Mexican accent you could cut with a machete, I’m even better there than in French. And I know some German, and a little Russian.”

Blake Hartley was staring at his son, stunned. It was some time before he could make himself speak.

“I could barely keep up with you, in French,” he admitted. “I can swear that in the last thirteen years of your life, you had absolutely no chance to learn it. All right; you lived till 1975, you say. Then, all of a sudden, you found yourself back here, thirteen years old, in 1945. I suppose you remember everything in between?” he asked. “Did you ever read James Branch Cabell? Remember Florian de Puysange, in The High Place?”

“Yes. You find the same idea in Jurgen too,” Allan said. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if Cabell mightn’t have known something he didn’t want to write.”

“But it’s impossible!” Blake Hartley hit the table with his hand, so hard that the heavy pistol bounced. The loose round he had ejected from the chamber toppled over and started to roll, falling off the edge. He stooped and picked it up. “How can you go back, against time? And the time you claim you came from doesn’t exist, now; it hasn’t happened yet.” He reached for the pistol magazine, to insert the cartridge, and as he did, he saw the books in front of his son. “Dunne’s Experiment with Time,” he commented. “And J. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena. Are you trying to work out a theory?”

“Yes.” It encouraged Allan to see that his father had unconsciously adopted an adult-to-adult manner. “I think I’m getting somewhere, too. You’ve read these books? Well, look, Dad; what’s your attitude on precognition? The ability of the human mind to exhibit real knowledge, apart from logical inference, of future events? You think Dunne is telling the truth about his experiences? Or that the cases in Tyrrell’s book are properly verified, and can’t be explained away on the basis of chance?”

Blake Hartley frowned. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “The evidence is the sort that any court in the world would accept, if it concerned ordinary, normal events. Especially the cases investigated by the Society for Psychical Research: they have been verified. But how can anybody know of something that hasn’t happened yet? If it hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t exist, and you can’t have real knowledge of something that has no real existence.”

“Tyrrell discusses that dilemma, and doesn’t dispose of it. I think I can. If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind. And if any moment other than the bare present exists, then all time must be totally present; every moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment,” Allan said.

“Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each being the bare present moment of the next. What I’m postulating is the perpetual coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in space.”

“Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that’s all right,” the father agreed. “But how about the ‘Passage of Time’?”

“Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window. I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic, because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”

“That seems all right. But what’s your car window?”

“If all time is totally present, then you must exist simultaneously at every moment along your individual life span,” Allan said. “Your physical body, and your mind, and all the thoughts contained in your mind, each at its appropriate moment in sequence. But what is it that exists only at the bare moment we think of as now?”

Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an intellectual equal.

“Please, teacher; what?”

“Your consciousness. And don’t say, ‘What’s that?’ Teacher doesn’t know. But we’re only conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is ‘now,’ and it was ‘now’ when you asked that question, and it’ll be ‘now’ when I stop talking, but each is a different moment. We imagine that all those nows are rushing past us. Really, they’re standing still, and our consciousness is whizzing past them.”

His father thought that over for some time. Then he sat up. “Hey!” he cried, suddenly. “If some part of our ego is time-free and passes from moment to moment, it must be extraphysical, because the physical body exists at every moment through which the consciousness passes. And if it’s extraphysical, there’s no reason whatever for assuming that it passes out of existence when it reaches the moment of the death of the body. Why, there’s logical evidence for survival, independent of any alleged spirit communication! You can toss out Patience Worth, and Mrs. Osborne Leonard’s Feda, and Sir Oliver Lodge’s son, and Wilfred Brandon, and all the other spirit-communicators, and you still have evidence.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Allan confessed. “I think you’re right. Well, let’s put that at the bottom of the agenda and get on with this time business. You ‘lose consciousness’ as in sleep; where does your consciousness go? I think it simply detaches from the moment at which you go to sleep, and moves backward or forward along the line of moment-sequence, to some prior or subsequent moment, attaching there.”

“Well, why don’t we know anything about that?” Blake Hartley asked. “It never seems to happen. We go to sleep tonight, and it’s always tomorrow morning when we wake; never day-before-yesterday, or last month, or next year.”

“It never⁠ ⁠… or almost never⁠ ⁠… seems to happen; you’re right there. Know why? Because if the consciousness goes forward, it attaches at a moment when the physical brain contains memories of the previous, consciously unexperienced, moment. You wake, remembering the evening before, because that’s the memory contained in your mind at that moment, and back of it are memories of all the events in the interim. See?”

“Yes. But how about backward movement, like this experience of yours?”

“This experience of mine may not be unique, but I never heard of another case like it. What usually happens is that the memories carried back by the consciousness are buried in the subconscious mind. You know how thick the wall between the subconscious and the conscious mind is. These dreams of Dunne’s, and the cases in Tyrrell’s book, are leakage. That’s why precognitions are usually incomplete and distorted, and generally trivial. The wonder isn’t that good cases are so few; it’s surprising that there are any at all.” Allan looked at the papers in front of him. “I haven’t begun to theorize about how I managed to remember everything. It may have been the radiations from the bomb, or the effect of the narcotic, or both together, or something at this end, or a combination of all three. But the fact remains that my subconscious barrier didn’t function, and everything got through. So, you see, I am obsessed⁠—by my own future identity.”

“And I’d been afraid that you’d been, well, taken-over by some⁠ ⁠… some outsider.” Blake Hartley grinned weakly. “I don’t mind admitting, Allan, that what’s happened has been a shock. But that other⁠ ⁠… I just couldn’t have taken that.”

“No. Not and stayed sane. But really, I am your son; the same entity I was yesterday. I’ve just had what you might call an educational shortcut.”

“I’ll say you have!” His father laughed in real amusement. He discovered that his cigar had gone out, and re-lit it. “Here; if you can remember the next thirty years, suppose you tell me when the War’s going to end. This one, I mean.”

“The Japanese surrender will be announced at exactly 1901⁠—7:01 p.m. present style⁠—on August 14. A week from Tuesday. Better make sure we have plenty of grub in the house by then. Everything will be closed up tight till Thursday morning; even the restaurants. I remember, we had nothing to eat in the house but some scraps.”

“Well! It is handy, having a prophet in the family! I’ll see to it Mrs. Stauber gets plenty of groceries in.⁠ ⁠… Tuesday a week? That’s pretty sudden, isn’t it?”

“The Japs are going to think so,” Allan replied. He went on to describe what was going to happen.

His father swore softly. “You know, I’ve heard talk about atomic energy, but I thought it was just Buck Rogers stuff. Was that the sort of bomb that got you?”

“That was a firecracker to the bomb that got me. That thing exploded a good ten miles away.”

Blake Hartley whistled softly. “And that’s going to happen in thirty years! You know, son, if I were you, I wouldn’t like to have to know about a thing like that.” He looked at Allan for a moment. “Please, if you know, don’t ever tell me when I’m going to die.”

Allan smiled. “I can’t. I had a letter from you just before I left for the front. You were seventy-eight, then, and you were still hunting, and fishing, and flying your own plane. But I’m not going to get killed in any Battle of Buffalo, this time, and if I can prevent it, and I think I can, there won’t be any World War III.”

“But⁠—You say all time exists, perpetually coexistent and totally present,” his father said. “Then it’s right there in front of you, and you’re getting closer to it, every watch tick.”

Allan Hartley shook his head. “You know what I remembered, when Frank Gutchall came to borrow a gun?” he asked. “Well, the other time, I hadn’t been home: I’d been swimming at the Canoe Club, with Larry Morton. When I got home, about half an hour from now, I found the house full of cops. Gutchall talked the .38 officers’ model out of you, and gone home; he’d shot his wife four times through the body, finished her off with another one back of the ear, and then used his sixth shot to blast his brains out. The cops traced the gun; they took a very poor view of your lending it to him. You never got it back.”

“Trust that gang to keep a good gun,” the lawyer said.

“I didn’t want us to lose it, this time, and I didn’t want to see you lose face around City Hall. Gutchalls, of course, are expendable,” Allan said. “But my main reason for fixing Frank Gutchall up with a padded cell was that I wanted to know whether or not the future could be altered. I have it on experimental authority that it can be. There must be additional dimensions of time; lines of alternate probabilities. Something like William Seabrook’s witch-doctor friend’s Fan-Shaped Destiny. When I brought memories of the future back to the present, I added certain factors to the causal chain. That set up an entirely new line of probabilities. On no notice at all, I stopped a murder and a suicide. With thirty years to work, I can stop a world war. I’ll have the means to do it, too.”

“The means?”

“Unlimited wealth and influence. Here.” Allan picked up a sheet and handed it to his father. “Used properly, we can make two or three million on that, alone. A list of all the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont winners to 1970. That’ll furnish us primary capital. Then, remember, I was something of a chemist. I took it up, originally, to get background material for one of my detective stories; it fascinated me, and I made it a hobby, and then a source of income. I’m thirty years ahead of any chemist in the world, now. You remember I.G. Farbenindustrie? Ten years from now, we’ll make them look like pikers.”

His father looked at the yellow sheet. “Assault, at eight to one,” he said. “I can scrape up about five thousand for that⁠—Yes; in ten years⁠—Any other little operations you have in mind?” he asked.

“About 1950, we start building a political organization, here in Pennsylvania. In 1960, I think we can elect you President. The world situation will be crucial, by that time, and we had a good-natured nonentity in the White House then, who let things go till war became inevitable. I think President Hartley can be trusted to take a strong line of policy. In the meantime, you can read Machiavelli.”

“That’s my little boy, talking!”

Blake Hartley said softly. “All right, son; I’ll do just what you tell me, and when you grow up, I’ll be president.⁠ ⁠… Let’s go get supper, now.”

He Walked Around the Horses

In November 1809, an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst vanished, inexplicably and utterly.

He was en route to Hamburg from Vienna, where he had been serving as his government’s envoy to the court of what Napoleon had left of the Austrian Empire. At an inn in Perleburg, in Prussia, while examining a change of horses for his coach, he casually stepped out of sight of his secretary and his valet. He was not seen to leave the inn yard. He was not seen again, ever.

At least, not in this continuum.⁠ ⁠…

(From Baron Eugen von Krutz, Minister of Police, to His Excellency the Count von Berchtenwald, Chancellor to His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia.)

25 November, 1809

Your Excellency:

A circumstance has come to the notice of this Ministry, the significance of which I am at a loss to define, but, since it appears to involve matters of State, both here and abroad, I am convinced that it is of sufficient importance to be brought to your personal attention. Frankly, I am unwilling to take any further action in the matter without your advice.

Briefly, the situation is this: We are holding, here at the Ministry of Police, a person giving his name as Benjamin Bathurst, who claims to be a British diplomat. This person was taken into custody by the police at Perleburg yesterday, as a result of a disturbance at an inn there; he is being detained on technical charges of causing disorder in a public place, and of being a suspicious person. When arrested, he had in his possession a dispatch case, containing a number of papers; these are of such an extraordinary nature that the local authorities declined to assume any responsibility beyond having the man sent here to Berlin.

After interviewing this person and examining his papers, I am, I must confess, in much the same position. This is not, I am convinced, any ordinary police matter; there is something very strange and disturbing here. The man’s statements, taken alone, are so incredible as to justify the assumption that he is mad. I cannot, however, adopt this theory, in view of his demeanor, which is that of a man of perfect rationality, and because of the existence of these papers. The whole thing is mad; incomprehensible!

The papers in question accompany, along with copies of the various statements taken at Perleburg, a personal letter to me from my nephew, Lieutenant Rudolf von Tarlburg. This last is deserving of your particular attention; Lieutenant von Tarlburg is a very levelheaded young officer, not at all inclined to be fanciful or imaginative. It would take a good deal to affect him as he describes.

The man calling himself Benjamin Bathurst is now lodged in an apartment here at the Ministry; he is being treated with every consideration, and, except for freedom of movement, accorded every privilege.

(Report of Traugott Zeller, Oberwachtmeister, Staatspolizei, made at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

At about ten minutes past two of the afternoon of Saturday, 25 November, while I was at the police station, there entered a man known to me as Franz Bauer, an inn servant employed by Christian Hauck, at the sign of the Sword & Scepter, here in Perleburg. This man Franz Bauer made complaint to Staatspolizeikapitan Ernst Hartenstein, saying that there was a madman making trouble at the inn where he, Franz Bauer, worked. I was, therefore, directed, by Staatspolizeikapitan Hartenstein, to go to the Sword & Scepter Inn, there to act at discretion to maintain the peace.

Arriving at the inn in company with the said Franz Bauer, I found a considerable crowd of people in the common room, and, in the midst of them, the innkeeper, Christian Hauck, in altercation with a stranger. This stranger was a gentlemanly-appearing person, dressed in traveling clothes, who had under his arm a small leather dispatch case. As I entered, I could hear him, speaking in German with a strong English accent, abusing the innkeeper, the said Christian Hauck, and accusing him of having drugged his, the stranger’s, wine, and of having stolen his, the stranger’s, coach-and-four, and of having abducted his, the stranger’s, secretary and servants. This the said Christian Hauck was loudly denying, and the other people in the inn were taking the innkeeper’s part, and mocking the stranger for a madman.

On entering, I commanded everyone to be silent, in the king’s name, and then, as he appeared to be the complaining party of the dispute, I required the foreign gentleman to state to me what was the trouble. He then repeated his accusations against the innkeeper, Hauck, saying that Hauck, or, rather, another man who resembled Hauck and who had claimed to be the innkeeper, had drugged his wine and stolen his coach and made off with his secretary and his servants. At this point, the innkeeper and the bystanders all began shouting denials and contradictions, so that I had to pound on a table with my truncheon to command silence.

I then required the innkeeper, Christian Hauck, to answer the charges which the stranger had made; this he did with a complete denial of all of them, saying that the stranger had had no wine in his inn, and that he had not been inside the inn until a few minutes before, when he had burst in shouting accusations, and that there had been no secretary, and no valet, and no coachman, and no coach-and-four, at the inn, and that the gentleman was raving mad. To all this, he called the people who were in the common room to witness.

I then required the stranger to account for himself. He said that his name was Benjamin Bathurst, and that he was a British diplomat, returning to England from Vienna. To prove this, he produced from his dispatch case sundry papers. One of these was a letter of safe-conduct, issued by the Prussian Chancellery, in which he was named and described as Benjamin Bathurst. The other papers were English, all bearing seals, and appearing to be official documents.

Accordingly, I requested him to accompany me to the police station, and also the innkeeper, and three men whom the innkeeper wanted to bring as witnesses.

(Statement of the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

My name is Benjamin Bathurst, and I am Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the government of His Britannic Majesty to the court of His Majesty Franz I, Emperor of Austria, or, at least, I was until the events following the Austrian surrender made necessary my return to London. I left Vienna on the morning of Monday, the 20th, to go to Hamburg to take ship home; I was traveling in my own coach-and-four, with my secretary, Mr. Bertram Jardine, and my valet, William Small, both British subjects, and a coachman, Josef Bidek, an Austrian subject, whom I had hired for the trip. Because of the presence of French troops, whom I was anxious to avoid, I was forced to make a detour west as far as Salzburg before turning north toward Magdeburg, where I crossed the Elbe. I was unable to get a change of horses for my coach after leaving Gera, until I reached Perleburg, where I stopped at the Sword & Scepter Inn.

Arriving there, I left my coach in the inn yard, and I and my secretary, Mr. Jardine, went into the inn. A man, not this fellow here, but another rogue, with more beard and less paunch, and more shabbily dressed, but as like him as though he were his brother, represented himself as the innkeeper, and I dealt with him for a change of horses, and ordered a bottle of wine for myself and my secretary, and also a pot of beer apiece for my valet and the coachman, to be taken outside to them. Then Jardine and I sat down to our wine, at a table in the common room, until the man who claimed to be the innkeeper came back and told us that the fresh horses were harnessed to the coach and ready to go. Then we went outside again.

I looked at the two horses on the off side, and then walked around in front of the team to look at the two nigh-side horses, and as I did I felt giddy, as though I were about to fall, and everything went black before my eyes. I thought I was having a fainting spell, something I am not at all subject to, and I put out my hand to grasp the hitching bar, but could not find it. I am sure, now, that I was unconscious for some time, because when my head cleared, the coach and horses were gone, and in their place was a big farm wagon, jacked up in front, with the right front wheel off, and two peasants were greasing the detached wheel.

I looked at them for a moment, unable to credit my eyes, and then I spoke to them in German, saying, “Where the devil’s my coach-and-four?”

They both straightened, startled: the one who was holding the wheel almost dropped it.

“Pardon, excellency,” he said, “there’s been no coach-and-four here, all the time we’ve been here.”

“Yes,” said his mate, “and we’ve been here since just after noon.”

I did not attempt to argue with them. It occurred to me⁠—and it is still my opinion⁠—that I was the victim of some plot; that my wine had been drugged, that I had been unconscious for some time, during which my coach had been removed and this wagon substituted for it, and that these peasants had been put to work on it and instructed what to say if questioned. If my arrival at the inn had been anticipated, and everything put in readiness, the whole business would not have taken ten minutes.

I therefore entered the inn, determined to have it out with this rascally innkeeper, but when I returned to the common room, he was nowhere to be seen, and this other fellow, who has given his name as Christian Hauck, claimed to be the innkeeper and denied knowledge of any of the things I have just stated. Furthermore, there were four cavalrymen, Uhlans, drinking beer and playing cards at the table where Jardine and I had had our wine, and they claimed to have been there for several hours.

I have no idea why such an elaborate prank, involving the participation of many people, should be played on me, except at the instigation of the French. In that case, I cannot understand why Prussian soldiers should lend themselves to it.

(Statement of Christian Hauck, innkeeper, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Christian Hauck, and I keep an inn at the sign of the Sword & Scepter, and have these past fifteen years, and my father, and his father, before me, for the past fifty years, and never has there been a complaint like this against my inn. Your honor, it is a hard thing for a man who keeps a decent house, and pays his taxes, and obeys the laws, to be accused of crimes of this sort.

I know nothing of this gentleman, nor of his coach, nor his secretary, nor his servants; I never set eyes on him before he came bursting into the inn from the yard, shouting and raving like a madman, and crying out, “Where the devil’s that rogue of an innkeeper?”

I said to him, “I am the innkeeper; what cause have you to call me a rogue, sir?”

The stranger replied:

“You’re not the innkeeper I did business with a few minutes ago, and he’s the rascal I want to see. I want to know what the devil’s been done with my coach, and what’s happened to my secretary and my servants.”

I tried to tell him that I knew nothing of what he was talking about, but he would not listen, and gave me the lie, saying that he had been drugged and robbed, and his people kidnaped. He even had the impudence to claim that he and his secretary had been sitting at a table in that room, drinking wine, not fifteen minutes before, when there had been four noncommissioned officers of the Third Uhlans at that table since noon. Everybody in the room spoke up for me, but he would not listen, and was shouting that we were all robbers, and kidnapers, and French spies, and I don’t know what all, when the police came.

Your honor, the man is mad. What I have told you about this is the truth, and all that I know about this business, so help me God.

(Statement of Franz Bauer, inn servant, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Franz Bauer, and I am a servant at the Sword & Scepter Inn, kept by Christian Hauck.

This afternoon, when I went into the inn yard to empty a bucket of slops on the dung heap by the stables, I heard voices and turned around, to see this gentleman speaking to Wilhelm Beick and Fritz Herzer, who were greasing their wagon in the yard. He had not been in the yard when I had turned away to empty the bucket, and I thought that he must have come in from the street. This gentleman was asking Beick and Herzer where was his coach, and when they told him they didn’t know, he turned and ran into the inn.

Of my own knowledge, the man had not been inside the inn before then, nor had there been any coach, or any of the people he spoke of, at the inn, and none of the things he spoke of happened there, for otherwise I would know, since I was at the inn all day.

When I went back inside, I found him in the common room shouting at my master, and claiming that he had been drugged and robbed. I saw that he was mad and was afraid that he would do some mischief, so I went for the police.

(Statements of Wilhelm Beick and Fritz Herzer, peasants, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Wilhelm Beick, and I am a tenant on the estate of the Baron von Hentig. On this day, I and Fritz Herzer were sent into Perleburg with a load of potatoes and cabbages which the innkeeper at the Sword & Scepter had bought from the estate superintendent. After we had unloaded them, we decided to grease our wagon, which was very dry, before going back, so we unhitched and began working on it. We took about two hours, starting just after we had eaten lunch, and in all that time, there was no coach-and-four in the inn yard. We were just finishing when this gentleman spoke to us, demanding to know where his coach was. We told him that there had been no coach in the yard all the time we had been there, so he turned around and ran into the inn. At the time, I thought that he had come out of the inn before speaking to us, for I know that he could not have come in from the street. Now I do not know where he came from, but I know that I never saw him before that moment.

(From Staatspolizeikapitan Ernst Hartenstein, to His Excellency, the Baron von Krutz, Minister of Police.)

25 November, 1809

Your Excellency:

The accompanying copies of statements taken this day will explain how the prisoner, the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, came into my custody. I have charged him with causing disorder and being a suspicious person, to hold him until more can be learned about him. However, as he represents himself to be a British diplomat, I am unwilling to assume any further responsibility, and am having him sent to your excellency, in Berlin.

In the first place, your excellency, I have the strongest doubts of the man’s story. The statement which he made before me, and signed, is bad enough, with a coach-and-four turning into a farm wagon, like Cinderella’s coach into a pumpkin, and three people vanishing as though swallowed by the earth. But all this is perfectly reasonable and credible, beside the things he said to me, of which no record was made.

Your excellency will have noticed, in his statement, certain allusions to the Austrian surrender, and to French troops in Austria. After his statement had been taken down, I noticed these allusions, and I inquired, what surrender, and what were French troops doing in Austria. The man looked at me in a pitying manner, and said:

“News seems to travel slowly, hereabouts; peace was concluded at Vienna on the 14th of last month. And as for what French troops are doing in Austria, they’re doing the same things Bonaparte’s brigands are doing everywhere in Europe.”

“And who is Bonaparte?” I asked.

He stared at me as though I had asked him, “Who is the Lord Jehovah?” Then, after a moment, a look of comprehension came into his face.

“So, you Prussians concede him the title of Emperor, and refer to him as Napoleon,” he said. “Well, I can assure you that His Britannic Majesty’s government haven’t done so, and never will; not so long as one Englishman has a finger left to pull a trigger. General Bonaparte is a usurper; His Britannic Majesty’s government do not recognize any sovereignty in France except the House of Bourbon.” This he said very sternly, as though rebuking me.

It took me a moment or so to digest that, and to appreciate all its implications. Why, this fellow evidently believed, as a matter of fact, that the French Monarchy had been overthrown by some military adventurer named Bonaparte, who was calling himself the Emperor Napoleon, and who had made war on Austria and forced a surrender. I made no attempt to argue with him⁠—one wastes time arguing with madmen⁠—but if this man could believe that, the transformation of a coach-and-four into a cabbage wagon was a small matter indeed. So, to humor him, I asked him if he thought General Bonaparte’s agents were responsible for his trouble at the inn.

“Certainly,” he replied. “The chances are they didn’t know me to see me, and took Jardine for the minister, and me for the secretary, so they made off with poor Jardine. I wonder, though, that they left me my dispatch case. And that reminds me; I’ll want that back. Diplomatic papers, you know.”

I told him, very seriously, that we would have to check his credentials. I promised him I would make every effort to locate his secretary and his servants and his coach, took a complete description of all of them, and persuaded him to go into an upstairs room, where I kept him under guard. I did start inquiries, calling in all my informers and spies, but, as I expected, I could learn nothing. I could not find anybody, even, who had seen him anywhere in Perleburg before he appeared at the Sword & Scepter, and that rather surprised me, as somebody should have seen him enter the town, or walk along the street.

In this connection, let me remind your excellency of the discrepancy in the statements of the servant, Franz Bauer, and of the two peasants. The former is certain the man entered the inn yard from the street; the latter are just as positive that he did not. Your excellency, I do not like such puzzles, for I am sure that all three were telling the truth to the best of their knowledge. They are ignorant common folk, I admit, but they should know what they did or did not see.

After I got the prisoner into safekeeping, I fell to examining his papers, and I can assure your excellency that they gave me a shock. I had paid little heed to his ravings about the King of France being dethroned, or about this General Bonaparte who called himself the Emperor Napoleon, but I found all these things mentioned in his papers and dispatches, which had every appearance of being official documents. There was repeated mention of the taking, by the French, of Vienna, last May, and of the capitulation of the Austrian Emperor to this General Bonaparte, and of battles being fought all over Europe, and I don’t know what other fantastic things. Your excellency, I have heard of all sorts of madmen⁠—one believing himself to be the Archangel Gabriel, or Mohammed, or a werewolf, and another convinced that his bones are made of glass, or that he is pursued and tormented by devils⁠—but so help me God, this is the first time I have heard of a madman who had documentary proof for his delusions! Does your excellency wonder, then, that I want no part of this business?

But the matter of his credentials was even worse. He had papers, sealed with the seal of the British Foreign Office, and to every appearance genuine⁠—but they were signed, as Foreign Minister, by one George Canning, and all the world knows that Lord Castlereagh has been Foreign Minister these last five years. And to cap it all, he had a safe-conduct, sealed with the seal of the Prussian Chancellery⁠—the very seal, for I compared it, under a strong magnifying glass, with one that I knew to be genuine, and they were identical!⁠—and yet, this letter was signed, as Chancellor, not by Count von Berchtenwald, but by Baron Stein, the Minister of Agriculture, and the signature, as far as I could see, appeared to be genuine! This is too much for me, your excellency; I must ask to be excused from dealing with this matter, before I become as mad as my prisoner!

I made arrangements, accordingly, with Colonel Keitel, of the Third Uhlans, to furnish an officer to escort this man into Berlin. The coach in which they come belongs to this police station, and the driver is one of my men. He should be furnished expense money to get back to Perleburg. The guard is a corporal of Uhlans, the orderly of the officer. He will stay with the Herr Oberleutnant, and both of them will return here at their own convenience and expense.

(From Oberleutnant Rudolf von Tarlburg, to Baron Eugen von Krutz.)

26 November, 1809

Dear Uncle Eugen;

This is in no sense a formal report; I made that at the Ministry, when I turned the Englishman and his papers over to one of your officers⁠—a fellow with red hair and a face like a bulldog. But there are a few things which you should be told, which wouldn’t look well in an official report, to let you know just what sort of a rare fish has got into your net.

I had just come in from drilling my platoon, yesterday, when Colonel Keitel’s orderly told me that the colonel wanted to see me in his quarters. I found the old fellow in undress in his sitting room, smoking his big pipe.

“Come in, lieutenant; come in and sit down, my boy!” he greeted me, in that bluff, hearty manner which he always adopts with his junior officers when he has some particularly nasty job to be done. “How would you like to take a little trip in to Berlin? I have an errand, which won’t take half an hour, and you can stay as long as you like, just so you’re back by Thursday, when your turn comes up for road patrol.”

Well, I thought, this is the bait. I waited to see what the hook would look like, saying that it was entirely agreeable with me, and asking what his errand was.

“Well, it isn’t for myself, Tarlburg,” he said. “It’s for this fellow Hartenstein, the Staatspolizeikapitan here. He has something he wants done at the Ministry of Police, and I thought of you because I’ve heard you’re related to the Baron von Krutz. You are, aren’t you?” he asked, just as though he didn’t know all about who all his officers are related to.

“That’s right, colonel; the baron is my uncle,” I said. “What does Hartenstein want done?”

“Why, he has a prisoner whom he wants taken to Berlin and turned over at the Ministry. All you have to do is to take him in, in a coach, and see he doesn’t escape on the way, and get a receipt for him, and for some papers. This is a very important prisoner; I don’t think Hartenstein has anybody he can trust to handle him. The prisoner claims to be some sort of a British diplomat, and for all Hartenstein knows, maybe he is. Also, he is a madman.”

“A madman?” I echoed.

“Yes, just so. At least, that’s what Hartenstein told me. I wanted to know what sort of a madman⁠—there are various kinds of madmen, all of whom must be handled differently⁠—but all Hartenstein would tell me was that he had unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe.”

“Ha! What diplomat hasn’t?” I asked.

Old Keitel gave a laugh, somewhere between the bark of a dog and the croaking of a raven.

“Yes, exactly! The unrealistic beliefs of diplomats are what soldiers die of,” he said. “I said as much to Hartenstein, but he wouldn’t tell me anything more. He seemed to regret having said even that much. He looked like a man who’s seen a particularly terrifying ghost.” The old man puffed hard at his famous pipe for a while, blowing smoke through his mustache. “Rudi, Hartenstein has pulled a hot potato out of the ashes, this time, and he wants to toss it to your uncle, before he burns his fingers. I think that’s one reason why he got me to furnish an escort for his Englishman. Now, look; you must take this unrealistic diplomat, or this undiplomatic madman, or whatever in blazes he is, in to Berlin. And understand this.” He pointed his pipe at me as though it were a pistol. “Your orders are to take him there and turn him over at the Ministry of Police. Nothing has been said about whether you turn him over alive, or dead, or half one and half the other. I know nothing about this business, and want to know nothing; if Hartenstein wants us to play gaol warders for him, then he must be satisfied with our way of doing it!”

Well, to cut short the story, I looked at the coach Hartenstein had placed at my disposal, and I decided to chain the left door shut on the outside, so that it couldn’t be opened from within. Then, I would put my prisoner on my left, so that the only way out would be past me. I decided not to carry any weapons which he might be able to snatch from me, so I took off my saber and locked it in the seat box, along with the dispatch case containing the Englishman’s papers. It was cold enough to wear a greatcoat in comfort, so I wore mine, and in the right side pocket, where my prisoner couldn’t reach, I put a little leaded bludgeon, and also a brace of pocket pistols. Hartenstein was going to furnish me a guard as well as a driver, but I said that I would take a servant, who could act as guard. The servant, of course, was my orderly, old Johann; I gave him my double hunting gun to carry, with a big charge of boar shot in one barrel and an ounce ball in the other.

In addition, I armed myself with a big bottle of cognac. I thought that if I could shoot my prisoner often enough with that, he would give me no trouble.

As it happened, he didn’t, and none of my precautions⁠—except the cognac⁠—were needed. The man didn’t look like a lunatic to me. He was a rather stout gentleman, of past middle age, with a ruddy complexion and an intelligent face. The only unusual thing about him was his hat, which was a peculiar contraption, looking like a pot. I put him in the carriage, and then offered him a drink out of my bottle, taking one about half as big myself. He smacked his lips over it and said, “Well, that’s real brandy; whatever we think of their detestable politics, we can’t criticize the French for their liquor.” Then, he said, “I’m glad they’re sending me in the custody of a military gentleman, instead of a confounded gendarme. Tell me the truth, lieutenant; am I under arrest for anything?”

“Why,” I said, “Captain Hartenstein should have told you about that. All I know is that I have orders to take you to the Ministry of Police, in Berlin, and not to let you escape on the way. These orders I will carry out; I hope you don’t hold that against me.”

He assured me that he did not, and we had another drink on it⁠—I made sure, again, that he got twice as much as I did⁠—and then the coachman cracked his whip and we were off for Berlin.

Now, I thought, I am going to see just what sort of a madman this is, and why Hartenstein is making a State affair out of a squabble at an inn. So I decided to explore his unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe.

After guiding the conversation to where I wanted it, I asked him:

“What, Herr Bathurst, in your belief, is the real, underlying cause of the present tragic situation in Europe?”

That, I thought, was safe enough. Name me one year, since the days of Julius Caesar, when the situation in Europe hasn’t been tragic! And it worked, to perfection.

“In my belief,” says this Englishman, “the whole mess is the result of the victory of the rebellious colonists in North America, and their blasted republic.”

Well, you can imagine, that gave me a start. All the world knows that the American Patriots lost their war for independence from England; that their army was shattered, that their leaders were either killed or driven into exile. How many times, when I was a little boy, did I not sit up long past my bedtime, when old Baron von Steuben was a guest at Tarlburg-Schloss, listening open-mouthed and wide-eyed to his stories of that gallant lost struggle! How I used to shiver at his tales of the terrible winter camp, or thrill at the battles, or weep as he told how he held the dying Washington in his arms, and listened to his noble last words, at the Battle of Doylestown! And here, this man was telling me that the Patriots had really won, and set up the republic for which they had fought! I had been prepared for some of what Hartenstein had called unrealistic beliefs, but nothing as fantastic as this.

“I can cut it even finer than that,” Bathurst continued. “It was the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga. We made a good bargain when we got Benedict Arnold to turn his coat, but we didn’t do it soon enough. If he hadn’t been on the field that day, Burgoyne would have gone through Gates’ army like a hot knife through butter.”

But Arnold hadn’t been at Saratoga. I know; I have read much of the American War. Arnold was shot dead on New Year’s Day of 1776, during the storming of Quebec. And Burgoyne had done just as Bathurst had said; he had gone through Gates like a knife, and down the Hudson to join Howe.

“But, Herr Bathurst,” I asked, “how could that affect the situation in Europe? America is thousands of miles away, across the ocean.”

“Ideas can cross oceans quicker than armies. When Louis XVI decided to come to the aid of the Americans, he doomed himself and his regime. A successful resistance to royal authority in America was all the French Republicans needed to inspire them. Of course, we have Louis’s own weakness to blame, too. If he’d given those rascals a whiff of grapeshot, when the mob tried to storm Versailles in 1790, there’d have been no French Revolution.”

But he had. When Louis XVI ordered the howitzers turned on the mob at Versailles, and then sent the dragoons to ride down the survivors, the Republican movement had been broken. That had been when Cardinal Talleyrand, who was then merely Bishop of Autun, had came to the fore and become the power that he is today in France; the greatest King’s Minister since Richelieu.

“And, after that, Louis’s death followed as surely as night after day,” Bathurst was saying. “And because the French had no experience in self-government, their republic was foredoomed. If Bonaparte hadn’t seized power, somebody else would have; when the French murdered their king, they delivered themselves to dictatorship. And a dictator, unsupported by the prestige of royalty, has no choice but to lead his people into foreign war, to keep them from turning upon him.”

It was like that all the way to Berlin. All these things seem foolish, by daylight, but as I sat in the darkness of that swaying coach, I was almost convinced of the reality of what he told me. I tell you, Uncle Eugen, it was frightening, as though he were giving me a view of Hell. Gott im Himmel, the things that man talked of! Armies swarming over Europe; sack and massacre, and cities burning; blockades, and starvation; kings deposed, and thrones tumbling like tenpins; battles in which the soldiers of every nation fought, and in which tens of thousands were mowed down like ripe grain; and, over all, the Satanic figure of a little man in a gray coat, who dictated peace to the Austrian Emperor in Schoenbrunn, and carried the Pope away a prisoner to Savona.

Madman, eh? Unrealistic beliefs, says Hartenstein? Well, give me madmen who drool spittle, and foam at the mouth, and shriek obscene blasphemies. But not this pleasant-seeming gentleman who sat beside me and talked of horrors in a quiet, cultured voice, while he drank my cognac.

But not all my cognac! If your man at the Ministry⁠—the one with red hair and the bulldog face⁠—tells you that I was drunk when I brought in that Englishman, you had better believe him!

(From Count von Berchtenwald, to the British Minister.)

28 November, 1809

Honored Sir:

The accompanying dossier will acquaint you with the problem confronting this Chancellery, without needless repetition on my part. Please to understand that it is not, and never was, any part of the intentions of the government of His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm III to offer any injury or indignity to the government of His Britannic Majesty George III. We would never contemplate holding in arrest the person, or tampering with the papers, of an accredited envoy of your government. However, we have the gravest doubt, to make a considerable understatement, that this person who calls himself Benjamin Bathurst is any such envoy, and we do not think that it would be any service to the government of His Britannic Majesty to allow an impostor to travel about Europe in the guise of a British diplomatic representative. We certainly should not thank the government of His Britannic Majesty for failing to take steps to deal with some person who, in England, might falsely represent himself to be a Prussian diplomat.

This affair touches us as closely as it does your own government; this man had in his possession a letter of safe-conduct, which you will find in the accompanying dispatch case. It is of the regular form, as issued by this Chancellery, and is sealed with the Chancellery seal, or with a very exact counterfeit of it. However, it has been signed, as Chancellor of Prussia, with a signature indistinguishable from that of the Baron Stein, who is the present Prussian Minister of Agriculture. Baron Stein was shown the signature, with the rest of the letter covered, and without hesitation acknowledged it for his own writing. However, when the letter was uncovered and shown to him, his surprise and horror were such as would require the pen of a Goethe or a Schiller to describe, and he denied categorically ever having seen the document before.

I have no choice but to believe him. It is impossible to think that a man of Baron Stein’s honorable and serious character would be party to the fabrication of a paper of this sort. Even aside from this, I am in the thing as deeply as he; if it is signed with his signature, it is also sealed with my seal, which has not been out of my personal keeping in the ten years that I have been Chancellor here. In fact, the word “impossible” can be used to describe the entire business. It was impossible for the man Benjamin Bathurst to have entered the inn yard⁠—yet he did. It was impossible that he should carry papers of the sort found in his dispatch case, or that such papers should exist⁠—yet I am sending them to you with this letter. It is impossible that Baron von Stein should sign a paper of the sort he did, or that it should be sealed by the Chancellery⁠—yet it bears both Stein’s signature and my seal.

You will also find in the dispatch case other credentials, ostensibly originating with the British Foreign Office, of the same character, being signed by persons having no connection with the Foreign Office, or even with the government, but being sealed with apparently authentic seals. If you send these papers to London, I fancy you will find that they will there create the same situation as that caused here by this letter of safe-conduct.

I am also sending you a charcoal sketch of the person who calls himself Benjamin Bathurst. This portrait was taken without its subject’s knowledge. Baron von Krutz’s nephew, Lieutenant von Tarlburg, who is the son of our mutual friend Count von Tarlburg, has a little friend, a very clever young lady who is, as you will see, an expert at this sort of work: she was introduced into a room at the Ministry of Police and placed behind a screen, where she could sketch our prisoner’s face. If you should send this picture to London, I think that there is a good chance that it might be recognized. I can vouch that it is an excellent likeness.

To tell the truth, we are at our wits’ end about this affair. I cannot understand how such excellent imitations of these various seals could be made, and the signature of the Baron von Stein is the most expert forgery that I have ever seen, in thirty years’ experience as a statesman. This would indicate careful and painstaking work on the part of somebody; how, then, do we reconcile this with such clumsy mistakes, recognizable as such by any schoolboy, as signing the name of Baron Stein as Prussian Chancellor, or Mr. George Canning, who is a member of the opposition party and not connected with your government, as British Foreign secretary.

These are mistakes which only a madman would make. There are those who think our prisoner is mad, because of his apparent delusions about the great conqueror, General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon. Madmen have been known to fabricate evidence to support their delusions, it is true, but I shudder to think of a madman having at his disposal the resources to manufacture the papers you will find in this dispatch case. Moreover, some of our foremost medical men, who have specialized in the disorders of the mind, have interviewed this man Bathurst and say that, save for his fixed belief in a nonexistent situation, he is perfectly sane.

Personally, I believe that the whole thing is a gigantic hoax, perpetrated for some hidden and sinister purpose, possibly to create confusion, and to undermine the confidence existing between your government and mine, and to set against one another various persons connected with both governments, or else as a mask for some other conspiratorial activity. Only a few months ago, you will recall, there was a Jacobin plot unmasked at Köln.

But, whatever this business may portend, I do not like it. I want to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible, and I will thank you, my dear sir, and your government, for any assistance you may find possible.

From Baron Von Krutz, to The Count Von Berchtenwald. Most urgent; Most important.
To Be Delivered Immediately and in Person Regardless of Circumstances.

28 November, 1809

Count von Berchtenwald:

Within the past half hour, that is, at about eleven o’clock tonight, the man calling himself Benjamin Bathurst was shot and killed by a sentry at the Ministry of Police, while attempting to escape from custody.

A sentry on duty in the rear courtyard of the Ministry observed a man attempting to leave the building in a suspicious and furtive manner. This sentry, who was under the strictest orders to allow no one to enter or leave without written authorization, challenged him; when he attempted to run, the sentry fired his musket at him, bringing him down. At the shot, the Sergeant of the Guard rushed into the courtyard with his detail, and the man whom the sentry had shot was found to be the Englishman, Benjamin Bathurst. He had been hit in the chest with an ounce ball, and died before the doctor could arrive, and without recovering consciousness.

An investigation revealed that the prisoner, who was confined on the third floor of the building, had fashioned a rope from his bedding, his bed cord, and the leather strap of his bell pull. This rope was only long enough to reach to the window of the office on the second floor, directly below, but he managed to enter this by kicking the glass out of the window. I am trying to find out how he could do this without being heard. I can assure you that somebody is going to smart for this night’s work. As for the sentry, he acted within his orders; I have commended him for doing his duty, and for good shooting, and I assume full responsibility for the death of the prisoner at his hands.

I have no idea why the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, who, until now, was well-behaved and seemed to take his confinement philosophically, should suddenly make this rash and fatal attempt, unless it was because of those infernal dunderheads of madhouse doctors who have been bothering him. Only this afternoon they deliberately handed him a bundle of newspapers⁠—Prussian, Austrian, French, and English⁠—all dated within the last month. They wanted they said, to see how he would react. Well, God pardon them, they’ve found out!

What do you think should be done about giving the body burial?

(From the British Minister, to the Count von Berchtenwald.)

December 20th, 1809

My dear Count von Berchtenwald:

Reply from London to my letter of the 28th, which accompanied the dispatch case and the other papers, has finally come to hand. The papers which you wanted returned⁠—the copies of the statements taken at Perleburg, the letter to the Baron von Krutz from the police captain, Hartenstein, and the personal letter of Krutz’s nephew, Lieutenant von Tarlburg, and the letter of safe-conduct found in the dispatch case⁠—accompany herewith. I don’t know what the people at Whitehall did with the other papers; tossed them into the nearest fire, for my guess. Were I in your place, that’s where the papers I am returning would go.

I have heard nothing, yet, from my dispatch of the 29th concerning the death of the man who called himself Benjamin Bathurst, but I doubt very much if any official notice will ever be taken of it. Your government had a perfect right to detain the fellow, and, that being the case, he attempted to escape at his own risk. After all, sentries are not required to carry loaded muskets in order to discourage them from putting their hands in their pockets.

To hazard a purely unofficial opinion, I should not imagine that London is very much dissatisfied with this dénouement. His Majesty’s government are a hardheaded and matter-of-fact set of gentry who do not relish mysteries, least of all mysteries whose solution may be more disturbing than the original problem.

This is entirely confidential, but those papers which were in that dispatch case kicked up the devil’s own row in London, with half the government bigwigs protesting their innocence to high Heaven, and the rest accusing one another of complicity in the hoax. If that was somebody’s intention, it was literally a howling success. For a while, it was even feared that there would be questions in Parliament, but eventually, the whole vexatious business was hushed.

You may tell Count Tarlburg’s son that his little friend is a most talented young lady; her sketch was highly commended by no less an authority than Sir Thomas Lawrence, and here comes the most bedeviling part of a thoroughly bedeviled business. The picture was instantly recognized. It is a very fair likeness of Benjamin Bathurst, or, I should say, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who is King’s lieutenant governor for the Crown Colony of Georgia. As Sir Thomas Lawrence did his portrait a few years back, he is in an excellent position to criticize the work of Lieutenant von Tarlburg’s young lady. However, Sir Benjamin Bathurst was known to have been in Savannah, attending to the duties of his office, and in the public eye, all the while that his double was in Prussia. Sir Benjamin does not have a twin brother. It has been suggested that this fellow might be a half-brother, but, as far as I know, there is no justification for this theory.

The General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon, who is given so much mention in the dispatches, seems also to have a counterpart in actual life; there is, in the French army, a Colonel of Artillery by that name, a Corsican who Gallicized his original name of Napolione Bonaparte. He is a most brilliant military theoretician; I am sure some of your own officers, like General Scharnhorst, could tell you about him. His loyalty to the French monarchy has never been questioned.

This same correspondence to fact seems to crop up everywhere in that amazing collection of pseudo-dispatches and pseudo-State papers. The United States of America, you will recall, was the style by which the rebellious colonies referred to themselves, in the Declaration of Philadelphia. The James Madison who is mentioned as the current President of the United States is now living, in exile, in Switzerland. His alleged predecessor in office, Thomas Jefferson, was the author of the rebel Declaration; after the defeat of the rebels, he escaped to Havana, and died, several years ago, in the Principality of Lichtenstein.

I was quite amused to find our old friend Cardinal Talleyrand⁠—without the ecclesiastical title⁠—cast in the role of chief adviser to the usurper, Bonaparte. His Eminence, I have always thought, is the sort of fellow who would land on his feet on top of any heap, and who would as little scruple to be Prime Minister to His Satanic Majesty as to His Most Christian Majesty.

I was baffled, however, by one name, frequently mentioned in those fantastic papers. This was the English general, Wellington. I haven’t the least idea who this person might be.

Police Operation

“… there may be something in the nature of an occult police force, which operates to divert human suspicions, and to supply explanations that are good enough for whatever, somewhat in the nature of minds, human beings have⁠—or that, if there be occult mischief makers and occult ravagers, they may be of a world also of other beings that are acting to check them, and to explain them, not benevolently, but to divert suspicion from themselves, because they, too, may be exploiting life upon this earth, but in ways more subtle, and in orderly, or organised, fashion.”

Charles Fort: Lo!

John Strawmyer stood, an irate figure in faded overalls and sweat-whitened black shirt, apart from the others, his back to the weathered farm-buildings and the line of yellowing woods and the cirrus-streaked blue October sky. He thrust out a work-gnarled hand accusingly.

“That there heifer was worth two hund’rd, two hund’rd an’ fifty dollars!” he clamored. “An’ that there dog was just like one uh the fam’ly; An’ now look at’m! I don’t like t’ use profane language, but you’ns gotta do some’n about this!”

Steve Parker, the district game protector, aimed his Leica at the carcass of the dog and snapped the shutter. “We’re doing something about it,” he said shortly. Then he stepped ten feet to the left and edged around the mangled heifer, choosing an angle for his camera shot.

The two men in the gray whipcords of the State police, seeing that Parker was through with the dog, moved in and squatted to examine it. The one with the triple chevrons on his sleeves took it by both forefeet and flipped it over on its back. It had been a big brute, of nondescript breed, with a rough black-and-brown coat. Something had clawed it deeply about the head, its throat was slashed transversely several times, and it had been disemboweled by a single slash that had opened its belly from breastbone to tail. They looked at it carefully, and then went to stand beside Parker while he photographed the dead heifer. Like the dog, it had been talon-raked on either side of the head, and its throat had been slashed deeply several times. In addition, flesh had been torn from one flank in great strips.

“I can’t kill a bear outa season, no!” Strawmyer continued his plaint. “But a bear comes an’ kills my stock an’ my dog; that there’s all right! That’s the kinda deal a farmer always gits, in this state! I don’t like t’ use profane language⁠—”

“Then don’t!” Parker barked at him, impatiently. “Don’t use any kind of language. Just put in your claim and shut up!” He turned to the men in whipcords and gray Stetsons. “You boys seen everything?” he asked. “Then let’s go.”

They walked briskly back to the barnyard, Strawmyer following them, still vociferating about the wrongs of the farmer at the hands of a cynical and corrupt State government. They climbed into the State police car, the sergeant and the private in front and Parker into the rear, laying his camera on the seat beside a Winchester carbine.

“Weren’t you pretty short with that fellow, back there, Steve?” the sergeant asked as the private started the car.

“Not too short. ‘I don’t like t’ use profane language,’ ” Parker mimicked the bereaved heifer owner, and then he went on to specify: “I’m morally certain that he’s shot at least four illegal deer in the last year. When and if I ever get anything on him, he’s going to be sorrier for himself then he is now.”

“They’re the characters that always beef their heads off,” the sergeant agreed. “You think that whatever did this was the same as the others?”

“Yes. The dog must have jumped it while it was eating at the heifer. Same superficial scratches about the head, and deep cuts on the throat or belly. The bigger the animal, the farther front the big slashes occur. Evidently something grabs them by the head with front claws, and slashes with hind claws; that’s why I think it’s a bobcat.”

“You know,” the private said, “I saw a lot of wounds like that during the war. My outfit landed on Mindanao, where the guerrillas had been active. And this looks like bolo-work to me.”

“The surplus-stores are full of machetes and jungle knives,” the sergeant considered. “I think I’ll call up Doc Winters, at the County Hospital, and see if all his squirrel-fodder is present and accounted for.”

“But most of the livestock was eaten at, like the heifer,” Parker objected.

“By definition, nuts have abnormal tastes,” the sergeant replied. “Or the eating might have been done later, by foxes.”

“I hope so; that’d let me out,” Parker said.

“Ha, listen to the man!” the private howled, stopping the car at the end of the lane. “He thinks a nut with a machete and a Tarzan complex is just good clean fun. Which way, now?”

“Well, let’s see.” The sergeant had unfolded a quadrangle sheet; the game protector leaned forward to look at it over his shoulder. The sergeant ran a finger from one to another of a series of variously colored crosses which had been marked on the map.

“Monday night, over here on Copperhead Mountain, that cow was killed,” he said. “The next night, about ten o’clock, that sheepflock was hit, on this side of Copperhead, right about here. Early Wednesday night, that mule got slashed up in the woods back of the Weston farm. It was only slightly injured; must have kicked the whatzit and got away, but the whatzit wasn’t too badly hurt, because a few hours later, it hit that turkey-flock on the Rhymer farm. And last night, it did that.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the Strawmyer farm. “See, following the ridges, working toward the southeast, avoiding open ground, killing only at night. Could be a bobcat, at that.”

“Or Jink’s maniac with the machete,” Parker agreed. “Let’s go up by Hindman’s gap and see if we can see anything.”

They turned, after a while, into a rutted dirt road, which deteriorated steadily into a grass-grown track through the woods. Finally, they stopped, and the private backed off the road. The three men got out; Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a Thompson, and the private pumping a buckshot shell into the chamber of a riot gun. For half an hour, they followed the brush-grown trail beside the little stream; once, they passed a dark gray commercial-model jeep, backed to one side. Then they came to the head of the gap.

A man, wearing a tweed coat, tan field boots, and khaki breeches, was sitting on a log, smoking a pipe; he had a bolt-action rifle across his knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about thirty years old, and any bobbysoxer’s idol of the screen would have envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features. As Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging his rifle, and greeted them.

“Sergeant Haines, isn’t it?” he asked pleasantly. “Are you gentlemen out hunting the critter, too?”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that was your jeep I saw, down the road a little.” The sergeant turned to the others. “Mr. Richard Lee; staying at the old Kinchwalter place, the other side of Rutter’s Fort. This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector. And Private Zinkowski.” He glanced at the rifle. “Are you out hunting for it, too?”

“Yes, I thought I might find something, up here. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” the sergeant admitted. “It could be a bobcat. Canada lynx. Jink, here, has a theory that it’s some escapee from the paper-doll factory, with a machete. Me, I hope not, but I’m not ignoring the possibility.”

The man with the matinee-idol’s face nodded. “It could be a lynx. I understand they’re not unknown, in this section.”

“We paid bounties on two in this county, in the last year,” Parker said. “Odd rifle you have, there; mind if I look at it?”

“Not at all.” The man who had been introduced as Richard Lee unslung and handed it over. “The chamber’s loaded,” he cautioned.

“I never saw one like this,” Parker said. “Foreign?”

“I think so. I don’t know anything about it; it belongs to a friend of mine, who loaned it to me. I think the action’s German, or Czech; the rest of it’s a custom job, by some West Coast gunmaker. It’s chambered for some ultra-velocity wildcat load.”

The rifle passed from hand to hand; the three men examined it in turn, commenting admiringly.

“You find anything, Mr. Lee?” the sergeant asked, handing it back.

“Not a trace.” The man called Lee slung the rifle and began to dump the ashes from his pipe. “I was along the top of this ridge for about a mile on either side of the gap, and down the other side as far as Hindman’s Run; I didn’t find any tracks, or any indication of where it had made a kill.”

The game protector nodded, turning to Sergeant Haines.

“There’s no use us going any farther,” he said. “Ten to one, it followed that line of woods back of Strawmyer’s, and crossed over to the other ridge. I think our best bet would be the hollow at the head of Lowrie’s Run. What do you think?”

The sergeant agreed. The man called Richard Lee began to refill his pipe methodically.

“I think I shall stay here for a while, but I believe you’re right. Lowrie’s Run, or across Lowrie’s Gap into Coon Valley,” he said.

After Parker and the State policemen had gone, the man whom they had addressed as Richard Lee returned to his log and sat smoking, his rifle across his knees. From time to time, he glanced at his wrist watch and raised his head to listen. At length, faint in the distance, he heard the sound of a motor starting.

Instantly, he was on his feet. From the end of the hollow log on which he had been sitting, he produced a canvas musette-bag. Walking briskly to a patch of damp ground beside the little stream, he leaned the rifle against a tree and opened the bag. First, he took out a pair of gloves of some greenish, rubberlike substance, and put them on, drawing the long gauntlets up over his coat sleeves. Then he produced a bottle and unscrewed the cap. Being careful to avoid splashing his clothes, he went about, pouring a clear liquid upon the ground in several places. Where he poured, white vapors rose, and twigs and grass crumbled into brownish dust. After he had replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the bag, he waited for a few minutes, then took a spatula from the musette and dug where he had poured the fluid, prying loose four black, irregular-shaped lumps of matter, which he carried to the running water and washed carefully, before wrapping them and putting them in the bag, along with the gloves. Then he slung bag and rifle and started down the trail to where he had parked the jeep.

Half an hour later, after driving through the little farming village of Rutter’s Fort, he pulled into the barnyard of a rundown farm and backed through the open doors of the barn. He closed the double doors behind him, and barred them from within. Then he went to the rear wall of the barn, which was much closer the front than the outside dimensions of the barn would have indicated.

He took from his pocket a black object like an automatic pencil. Hunting over the rough plank wall, he found a small hole and inserted the pointed end of the pseudo-pencil, pressing on the other end. For an instant, nothing happened. Then a ten-foot-square section of the wall receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which had slid inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin covering of boards; the wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly camouflaged. He stepped quickly inside.

Fumbling at the right side of the opening, he found a switch and flicked it. Instantly, the massive steel plate slid back into place with a soft, oily click. As it did, lights came on within the hidden room, disclosing a great semiglobe of some fine metallic mesh, thirty feet in diameter and fifteen in height. There was a sliding door at one side of this; the man called Richard Lee opened and entered through it, closing it behind him. Then he turned to the center of the hollow dome, where an armchair was placed in front of a small desk below a large instrument panel. The gauges and dials on the panel, and the levers and switches and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered and numbered with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation, and, within instant reach of the occupant of the chair, a pistollike weapon lay on the desk. It had a conventional index-finger trigger and a hand-fit grip, but, instead of a tubular barrel, two slender parallel metal rods extended about four inches forward of the receiver, joined together at what would correspond to the muzzle by a streamlined knob of some light blue ceramic or plastic substance.

The man with the handsome immobile face deposited his rifle and musette on the floor beside the chair and sat down. First, he picked up the pistollike weapon and checked it, and then he examined the many instruments on the panel in front of him. Finally, he flicked a switch on the control board.

At once, a small humming began, from some point overhead. It wavered and shrilled and mounted in intensity, and then fell to a steady monotone. The dome about him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence, and slowly vanished. The hidden room vanished, and he was looking into the shadowy interior of a deserted barn. The barn vanished; blue sky appeared above, streaked with wisps of high cirrus cloud. The autumn landscape flickered unreally. Buildings appeared and vanished, and other buildings came and went in a twinkling. All around him, half-seen shapes moved briefly and disappeared.

Once, the figure of a man appeared, inside the circle of the dome. He had an angry, brutal face, and he wore a black tunic piped with silver, and black breeches, and polished black boots, and there was an insignia, composed of a cross and thunderbolt, on his cap. He held an automatic pistol in his hand.

Instantly, the man at the desk snatched up his own weapon and thumbed off the safety, but before he could lift and aim it, the intruder stumbled and passed outside the force-field which surrounded the chair and instruments.

For a while, there were fires raging outside, and for a while, the man at the desk was surrounded by a great hall, with a high, vaulted ceiling, through which figures flitted and vanished. For a while, there were vistas of deep forests, always set in the same background of mountains and always under the same blue cirrus-laced sky. There was an interval of flickering blue-white light, of unbearable intensity. Then the man at the desk was surrounded by the interior of vast industrial works. The moving figures around him slowed, and became more distinct. For an instant, the man in the chair grinned as he found himself looking into a big washroom, where a tall blond girl was taking a shower bath, and a pert little redhead was vigorously drying herself with a towel. The dome grew visible, coruscating with many-colored lights and then the humming died and the dome became a cold and inert mesh of fine white metal. A green light above flashed on and off slowly.

He stabbed a button and flipped a switch, then got to his feet, picking up his rifle and musette and fumbling under his shirt for a small mesh bag, from which he took an inch-wide disk of blue plastic. Unlocking a container on the instrument panel, he removed a small roll of solidograph-film, which he stowed in his bag. Then he slid open the door and emerged into his own dimension of space-time.

Outside was a wide hallway, with a pale green floor, paler green walls, and a ceiling of greenish off-white. A big hole had been cut to accommodate the dome, and across the hallway a desk had been set up, and at it sat a clerk in a pale blue tunic, who was just taking the audio-plugs of a music-box out of his ears. A couple of policemen in green uniforms, with ultrasonic paralyzers dangling by thongs from their left wrists and holstered sigma-ray needlers like the one on the desk inside the dome, were kidding with some girls in vivid orange and scarlet and green smocks. One of these, in bright green, was a duplicate of the one he had seen rubbing herself down with a towel.

“Here comes your boss-man,” one of the girls told the cops, as he approached. They both turned and saluted casually. The man who had lately been using the name of Richard Lee responded to their greeting and went to the desk. The policemen grasped their paralyzers, drew their needlers, and hurried into the dome.

Taking the disk of blue plastic from his packet, he handed it to the clerk at the desk, who dropped it into a slot in the voder in front of him. Instantly, a mechanical voice responded:

“Verkan Vall, blue-seal noble, hereditary Mavrad of Nerros. Special Chief’s Assistant, Paratime Police, special assignment. Subject to no orders below those of Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police. To be given all courtesies and cooperation within the Paratime Transposition Code and the Police Powers Code. Further particulars?”

The clerk pressed the “no”-button. The blue sigil fell out the release-slot and was handed back to its bearer, who was drawing up his left sleeve.

“You’ll want to be sure I’m your Verkan Vall, I suppose?” he said, extending his arm.

“Yes, quite, sir.”

The clerk touched his arm with a small instrument which swabbed it with antiseptic, drew a minute blood-sample, and medicated the needle prick, all in one almost painless operation. He put the blood-drop on a slide and inserted it at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. It showed the same distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample he had ready for comparison; the colloid pattern given in infancy by injection to the man in front of him, to set him apart from all the myriad other Verkan Valls on every other probability-line of paratime.

“Right, sir,” the clerk nodded.

The two policemen came out of the dome, their needlers holstered and their vigilance relaxed. They were lighting cigarettes as they emerged.

“It’s all right, sir,” one of them said. “You didn’t bring anything in with you, this trip.”

The other cop chuckled. “Remember that Fifth Level wild-man who came in on the freight conveyor at Jandar, last month?” he asked.

If he was hoping that some of the girls would want to know, what wild-man, it was a vain hope. With a blue-seal mavrad around, what chance did a couple of ordinary coppers have? The girls were already converging on Verkan Vall.

“When are you going to get that monstrosity out of our restroom,” the little redhead in green coveralls was demanding. “If it wasn’t for that thing, I’d be taking a shower, right now.”

“You were just finishing one, about fifty paraseconds off, when I came through,” Verkan Vall told her.

The girl looked at him in obviously feigned indignation.

“Why, you⁠—You parapeeper!”

Verkan Vall chuckled and turned to the clerk. “I want a strato-rocket and pilot, for Dhergabar, right away. Call Dhergabar Paratime Police Field and give them my E.T.A.; have an air-taxi meet me, and have the chief notified that I’m coming in. Extraordinary report. Keep a guard over the conveyor; I think I’m going to need it, again, soon.” He turned to the little redhead. “Want to show me the way out of here, to the rocket field?” he asked.

Outside, on the open landing field, Verkan Vall glanced up at the sky, then looked at his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he had backed the jeep into the barn, on that distant other timeline; the same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above. The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of the mountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumn colors, but where the little village of Rutter’s Fort stood on that other line of probability, the white towers of an apartment-city rose⁠—the living quarters of the plant personnel.

The rocket that was to take him to headquarters was being hoisted with a crane and lowered into the firing-stand, and he walked briskly toward it, his rifle and musette slung. A boyish-looking pilot was on the platform, opening the door of the rocket; he stood aside for Verkan Vall to enter, then followed and closed it, dogging it shut while his passenger stowed his bag and rifle and strapped himself into a seat.

“Dhergabar Commercial Terminal, sir?” the pilot asked, taking the adjoining seat at the controls.

“Paratime Police Field, back of the Paratime Administration Building.”

“Right, sir. Twenty seconds to blast, when you’re ready.”

“Ready now.” Verkan Vall relaxed, counting seconds subconsciously.

The rocket trembled, and Verkan Vall felt himself being pushed gently back against the upholstery. The seats, and the pilot’s instrument panel in front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator swept slowly over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled. By then, the high cirrus clouds Verkan Vall had watched from the field were far below; they were well into the stratosphere.

There would be nothing to do, now, for the three hours in which the rocket sped northward across the pole and southward to Dhergabar; the navigation was entirely in the electronic hands of the robot controls. Verkan Vall got out his pipe and lit it; the pilot lit a cigarette.

“That’s an odd pipe, sir,” the pilot said. “Outtime item?”

“Yes, Fourth Probability Level; typical of the whole paratime belt I was working in.” Verkan Vall handed it over for inspection. “The bowl’s natural brier-root; the stem’s a sort of plastic made from the sap of certain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker’s trademark; it’s made of elephant tusk.”

“Sounds pretty crude to me, sir.” The pilot handed it back. “Nice workmanship, though. Looks like good machine production.”

“Yes. The sector I was on is really quite advanced, for an electrochemical civilization. That weapon I brought back with me⁠—that solid-missile projector⁠—is typical of most Fourth Level culture. Moving parts machined to the closest tolerances, and interchangeable with similar parts of all similar weapons. The missile is a small bolt of cupro-alloy coated lead, propelled by expanding gases from the ignition of some nitrocellulose compound. Most of their scientific advance occurred within the past century, and most of that in the past forty years. Of course, the life-expectancy on that level is only about seventy years.”

“Humph! I’m seventy-eight, last birthday,” the boyish-looking pilot snorted. “Their medical science must be mostly witchcraft!”

“Until quite recently, it was,” Verkan Vall agreed. “Same story there as in everything else⁠—rapid advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of years of cultural inertia.”

“You know, sir, I don’t really understand this paratime stuff,” the pilot confessed. “I know that all time is totally present, and that every moment has its own past-future line of event-sequence, and that all events in space-time occur according to maximum probability, but I just don’t get this alternate probability stuff, at all. If something exists, it’s because it’s the maximum-probability effect of prior causes; why does anything else exist on any other timeline?”

Verkan Vall blew smoke at the air-renovator. A lecture on paratime theory would nicely fill in the three-hour interval until the landing at Dhergabar. At least, this kid was asking intelligent questions.

“Well, you know the principal of time-passage, I suppose?” he began.

“Yes, of course; Rhogom’s Doctrine. The basis of most of our psychical science. We exist perpetually at all moments within our lifespan; our extraphysical ego component passes from the ego existing at one moment to the ego existing at the next. During unconsciousness, the E.P.C. is ‘time-free’; it may detach, and connect at some other moment, with the ego existing at that time-point. That’s how we precog. We take an autohypno and recover memories brought back from the future moment and buried in the subconscious mind.”

“That’s right,” Verkan Vall told him. “And even without the autohypno, a lot of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires ‘instinctive’ acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness. For instance, suppose, you’re walking along North Promenade, in Dhergabar, and you come to the Martian Palace Café, and you go in for a drink, and meet some girl, and strike up an acquaintance with her. This chance acquaintance develops into a love affair, and a year later, out of jealousy, she rays you half a dozen times with a needler.”

“Just about that happened to a friend of mine, not long ago,” the pilot said. “Go on, sir.”

“Well, in the microsecond or so before you die⁠—or afterward, for that matter, because we know that the extraphysical component survives physical destruction⁠—your E.P.C. slips back a couple of years, and re-connects at some point pastward of your first meeting with this girl, and carries with it memories of everything up to the moment of detachment, all of which are indelibly recorded in your subconscious mind. So, when you re-experience the event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst, you go on to the Starway, or Nhergal’s, or some other bar. In both cases, on both timelines, you follow the line of maximum probability; in the second case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal factor.”

“And when I back-slip, after I’ve been needled, I generate a new timeline? Is that it?”

Verkan Vall made a small sound of impatience. “No such thing!” he exclaimed. “It’s semantically inadmissible to talk about the total presence of time with one breath and about generating new timelines with the next. All timelines are totally present, in perpetual coexistence. The theory is that the E.P.C. passes from one moment, on one timeline, to the next moment on the next line, so that the true passage of the E.P.C. from moment to moment is a two-dimensional diagonal. So, in the case we’re using, the event of your going into the Martian Palace exists on one timeline, and the event of your passing along to the Starway exists on another, but both are events in real existence.

“Now, what we do, in paratime transposition, is to build up a hypertemporal field to include the timeline we want to reach, and then shift over to it. Same point in the plenum; same point in primary time⁠—plus primary time elapsed during mechanical and electronic lag in the relays⁠—but a different line of secondary time.”

“Then why don’t we have past-future time travel on our own timeline?” the pilot wanted to know.

That was a question every paratimer has to answer, every time he talks paratime to the laity. Verkan Vall had been expecting it; he answered patiently.

“The Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator is like every other mechanism; it can operate only in the area of primary time in which it exists. It can transpose to any other timeline, and carry with it anything inside its field, but it can’t go outside its own temporal area of existence, any more than a bullet from that rifle can hit the target a week before it’s fired,” Verkan Vall pointed out. “Anything inside the field is supposed to be unaffected by anything outside. Supposed to be is the way to put it; it doesn’t always work. Once in a while, something pretty nasty gets picked up in transit.” He thought, briefly, of the man in the black tunic. “That’s why we have armed guards at terminals.”

“Suppose you pick up a blast from a nucleonic bomb,” the pilot asked, “or something red-hot, or radioactive?”

“We have a monument, at Paratime Police Headquarters, in Dhergabar, bearing the names of our own personnel who didn’t make it back. It’s a large monument; over the past ten thousand years, it’s been inscribed with quite a few names.”

“You can have it; I’ll stick to rockets!” the pilot replied. “Tell me another thing, though: What’s all this about levels, and sectors, and belts? What’s the difference?”

“Purely arbitrary terms. There are five main probability levels, derived from the five possible outcomes of the attempt to colonize this planet, seventy-five thousand years ago. We’re on the First Level⁠—complete success, and colony fully established. The Fifth Level is the probability of complete failure⁠—no human population established on this planet, and indigenous quasi-human life evolved indigenously. On the Fourth Level, the colonists evidently met with some disaster and lost all memory of their extraterrestrial origin, as well as all extraterrestrial culture. As far as they know, they are an indigenous race; they have a long prehistory of stone-age savagery.

“Sectors are areas of paratime on any level in which the prevalent culture has a common origin and common characteristics. They are divided more or less arbitrarily into sub-sectors. Belts are areas within sub-sectors where conditions are the result of recent alternate probabilities. For instance, I’ve just come from the Europo-American Sector of the Fourth Level, an area of about ten thousand parayears in depth, in which the dominant civilization developed on the Northwest Continent of the Major Land Mass, and spread from there to the Minor Land Mass. The line on which I was operating is also part of a sub-sector of about three thousand parayears’ depth, and a belt developing from one of several probable outcomes of a war concluded about three elapsed years ago. On that timeline, the field at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, where we took off, is part of an abandoned farm; on the site of Hagraban City is a little farming village. Those things are there, right now, both in primary time and in the plenum. They are about two hundred and fifty thousand parayears perpendicular to each other, and each is of the same general order of reality.”

The red light overhead flashed on. The pilot looked into his visor and put his hands to the manual controls, in case of failure of the robot controls. The rocket landed smoothly, however; there was a slight jar as it was grappled by the crane and hoisted upright, the seats turning in their gimbals. Pilot and passenger unstrapped themselves and hurried through the refrigerated outlet and away from the glowing-hot rocket.

An air-taxi, emblazoned with the device of the Paratime Police, was waiting. Verkan Vall said goodbye to the rocket-pilot and took his seat beside the pilot of the aircab; the latter lifted his vehicle above the building level and then set it down on the landing-stage of the Paratime Police Building in a long, side-swooping glide. An express elevator took Verkan Vall down to one of the middle stages, where he showed his sigil to the guard outside the door of Tortha Karf’s office and was admitted at once.

The Paratime Police chief rose from behind his semicircular desk, with its array of keyboards and viewing-screens and communicators. He was a big man, well past his two hundredth year; his hair was iron-gray and thinning in front, he had begun to grow thick at the waist, and his calm features bore the lines of middle age. He wore the dark-green uniform of the Paratime Police.

“Well, Vall,” he greeted. “Everything secure?”

“Not exactly, sir.” Verkan Vall came around the desk, deposited his rifle and bag on the floor, and sat down in one of the spare chairs. “I’ll have to go back again.”

“So?” His chief lit a cigarette and waited.

“I traced Gavran Sarn.” Verkan Vall got out his pipe and began to fill it. “But that’s only the beginning. I have to trace something else. Gavran Sarn exceeded his Paratime permit, and took one of his pets along. A Venusian nighthound.”

Tortha Karf’s expression did not alter; it merely grew more intense. He used one of the short, semantically ugly terms which serve, in place of profanity, as the emotional release of a race that has forgotten all the taboos and terminologies of supernaturalistic religion and sex-inhibition.

“You’re sure of this, of course.” It was less a question than a statement.

Verkan Vall bent and took cloth-wrapped objects from his bag, unwrapping them and laying them on the desk. They were casts, in hard black plastic, of the footprints of some large three-toed animal.

“What do these look like, sir?” he asked.

Tortha Karf fingered them and nodded. Then he became as visibly angry as a man of his civilization and culture-level ever permitted himself.

“What does that fool think we have a Paratime Code for?” he demanded. “It’s entirely illegal to transpose any extraterrestrial animal or object to any timeline on which space-travel is unknown. I don’t care if he is a green-seal thavrad; he’ll face charges, when he gets back, for this!”

“He was a green-seal thavrad,” Verkan Vall corrected. “And he won’t be coming back.”

“I hope you didn’t have to deal summarily with him,” Tortha Karf said. “With his title, and social position, and his family’s political importance, that might make difficulties. Not that it wouldn’t be all right with me, of course, but we never seem to be able to make either the Management or the public realize the extremities to which we are forced, at times.” He sighed. “We probably never shall.”

Verkan Vall smiled faintly. “Oh, no, sir; nothing like that. He was dead before I transposed to that timeline. He was killed when he wrecked a self-propelled vehicle he was using. One of those Fourth Level automobiles. I posed as a relative and tried to claim his body for the burial-ceremony observed on that cultural level, but was told that it had been completely destroyed by fire when the fuel tank of this automobile burned. I was given certain of his effects which had passed through the fire; I found his sigil concealed inside what appeared to be a cigarette case.” He took a green disk from the bag and laid it on the desk. “There’s no question; Gavran Sarn died in the wreck of that automobile.”

“And the nighthound?”

“It was in the car with him, but it escaped. You know how fast those things are. I found that track”⁠—he indicated one of the black casts⁠—“in some dried mud near the scene of the wreck. As you see, the cast is slightly defective. The others were fresh this morning, when I made them.”

“And what have you done so far?”

“I rented an old farm near the scene of the wreck, and installed my field-generator there. It runs through to the Hagraban Synthetics Works, about a hundred miles east of Thalna-Jarvizar. I have my this-line terminal in the girls’ rest room at the durable plastics factory; handled that on a local police-power writ. Since then, I’ve been hunting for the nighthound. I think I can find it, but I’ll need some special equipment, and a hypno-mech indoctrination. That’s why I came back.”

“Has it been attracting any attention?” Tortha Karf asked anxiously.

“Killing cattle in the locality; causing considerable excitement. Fortunately, it’s a locality of forested mountains and valley farms, rather than a built-up industrial district. Local police and wild-game protection officers are concerned; all the farmers excited, and going armed. The theory is that it’s either a wildcat of some sort, or a maniac armed with a cutlass. Either theory would conform, more or less, to the nature of its depredations. Nobody has actually seen it.”

“That’s good!” Tortha Karf was relieved. “Well, you’ll have to go and bring it out, or kill it and obliterate the body. You know why, as well as I do.”

“Certainly, sir,” Verkan Vall replied. “In a primitive culture, things like this would be assigned supernatural explanations, and imbedded in the locally accepted religion. But this culture, while nominally religious, is highly rationalistic in practice. Typical lag-effect, characteristic of all expanding cultures. And this Europo-American Sector really has an expanding culture. A hundred and fifty years ago, the inhabitants of this particular timeline didn’t even know how to apply steam power; now they’ve begun to release nuclear energy, in a few crude forms.”

Tortha Karf whistled, softly. “That’s quite a jump. There’s a sector that’ll be in for trouble, in the next few centuries.”

“That is realized, locally, sir.” Verkan Vall concentrated on relighting his pipe, for a moment, then continued: “I would predict space-travel on that sector within the next century. Maybe the next half-century, at least to the Moon. And the art of taxidermy is very highly developed. Now, suppose some farmer shoots that thing; what would he do with it, sir?”

Tortha Karf grunted. “Nice logic, Vall. On a most uncomfortable possibility. He’d have it mounted, and it’d be put in a museum, somewhere. And as soon as the first spaceship reaches Venus, and they find those things in a wild state, they’ll have the mounted specimen identified.”

“Exactly. And then, instead of beating their brains about where their specimen came from, they’ll begin asking when it came from. They’re quite capable of such reasoning, even now.”

“A hundred years isn’t a particularly long time,” Tortha Karf considered. “I’ll be retired, then, but you’ll have my job, and it’ll be your headache. You’d better get this cleaned up, now, while it can be handled. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure, now, sir. I want a hypno-mech indoctrination, first.” Verkan Vall gestured toward the communicator on the desk. “May I?” he asked.

“Certainly.” Tortha Karf slid the instrument across the desk. “Anything you want.”

“Thank you, sir.” Verkan Vall snapped on the code-index, found the symbol he wanted, and then punched it on the keyboard. “Special Chief’s Assistant Verkan Vall,” he identified himself. “Speaking from office of Tortha Karf, Chief Paratime Police. I want a complete hypno-mech on Venusian nighthounds, emphasis on wild state, special emphasis domesticated nighthounds reverted to wild state in terrestrial surroundings, extra-special emphasis hunting techniques applicable to same. The word ‘nighthound’ will do for trigger-symbol.” He turned to Tortha Karf. “Can I take it here?”

Tortha Karf nodded, pointing to a row of booths along the far wall of the office.

“Make setup for wired transmission; I’ll take it here.”

“Very well, sir; in fifteen minutes,” a voice replied out of the communicator.

Verkan Vall slid the communicator back. “By the way, sir; I had a hitchhiker, on the way back. Carried him about a hundred or so parayears; picked him up about three hundred parayears after leaving my other-line terminal. Nasty-looking fellow, in a black uniform; looked like one of these private-army storm troopers you find all through that sector. Armed, and hostile. I thought I’d have to ray him, but he blundered outside the field almost at once. I have a record, if you’d care to see it.”

“Yes, put it on,” Tortha Karf gestured toward the solidograph-projector. “It’s set for miniature reproduction here on the desk; that be all right?”

Verkan Vall nodded, getting out the film and loading it into the projector. When he pressed a button, a dome of radiance appeared on the desk top; two feet in width and a foot in height. In the middle of this appeared a small solidograph image of the interior of the conveyor, showing the desk, and the control board, and the figure of Verkan Vall seated at it. The little figure of the storm trooper appeared, pistol in hand. The little Verkan Vall snatched up his tiny needler; the storm trooper moved into one side of the dome and vanished.

Verkan Vall flipped a switch and cut out the image.

“Yes. I don’t know what causes that, but it happens, now and then,” Tortha Karf said. “Usually at the beginning of a transposition. I remember, when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago⁠—a hundred and thirty-nine, to be exact⁠—I picked up a fellow on the Fourth Level, just about where you’re operating, and dragged him a couple of hundred parayears. I went back to find him and return him to his own timeline, but before I could locate him, he’d been arrested by the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot trying to escape. I felt badly about that, but⁠—” Tortha Karf shrugged. “Anything else happen on the trip?”

“I ran through a belt of intermittent nucleonic bombing on the Second Level.” Verkan Vall mentioned an approximate paratime location.

“Aaagh! That Khiftan civilization⁠—by courtesy so called!” Tortha Karf pulled a wry face. “I suppose the intra-family enmities of the Hvadka Dynasty have reached critical mass again. They’ll fool around till they blast themselves back to the stone age.”

“Intellectually, they’re about there, now. I had to operate in that sector, once⁠—Oh, yes, another thing, sir. This rifle.” Verkan Vall picked it up, emptied the magazine, and handed it to his superior. “The supplies office slipped up on this; it’s not appropriate to my line of operation. It’s a lovely rifle, but it’s about two hundred percent in advance of existing arms design on my line. It excited the curiosity of a couple of police officers and a game-protector, who should be familiar with the weapons of their own timeline. I evaded by disclaiming ownership or intimate knowledge, and they seemed satisfied, but it worried me.”

“Yes. That was made in our duplicating shops, here in Dhergabar.” Tortha Karf carried it to a photographic bench, behind his desk. “I’ll have it checked, while you’re taking your hypno-mech. Want to exchange it for something authentic?”

“Why, no, sir. It’s been identified to me, and I’d excite less suspicion with it than I would if I abandoned it and mysteriously acquired another rifle. I just wanted a check, and Supplies warned to be more careful in future.”

Tortha Karf nodded approvingly. The young Mavrad of Nerros was thinking as a paratimer should.

“What’s the designation of your line, again?”

Verkan Vall told him. It was a short numerical term of six places, but it expressed a number of the order of ten to the fortieth power, exact to the last digit. Tortha Karf repeated it into his stenomemograph, with explanatory comment.

“There seems to be quite a few things going wrong, in that area,” he said. “Let’s see, now.”

He punched the designation on a keyboard; instantly, it appeared on a translucent screen in front of him. He punched another combination, and, at the top of the screen, under the number, there appeared:

Events, Past Elapsed Five Years.

He punched again; below this line appeared the subheading:

Events Involving Paratime Transposition.

Another code-combination added a third line:

(Attracting Public Notice Among Inhabitants.)

He pressed the start button; the headings vanished, to be replaced by page after page of print, succeeding one another on the screen as the two men read. They told strange and apparently disconnected stories⁠—of unexplained fires and explosions; of people vanishing without trace; of unaccountable disasters to aircraft. There were many stories of an epidemic of mysterious disk-shaped objects seen in the sky, singly or in numbers. To each account was appended one or more reference-numbers. Sometimes Tortha Karf or Verkan Vall would punch one of these, and read, on an adjoining screen, the explanatory matter referred to.

Finally Tortha Karf leaned back and lit a fresh cigarette.

“Yes, indeed, Vall; very definitely we will have to take action in the matter of the runaway nighthound of the late Gavran Sarn,” he said. “I’d forgotten that that was the timeline onto which the Ardrath expedition launched those antigrav disks. If this extraterrestrial monstrosity turns up, on the heels of that ‘Flying Saucer’ business, everybody above the order of intelligence of a cretin will suspect some connection.”

“What really happened, in the Ardrath matter?” Verkan Vall inquired. “I was on the Third Level, on that Luvarian Empire operation, at the time.”

“That’s right; you missed that. Well, it was one of these joint-operation things. The Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol were experimenting with a new technique for throwing a spaceship into paratime. They used the cruiser Ardrath, Kalzarn Jann commanding. Went into space about halfway to the Moon and took up orbit, keeping on the sunlit side of the planet to avoid being observed. That was all right. But then, Captain Kalzarn ordered away a flight of antigrav disks, fully manned, to take pictures, and finally authorized a landing in the western mountain range, Northern Continent, Minor Landmass. That’s when the trouble started.”

He flipped the run-back switch, till he had recovered the page he wanted. Verkan Vall read of a Fourth Level aviator, in his little airscrew-drive craft, sighting nine high-flying saucerlike objects.

“That was how it began,” Tortha Karf told him. “Before long, as other incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began sending back to know what was going on. Naturally, from the different descriptions of these ‘saucers,’ they recognized the objects as antigrav landing-disks from a spaceship. So I went to the Commission and raised atomic blazes about it, and the Ardrath was ordered to confine operations to the lower areas of the Fifth Level. Then our people on that timeline went to work with corrective action. Here.”

He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last.

“The standard smother-out technique,” Verkan Vall grinned. “I only heard a little talk about the ‘Flying Saucers,’ and all of that was in joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it⁠—Wasn’t that the timeline the Tharmax Trading Corporation almost lost their paratime license on?”

“That’s right; it was! They bought up all the cigarettes, and caused a conspicuous shortage, after Fourth Level cigarettes had been introduced on this line and had become popular. They should have spread their purchases over a number of lines, and kept them within the local supply-demand frame. And they also got into trouble with the local government for selling unrationed petrol and automobile tires. We had to send in a special-operations group, and they came closer to having to engage in outtime local politics than I care to think of.” Tortha Karf quoted a line from a currently popular song about the sorrows of a policeman’s life. “We’re jugglers, Vall; trying to keep our traders and sociological observers and tourists and plain idiots like the late Gavran Sarn out of trouble; trying to prevent panics and disturbances and dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations; trying to keep out of outtime politics⁠—and, at all times, at all costs and hazards, by all means, guarding the secret of paratime transposition. Sometimes I wish Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in their cradles!”

Verkan Vall shook his head. “No, chief,” he said. “You don’t mean that; not really,” he said. “We’ve been paratiming for the past ten thousand years. When the Ghaldron-Hesthor transtemporal field was discovered, our ancestors had pretty well exhausted the resources of this planet. We had a world population of half a billion, and it was all they could do to keep alive. After we began paratime transposition, our population climbed to ten billion, and there it stayed for the last eight thousand years. Just enough of us to enjoy our planet and the other planets of the system to the fullest; enough of everything for everybody that nobody needs fight anybody for anything. We’ve tapped the resources of those other worlds on other timelines, a little here, a little there, and not enough to really hurt anybody. We’ve left our mark in a few places⁠—the Dakota Badlands, and the Gobi, on the Fourth Level, for instance⁠—but we’ve done no great damage to any of them.”

“Except the time they blew up half the Southern Island Continent, over about five hundred parayears on the Third Level,” Tortha Karf mentioned.

“Regrettable accident, to be sure,” Verkan Vall conceded. “And look how much we’ve learned from the experiences of those other timelines. During the Crisis, after the Fourth Interplanetary War, we might have adopted Palnar Sarn’s ‘Dictatorship of the Chosen’ scheme, if we hadn’t seen what an exactly similar scheme had done to the Jak-Hakka Civilization, on the Second Level. When Palnar Sarn was told about that, he went into paratime to see for himself, and when he returned, he renounced his proposal in horror.”

Tortha Karf nodded. He wouldn’t be making any mistake in turning his post over to the Mavrad of Nerros on his retirement.

“Yes, Vall; I know,” he said. “But when you’ve been at this desk as long as I have, you’ll have a sour moment or two, now and then, too.”

A blue light flashed over one of the booths across the room. Verkan Vall got to his feet, removing his coat and hanging it on the back of his chair, and crossed the room, rolling up his left shirt sleeve. There was a relaxer-chair in the booth, with a blue plastic helmet above it. He glanced at the indicator-screen to make sure he was getting the indoctrination he called for, and then sat down in the chair and lowered the helmet over his head, inserting the ear plugs and fastening the chin strap. Then he touched his left arm with an injector which was lying on the arm of the chair, and at the same time flipped the starter switch.

Soft, slow music began to chant out of the earphones. The insidious fingers of the drug blocked off his senses, one by one. The music diminished, and the words of the hypnotic formula lulled him to sleep.

He woke, hearing the lively strains of dance music. For a while, he lay relaxed. Then he snapped off the switch, took out the ear plugs, removed the helmet and rose to his feet. Deep in his subconscious mind was the entire body of knowledge about the Venusian nighthound. He mentally pronounced the word, and at once it began flooding into his conscious mind. He knew the animal’s evolutionary history, its anatomy, its characteristics, its dietary and reproductive habits, how it hunted, how it fought its enemies, how it eluded pursuit, and how best it could be tracked down and killed. He nodded. Already, a plan for dealing with Gavran Sarn’s renegade pet was taking shape in his mind.

He picked a plastic cup from the dispenser, filled it from a cooler-tap with amber-colored spiced wine, and drank, tossing the cup into the disposal-bin. He placed a fresh injector on the arm of the chair, ready for the next user of the booth. Then he emerged, glancing at his Fourth Level wrist watch and mentally translating to the First Level time-scale. Three hours had passed; there had been more to learn about his quarry than he had expected.

Tortha Karf was sitting behind his desk, smoking a cigarette. It seemed as though he had not moved since Verkan Vall had left him, though the special agent knew that he had dined, attended several conferences, and done many other things.

“I checked up on your hitchhiker, Vall,” the chief said. “We won’t bother about him. He’s a member of something called the Christian Avengers⁠—one of those typical Europo-American race-and-religious hate groups. He belongs in a belt that is the outcome of the Hitler victory of 1940, whatever that was. Something unpleasant, I daresay. We don’t owe him anything; people of that sort should be stepped on, like cockroaches. And he won’t make any more trouble on the line where you dropped him than they have there already. It’s in a belt of complete social and political anarchy; somebody probably shot him as soon as he emerged, because he wasn’t wearing the right sort of a uniform. Nineteen-forty what, by the way?”

“Elapsed years since the birth of some religious leader,” Verkan Vall explained. “And did you find out about my rifle?”

“Oh, yes. It’s reproduction of something that’s called a Sharp’s Model ’37 .235 Ultraspeed-Express. Made on an adjoining paratime belt by a company that went out of business sixty-seven years ago, elapsed time, on your line of operation. What made the difference was the Second War Between The States. I don’t know what that was, either⁠—I’m not too well up on Fourth Level history⁠—but whatever, your line of operation didn’t have it. Probably just as well for them, though they very likely had something else, as bad or worse. I put in a complaint to Supplies about it, and got you some more ammunition and reloading tools. Now, tell me what you’re going to do about this nighthound business.”

Tortha Karf was silent for a while, after Verkan Vall had finished.

“You’re taking some awful chances, Vall,” he said, at length. “The way you plan doing it, the advantages will all be with the nighthound. Those things can see as well at night as you can in daylight. I suppose you know that, though; you’re the nighthound specialist, now.”

“Yes. But they’re accustomed to the Venus hotland marshes; it’s been dry weather for the last two weeks, all over the northeastern section of the Northern Continent. I’ll be able to hear it, long before it gets close to me. And I’ll be wearing an electric headlamp. When I snap that on, it’ll be dazzled, for a moment.”

“Well, as I said, you’re the nighthound specialist. There’s the communicator; order anything you need.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one before crushing it out. “But be careful, Vall. It took me close to forty years to make a paratimer out of you; I don’t want to have to repeat the process with somebody else before I can retire.”

The grass was wet as Verkan Vall⁠—who reminded himself that here he was called Richard Lee⁠—crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that morning when the strato-rocket from Dhergabar had landed him at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the probabilities of human history, the same rain had been coming down on the old Kinchwalter farm, near Rutter’s Fort, on the Fourth Level. And it had persisted all day, in a slow, deliberate drizzle.

He didn’t like that. The woods would be wet, muffling his quarry’s footsteps, and canceling his only advantage over the night-prowler he hunted. He had no idea, however, of postponing the hunt. If anything, the rain had made it all the more imperative that the nighthound be killed at once. At this season, a falling temperature would speedily follow. The nighthound, a creature of the hot Venus marshes, would suffer from the cold, and, taught by years of domestication to find warmth among human habitations, it would invade some isolated farmhouse, or, worse, one of the little valley villages. If it were not killed tonight, the incident he had come to prevent would certainly occur.

Going to the barn, he spread an old horse blanket on the seat of the jeep, laid his rifle on it, and then backed the jeep outside. Then he took off his coat, removing his pipe and tobacco from the pockets, and spread it on the wet grass. He unwrapped a package and took out a small plastic spraygun he had brought with him from the First Level, aiming it at the coat and pressing the trigger until it blew itself empty. A sickening, rancid fetor tainted the air⁠—the scent of the giant poison-roach of Venus, the one creature for which the nighthound bore an inborn, implacable hatred. It was because of this compulsive urge to attack and kill the deadly poison-roach that the first human settlers on Venus, long millennia ago, had domesticated the ugly and savage nighthound. He remembered that the Gavran family derived their title from their vast Venus hotlands estates; that Gavran Sarn, the man who had brought this thing to the Fourth Level, had been born on the inner planet. When Verkan Vall donned that coat, he would become his own living bait for the murderous fury of the creature he sought. At the moment, mastering his queasiness and putting on the coat, he objected less to that danger than to the hideous stench of the scent, to obtain which a valuable specimen had been sacrificed at the Dhergabar Museum of Extraterrestrial Zoology, the evening before.

Carrying the wrapper and the spraygun to an outside fireplace, he snapped his lighter to them and tossed them in. They were highly inflammable, blazing up and vanishing in a moment. He tested the electric headlamp on the front of his cap; checked his rifle; drew the heavy revolver, an authentic product of his line of operation, and flipped the cylinder out and in again. Then he got into the jeep and drove away.

For half an hour, he drove quickly along the valley roads. Now and then, he passed farmhouses, and dogs, puzzled and angered by the alien scent his coat bore, barked furiously. At length, he turned into a back road, and from this to the barely discernible trace of an old log road. The rain had stopped, and, in order to be ready to fire in any direction at any time, he had removed the top of the jeep. Now he had to crouch below the windshield to avoid overhanging branches. Once three deer⁠—a buck and two does⁠—stopped in front of him and stared for a moment, then bounded away with a flutter of white tails.

He was driving slowly, now; laying behind him a reeking trail of scent. There had been another stock-killing, the night before, while he had been on the First Level. The locality of this latest depredation had confirmed his estimate of the beast’s probable movements, and indicated where it might be prowling, tonight. He was certain that it was somewhere near; sooner or later, it would pick up the scent.

Finally, he stopped, snapping out his lights. He had chosen this spot carefully, while studying the Geological Survey map, that afternoon; he was on the grade of an old railroad line, now abandoned and its track long removed, which had served the logging operations of fifty years ago. On one side, the mountain slanted sharply upward; on the other, it fell away sharply. If the nighthound were below him, it would have to climb that forty-five degree slope, and could not avoid dislodging loose stones, or otherwise making a noise. He would get out on that side; if the nighthound were above him, the jeep would protect him when it charged. He got to the ground, thumbing off the safety of his rifle, and an instant later he knew that he had made a mistake which could easily cost him his life; a mistake from which neither his comprehensive logic nor his hypnotically acquired knowledge of the beast’s habits had saved him.

As he stepped to the ground, facing toward the front of the jeep, he heard a low, whining cry behind him, and a rush of padded feet. He whirled, snapping on the headlamp with his left hand and thrusting out his rifle pistol-wise in his right. For a split second, he saw the charging animal, its long, lizardlike head split in a toothy grin, its talon-tipped forepaws extended.

He fired, and the bullet went wild. The next instant, the rifle was knocked from his hand. Instinctively, he flung up his left arm to shield his eyes. Claws raked his left arm and shoulder, something struck him heavily along the left side, and his cap-light went out as he dropped and rolled under the jeep, drawing in his legs and fumbling under his coat for the revolver.

In that instant, he knew what had gone wrong. His plan had been entirely too much of a success. The nighthound had winded him as he had driven up the old railroad-grade, and had followed. Its best running speed had been just good enough to keep it a hundred or so feet behind the jeep, and the motor-noise had covered the padding of its feet. In the few moments between stopping the little car and getting out, the nighthound had been able to close the distance and spring upon him.

It was characteristic of First-Level mentality that Verkan Vall wasted no moments on self-reproach or panic. While he was still rolling under his jeep, his mind had been busy with plans to retrieve the situation. Something touched the heel of one boot, and he froze his leg into immobility, at the same time trying to get the big Smith & Wesson free. The shoulder-holster, he found, was badly torn, though made of the heaviest skirting-leather, and the spring which retained the weapon in place had been wrenched and bent until he needed both hands to draw. The eight-inch slashing-claw of the nighthound’s right intermediary limb had raked him; only the instinctive motion of throwing up his arm, and the fact that he wore the revolver in a shoulder-holster, had saved his life.

The nighthound was prowling around the jeep, whining frantically. It was badly confused. It could see quite well, even in the close darkness of the starless night; its eyes were of a nature capable of perceiving infrared radiations as light. There were plenty of these; the jeep’s engine, lately running on four-wheel drive, was quite hot. Had he been standing alone, especially on this raw, chilly night, Verkan Vall’s own body-heat would have lighted him up like a jack-o’-lantern. Now, however, the hot engine above him masked his own radiations. Moreover, the poison-roach scent on his coat was coming up through the floor board and mingling with the scent on the seat, yet the nighthound couldn’t find the two-and-a-half foot insectlike thing that should have been producing it. Verkan Vall lay motionless, wondering how long the next move would be in coming. Then he heard a thud above him, followed by a furious tearing as the nighthound ripped the blanket and began rending at the seat cushion.

“Hope it gets a paw-full of seat-springs,” Verkan Vall commented mentally. He had already found a stone about the size of his two fists, and another slightly smaller, and had put one in each of the side pockets of the coat. Now he slipped his revolver into his waist-belt and writhed out of the coat, shedding the ruined shoulder-holster at the same time. Wriggling on the flat of his back, he squirmed between the rear wheels, until he was able to sit up, behind the jeep. Then, swinging the weighted coat, he flung it forward, over the nighthound and the jeep itself, at the same time drawing his revolver.

Immediately, the nighthound, lured by the sudden movement of the principal source of the scent, jumped out of the jeep and bounded after the coat, and there was considerable noise in the brush on the lower side of the railroad grade. At once, Verkan Vall swarmed into the jeep and snapped on the lights.

His stratagem had succeeded beautifully. The stinking coat had landed on the top of a small bush, about ten feet in front of the jeep and ten feet from the ground. The nighthound, erect on its haunches, was reaching out with its front paws to drag it down, and slashing angrily at it with its single-clawed intermediary limbs. Its back was to Verkan Vall.

His sights clearly defined by the lights in front of him, the paratimer centered them on the base of the creature’s spine, just above its secondary shoulders, and carefully squeezed the trigger. The big .357 Magnum bucked in his hand and belched flame and sound⁠—if only these Fourth Level weapons weren’t so confoundedly boisterous!⁠—and the nighthound screamed and fell. Recocking the revolver, Verkan Vall waited for an instant, then nodded in satisfaction. The beast’s spine had been smashed, and its hind quarters, and even its intermediary fighting limbs had been paralyzed. He aimed carefully for a second shot and fired into the base of the thing’s skull. It quivered and died.

Getting a flashlight, he found his rifle, sticking muzzle-down in the mud a little behind and to the right of the jeep, and swore briefly in the local Fourth Level idiom, for Verkan Vall was a man who loved good weapons, be they sigma-ray needlers, neutron-disruption blasters, or the solid-missile projectors of the lower levels. By this time, he was feeling considerable pain from the claw-wounds he had received. He peeled off his shirt and tossed it over the hood of the jeep.

Tortha Karf had advised him to carry a needler, or a blaster, or a neurostat-gun, but Verkan Vall had been unwilling to take such arms onto the Fourth Level. In event of mishap to himself, it would be all too easy for such a weapon to fall into the hands of someone able to deduce from it scientific principles too far in advance of the general Fourth Level culture. But there had been one First Level item which he had permitted himself, mainly because, suitably packaged, it was not readily identifiable as such. Digging a respectable Fourth-Level leatherette case from under the seat, he opened it and took out a pint bottle with a red poison-label, and a towel. Saturating the towel with the contents of the bottle, he rubbed every inch of his torso with it, so as not to miss even the smallest break made in his skin by the septic claws of the nighthound. Whenever the lotion-soaked towel touched raw skin, a pain like the burn of a hot iron shot through him; before he was through, he was in agony. Satisfied that he had disinfected every wound, he dropped the towel and clung weakly to the side of the jeep. He grunted out a string of English oaths, and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Mogga, Fire-God of Dool, in a Third-Level tongue. He mentioned Fasif, Great God of Khift, in a manner which would have got him an acid-bath if the Khiftan priests had heard him. He alluded to the baroque amatory practices of the Third-Level Illyalla people, and soothed himself, in the classical Dar-Halma tongue, with one of those rambling genealogical insults favored in the Indo-Turanian Sector of the Fourth Level.

By this time, the pain had subsided to an overall smarting itch. He’d have to bear with that until his work was finished and he could enjoy a hot bath. He got another bottle out of the first-aid kit⁠—a flat pint, labeled “Old Overholt,” containing a locally-manufactured specific for inward and subjective wounds⁠—and medicated himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail.

It was an ugly thing, weighing close to two hundred pounds, with powerfully muscled hind legs which furnished the bulk of its motive-power, and sturdy three-clawed front legs. Its secondary limbs, about a third of the way back from its front shoulders, were long and slender; normally, they were carried folded closely against the body, and each was armed with a single curving claw. The revolver-bullet had gone in at the base of the skull and emerged under the jaw; the head was relatively undamaged. Verkan Vall was glad of that; he wanted that head for the trophy-room of his home on Nerros. Grunting and straining, he got the thing into the back of the jeep, and flung his almost shredded tweed coat over it.

A last look around assured him that he had left nothing unaccountable or suspicious. The brush was broken where the nighthound had been tearing at the coat; a bear might have done that. There were splashes of the viscid stuff the thing had used for blood, but they wouldn’t be there long. Terrestrial rodents liked nighthound blood, and the woods were full of mice. He climbed in under the wheel, backed, turned, and drove away.

Inside the paratime-transposition dome, Verkan Vall turned from the body of the nighthound, which he had just dragged in, and considered the inert form of another animal⁠—a stump-tailed, tuft-eared, tawny Canada lynx. That particular animal had already made two paratime transpositions; captured in the vast wilderness of Fifth-Level North America, it had been taken to the First Level and placed in the Dhergabar Zoological Gardens, and then, requisitioned on the authority of Tortha Karf, it had been brought to the Fourth Level by Verkan Vall. It was almost at the end of all its travels.

Verkan Vall prodded the supine animal with the toe of his boot; it twitched slightly. Its feet were cross-bound with straps, but when he saw that the narcotic was wearing off, Verkan Vall snatched a syringe, parted the fur at the base of its neck, and gave it an injection. After a moment, he picked it up in his arms and carried it out to the jeep.

“All right, pussy cat,” he said, placing it under the rear seat, “this is the one-way ride. The way you’re doped up, it won’t hurt a bit.”

He went back and rummaged in the debris of the long-deserted barn. He picked up a hoe, and discarded it as too light. An old plowshare was too unhandy. He considered a grate-bar from a heating furnace, and then he found the poleax, lying among a pile of wormeaten boards. Its handle had been shortened, at some time, to about twelve inches, converting it into a heavy hatchet. He weighed it, and tried it on a block of wood, and then, making sure that the secret door was closed, he went out again and drove off.

An hour later, he returned. Opening the secret door, he carried the ruined shoulder holster, and the straps that had bound the bobcat’s feet, and the ax, now splotched with blood and tawny cat-hairs, into the dome. Then he closed the secret room, and took a long drink from the bottle on his hip.

The job was done. He would take a hot bath, and sleep in the farmhouse till noon, and then he would return to the First Level. Maybe Tortha Karf would want him to come back here for a while. The situation on this timeline was far from satisfactory, even if the crisis threatened by Gavran Sarn’s renegade pet had been averted. The presence of a chief’s assistant might be desirable.

At least, he had a right to expect a short vacation. He thought of the little redhead at the Hagraban Synthetics Works. What was her name? Something Kara⁠—Morvan Kara; that was it. She’d be coming off shift about the time he’d make First Level, tomorrow afternoon.

The claw-wounds were still smarting vexatiously. A hot bath, and a night’s sleep⁠—He took another drink, lit his pipe, picked up his rifle and started across the yard to the house.

Private Zinkowski cradled the telephone and got up from the desk, stretching. He left the orderly-room and walked across the hall to the recreation room, where the rest of the boys were loafing. Sergeant Haines, in a languid gin-rummy game with Corporal Conner, a sheriff’s deputy, and a mechanic from the service station down the road, looked up.

“Well, Sarge, I think we can write off those stock-killings,” the private said.

“Yeah?” The sergeant’s interest quickened.

“Yeah. I think the whatzit’s had it. I just got a buzz from the railroad cops at Logansport. It seems a track-walker found a dead bobcat on the Logan River branch, about a mile or so below M.M.Y. signal tower. Looks like it tangled with that night freight upriver, and came off second best. It was near chopped to hamburger.”

“M.M.Y. signal tower; that’s right below Yoder’s Crossing,” the sergeant considered. “The Strawmyer farm night-before-last, the Amrine farm last night⁠—Yeah, that would be about right.”

“That’ll suit Steve Parker; bobcats aren’t protected, so it’s not his trouble. And they’re not a violation of state law, so it’s none of our worry,” Conner said. “Your deal, isn’t it, Sarge?”

“Yeah. Wait a minute.” The sergeant got to his feet. “I promised Sam Kane, the A.P. man at Logansport, that I’d let him in on anything new.” He got up and started for the phone. “Phantom Killer!” He blew an impolite noise.

“Well, it was a lot of excitement, while it lasted,” the deputy sheriff said. “Just like that Flying Saucer thing.”

The Mercenaries

Duncan MacLeod hung up the suit he had taken off, and sealed his shirt, socks and underwear in a laundry envelope bearing his name and identity-number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided for the purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around his neck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passed into the big room beyond.

Four or five young men, probably soldiers on their way to town, were coming through from the other side. Like MacLeod, they wore only the plastic disks they had received in exchange for the metal ones they wore inside the reservation, and they were being searched by attendants who combed through their hair, probed into ears and nostrils, peered into mouths with tiny searchlights, and employed a variety of magnetic and electronic detectors.

To this search MacLeod submitted wearily. He had become quite a connoisseur of security measures in fifteen years’ research and development work for a dozen different nations, but the Tonto Basin Research Establishment of the Philadelphia Project exceeded anything he had seen before. There were gray-haired veterans of the old Manhattan Project here, men who had worked with Fermi at Chicago, or with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, twenty years before, and they swore in amused exasperation when they thought of how the relatively mild regulations of those days had irked them. And yet, the very existence of the Manhattan Project had been kept a secret from all but those engaged in it, and its purpose from most of them. Today, in 1965, there might have been a few wandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had never heard of the Western Union’s Philadelphia Project, or of the Fourth Komintern’s Red Triumph Five-Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate’s al-Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero-American Confederation’s Cavor Project, but every literate person in the world knew that the four great power-blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship to reach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure world supremacy.

He turned in the nonmagnetic identity disk at the desk on the other side of the search room, receiving the metal one he wore inside the reservation, and with it the key to his inside locker. He put on the clothes he had left behind when he had passed out, and filled his pockets with the miscellany of small articles he had not been allowed to carry off the reservation. He knotted the garish necktie affected by the civilian workers and in particular by members of the MacLeod Research Team to advertise their nonmilitary status, lit his pipe, and walked out into the open gallery beyond.

Karen Hilquist was waiting for him there, reclining in one of the metal chairs. She looked cool in the belted white coveralls, with the white turban bound around her yellow hair, and very beautiful, and when he saw her, his heart gave a little bump, like a geiger responding to an ionizing particle. It always did that, although they had been together for twelve years, and married for ten. Then she saw him and smiled, and he came over, fanning himself with his sun helmet, and dropped into a chair beside her.

“Did you call our center for a jeep?” he asked. When she nodded, he continued: “I thought you would, so I didn’t bother.”

For a while, they sat silent, looking with bored distaste at the swarm of steel-helmeted Army riflemen and tommy-gunners guarding the transfer platforms and the vehicles gate. A string of trucks had been passed under heavy guard into the clearance compound: they were now unloading supplies onto a platform, at the other side of which other trucks were backed waiting to receive the shipment. A hundred feet of bare concrete and fifty armed soldiers separated these from the men and trucks from the outside, preventing contact.

“And still they can’t stop leaks,” Karen said softly. “And we get blamed for it.”

MacLeod nodded and started to say something, when his attention was drawn by a commotion on the driveway. A big Tucker limousine with an O.D. paint job and the single-starred flag of a brigadier general was approaching, horning impatiently. In the back seat MacLeod could see a heavy-shouldered figure with the face of a bad-tempered great Dane⁠—General Daniel Nayland, the military commander of Tonto Basin. The inside guards jumped to attention and saluted; the barrier shot up as though rocket-propelled, and the car slid through; the barrier slammed down behind it. On the other side, the guards were hurling themselves into a frenzy of saluting. Karen made a face after the receding car and muttered something in Hindustani. She probably didn’t know the literal meaning of what she had called General Nayland, but she understood that it was a term of extreme opprobrium.

Her husband contributed: “His idea of Heaven would be a huge research establishment, where he’d be a five-star general, and Galileo, Newton, Priestley, Dalton, Maxwell, Planck and Einstein would be tech sergeants.”

“And Marie Curie and Lise Meitner would be Wac corporals,” Karen added. “He really hates all of us, doesn’t he?”

“He hates our Team,” MacLeod replied. “In the first place, we’re a lot of civilians, who aren’t subject to his regulations and don’t have to salute him. We’re working under contract with the Western Union, not with the United States Government, and as the United States participates in the Western Union on a treaty basis, our contract has the force of a treaty obligation. It gives us what amounts to extraterritoriality, like Europeans in China during the Nineteenth Century. So we have our own transport, for which he must furnish petrol, and our own armed guard, and we fly our own flag over Team Center, and that gripes him as much as anything else. That and the fact that we’re foreigners. So wouldn’t he love to make this espionage rap stick on us!”

“And our contract specifically gives the United States the right to take action against us in case we endanger the national security,” Karen added. She stuffed her cigarette into the not-too-recently-emptied receiver beside her chair, her blue eyes troubled. “You know, some of us could get shot over this, if we’re not careful. Dunc, does it really have to be one of our own people who⁠—?”

“I don’t see how it could be anybody else,” MacLeod said. “I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but there it is.”

“Well, what are we going to do? Is there nobody whom we can trust?”

“Among the technicians and guards, yes. I could think of a score who are absolutely loyal. But among the Team itself⁠—the top researchers⁠—there’s nobody I’d take a chance on but Kato Sugihara.”

“Can you even be sure of him? I’d hate to think of him as a traitor, but⁠—”

“I have a couple of reasons for eliminating Kato,” MacLeod said. “In the first place, outside nucleonic and binding-force physics, there are only three things he’s interested in. Jitterbugging, hand-painted neckties, and Southern-style cooking. If he went over to the Komintern, he wouldn’t be able to get any of those. Then, he only spends about half his share of the Team’s profits, and turns the rest back into the Team Fund. He has a credit of about a hundred thousand dollars, which he’d lose by leaving us. And then, there’s another thing. Kato’s father was killed on Guadalcanal, in 1942, when he was only five. After that he was brought up in the teachings of Bushido by his grandfather, an old-time samurai. Bushido is open to some criticism, but nobody can show where double-crossing your own gang is good Bushido. And today, Japan is allied with the Western Union, and in any case, he wouldn’t help the Komintern. The Japs’ll forgive Russia for that Mussolini back-stab in 1945 after the Irish start building monuments to Cromwell.”

A light-blue jeep, lettered MacLeod Research Team in cherry-red, was approaching across the wide concrete apron. MacLeod grinned.

“Here it comes. Fasten your safety belt when you get in; that’s Ahmed driving.”

Karen looked at her watch. “And it’s almost time for dinner. You know, I dread the thought of sitting at the table with the others, and wondering which of them is betraying us.”

“Only nine of us, instead of thirteen, and still one is a Judas,” MacLeod said. “I suppose there’s always a place for Judas, at any table.”

The MacLeod Team dined together, apart from their assistants and technicians and students. This was no snobbish attempt at class-distinction: matters of Team policy were often discussed at the big round table, and the more confidential details of their work. People who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about bandying either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each other across the twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other stock-in-trade.

They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine people of the common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod, their leader, had grown up in the Transvaal and his wife had been born in the Swedish university town of Upsala was typical not only of their own group but of the hundreds of independent research-teams that had sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer may have been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy among nations and the competition for improved techniques among industrial corporations during the late 1950s and early ’60s, but he had been begotten when two masses of uranium came together at the top of a steel tower in New Mexico in 1945. And, because scientific research is preeminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the independent scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power greater than that of any condottiere captain of Renaissance Italy.

Duncan MacLeod, sitting outwardly relaxed and merry and secretly watchful and bitterly sad, was such a free-captain of science. One by one, the others had rallied around him, not because he was a greater physicist than they, but because he was a bolder, more clever, less scrupulous adventurer, better able to guide them through the maze of international power-politics and the no less ruthless if less nakedly violent world of Big Industry.

There was his wife, Karen Hilquist, the young metallurgist who, before she was twenty-five, had perfected a new hardening process for S.K.F. and an incredibly tough gun-steel for the Bofors works. In the few minutes since they had returned to Team Center, she had managed to change her coveralls for a skirt and blouse, and do something intriguing with her hair.

And there was Kato Sugihara, looking younger than his twenty-eight years, who had begun to demonstrate the existence of whole orders of structure below the level of nuclear particles.

There was Suzanne Maillard, her gray hair upswept from a face that had never been beautiful but which was alive with something rarer than mere beauty: she possessed, at the brink of fifty, a charm and smartness that many women half her age might have envied, and she knew more about cosmic rays than any other person living.

And Adam Lowiewski, his black mustache contrasting so oddly with his silver hair, frantically scribbling equations on his doodling-pad, as though his racing fingers could never keep pace with his brain, and explaining them, with obvious condescension, to the boyish-looking Japanese beside him. He was one of the greatest of living mathematicians by anybody’s reckoning⁠—the greatest, by his own.

And Sir Neville Lawton, the electronics expert, with thinning red-gray hair and meticulously-clipped mustache, who always gave the impression of being in evening clothes, even when, as now, he was dressed in faded khaki.

And Heym ben-Hillel, the Israeli quantum and wave-mechanics man, his heaping dinner plate an affront to the Laws of Moses, his white hair a fluffy, tangled chaos, laughing at an impassively-delivered joke the English knight had made.

And Rudolf von Heldenfeld, with a thin-lipped killer’s mouth and a frozen face that never betrayed its owner’s thoughts⁠—he was the specialist in magnetic currents and electromagnetic fields.

And Farida Khouroglu, the Turkish girl whom MacLeod and Karen had found begging in the streets of Istanbul, ten years ago, and who had grown up following the fortunes of the MacLeod Team on every continent and in a score of nations. It was doubtful if she had ever had a day’s formal schooling in her life, but now she was secretary of the Team, with a grasp of physics that would have shamed many a professor. She had grown up a beauty, too, with the large dark eyes and jet-black hair and paper-white skin of her race. She and Kato Sugihara were very much in love.

A good team; the best physics-research team in a power-mad, knowledge-hungry world. MacLeod thought, toying with the stem of his wineglass, of some of their triumphs: The West Australia Atomic Power Plant. The Segovia Plutonium Works, which had got them all titled as Grandees of the restored Spanish Monarchy. The seawater chemical extraction plant in Puerto Rico, where they had worked for Associated Enterprises, whose president, Blake Hartley, had later become President of the United States. The hard-won victory over a seemingly insoluble problem in the Belgian Congo uranium mines⁠—He thought, too, of the dangers they had faced together, in a world where soldiers must use the weapons of science and scientists must learn the arts of violence. Of the treachery of the Islamic Kaliphate, for whom they had once worked; of the intrigues and plots which had surrounded them in Spain; of the many attempted kidnappings and assassinations; of the time in Basra when they had fought with pistols and tommy guns and snatched-up clubs and flasks of acid to defend their laboratories.

A good team⁠—before the rot of treason had touched it. He could almost smell the putrid stench of it, and yet, as he glanced from face to face, he could not guess the traitor. And he had so little time⁠—

Kato Sugihara’s voice rose to dominate the murmur of conversation around the table.

“I think I am getting somewhere on my photon-neutrino-electron interchange-cycle,” he announced. “And I think it can be correlated to the collapsed-matter research.”

“So?” von Heldenfeld looked up in interest. “And not with the problem of what goes on in the ‘hot layer’ surrounding the Earth?”

“No, Suzanne talked me out of that idea,” the Japanese replied. “That’s just a secondary effect of the effect of cosmic rays and solar radiations on the order of particles existing at that level. But I think that I have the key to the problem of collapsing matter to plate the hull of the spaceship.”

“That’s interesting,” Sir Neville Lawton commented. “How so?”

“Well, you know what happens when a photon comes in contact with the atomic structure of matter,” Kato said. “There may be an elastic collision, in which the photon merely bounces off. Macroscopically, that’s the effect we call reflection of light. Or there may be an inelastic collision, when the photon hits an atom and knocks out an electron⁠—the old photoelectric effect. Or, the photon may be retained for a while and emitted again relatively unchanged⁠—the effect observed in luminous paint. Or, the photon may penetrate, undergo a change to a neutrino, and either remain in the nucleus of the atom or pass through it, depending upon a number of factors. All this, of course, is old stuff; even the photon-neutrino interchange has been known since the mid-’50s, when the Gamow neutrino-counter was developed. But now we come to what you have been so good as to christen the Sugihara Effect⁠—the neutrino picking up a negative charge and, in effect, turning into an electron, and then losing its charge, turning back into a neutrino, and then, as in the case of metal heated to incandescence, being emitted again as a photon.

“At first, we thought this had no connection with the spaceship insulation problem we are under contract to work out, and we agreed to keep this effect a Team secret until we could find out if it had commercial possibilities. But now, I find that it has a direct connection with the collapsed-matter problem. When the electron loses its negative charge and reverts to a neutrino, there is a definite accretion of interatomic binding-force, and the molecule, or the crystalline lattice or whatever tends to contract, and when the neutrino becomes a photon, the nucleus of the atom contracts.”

Heym ben-Hillel was sitting oblivious to everything but his young colleague’s words, a slice of the flesh of the unclean beast impaled on his fork and halfway to his mouth.

“Yes! Certainly!” he exclaimed. “That would explain so many things I have wondered about: And of course, there are other forces at work which, in the course of nature, balance that effect⁠—”

“But can the process be controlled?” Suzanne Maillard wanted to know. “Can you convert electrons to neutrinos and then to photons in sufficient numbers, and eliminate other effects that would cause compensating atomic and molecular expansion?”

Kato grinned, like a tomcat contemplating the bones of a fish he has just eaten.

“Yes, I can. I have.” He turned to MacLeod. “Remember those bullets I got from you?” he asked.

MacLeod nodded. He handloaded for his .38-special, and like all advanced cases of handloading-fever, he was religiously fanatical about uniformity of bullet weights and dimensions. Unlike most handloaders, he had available the instruments to secure such uniformity.

“Those bullets are as nearly alike as different objects can be,” Kato said. “They weigh 158 grains, and that means one-five-eight-point-zero-zero-zero-practically-nothing. The diameter is .35903 inches. All right; I’ve been subjecting those bullets to different radiation-bombardments, and the best results have given me a bullet with a diameter of .35892 inches, and the weight is unchanged. In other words, there’s been no loss of mass, but the mass had contracted. And that’s only been the first test.”

“Well, write up everything you have on it, and we’ll lay out further experimental work,” MacLeod said. He glanced around the table. “So far, we can’t be entirely sure. The shrinkage may be all in the crystalline lattice: the atomic structure may be unchanged. What we need is matter that is really collapsed.”

“I’ll do that,” Kato said. “Barida, I’ll have all my data available for you before noon tomorrow: you can make up copies for all Team members.”

“Make mine on microfilm, for projection,” von Heldenfeld said.

“Mine, too,” Sir Neville Lawton added.

“Better make microfilm copies for everybody,” Heym ben-Hillel suggested. “They’re handier than typescript.”

MacLeod rose silently and tiptoed around behind his wife and Rudolf von Heldenfeld, to touch Kato Sugihara on the shoulder.

“Come on outside, Kato,” he whispered. “I want to talk to you.”

The Japanese nodded and rose, following him outside onto the roof above the laboratories. They walked over to the edge and stopped at the balustrade.

“Kato, when you write up your stuff, I want you to falsify everything you can. Put it in such form that the data will be absolutely worthless, but also in such form that nobody, not even Team members, will know it has been falsified. Can you do that?”

Kato’s almond-shaped eyes widened. “Of course I can, Dunc,” he replied. “But why⁠—?”

“I hate to say this, but we have a traitor in the Team. One of those people back in the dining room is selling us out to the Fourth Komintern. I know it’s not Karen, and I know it’s not you, and that’s as much as I do know, now.”

The Japanese sucked in his breath in a sharp hiss. “You wouldn’t say that unless you were sure, Dunc,” he said.

“No. At about 1000 this morning, Dr. Weissberg, the civilian director, called me to his office. I found him very much upset. He told me that General Nayland is accusing us⁠—by which he meant this Team⁠—of furnishing secret information on our subproject to Komintern agents. He said that British Intelligence agents at Smolensk had learned that the Red Triumph laboratories there were working along lines of research originated at MacLeod Team Center here. They relayed the information to Western Union Central Intelligence, and W.U. passed it on to United States Central Intelligence, and now Counter Espionage is riding Nayland about it, and he’s trying to make us the goat.”

“He would love to get some of us shot,” Kato said. “And that could happen. They took a long time getting tough about espionage in this country, but when Americans get tough about something, they get tough right. But look here; we handed in our progress-reports to Felix Weissberg, and he passed them on to Nayland. Couldn’t the leak be right in Nayland’s own H.Q.?”

“That’s what I thought, at first,” MacLeod replied. “Just wishful thinking, though. Fact is, I went up to Nayland’s H.Q. and had it out with him; accused him of just that. I think I threw enough of a scare into him to hold him for a couple of days. I wanted to know just what it was the Komintern was supposed to have got from us, but he wouldn’t tell me. That, of course, was classified-stuff.”

“Well?”

“Well then, Karen and I got our digestive tracts emptied and went in to town, where I could use a phone that didn’t go through a military switchboard, and I put through a call to Allan Hartley, President Hartley’s son. He owes us a break, after the work we did in Puerto Rico. I told him all I wanted was some information to help clear ourselves, and he told me to wait a half an hour and then call Counter Espionage Office in Washington and talk to General Hammond.”

“Ha! If Allan Hartley’s for us, what are we worried about?” Kato asked. “I always knew he was the power back of Associated Enterprises and his father was the front-man: I’ll bet it’s the same with the Government.”

“Allan Hartley’s for us as long as our nose is clean. If we let it get dirty, we get it bloodied, too. We have to clean it ourselves,” MacLeod told him. “But here’s what Hammond gave me: The Komintern knows all about our collapsed-matter experiments with zinc, titanium and nickel. They know about our theoretical work on cosmic rays, including Suzanne’s work up to about a month ago. They know about that effect Sir Neville and Heym discovered two months ago.” He paused. “And they know about the photon-neutrino-electron interchange.”

Kato responded to this with a gruesome double-take that gave his face the fleeting appearance of an ancient samurai war mask.

“That wasn’t included in any report we ever made,” he said. “You’re right: the leak comes from inside the Team. It must be Sir Neville, or Suzanne, or Heym ben-Hillel, or Adam Lowiewski, or Rudolf von Heldenfeld, or⁠—No! No, I can’t believe it could be Farida!” He looked at MacLeod pleadingly. “You don’t think she could have⁠—?”

“No, Kato. The Team’s her whole life, even more than it is mine. She came with us when she was only twelve, and grew up with us. She doesn’t know any other life than this, and wouldn’t want any other. It has to be one of the other five.”

“Well, there’s Suzanne,” Kato began. “She had to clear out of France because of political activities, after the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of the Rightist Directoire in ’57. And she worked with Joliot-Curie, and she was at the University of Louvain in the early ’50s, when that place was crawling with Commies.”

“And that brings us to Sir Neville,” MacLeod added. “He dabbles in spiritualism; he and Suzanne do planchette-séances. A planchette can be manipulated. Maybe Suzanne produced a communication advising Sir Neville to help the Komintern.”

“Could be. Then, how about Lowiewski? He’s a Pole who can’t go back to Poland, and Poland’s a Komintern country.” Kato pointed out. “Maybe he’d sell us out for amnesty, though why he’d want to go back there, the way things are now⁠—?”

“His vanity. You know, missionary-school native going back to the village wearing real pants, to show off to the savages. Used to be a standing joke, down where I came from.” MacLeod thought for a moment. “And Rudolf: he’s always had a poor view of the democratic system of government. He might feel more at home with the Komintern. Of course, the Ruskis killed his parents in 1945⁠—”

“So what?” Kato retorted. “The Americans killed my father in 1942, but I’m not making an issue out of it. That was another war; Japan’s a Western Union country, now. So’s Germany⁠—How about Heym, by the way? Remember when the Komintern wanted us to come to Russia and do the same work we’re doing here?”

“I remember that after we turned them down, somebody tried to kidnap Karen,” MacLeod said grimly. “I remember a couple of Russians got rather suddenly dead trying it, too.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of our roundtable argument when the proposition was considered. Heym was in favor of accepting. Now that, I would say, indicates either Communist sympathies or an overtrusting nature,” Kato submitted. “And a lot of grade-A traitors have been made out of people with trusting natures.”

MacLeod got out his pipe and lit it. For a long time, he stared out across the mountain-ringed vista of sagebrush, dotted at wide intervals with the bulks of research-centers and the red roofs of the villages.

“Kato, I think I know how we’re going to find out which one it is,” he said. “First of all, you write up your data, and falsify it so that it won’t do any damage if it gets into Komintern hands. And then⁠—”

The next day started in an atmosphere of suppressed excitement and anxiety, which, beginning with MacLeod and Karen and Kato Sugihara, seemed to communicate itself by contagion to everybody in the MacLeod Team’s laboratories. The top researchers and their immediate assistants and students were the first to catch it; they ascribed the tension under which their leader and his wife and the Japanese labored to the recent developments in the collapsed-matter problem. Then, there were about a dozen implicitly-trusted technicians and guards, who had been secretly gathered in MacLeod’s office the night before and informed of the crisis that had arisen. Their associates could not miss the fact that they were preoccupied with something unusual.

They were a variegated crew; men who had been added to the Team in every corner of the world. There was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman, the Arab jeep-driver who had joined them in Basra. There was the wiry little Greek whom everybody called Alex Unpronounceable. There was an Italian, and two Chinese, and a cashiered French Air Force officer, and a Malay, and the son of an English earl who insisted that his name was Bertie Wooster. They had sworn themselves to secrecy, had heard MacLeod’s story with a polylingual burst of pious or blasphemous exclamations, and then they had scattered, each to the work assigned him.

MacLeod had risen early and submitted to the ordeal of the search to leave the reservation and go to town again, this time for a conference at the shabby back-street cigar store that concealed a Counter Espionage center. He had returned just as Farida Khouroglu was finishing the microfilm copies of Kato’s ingeniously-concocted pseudo-data. These copies were distributed at noon, while the Team was lunching, along with carbons of the original typescript.

He was the first to leave the table, going directly to the basement, where Alex Unpronounceable and the man who had got his alias from the works of P. G. Wodehouse were listening in on the telephone calls going in and out through the Team-center switchboard, and making recordings. For two hours, MacLeod remained with them. He heard Suzanne Maillard and some woman who was talking from a number in the Army married-officers’ settlement making arrangements about a party. He heard Rudolf von Heldenfeld make a date with some girl. He listened to a violent altercation between the Team chef and somebody at Army Quartermaster’s H.Q. about the quality of a lot of dressed chicken. He listened to a call that came in for Adam Lowiewski, the mathematician.

“This is Joe,” the caller said. “I’ve got to go to town late this afternoon, but I was wondering if you’d have time to meet me at the Recreation House at Oppenheimer Village for a game of chess. I’m calling from there, now.”

“Fine; I can make it,” Lowiewski’s voice replied. “I’m in the middle of a devil’s own mathematical problem; maybe a game of chess would clear my head. I have a new queen’s-knight gambit I want to try on you, anyhow.”

Bertie Wooster looked up sharply. “Now there; that may be what we’re⁠—”

The telephone beside MacLeod rang. He scooped it up; named himself into it.

It was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman. “Look, chief; I tail this guy to Oppenheimer Village,” the Arab, who had learned English from American movies, answered. “He goes into the rec-joint. I slide in after him, an’ he ain’t in sight. I’m lookin’ around for him, see, when he comes bargin’ outa the Don Ameche box. Then he grabs a table an’ a beer. What next?”

“Stay there; keep an eye on him,” MacLeod told him. “If I want you, I’ll call.”

MacLeod hung up and straightened, feeling under his packet for his .38-special.

“That’s it, boys,” he said. “Lowiewski. Come on.”

“Hah!” Alex Unpronounceable had his gun out and was checking the cylinder. He spoke briefly in description of the Polish mathematician’s ancestry, physical characteristics, and probable postmortem destination. Then he put the gun away, and the three men left the basement.

For minutes that seemed like hours, MacLeod and the Greek waited on the main floor, where they could watch both the elevators and the stairway. Bertie Wooster had gone up to alert Kato Sugihara and Karen. Then the door of one of the elevators opened and Adam Lowiewski emerged, with Kato behind him, apparently lost in a bulky scientific journal he was reading. The Greek moved in from one side, and MacLeod stepped in front of the Pole.

“Hi, Adam,” he greeted. “Have you looked into that batch of data yet?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.” Lowiewski seemed barely able to keep his impatience within the bounds of politeness. “Of course, it’s out of my line, but the mathematics seems sound.” He started to move away.

“You’re not going anywhere,” MacLeod told him. “The chess game is over. The red pawns are taken⁠—the one at Oppenheimer Village, and the one here.”

There was a split second in which Lowiewski struggled⁠—almost successfully⁠—to erase the consternation from his face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he began. His right hand started to slide under his left coat lapel.

MacLeod’s Colt was covering him before he could complete the movement. At the same time, Kato Sugihara dropped the paper-bound periodical, revealing the thin-bladed knife he had concealed under it. He stepped forward, pressing the point of the weapon against the Pole’s side. With the other hand, he reached across Lowiewski’s chest and jerked the pistol from his shoulder-holster. It was one of the elegant little .32 Beretta 1954 Model automatics.

“Into the elevator,” MacLeod ordered. An increasing pressure of Kato’s knife emphasized the order. “And watch him; don’t let him get rid of anything,” he added to the Greek.

“If you would explain this outrage⁠—” Lowiewski began. “I assume it is your idea of a joke⁠—”

Without even replying, MacLeod slammed the doors and started the elevator upward, letting it rise six floors to the living quarters. Karen Hilquist and the aristocratic black-sheep who called himself Bertie Wooster were waiting when he opened the door. The Englishman took one of Lowiewski’s arms; MacLeod took the other. The rest fell in behind as they hustled the captive down the hall and into the big soundproofed dining room. They kept Lowiewski standing, well away from any movable object in the room; Alex Unpronounceable took his left arm as MacLeod released it and went to the communicator and punched the all-outlets button.

“Dr. Maillard; Dr. Sir Neville Lawton; Dr. ben-Hillel; Dr. von Heldenfeld; Mlle. Khouroglu,” he called. “Dr. MacLeod speaking. Come at once, repeat at once, to the round table⁠—Dr. Maillard; Dr. Sir Neville Lawton⁠—”

Karen said something to the Japanese and went outside. For a while, nobody spoke. Kato came over and lit a cigarette in the bowl of MacLeod’s pipe. Then the other Team members entered in a body. Evidently Karen had intercepted them in the hallway and warned them that they would find some unusual situation inside; even so, there was a burst of surprised exclamations when they found Adam Lowiewski under detention.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” MacLeod said, “I regret to tell you that I have placed our colleague, Dr. Lowiewski, under arrest. He is suspected of betraying confidential data to agents of the Fourth Komintern. Yesterday, I learned that data on all our work here, including Team-secret data on the Sugihara Effect, had got into the hands of the Komintern and was being used in research at the Smolensk laboratories. I also learned that General Nayland blames this Team as a whole with double-dealing and selling this data to the Komintern. I don’t need to go into any lengthy exposition of General Nayland’s attitude toward this Team, or toward Free Scientists as a class, or toward the research-contract system. Nor do I need to point out that if he pressed these charges against us, some of us could easily suffer death or imprisonment.”

“So he had to have a victim in a hurry, and pulled my name out of the hat,” Lowiewski sneered.

“I appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Sir Neville Lawton said. “And if the Sugihara Effect was among the data betrayed, I can understand that nobody but one of us could have betrayed it. But why, necessarily, should it be Adam? We all have unlimited access to all records and theoretical data.”

“Exactly. But collecting information is the smallest and easiest part of espionage. Almost anybody can collect information. Where the spy really earns his pay is in transmitting of information. Now, think of the almost fantastic security measures in force here, and consider how you would get such information, including masses of mathematical data beyond any human power of memorization, out of this reservation.”

“Ha, nobody can take anything out,” Suzanne Maillard said. “Not even one’s breakfast. Is Adam accused of sorcery, too?”

“The only material things that are allowed to leave this reservation are sealed cases of models and data shipped to the different development plants. And the Sugihara Effect never was reported, and wouldn’t go out that way,” Heym ben-Hillel objected.

“But the data on the Sugihara Effect reached Smolensk,” MacLeod replied. “And don’t talk about Darwin and Wallace: it wasn’t a coincidence. This stuff was taken out of the Tonto Basin Reservation by the only person who could have done so, in the only way that anything could leave the reservation without search. So I had that person shadowed, and at the same time I had our telephone lines tapped, and eavesdropped on all calls entering or leaving this center. And the person who had to be the spy-courier called Adam Lowiewski, and Lowiewski made an appointment to meet him at the Oppenheimer Village Recreation House to play chess.”

“Very suspicious, very suspicious,” Lowiewski derided. “I receive a call from a friend at the same time that some anonymous suspect is using the phone. There are only five hundred telephone conversations a minute on this reservation.”

“Immediately, Dr. Lowiewski attempted to leave this building,” MacLeod went on. “When I intercepted him, he tried to draw a pistol. This one.” He exhibited the Beretta. “I am now going to have Dr. Lowiewski searched, in the presence of all of you.” He nodded to Alex and the Englishman.

They did their work thoroughly. A pile of Lowiewski’s pocket effects was made on the table; as each item was added to it, the Pole made some sarcastic comment.

“And that pack of cigarettes: unopened,” he jeered. “I suppose I communicated the data to the manufacturers by telepathy, and they printed it on the cigarette papers in invisible ink.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you opened the pack, and then resealed it,” Kato suggested. “A heated spatula under the cellophane; like this.”

He used the point of his knife to illustrate. The cellophane came unsealed with surprising ease: so did the revenue stamp. He dumped out the contents of the pack: sixteen cigarettes, four cigarette tip-ends, four bits snapped from the other ends⁠—and a small aluminum microfilm capsule.

Lowiewski’s face twitched. For an instant, he tried vainly to break loose from the men who held him. Then he slumped into a chair. Heym ben-Hillel gasped in shocked surprise. Suzanne Maillard gave a short, felinelike cry. Sir Neville Lawton looked at the capsule curiously and said: “Well, my sainted Aunt Agatha!”

“That’s the capsule I gave him, at noon,” Farida Khouroglu exclaimed, picking it up. She opened it and pulled out a roll of colloidex projection film. There was also a bit of cigarette paper in the capsule, upon which a notation had been made in Kyrilic characters.

Rudolf von Heldenfeld could read Russian. “ ‘Data on new development of photon-neutrino-electron interchange. 22 July, ’65. Vladmir.’ Vladmir, I suppose, is this schweinhund’s code name,” he added.

The film and the paper passed from hand to hand. The other members of the Team sat down; there was a tendency to move away from the chair occupied by Adam Lowiewski. He noticed this and sneered.

“Afraid of contamination from the moral leper?” he asked. “You were glad enough to have me correct your stupid mathematical errors.”

Kato Sugihara picked up the capsule, took a final glance at the cigarette pack, and said to MacLeod: “I’ll be back as soon as this is done.” With that, he left the room, followed by Bertie Wooster and the Greek.

Heym ben-Hillel turned to the others: his eyes had the hurt and puzzled look of a dog that has been kicked for no reason. “But why did he do this?” he asked.

“He just told you,” MacLeod replied. “He’s the great Adam Lowiewski. Checking math for a physics-research team is beneath his dignity. I suppose the Komintern offered him a professorship at Stalin University.” He was watching Lowiewski’s face keenly. “No,” he continued. “It was probably the mathematics chair of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.”

“But who was this person who could smuggle microfilm out of the reservation?” Suzanne Maillard wanted to know. “Somebody has invented teleportation, then?”

MacLeod shook his head. “It was General Nayland’s chauffeur. It had to be. General Nayland’s car is the only thing that gets out of here without being searched. The car itself is serviced at Army vehicles pool; nobody could hide anything in it for a confederate to pick up outside. Nayland is a stuffed shirt of the first stuffing, and a tinpot Hitler to boot, but he is fanatically and incorruptibly patriotic. That leaves the chauffeur. When Nayland’s in the car, nobody even sees him; he might as well be a robot steering-device. Old case of Father Brown’s Invisible Man. So, since he had to be the courier, all I did was have Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman shadow him, and at the same time tap our phones. When he contacted Lowiewski, I knew Lowiewski was our traitor.”

Sir Neville Lawton gave a strangling laugh. “Oh, my dear Aunt Fanny! And Nayland goes positively crackers on security. He gets goose pimples every time he hears somebody saying ’E = mc²,’ for fear a Komintern spy might hear him. It’s a wonder he hasn’t put the value of Planck’s Constant on the classified list. He sets up all these fantastic search rooms and barriers, and then he drives through the gate, honking his bloody horn, with his chauffeur’s pockets full of top secrets. Now I’ve seen everything!”

“Not quite everything,” MacLeod said. “Kato’s going to put that capsule in another cigarette pack, and he’ll send one of his lab girls to Oppenheimer Village with it, with a message from Lowiewski to the effect that he couldn’t get away. And when this chauffeur takes it out, he’ll run into a Counter Espionage roadblock on the way to town. They’ll shoot him, of course, and they’ll probably transfer Nayland to the Mississippi Valley Flood Control Project, where he can’t do any more damage. At least, we’ll have him out of our hair.”

“If we have any hair left,” Heym ben-Hillel gloomed. “You’ve got Nayland into trouble, but you haven’t got us out of it.”

“What do you mean?” Suzanne Maillard demanded. “He’s found the traitor and stopped the leak.”

“Yes, but we’re still responsible, as a team, for this betrayal,” the Israeli pointed out. “This Nayland is only a symptom of the enmity which politicians and militarists feel toward the Free Scientists, and of their opposition to the research-contract system. Now they have a scandal to use. Our part in stopping the leak will be ignored; the publicity will be about the treason of a Free Scientist.”

“That’s right,” Sir Neville Lawton agreed. “And that brings up another point. We simply can’t hand this fellow over to the authorities. If we do, we establish a precedent that may wreck the whole system under which we operate.”

“Yes: it would be a fine thing if governments start putting Free Scientists on trial and shooting them,” Farida Khouroglu supported him. “In a few years, none of us would be safe.”

“But,” Suzanne cried, “you are not arguing that this species of an animal be allowed to betray us unpunished?”

“Look,” Rudolf von Heldenfeld said. “Let us give him his pistol, and one cartridge, and let him remove himself like a gentleman. He will spare himself the humiliation of trial and execution, and us all the embarrassment of having a fellow scientist pilloried as a traitor.”

“Now there’s a typical Prussian suggestion,” Lowiewski said.

Kato Sugihara, returning alone, looked around the table. “Did I miss something interesting?” he asked.

“Oh, very,” Lowiewski told him. “Your Junker friend thinks I should perform seppuku.”

Kato nodded quickly. “Excellent idea!” he congratulated von Heldenfeld. “If he does, he’ll save everybody a lot of trouble. Himself included.” He nodded again. “If he does that, we can protect his reputation, after he’s dead.”

“I don’t really see how,” Sir Neville objected. “When the Counter Espionage people were brought into this, the thing went out of our control.”

“Why, this chauffeur was the spy, as well as the spy-courier,” MacLeod said. “The information he transmitted was picked up piecemeal from different indiscreet lab-workers and students attached to our team. Of course, we are investigating, mumble-mumble. Naturally, no one will admit, mumble-mumble. No stone will be left unturned, mumble-mumble. Disciplinary action, mumble-mumble.”

“And I suppose he got that microfilm piecemeal, too?” Lowiewski asked.

“Oh, that?” MacLeod shrugged. “That was planted on him. One of our girls arranged an opportunity for him to steal it from her, after we began to suspect him. Of course, Kato falsified everything he put into that report. As information, it’s worthless.”

“Worthless? It’s better than that,” Kato grinned. “I’m really sorry the Komintern won’t get it. They’d try some of that stuff out with the big betatron at Smolensk, and a microsecond after they’d throw the switch, Smolensk would look worse than Hiroshima did.”

“Well, why would our esteemed colleague commit suicide, just at this time?” Karen Hilquist asked.

“Maybe plutonium poisoning.” Farida suggested. “He was doing something in the radiation-lab and got some Pu in him, and of course, shooting’s not as painful as that. So⁠—”

“Oh, my dear!” Suzanne protested. “That but stinks! The great Adam Lowiewski, descending from his pinnacle of pure mathematics, to perform a vulgar experiment? With actual things?” The Frenchwoman gave an exaggerated shudder. “Horrors!”

“Besides, if our people began getting radioactive, somebody would be sure to claim we were endangering the safely of the whole establishment, and the national-security clause would be invoked, and some nosy person would put a geiger on the dear departed,” Sir Neville added.

“Nervous collapse.” Karen said. “According to the laity, all scientists are crazy. Crazy people kill themselves. Adam Lowiewski was a scientist. Ergo Adam Lowiewski killed himself. Besides, a nervous collapse isn’t instrumentally detectable.”

Heym ben-Hillel looked at MacLeod, his eyes troubled.

“But, Dunc; have we the right to put him to death, either by his own hand or by an Army firing squad?” he asked. “Remember he is not only a traitor; he is one of the world’s greatest mathematical minds. Have we a right to destroy that mind?”

Von Heldenfeld shouted, banging his fist on the table: “I don’t care if he’s Gauss and Riemann and Lorenz and Poincare and Minkowski and Whitehead and Einstein, all collapsed into one! The man is a stinking traitor, not only to us, but to all scientists and all sciences! If he doesn’t shoot himself, hand him over to the United States, and let them shoot him! Why do we go on arguing?”

Lowiewski was smiling, now. The panic that had seized him in the hallway below, and the desperation when the cigarette pack had been opened, had left him.

“Now I have a modest proposal, which will solve your difficulties,” he said. “I have money, papers, clothing, everything I will need, outside the reservation. Suppose you just let me leave here. Then, if there is any trouble, you can use this fiction about the indiscreet underlings, without the unnecessary embellishment of my suicide⁠—”

Rudolf von Heldenfeld let out an inarticulate roar of fury. For an instant he was beyond words. Then he sprang to his feet.

“Look at him!” he cried. “Look at him, laughing in our faces, for the dupes and fools he thinks we are!” He thrust out his hand toward MacLeod. “Give me the pistol! He won’t shoot himself; I’ll do it for him!”

“It would work, Dunc. Really, it would,” Heym ben-Hillel urged.

“No,” Karen Hilquist contradicted. “If he left here, everybody would know what had happened, and we’d be accused of protecting him. If he kills himself, we can get things hushed up: dead traitors are good traitors. But if he remains alive, we must disassociate ourselves from him by handing him over.”

“And wreck the prestige of the Team?” Lowiewski asked.

“At least you will not live to see that!” Suzanne retorted.

Heym ben-Hillel put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “Is there no solution to this?” he almost wailed.

“Certainly: an obvious solution,” MacLeod said, rising. “Rudolf has just stated it. Only I’m leader of this Team, and there are, of course, jobs a team-leader simply doesn’t delegate.” The safety catch of the Beretta clicked a period to his words.

“No!” The word was wrenched almost physically out of Lowiewski. He, too, was on his feet, a sudden desperate fear in his face. “No! You wouldn’t murder me!”

“The term is ‘execute,’ ” MacLeod corrected. Then his arm swung up, and he shot Adam Lowiewski through the forehead.

For an instant, the Pole remained on his feet. Then his knees buckled, and he fell forward against the table, sliding to the floor.

MacLeod went around the table, behind Kato Sugihara and Farida Khouroglu and Heym ben-Hillel, and stood looking down at the man he had killed. He dropped the automatic within a few inches of the dead renegade’s outstretched hand, then turned to face the others.

“I regret,” he addressed them, his voice and face blank of expression, “to announce that our distinguished colleague, Dr. Adam Lowiewski, has committed suicide by shooting, after a nervous collapse resulting from overwork.”

Sir Neville Lawton looked critically at the motionless figure on the floor.

“I’m afraid we’ll have trouble making that stick, Dunc,” he said. “You shot him at about five yards; there isn’t a powder mark on him.”

“Oh, sorry; I forgot.” MacLeod’s voice was mockingly contrite. “It was Dr. Lowiewski’s expressed wish that his remains be cremated as soon after death as possible, and that funeral services be held over his ashes. The big electric furnace in the metallurgical lab will do, I think.”

“But⁠ ⁠… but there’ll be all sorts of formalities⁠—” the Englishman protested.

“Now you forget. Our contract,” MacLeod reminded him. “We stand upon our contractual immunity: we certainly won’t allow any stupid bureaucratic interference with our deceased colleague’s wishes. We have a regular M.D. on our payroll, in case anybody has to have a death certificate to keep him happy, but beyond that⁠—” He shrugged.

“It burns me up, though!” Suzanne Maillard cried. “After the spaceship is built, and the Moon is annexed to the Western Union, there will be publicity, and people will eulogize this species of an Iscariot!”

Heym ben-Hillel, who had been staring at MacLeod in shocked unbelief, roused himself.

“Well, why not? Isn’t the creator of the Lowiewski function transformations and the rules of inverse probabilities worthy of eulogy?” He turned to MacLeod. “I couldn’t have done what you did, but maybe it was for the best. The traitor is dead; the mathematician will live forever.”

“You miss the whole point,” MacLeod said. “Both of you. It wasn’t a question of revenge, like gangsters bumping off a double-crosser. And it wasn’t a question of whitewashing Lowiewski for posterity. We are the MacLeod Research Team. We owe no permanent allegiance to, nor acknowledge the authority of, any national sovereignty or any combination of nations. We deal with national governments as with equals. In consequence, we must make and enforce our own laws.

“You must understand that we enjoy this status only on sufferance. The nations of the world tolerate the Free Scientists only because they need us, and because they know they can trust us. Now, no responsible government official is going to be deceived for a moment by this suicide story we’ve confected. It will be fully understood that Lowiewski was a traitor, and that we found him out and put him to death. And, as a corollary, it will be understood that this Team, as a Team, is fully trustworthy, and that when any individual Team member is found to be untrustworthy, he will be dealt with promptly and without public scandal. In other words, it will be understood, from this time on, that the MacLeod Team is worthy of the status it enjoys and the responsibilities concomitant with it.”

Last Enemy

Along the U-shaped table, the subdued clatter of dinnerware and the buzz of conversation was dying out; the soft music that drifted down from the overhead sound outlets seemed louder as the competing noises diminished. The feast was drawing to a close, and Dallona of Hadron fidgeted nervously with the stem of her wineglass as last-moment doubts assailed her.

The old man at whose right she sat noticed, and reached out to lay his hand on hers.

“My dear, you’re worried,” he said softly. “You, of all people, shouldn’t be, you know.”

“The theory isn’t complete,” she replied. “And I could wish for more positive verification. I’d hate to think I’d got you into this⁠—”

Garnon of Roxor laughed. “No, no!” he assured her. “I’d decided upon this long before you announced the results of your experiments. Ask Girzon; he’ll bear me out.”

“That’s true,” the young man who sat at Garnon’s left said, leaning forward. “Father has meant to take this step for a long time. He was waiting until after the election, and then he decided to do it now, to give you an opportunity to make experimental use of it.”

The man on Dallona’s right added his voice. Like the others at the table, he was of medium stature, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, with a wide mouth, prominent cheekbones and a short, square jaw. Unlike the others, he was armed, with a knife and pistol on his belt, and on the breast of his black tunic he wore a scarlet oval patch on which a pair of black wings, with a tapering silver object between them had been superimposed.

“Yes, Lady Dallona; the Lord Garnon and I discussed this, oh, two years ago at the least. Really, I’m surprised that you seem to shrink from it, now. Of course, you’re Venus-born, and customs there may be different, but with your scientific knowledge⁠—”

“That may be the trouble, Dirzed,” Dallona told him. “A scientist gets in the way of doubting, and one doubts one’s own theories most of all.”

“That’s the scientific attitude, I’m told,” Dirzed replied, smiling. “But somehow, I cannot think of you as a scientist.” His eyes traveled over her in a way that would have made most women, scientists or otherwise, blush. It gave Dallona of Hadron a feeling of pleasure. Men often looked at her that way, especially here at Darsh. Novelty had something to do with it⁠—her skin was considerably lighter than usual, and there was a pleasing oddness about the structure of her face. Her alleged Venusian origin was probably accepted as the explanation of that, as of so many other things.

As she was about to reply, a man in dark gray, one of the upper-servants who were accepted as social equals by the Akor-Neb nobles, approached the table. He nodded respectfully to Garnon of Roxor.

“I hate to seem to hurry things, sir, but the boy’s ready. He’s in a trance-state now,” he reported, pointing to the pair of visiplates at the end of the room.

Both of the ten-foot-square plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, a pervading dullness.

“One of our best sensitives,” a man with a beard, several places down the table on Dallona’s right, said. “You remember him, Dallona; he produced that communication from the discarnate Assassin, Sirzim. Normally, he’s a low-grade imbecile, but in trance-state he’s wonderful. And there can be no argument that the communications he produces originates in his own mind; he doesn’t have mind enough, of his own, to operate that machine.”

Garnon of Roxor rose to his feet, the others rising with him. He unfastened a jewel from the front of his tunic and handed it to Dallona.

“Here, my dear Lady Dallona; I want you to have this,” he said. “It’s been in the family of Roxor for six generations, but I know that you will appreciate and cherish it.” He twisted a heavy ring from his left hand and gave it to his son. He unstrapped his wrist watch and passed it across the table to the gray-clad upper-servant. He gave a pocket case, containing writing tools, slide rule and magnifier, to the bearded man on the other side of Dallona. “Something you can use, Dr. Harnosh,” he said. Then he took a belt, with a knife and holstered pistol, from a servant who had brought it to him, and gave it to the man with the red badge. “And something for you, Dirzed. The pistol’s by Farnor of Yand, and the knife was forged and tempered on Luna.”

The man with the winged-bullet badge took the weapons, exclaiming in appreciation. Then he removed his own belt and buckled on the gift.

“The pistol’s fully loaded,” Garnon told him.

Dirzed drew it and checked⁠—a man of his craft took no statement about weapons without verification⁠—then slipped it back into the holster.

“Shall I use it?” he asked.

“By all means; I’d had that in mind when I selected it for you.”

Another man, to the left of Girzon, received a cigarette case and lighter. He and Garnon hooked fingers and clapped shoulders.

“Our views haven’t been the same, Garnon,” he said, “but I’ve always valued your friendship. I’m sorry you’re doing this, now; I believe you’ll be disappointed.”

Garnon chuckled. “Would you care to make a small wager on that, Nirzav?” he asked. “You know what I’m putting up. If I’m proven right, will you accept the Volitionalist theory as verified?”

Nirzav chewed his mustache for a moment. “Yes, Garnon, I will.” He pointed toward the blankly white screen. “If we get anything conclusive on that, I’ll have no other choice.”

“All right, friends,” Garnon said to those around him. “Will you walk with me to the end of the room?”

Servants removed a section from the table in front of him, to allow him and a few others to pass through; the rest of the guests remained standing at the table, facing toward the inside of the room. Garnon’s son, Girzon, and the gray-mustached Nirzav of Shonna, walked on his left; Dallona of Hadron and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh on his right. The gray-clad upper-servant, and two or three ladies, and a nobleman with a small chin beard, and several others, joined them; of those who had sat close to Garnon, only the man in the black tunic with the scarlet badge hung back. He stood still, by the break in the table, watching Garnon of Roxor walk away from him. Then Dirzed the Assassin drew the pistol he had lately received as a gift, hefted it in his hand, thumbed off the safety, and aimed at the back of Garnon’s head.

They had nearly reached the end of the room when the pistol cracked. Dallona of Hadron started, almost as though the bullet had crashed into her own body, then caught herself and kept on walking. She closed her eyes and laid a hand on Dr. Harnosh’s arm for guidance, concentrating her mind upon a single question. The others went on as though Garnon of Roxor were still walking among them.

“Look!” Harnosh of Hosh cried, pointing to the image in the visiplate ahead. “He’s under control!”

They all stopped short, and Dirzed, holstering his pistol, hurried forward to join them. Behind, a couple of servants had approached with a stretcher and were gathering up the crumpled figure that had, a moment ago, been Garnon.

A change had come over the boy at the writing machine. His eyes were still glazed with the stupor of the hypnotic trance, but the slack jaw had stiffened, and the loose mouth was compressed in a purposeful line. As they watched, his hands went out to the keyboard in front of him and began to move over it, and as they did, letters appeared on the white screen on the left.

Garnon of Roxor, discarnate, communicating, they read. The machine stopped for a moment, then began again. To Dallona of Hadron: The question you asked, after I discarnated, was: What was the last book I read, before the feast? While waiting for my valet to prepare my bath, I read the first ten verses of the fourth Canto of Splendor of Space, by Larnov of Horka, in my bedroom. When the bath was ready, I marked the page with a strip of message tape, containing a message from the bailiff of my estate on the Shevva River, concerning a breakdown at the power plant, and laid the book on the ivory-inlaid table beside the big red chair.

Harnosh of Hosh looked at Dallona inquiringly; she nodded.

“I rejected the question I had in my mind, and substituted that one, after the shot,” she said.

He turned quickly to the upper-servant. “Check on that, right away, Kirzon,” he directed.

As the upper-servant hurried out, the writing machine started again.

And to my son, Girzon: I will not use your son, Garnon, as a reincarnation-vehicle; I will remain discarnate until he is grown and has a son of his own; if he has no male child, I will reincarnate in the first available male child of the family of Roxor, or of some family allied to us by marriage. In any case, I will communicate before reincarnating.

To Nirzav of Shonna: Ten days ago, when I dined at your home, I took a small knife and cut three notches, two close together and one a little apart from the others, on the under side of the table. As I remember, I sat two places down on the left. If you find them, you will know that I have won that wager that I spoke of a few minutes ago.

“I’ll have my butler check on that, right away,” Nirzav said. His eyes were wide with amazement, and he had begun to sweat; a man does not casually watch the beliefs of a lifetime invalidated in a few moments.

To Dirzed the Assassin: the machine continued. You have served me faithfully, in the last ten years, never more so than with the last shot you fired in my service. After you fired, the thought was in your mind that you would like to take service with the Lady Dallona of Hadron, whom you believe will need the protection of a member of the Society of Assassins. I advise you to do so, and I advise her to accept your offer. Her work, since she has come to Darsh, has not made her popular in some quarters. No doubt Nirzav of Shonna can bear me out on that.

“I won’t betray things told me in confidence, or said at the Councils of the Statisticalists, but he’s right,” Nirzav said. “You need a good Assassin, and there are few better than Dirzed.”

I see that this sensitive is growing weary, the letters on the screen spelled out. His body is not strong enough for prolonged communication. I bid you all farewell, for the time; I will communicate again. Good evening, my friends, and I thank you for your presence at the feast.

The boy, on the other screen, slumped back in his chair, his face relaxing into its customary expression of vacancy.

“Will you accept my offer of service, Lady Dallona?” Dirzed asked. “It’s as Garnon said; you’ve made enemies.”

Dallona smiled at him. “I’ve not been too deep in my work to know that. I’m glad to accept your offer, Dirzed.”

Nirzav of Shonna had already turned away from the group and was hurrying from the room, to call his home for confirmation on the notches made on the underside of his dining table. As he went out the door, he almost collided with the upper-servant, who was rushing in with a book in his hand.

“Here it is,” the latter exclaimed, holding up the book. “Larnov’s Splendor of Space, just where he said it would be. I had a couple of servants with me as witnesses; I can call them in now, if you wish.” He handed the book to Harnosh of Hosh. “See, a strip of message tape in it, at the tenth verse of the Fourth Canto.”

Nirzav of Shonna re-entered the room; he was chewing his mustache and muttering to himself. As he rejoined the group in front of the now dark visiplates, he raised his voice, addressing them all generally.

“My butler found the notches, just as the communication described,” he said. “This settles it! Garnon, if you’re where you can hear me, you’ve won. I can’t believe in the Statisticalist doctrines after this, or in the political program based upon them. I’ll announce my change of attitude at the next meeting of the Executive Council, and resign my seat. I was elected by Statisticalist votes, and I cannot hold office as a Volitionalist.”

“You’ll need a couple of Assassins, too,” the nobleman with the chin beard told him. “Your former colleagues and fellow-party-members are regrettably given to the forcible discarnation of those who differ with them.”

“I’ve never employed personal Assassins before,” Nirzav replied, “but I think you’re right. As soon as I get home, I’ll call Assassins’ Hall and make the necessary arrangements.”

“Better do it now,” Girzon of Roxor told him, lowering his voice. “There are over a hundred guests here, and I can’t vouch for all of them. The Statisticalists would be sure to have a spy planted among them. My father was one of their most dangerous opponents, when he was on the Council; they’ve always been afraid he’d come out of retirement and stand for reelection. They’d want to make sure he was really discarnate. And if that’s the case, you can be sure your change of attitude is known to old Mirzark of Bashad by this time. He won’t dare allow you to make a public renunciation of Statisticalism.” He turned to the other nobleman. “Prince Jirzyn, why don’t you call the Volitionist headquarters and have a couple of our Assassins sent here to escort Lord Nirzav home?”

“I’ll do that immediately,” Jirzyn of Starpha said. “It’s as Lord Girzon says; we can be pretty sure there was a spy among the guests, and now that you’ve come over to our way of thinking, we’re responsible for your safety.”

He left the room to make the necessary visiphone call. Dallona, accompanied by Dirzed, returned to her place at the table, where she was joined by Harnosh of Hosh and some of the others.

“There’s no question about the results,” Harnosh was exulting. “I’ll grant that the boy might have picked up some of that stuff telepathically from the carnate minds present here; even from the mind of Garnon, before he was discarnated. But he could not have picked up enough data, in that way, to make a connected and coherent communication. It takes a sensitive with a powerful mind of his own to practice telesthesia, and that boy’s almost an idiot.” He turned to Dallona. “You asked a question, mentally, after Garnon was discarnate, and got an answer that could have been contained only in Garnon’s mind. I think it’s conclusive proof that the discarnate Garnon was fully conscious and communicating.”

“Dirzed also asked a question, mentally, after the discarnation, and got an answer. Dr. Harnosh, we can state positively that the surviving individuality is fully conscious in the discarnate state, is telepathically sensitive, and is capable of telepathic communication with other minds,” Dallona agreed. “And in view of our earlier work with memory-recalls, we’re justified in stating positively that the individual is capable of exercising choice in reincarnation vehicles.”

“My father had been considering voluntary discarnation for a long time,” Girzon of Roxor said. “Ever since the discarnation of my mother. He deferred that step because he was unwilling to deprive the Volitionalist Party of his support. Now it would seem that he has done more to combat Statisticalism by discarnating than he ever did in his carnate existence.”

“I don’t know, Girzon,” Jirzyn of Starpha said, as he joined the group. “The Statisticalists will denounce the whole thing as a prearranged fraud. And if they can discarnate the Lady Dallona before she can record her testimony under truth hypnosis or on a lie detector, we’re no better off than we were before. Dirzed, you have a great responsibility in guarding the Lady Dallona; some extraordinary security precautions will be needed.”

In his office, in the First Level city of Dhergabar, Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, leaned forward in his chair to hold his lighter for his special assistant, Verkan Vall, then lit his own cigarette. He was a man of middle age⁠—his three hundredth birthday was only a decade or so off⁠—and he had begun to acquire a double chin and a bulge at his waistline. His hair, once black, had turned a uniform iron-gray and was beginning to thin in front.

“What do you know about the Second Level Akor-Neb Sector, Vall?” he inquired. “Ever work in that paratime-area?”

Verkan Vall’s handsome features became even more immobile than usual as he mentally pronounced the verbal trigger symbols which should bring hypnotically acquired knowledge into his conscious mind. Then he shook his head.

“Must be a singularly well-behaved sector, sir,” he said. “Or else we’ve been lucky, so far. I never was on an Akor-Neb operation; don’t even have a hypno-mech for that sector. All I know is from general reading.

“Like all the Second Level, its timelines descend from the probability of one or more shiploads of colonists having come to Terra from Mars about seventy-five to a hundred thousand years ago, and then having been cut off from the home planet and forced to develop a civilization of their own here. The Akor-Neb civilization is of a fairly high culture-order, even for Second Level. An atomic-power, interplanetary culture; gravity-counteraction, direct conversion of nuclear energy to electrical power, that sort of thing. We buy fine synthetic plastics and fabrics from them.” He fingered the material of his smartly-cut green police uniform. “I think this cloth is Akor-Neb. We sell a lot of Venusian zerfa-leaf; they smoke it, straight and mixed with tobacco. They have a single System-wide government, a single race, and a universal language. They’re a dark-brown race, which evolved in its present form about fifty thousand years ago; the present civilization is about ten thousand years old, developed out of the wreckage of several earlier civilizations which decayed or fell through wars, exhaustion of resources, et cetera. They have legends, maybe historical records, of their extraterrestrial origin.”

Tortha Karf nodded. “Pretty good, for consciously acquired knowledge,” he commented. “Well, our luck’s run out, on that sector; we have troubles there, now. I want you to go iron them out. I know, you’ve been going pretty hard, lately⁠—that nighthound business, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, wasn’t any picnic. But the fact is that a lot of my ordinary and deputy assistants have a little too much regard for the alleged sanctity of human life, and this is something that may need some pretty drastic action.”

“Some of our people getting out of line?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Well, the data isn’t too complete, but one of our people has run into trouble on that sector, and needs rescuing⁠—a psychic-science researcher, a young lady named Hadron Dalla. I believe you know her, don’t you?” Tortha Karf asked innocently.

“Slightly,” Verkan Vall deadpanned. “I enjoyed a brief but rather hectic companionate-marriage with her, about twenty years ago. What sort of a jam’s little Dalla got herself into, now?”

“Well, frankly, we don’t know. I hope she’s still alive, but I’m not unduly optimistic. It seems that about a year ago, Dr. Hadron transposed to the Second Level, to study alleged proof of reincarnation which the Akor-Neb people were reported to possess. She went to Gindrabar, on Venus, and transposed to the Second Paratime Level, to a station maintained by Outtime Import & Export Trading Corporation⁠—a zerfa plantation just east of the High Ridge country. There she assumed an identity as the daughter of a planter, and took the name of Dallona of Hadron. Parenthetically, all Akor-Neb family-names are prepositional; family-names were originally place names. I believe that ancient Akor-Neb marital relations were too complicated to permit exact establishment of paternity. And all Akor-Neb men’s personal names have -irz- or -arn- inserted in the middle, and women’s names end in -itra or -ona. You could call yourself Virzal of Verkan, for instance.

“Anyhow, she made the Second Level Venus-Terra trip on a regular passenger liner, and landed at the Akor-Neb city of Ghamma, on the upper Nile. There she established contact with the Outtime Trading Corporation representative, Zortan Brend, locally known as Brarnend of Zorda. He couldn’t call himself Brarnend of Zortan⁠—in the Akor-Neb language, zortan is a particularly nasty dirty-word. Hadron Dalla spent a few weeks at his residence, briefing herself on local conditions. Then she went to the capital city, Darsh, in eastern Europe, and enrolled as a student at something called the Independent Institute for Reincarnation Research, having secured a letter of introduction to its director, a Dr. Harnosh of Hosh.

“Almost at once, she began sending in reports to her home organization, the Rhogom Memorial Foundation of Psychic Science, here at Dhergabar, through Zortan Brend. The people there were wildly enthusiastic. I don’t have more than the average intelligent⁠—I hope⁠—layman’s knowledge of psychics, but Dr. Volzar Darv, the director of Rhogom Foundation, tells me that even in the present incomplete form, her reports have opened whole new horizons in the science. It seems that these Akor-Neb people have actually demonstrated, as a scientific fact, that the human individuality reincarnates after physical death⁠—that your personality, and mine, have existed, as such, for ages, and will exist for ages to come. More, they have means of recovering, from almost anybody, memories of past reincarnations.

“Well, after about a month, the people at this Reincarnation Institute realized that this Dallona of Hadron wasn’t any ordinary student. She probably had trouble keeping down to the local level of psychic knowledge. So, as soon as she’d learned their techniques, she was allowed to undertake experimental work of her own. I imagine she let herself out on that; as soon as she’d mastered the standard Akor-Neb methods of recovering memories of past reincarnations, she began refining and developing them more than the local yokels had been able to do in the past thousand years. I can’t tell you just what she did, because I don’t know the subject, but she must have lit things up properly. She got quite a lot of local publicity; not only scientific journals, but general newscasts.

“Then, four days ago, she disappeared, and her disappearance seems to have been coincident with an unsuccessful attempt on her life. We don’t know as much about this as we should; all we have is Zortan Brend’s account.

“It seems that on the evening of her disappearance, she had been attending the voluntary discarnation feast⁠—suicide party⁠—of a prominent nobleman named Garnon of Roxor. Evidently when the Akor-Neb people get tired of their current reincarnation they invite in their friends, throw a big party, and then do themselves in in an atmosphere of general conviviality. Frequently they take poison or inhale lethal gas; this fellow had his personal trigger man shoot him through the head. Dalla was one of the guests of honor, along with this Harnosh of Hosh. They’d made rather elaborate preparations, and after the shooting they got a detailed and apparently authentic spirit-communication from the late Garnon. The voluntary discarnation was just a routine social event, it seems, but the communication caused quite an uproar, and rated top place on the System-wide newscasts, and started a storm of controversy.

“After the shooting and the communication, Dalla took the officiating gun artist, one Dirzed, into her own service. This Dirzed was spoken of as a generally respected member of something called the Society of Assassins, and that’ll give you an idea of what things are like on that sector, and why I don’t want to send anybody who might develop trigger-finger cramp at the wrong moment. She and Dirzed left the home of the gentleman who had just had himself discarnated, presumably for Dalla’s apartment, about a hundred miles away. That’s the last that’s been heard of either of them.

“This attempt on Dalla’s life occurred while the pre-mortem revels were still going on. She lived in a six-room apartment, with three servants, on one of the upper floors of a three-thousand-foot tower⁠—Akor-Neb cities are built vertically, with considerable interval between units⁠—and while she was at this feast, a package was delivered at the apartment, ostensibly from the Reincarnation Institute and made up to look as though it contained record tapes. One of the servants accepted it from a service employee of the apartments. The next morning, a little before noon, Dr. Harnosh of Hosh called her on the visiphone and got no answer; he then called the apartment manager, who entered the apartment. He found all three of the servants dead, from a lethal-gas bomb which had exploded when one of them had opened this package. However, Hadron Dalla had never returned to the apartment, the night before.”

Verkan Vall was sitting motionless, his face expressionless as he ran Tortha Karf’s narrative through the intricate semantic and psychological processes of the First Level mentality. The fact that Hadron Dalla had been a former wife of his had been relegated to one corner of his consciousness and contained there; it was not a fact that would, at the moment, contribute to the problem or to his treatment of it.

“The package was delivered while she was at this suicide party,” he considered. “It must, therefore, have been sent by somebody who either did not know she would be out of the apartment, or who did not expect it to function until after her return. On the other hand, if her disappearance was due to hostile action, it was the work of somebody who knew she was at the feast and did not want her to reach her apartment again. This would seem to exclude the sender of the package bomb.”

Tortha Karf nodded. He had reached that conclusion, himself.

“Thus,” Verkan Vall continued, “if her disappearance was the work of an enemy, she must have two enemies, each working in ignorance of the other’s plans.”

“What do you think she did to provoke such enmity?”

“Well, of course, it just might be that Dalla’s normally complicated love-life had got a little more complicated than usual and short-circuited on her,” Verkan Vall said, out of the fullness of personal knowledge, “but I doubt that, at the moment. I would think that this affair has political implications.”

“So?” Tortha Karf had not thought of politics as an explanation. He waited for Verkan Vall to elaborate.

“Don’t you see, chief?” the special assistant asked. “We find a belief in reincarnation on many timelines, as a religious doctrine, but these people accept it as a scientific fact. Such acceptance would carry much more conviction; it would influence a people’s entire thinking. We see it reflected in their disregard for death⁠—suicide as a social function, this Society of Assassins, and the like. It would naturally color their political thinking, because politics is nothing but common action to secure more favorable living conditions, and to these people, the term ‘living conditions’ includes not only the present life, but also an indefinite number of future lives as well. I find this title, ‘Independent’ Institute, suggestive. Independent of what? Possibly of partisan affiliation.”

“But wouldn’t these people be grateful to her for her new discoveries, which would enable them to plan their future reincarnations more intelligently?” Tortha Karf asked.

“Oh, chief!” Verkan Vall reproached. “You know better than that! How many times have our people got in trouble on other timelines because they divulged some useful scientific fact that conflicted with the locally revered nonsense? You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I’ll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed. For instance, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, where I was just working, there is a political sect, the Communists, who, in the territory under their control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world-picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw the teaching of evolution by natural selection.”

Tortha Karf nodded. “I remember some stories my grandfather told me, about his narrow escapes from an organization called the Holy Inquisition, when he was a paratime trader on the Fourth Level, about four hundred years ago. I believe that thing’s still operating, on the Europo-American Sector, under the name of the N.K.V.D. So you think Dalla may have proven something that conflicted with local reincarnation theories, and somebody who had a vested interest in maintaining those theories is trying to stop her?”

“You spoke of a controversy over the communication alleged to have originated with this voluntarily discarnated nobleman. That would suggest a difference of opinion on the manner of nature of reincarnation or the discarnate state. This difference may mark the dividing line between the different political parties. Now, to get to this Darsh place, do I have to go to Venus, as Dalla did?”

“No. The Outtime Trading Corporation has transposition facilities at Ravvanan, on the Nile, which is spatially coexistent with the city of Ghamma on the Akor-Neb Sector, where Zortan Brend is. You transpose through there, and Zortan Brend will furnish you transportation to Darsh. It’ll take you about two days, here, getting your hypno-mech indoctrinations and having your skin pigmented, and your hair turned black. I’ll notify Zortan Brend at once that you’re coming through. Is there anything special you’ll want?”

“Why, I’ll want an abstract of the reports Dalla sent back to Rhogom Foundation. It’s likely that there is some clue among them as to whom her discoveries may have antagonized. I’m going to be a Venusian zerfa-planter, a friend of her father’s; I’ll want full hypno-mech indoctrination to enable me to play that part. And I’ll want to familiarize myself with Akor-Neb weapons and combat techniques. I think that will be all, chief.”

The last of the tall city units of Ghamma were sliding out of sight as the ship passed over them⁠—shaft-like buildings that rose two or three thousand feet above the ground in clumps of three or four or six, one at each corner of the landing stages set in series between them. Each of these units stood in the middle of a wooded park some five miles square; no unit was much more or less than twenty miles from its nearest neighbor, and the land between was the uniform golden-brown of ripening grain, crisscrossed with the threads of irrigation canals and dotted here and there with sturdy farm-village buildings and tall, stack-like granaries. There were a few other ships in the air at the fifty-thousand-foot level, and below, swarms of small airboats darted back and forth on different levels, depending upon speed and direction. Far ahead, to the northeast, was the shimmer of the Red Sea and the hazy bulk of Asia Minor beyond.

Verkan Vall⁠—the Lord Virzal of Verkan, temporarily⁠—stood at the glass front of the observation deck, looking down. He was a different Verkan Vall from the man who had talked with Tortha Karf in the latter’s office, two days before. The First Level cosmeticists had worked miracles upon him with their art. His skin was a soft chocolate-brown, now; his hair was jet-black, and so were his eyes. And in his subconscious mind, instantly available to consciousness, was a vast body of knowledge about conditions on the Akor-Neb sector, as well as a complete command of the local language, all hypnotically acquired.

He knew that he was looking down upon one of the minor provincial cities of a very respectably advanced civilization. A civilization which built its cities vertically, since it had learned to counteract gravitation. A civilization which still depended upon natural cereals for food, but one which had learned to make the most efficient use of its soil. The network of dams and irrigation canals which he saw was as good as anything on his own paratime level. The wide dispersal of buildings, he knew, was a heritage of a series of disastrous atomic wars of several thousand years before; the Akor-Neb people had come to love the wide inter-vistas of open country and forest, and had continued to scatter their buildings, even after the necessity had passed. But the slim, towering buildings could only have been reared by a people who had banished nationalism and, with it, the threat of total war. He contrasted them with the ground-hugging dome cities of the Khiftan civilization, only a few thousand parayears distant.

Three men came out of the lounge behind him and joined him. One was, like himself, a disguised paratimer from the First Level⁠—the Outtime Export and Import man, Zortan Brend, here known as Brarnend of Zorda. The other two were Akor-Neb people, and both wore the black tunics and the winged-bullet badges of the Society of Assassins. Unlike Verkan Vall and Zortan Brend, who wore shoulder holsters under their short tunics, the Assassins openly displayed pistols and knives on their belts.

“We heard that you were coming two days ago, Lord Virzal,” Zortan Brend said. “We delayed the takeoff of this ship, so that you could travel to Darsh as inconspicuously as possible. I also booked a suite for you at the Solar Hotel, at Darsh. And these are your Assassins⁠—Olirzon, and Marnik.”

Verkan Vall hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with them.

“Virzal of Verkan,” he identified himself. “I am satisfied to entrust myself to you.”

“We’ll do our best for you, Lord Virzal,” the older of the pair, Olirzon, said. He hesitated for a moment, then continued: “Understand, Lord Virzal, I only ask for information useful in serving and protecting you. But is this of the Lady Dallona a political matter?”

“Not from our side,” Verkan Vall told him. “The Lady Dallona is a scientist, entirely nonpolitical. The Honorable Brarnend is a business man; he doesn’t meddle with politics as long as the politicians leave him alone. And I’m a planter on Venus; I have enough troubles, with the natives, and the weather, and blue-rot in the zerfa plants, and poison roaches, and javelin bugs, without getting into politics. But psychic science is inextricably mixed with politics, and the Lady Dallona’s work had evidently tended to discredit the theory of Statistical Reincarnation.”

“Do you often make understatements like that, Lord Virzal?” Olirzon grinned. “In the last six months, she’s knocked Statistical Reincarnation to splinters.”

“Well, I’m not a psychic scientist, and as I said, I don’t know much about Terran politics,” Verkan Vall replied. “I know that the Statisticalists favor complete socialization and political control of the whole economy, because they want everybody to have the same opportunities in every reincarnation. And the Volitionalists believe that everybody reincarnates as he pleases, and so they favor continuance of the present system of private ownership of wealth and private profit under a system of free competition. And that’s about all I do know. Naturally, as a landowner and the holder of a title of nobility, I’m a Volitionalist in politics, but the socialization issue isn’t important on Venus. There is still too much unseated land there, and too many personal opportunities, to make socialism attractive to anybody.”

“Well, that’s about it,” Zortan Brend told him. “I’m not enough of a psychicist to know what the Lady Dallona’s been doing, but she’s knocked the theoretical basis from under Statistical Reincarnation, and that’s the basis, in turn, of Statistical Socialism. I think we’ll find that the Statisticalist Party is responsible for whatever happened to her.”

Marnik, the younger of the two Assassins, hesitated for a moment, then addressed Verkan Vall:

“Lord Virzal, I know none of the personalities involved in this matter, and I speak without wishing to give offense, but is it not possible that the Lady Dallona and the Assassin Dirzed may have gone somewhere together voluntarily? I have met Dirzed, and he has many qualities which women find attractive, and he is by no means indifferent to the opposite sex. You understand, Lord Virzal⁠—”

“I understand all too perfectly, Marnik,” Verkan Vall replied, out of the fullness of experience. “The Lady Dallona has had affairs with a number of men, myself among them. But under the circumstances, I find that explanation unthinkable.”

Marnik looked at him in open skepticism. Evidently, in his book, where an attractive man and a beautiful woman were concerned, that explanation was never unthinkable.

“The Lady Dallona is a scientist,” Verkan Vall elaborated. “She is not above diverting herself with love affairs, but that’s all they are⁠—a not too important form of diversion. And, if you recall, she had just participated in a most significant experiment: you can be sure that she had other things on her mind at the time than pleasure jaunts with good-looking Assassins.”

The ship was passing around the Caucasus Mountains, with the Caspian Sea in sight ahead, when several of the crew appeared on the observation deck and began preparing the shielding to protect the deck from gunfire. Zortan Brend inquired of the petty officer in charge of the work as to the necessity.

“We’ve been getting reports of trouble at Darsh, sir,” the man said. “Newscast bulletins every couple of minutes: rioting in different parts of the city. Started yesterday afternoon, when a couple of Statisticalist members of the Executive Council resigned and went over to the Volitionalists. Lord Nirzav of Shonna, the only nobleman of any importance in the Statisticalist Party, was one of them; he was shot immediately afterward, while leaving the Council Chambers, along with a couple of Assassins who were with him. Some people in an airboat sprayed them with a machine rifle as they came out onto the landing stage.”

The two Assassins exclaimed in horrified anger over this.

“That wasn’t the work of members of the Society of Assassins!” Olirzon declared. “Even after he’d resigned, the Lord Nirzav was still immune till he left the Government Building. There’s too blasted much illegal assassination going on!”

“What happened next?” Verkan Vall wanted to know.

“About what you’d expect, sir. The Volitionalists weren’t going to take that quietly. In the past eighteen hours, four prominent Statisticalists were forcibly discarnated, and there was even a fight in Mirzark of Bashad’s house, when Volitionalist Assassins broke in; three of them and four of Mirzark’s Assassins were discarnated.”

“You know, something is going to have to be done about that, too,” Olirzon said to Marnik. “It’s getting to a point where these political faction fights are being carried on entirely between members of the Society. In Ghamma alone, last year, thirty or forty of our members were discarnated that way.”

“Plug in a newscast visiplate, Karnil,” Zortan Brend told the petty officer. “Let’s see what’s going on in Darsh now.”

In Darsh, it seemed, an uneasy peace was being established. Verkan Vall watched heavily-armed airboats and light combat ships patrolling among the high towers of the city. He saw a couple of minor riots being broken up by the blue-uniformed Constabulary, with considerable shooting and a ruthless disregard for who might get shot. It wasn’t exactly the sort of policing that would have been tolerated in the First Level Civil Order Section, but it seemed to suit Akor-Neb conditions. And he listened to a series of angry recriminations and contradictory statements by different politicians, all of whom blamed the disorders on their opponents. The Volitionalists spoke of the Statisticalists as “insane criminals” and “underminers of social stability,” and the Statisticalists called the Volitionalists “reactionary criminals” and “enemies of social progress.” Politicians, he had observed, differed little in their vocabularies from one timeline to another.

This kept up all the while the ship was passing over the Caspian Sea; as they were turning up the Volga valley, one of the ship’s officers came down from the control deck, above.

“We’re coming into Darsh, now,” he said, and as Verkan Vall turned from the visiplate to the forward windows, he could see the white and pastel-tinted towers of the city rising above the hardwood forests that covered the whole Volga basin on this sector. “Your luggage has been put into the airboat, Lord Virzal and Honorable Assassins, and it’s ready for launching whenever you are.” The officer glanced at his watch. “We dock at Commercial Center in twenty minutes; we’ll be passing the Solar Hotel in ten.”

They all rose, and Verkan Vall hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with Zortan Brend.

“Good luck, Lord Virzal,” the latter said. “I hope you find the Lady Dallona safe and carnate. If you need help, I’ll be at Mercantile House for the next day or so; if you get back to Ghamma before I do, you know who to ask for there.”

A number of assassins loitered in the hallways and offices of the Independent Institute of Reincarnation Research when Verkan Vall, accompanied by Marnik, called there that afternoon. Some of them carried submachine-guns or sleep-gas projectors, and they were stopping people and questioning them. Marnik needed only to give them a quick gesture and the words, “Assassins’ Truce,” and he and his client were allowed to pass. They entered a lifter tube and floated up to the office of Dr. Harnosh of Hosh, with whom Verkan Vall had made an appointment.

“I’m sorry, Lord Virzal,” the director of the Institute told him, “but I have no idea what has befallen the Lady Dallona, or even if she is still carnate. I am quite worried; I admired her extremely, both as an individual and as a scientist. I do hope she hasn’t been discarnated; that would be a serious blow to science. It is fortunate that she accomplished as much as she did, while she was with us.”

“You think she is no longer carnate, then?”

“I’m afraid so. The political effects of her discoveries⁠—” Harnosh of Hosh shrugged sadly. “She was devoted, to a rare degree, to her work. I am sure that nothing but her discarnation could have taken her away from us, at this time, with so many important experiments still uncompleted.”

Marnik nodded to Verkan Vall, as much as to say: “You were right.”

“Well, I intend acting upon the assumption that she is still carnate and in need of help, until I am positive to the contrary,” Verkan Vall said. “And in the latter case, I intend finding out who discarnated her, and send him to apologize for it in person. People don’t forcibly discarnate my friends with impunity.”

“Sound attitude,” Dr. Harnosh commented. “There’s certainly no positive evidence that she isn’t still carnate. I’ll gladly give you all the assistance I can, if you’ll only tell me what you want.”

“Well, in the first place,” Verkan Vall began, “just what sort of work was she doing?” He already knew the answer to that, from the reports she had sent back to the First Level, but he wanted to hear Dr. Harnosh’s version. “And what, exactly, are the political effects you mentioned? Understand, Dr. Harnosh, I am really quite ignorant of any scientific subject unrelated to zerfa culture, and equally so of Terran politics. Politics, on Venus, is mainly a question of who gets how much graft out of what.”

Dr. Harnosh smiled; evidently he had heard about Venusian politics. “Ah, yes, of course. But you are familiar with the main differences between Statistical and Volitional reincarnation theories?”

“In a general way. The Volitionalists hold that the discarnate individuality is fully conscious, and is capable of something analogous to sense-perception, and is also capable of exercising choice in the matter of reincarnation vehicles, and can reincarnate or remain in the discarnate state as it chooses. They also believe that discarnate individualities can communicate with one another, and with at least some carnate individualities, by telepathy,” he said. “The Statisticalists deny all this; their opinion is that the discarnate individuality is in a more or less somnambulistic state, that it is drawn by a process akin to tropism to the nearest available reincarnation vehicle, and that it must reincarnate in and only in that vehicle. They are labeled Statisticalists because they believe that the process of reincarnation is purely at random, or governed by unknown and uncontrollable causes, and is unpredictable except as to aggregates.”

“That’s a fairly good generalized summary,” Dr. Harnosh of Hosh grudged, unwilling to give a mere layman too much credit. He dipped a spoon into a tobacco humidor, dusted the tobacco lightly with dried zerfa, and rammed it into his pipe. “You must understand that our modern Statisticalists are the intellectual heirs of those ancient materialistic thinkers who denied the possibility of any discarnate existence, or of any extraphysical mind, or even of extrasensory perception. Since all these things have been demonstrated to be facts, the materialistic dogma has been broadened to include them, but always strictly within the frame of materialism.

“We have proven, for instance, that the human individuality can exist in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to be facts. So they picture the discarnate individuality as a material object, or physical event, of negligible but actual mass, in which an indefinite number of memories can be stored as electronic charges. And they picture it as being drawn irresistibly to the body of the nearest non-incarnated infant. Curiously enough, the reincarnation vehicle chosen is almost always of the same sex as the vehicle of the previous reincarnation, the exceptions being cases of persons who had a previous history of psychological sex-inversion.”

Dr. Harnosh remembered the unlighted pipe in his hand, thrust it into his mouth, and lit it. For a moment, he sat with it jutting out of his black beard, until it was drawing to his satisfaction. “This belief in immediate reincarnation leads the Statisticalists, when they fight duels or perform voluntary discarnation, to do so in the neighborhood of maternity hospitals,” he added. “I know, personally, of one reincarnation memory-recall, in which the subject, a Statisticalist, voluntarily discarnated by lethal-gas inhaler in a private room at one of our local maternity hospitals, and reincarnated twenty years later in the city of Jeddul, three thousand miles away.” The square black beard jiggled as the scientist laughed.

“Now, as to the political implications of these contradictory theories: Since the Statisticalists believe that they will reincarnate entirely at random, their aim is to create an utterly classless social and economic order, in which, theoretically, each individuality will reincarnate into a condition of equality with everybody else. Their political program, therefore, is one of complete socialization of all means of production and distribution, abolition of hereditary titles and inherited wealth⁠—eventually, all private wealth⁠—and total government control of all economic, social and cultural activities. Of course,” Dr. Harnosh apologized, “politics isn’t my subject; I wouldn’t presume to judge how that would function in practice.”

“I would,” Verkan Vall said shortly, thinking of all the different timelines on which he had seen systems like that in operation. “You wouldn’t like it, doctor. And the Volitionalists?”

“Well, since they believe that they are able to choose the circumstances of their next reincarnations for themselves, they are the party of the status quo. Naturally, almost all the nobles, almost all the wealthy trading and manufacturing families, and almost all professional people, are Volitionalists; most of the workers and peasants are Statisticalists. Or, at least, they were, for the most part, before we began announcing the results of the Lady Dallona’s experimental work.”

“Ah; now we come to it,” Verkan Vall said as the story clarified.

“Yes. In somewhat oversimplified form, the situation is rather like this,” Dr. Harnosh of Hosh said. “The Lady Dallona introduced a number of refinements and some outright innovations into our technique of recovering memories of past reincarnations. Previously, it was necessary to keep the subject in an hypnotic trance, during which he or she would narrate what was remembered of past reincarnations, and this would be recorded. On emerging from the trance, the subject would remember nothing; the tape-recording would be all that would be left. But the Lady Dallona devised a technique by which these memories would remain in what might be called the fore part of the subject’s subconscious mind, so that they could be brought to the level of consciousness at will. More, she was able to recover memories of past discarnate existences, something we had never been able to do heretofore.” Dr. Harnosh shook his head. “And to think, when I first met her, I thought that she was just another sensation-seeking young lady of wealth, and was almost about to refuse her enrollment!”

He wasn’t the only one whom little Dalla had surprised, Verkan Vall thought. At least, he had been pleasantly surprised.

“You see, this entirely disproves the Statistical Theory of Reincarnation. For example, we got a fine set of memory-recalls from one subject, for four previous reincarnations and four inter-carnations. In the first of these, the subject had been a peasant on the estate of a wealthy noble. Unlike most of his fellows, who reincarnated into other peasant families almost immediately after discarnation, this man waited for fifty years in the discarnate state for an opportunity to reincarnate as the son of an over-servant. In his next reincarnation, he was the son of a technician, and received a technical education; he became a physics researcher. For his next reincarnation, he chose the son of a nobleman by a concubine as his vehicle; in his present reincarnation, he is a member of a wealthy manufacturing family, and married into a family of the nobility. In five reincarnations, he has climbed from the lowest to the next-to-highest rung of the social ladder. Few individuals of the class from whence he began this ascent possess so much persistence or determination. Then, of course, there was the case of Lord Garnon of Roxor.”

He went on to describe the last experiment in which Hadron Dalla had participated.

“Well, that all sounds pretty conclusive,” Verkan Vall commented. “I take it the leaders of the Volitionalist Party here are pleased with the result of the Lady Dallona’s work?”

“Pleased? My dear Lord Virzal, they’re fairly bursting with glee over it!” Harnosh of Hosh declared. “As I pointed out, the Statisticalist program of socialization is based entirely on the proposition that no one can choose the circumstances of his next reincarnation, and that’s been demonstrated to be utter nonsense. Until the Lady Dallona’s discoveries were announced, they were the dominant party, controlling a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. Only the Constitution kept them from enacting their entire socialization program long ago, and they were about to legislate constitutional changes which would remove that barrier. They had expected to be able to do so after the forthcoming general elections. But now, social inequality has become desirable: it gives people something to look forward to in the next reincarnation. Instead of wanting to abolish wealth and privilege and nobility, the proletariat want to reincarnate into them.” Harnosh of Hosh laughed happily. “So you can see how furious the Statisticalist Party organization is!”

“There’s a catch to this, somewhere,” Marnik the Assassin, speaking for the first time, declared. “They can’t all reincarnate as princes, there aren’t enough vacancies to go ’round. And no noble is going to reincarnate as a tractor driver to make room for a tractor driver who wants to reincarnate as a noble.”

“That’s correct,” Dr. Harnosh replied. “There is a catch to it; a catch most people would never admit, even to themselves. Very few individuals possess the will power, the intelligence or the capacity for mental effort displayed by the subject of the case I just quoted. The average man’s interests are almost entirely on the physical side; he actually finds mental effort painful, and makes as little of it as possible. And that is the only sort of effort a discarnate individuality can exert. So, unable to endure the fifty or so years needed to make a really good reincarnation, he reincarnates in a year or so, out of pure boredom, into the first vehicle he can find, usually one nobody else wants.” Dr. Harnosh dug out the heel of his pipe and blew through the stem. “But nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself. Now, every machine operator and field hand on the planet thinks he can reincarnate as a prince or a millionaire. Politics isn’t my subject, but I’m willing to bet that since Statistical Reincarnation is an exploded psychic theory, Statisticalist Socialism has been caught in the blast area and destroyed along with it.”

Olirzon was in the drawing room of the hotel suite when they returned, sitting on the middle of his spinal column in a reclining chair, smoking a pipe, dressing the edge of his knife with a pocket-hone, and gazing lecherously at a young woman in the visiplate. She was an extremely well-designed young woman, in a rather fragmentary costume, and she was heaving her bosom at the invisible audience in anger, sorrow, scorn, entreaty, and numerous other emotions.

“… this revolting crime,” she was declaiming, in a husky contralto, as Verkan Vall and Marnik entered, “foul even for the criminal beasts who conceived and perpetrated it!” She pointed an accusing finger. “This murder of the beautiful Lady Dallona of Hadron!”

Verkan Vall stopped short, considering the possibility of something having been discovered lately of which he was ignorant. Olirzon must have guessed his thought; he grinned reassuringly.

“Think nothing of it, Lord Virzal,” he said, waving his knife at the visiplate. “Just political propaganda; strictly for the sparrows. Nice propagandist, though.”

“And now,” the woman with the magnificent natural resources lowered her voice reverently, “we bring you the last image of the Lady Dallona, and of Dirzed, her faithful Assassin, taken just before they vanished, never to be seen again.”

The plate darkened, and there were strains of slow, dirgelike music; then it lighted again, presenting a view of a broad hallway, thronged with men and women in bright varicolored costumes. In the foreground, wearing a tight skirt of deep blue and a short red jacket, was Hadron Dalla, just as she had looked in the solidographs taken in Dhergabar after her alteration by the First Level cosmeticians to conform to the appearance of the Malayoid Akor-Neb people. She was holding the arm of a man who wore the black tunic and red badge of an Assassin, a handsome specimen of the Akor-Neb race. Trust little Dalla for that, Verkan Vall thought. The figures were moving with exaggerated slowness, as though a very fleeting picture were being stretched out as far as possible. Having already memorized his former wife’s changed appearance, Verkan Vall concentrated on the man beside her until the picture faded.

“All right, Olirzon; what did you get?” he asked.

“Well, first of all, at Assassins’ Hall,” Olirzon said, rolling up his left sleeve, holding his bare forearm to the light, and shaving a few fine hairs from it to test the edge of his knife. “Of course, they never tell one Assassin anything about the client of another Assassin; that’s standard practice. But I was in the Lodge Secretary’s office, where nobody but Assassins are ever admitted. They have a big panel in there, with the names of all the Lodge members on it in light-letters; that’s standard in all Lodges. If an Assassin is unattached and free to accept a client, his name’s in white light. If he has a client, the light’s changed to blue, and the name of the client goes up under his. If his whereabouts are unknown, the light’s changed to amber. If he is discarnated, his name’s removed entirely, unless the circumstances of his discarnation are such as to constitute an injury to the Society. In that case, the name’s in red light until he’s been properly avenged, or, as we say, till his blood’s been mopped up. Well, the name of Dirzed is up in blue light, with the name of Dallona of Hadron under it. I found out that the light had been amber for two days after the disappearance, and then had been changed back to blue. Get it, Lord Virzal?”

Verkan Vall nodded. “I think so. I’d been considering that as a possibility from the first. Then what?”

“Then I was about and around for a couple of hours, buying drinks for people⁠—unattached Assassins, Constabulary detectives, political workers, newscast people. You owe me fifteen System Monetary Units for that, Lord Virzal. What I got, when it’s all sorted out⁠—I taped it in detail, as soon as I got back⁠—reduces to this: The Volitionalists are moving mountains to find out who was the spy at Garnon of Roxor’s discarnation feast, but are doing nothing but nothing at all to find the Lady Dallona or Dirzed. The Statisticalists are making all sorts of secret efforts to find out what happened to her. The Constabulary blame the Statistos for the package bomb: they’re interested in that because of the discarnation of the three servants by an illegal weapon of indiscriminate effect. They claim that the disappearance of Dirzed and the Lady Dallona was a publicity hoax. The Volitionalists are preparing a line of publicity to deny this.”

Verkan Vall nodded. “That ties in with what you learned at Assassins’ Hall,” he said. “They’re hiding out somewhere. Is there any chance of reaching Dirzed through the Society of Assassins?”

Olirzon shook his head. “If you’re right⁠—and that’s the way it looks to me, too⁠—he’s probably just called in and notified the Society that he’s still carnate and so is the Lady Dallona, and called off any search the Society might be making for him.”

“And I’ve got to find the Lady Dallona as soon as I can. Well, if I can’t reach her, maybe I can get her to send word to me,” Verkan Vall said. “That’s going to take some doing, too.”

“What did you find out, Lord Virzal?” Olirzon asked. He had a piece of soft leather, now, and was polishing his blade lovingly.

“The Reincarnation Research people don’t know anything,” Verkan Vall replied. “Dr. Harnosh of Hosh thinks she’s discarnate. I did find out that the experimental work she’s done, so far, has absolutely disproved the theory of Statistical Reincarnation. The Volitionalists’ theory is solidly established.”

“Yes, what do you think, Olirzon?” Marnik added. “They have a case on record of a man who worked up from field hand to millionaire in five reincarnations. Deliberately, that is.” He went on to repeat what Harnosh of Hosh had said; he must have possessed an almost eidetic memory, for he gave the bearded psychicist’s words verbatim, and threw in the gestures and voice-inflections.

Olirzon grinned. “You know, there’s a chance for the easy-money boys,” he considered. “ ‘You, too, can Reincarnate as a millionaire! Let Dr. Nirzutz of Futzbutz Help You! Only 49.98 System Monetary Units for the Secret, Infallible, Autosuggestive Formula.’ And would it sell!” He put away the hone and the bit of leather and slipped his knife back into its sheath. “If I weren’t a respectable Assassin, I’d give it a try, myself.”

Verkan Vall looked at his watch. “We’d better get something to eat,” he said. “We’ll go down to the main dining room; the Martian Room, I think they call it. I’ve got to think of some way to let the Lady Dallona know I’m looking for her.”

The Martian Room, fifteen stories down, was a big place, occupying almost half of the floor space of one corner tower. It had been fitted to resemble one of the ruined buildings of the ancient and vanished race of Mars who were the ancestors of Terran humanity. One whole side of the room was a gigantic cine-solidograph screen, on which the gullied desolation of a Martian landscape was projected; in the course of about two hours, the scene changed from sunrise through daylight and night to sunrise again.

It was high noon when they entered and found a table; by the time they had finished their dinner, the night was ending and the first glow of dawn was tinting the distant hills. They sat for a while, watching the light grow stronger, then got up and left the table.

There were five men at a table near them; they had come in before the stars had grown dim, and the waiters were just bringing their first dishes. Two were Assassins, and the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any timeline⁠—the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well. One was a beefy man in a gold-laced cream-colored dress tunic; he had thick lips and a too-ready laugh. Another was a rather monkish-looking young man who spoke earnestly and rolled his eyes upward, as though at some celestial vision. The third had the faint powdering of gray in his black hair which was, among the Akor-Neb people, almost the only indication of advanced age.

“Of course it is; the whole thing is a fraud,” the monkish young man was saying angrily. “But we can’t prove it.”

“Oh, Sirzob, here, can prove anything, if you give him time,” the beefy one laughed. “The trouble is, there isn’t too much time. We know that that communication was a fake, prearranged by the Volitionalists, with Dr. Harnosh and this Dallona of Hadron as their tools. They fed the whole thing to that idiot boy hypnotically, in advance, and then, on a signal, he began typing out this spurious communication. And then, of course, Dallona and this Assassin of hers ran off somewhere together, so that we’d be blamed with discarnating or abducting them, and so that they wouldn’t be made to testify about the communication on a lie detector.”

A sudden happy smile touched Verkan Vall’s eyes. He caught each of his Assassins by an arm.

“Marnik, cover my back,” he ordered. “Olirzon, cover everybody at the table. Come on!”

Then he stepped forward, halting between the chairs of the young man and the man with the gray hair and facing the beefy man in the light tunic.

“You!” he barked. “I mean you.”

The beefy man stopped laughing and stared at him; then sprang to his feet. His hand, streaking toward his left armpit, stopped and dropped to his side as Olirzon aimed a pistol at him. The others sat motionless.

“You,” Verkan Vall continued, “are a complete, deliberate, malicious, and unmitigated liar. The Lady Dallona of Hadron is a scientist of integrity, incapable of falsifying her experimental work. What’s more, her father is one of my best friends; in his name, and in hers, I demand a full retraction of the slanderous statements you have just made.”

“Do you know who I am?” the beefy one shouted.

“I know what you are,” Verkan Vall shouted back. Like most ancient languages, the Akor-Neb speech included an elaborate, delicately-shaded, and utterly vile vocabulary of abuse; Verkan Vall culled from it judiciously and at length. “And if I don’t make myself understood verbally, we’ll go down to the object level,” he added, snatching a bowl of soup from in front of the monkish-looking young man and throwing it across the table.

The soup was a dark brown, almost black. It contained bits of meat, and mushrooms, and slices of hard-boiled egg, and yellow Martian rock lichen. It produced, on the light tunic, a most spectacular effect.

For a moment, Verkan Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, however, he bowed jerkily.

“Marnark of Bashad,” he identified himself. “When and where can my friends consult yours?”

“Lord Virzal of Verkan,” the paratimer bowed back. “Your friends can negotiate with mine here and now. I am represented by these Gentlemen-Assassins.”

“I won’t submit my friends to the indignity of negotiating with them,” Marnark retorted. “I insist that you be represented by persons of your own quality and mine.”

“Oh, you do?” Olirzon broke in. “Well, is your objection personal to me, or to Assassins as a class? In the first case, I’ll remember to make a private project of you, as soon as I’m through with my present employment; if it’s the latter, I’ll report your attitude to the Society. I’ll see what Klarnood, our President-General, thinks of your views.”

A crowd had begun to accumulate around the table. Some of them were persons in evening dress, some were Assassins on the hotel payroll, and some were unattached Assassins.

“Well, you won’t have far to look for him,” one of the latter said, pushing through the crowd to the table.

He was a man of middle age, inclined to stoutness; he made Verkan Vall think of a chocolate figure of Tortha Karf. The red badge on his breast was surrounded with gold lace, and, instead of black wings and a silver bullet, it bore silver wings and a golden dagger. He bowed contemptuously at Marnark of Bashad.

“Klarnood, President-General of the Society of Assassins,” he announced. “Marnark of Bashad, did I hear you say that you considered members of the Society as unworthy to negotiate an affair of honor with your friends, on behalf of this nobleman who has been courteous enough to accept your challenge?” he demanded.

Marnark of Bashad’s arrogance suffered considerable evaporation-loss. His tone became almost servile.

“Not at all, Honorable Assassin-President,” he protested. “But as I was going to ask these gentlemen to represent me, I thought it would be more fitting for the other gentleman to be represented by personal friends, also. In that way⁠—”

“Sorry, Marnark,” the gray-haired man at the table said. “I can’t second you; I have a quarrel with the Lord Virzal, too.” He rose and bowed. “Sirzob of Abo. Inasmuch as the Honorable Marnark is a guest at my table, an affront to him is an affront to me. In my quality as his host, I must demand satisfaction from you, Lord Virzal.”

“Why, gladly, Honorable Sirzob,” Verkan Vall replied. This was getting better and better every moment. “Of course, your friend, the Honorable Marnark, enjoys priority of challenge; I’ll take care of you as soon as I have, shall we say, satisfied, him.”

The earnest and rather consecrated-looking young man rose also, bowing to Verkan Vall.

“Yirzol of Narva. I, too, have a quarrel with you, Lord Virzal; I cannot submit to the indignity of having my food snatched from in front of me, as you just did. I also demand satisfaction.”

“And quite rightly, Honorable Yirzol,” Verkan Vall approved. “It looks like such good soup, too,” he sorrowed, inspecting the front of Marnark’s tunic. “My seconds will negotiate with yours immediately; your satisfaction, of course, must come after that of Honorable Sirzob.”

“If I may intrude,” Klarnood put in smoothly, “may I suggest that as the Lord Virzal is represented by his Assassins, yours can represent all three of you at the same time. I will gladly offer my own good offices as impartial supervisor.”

Verkan Vall turned and bowed as to royalty. “An honor, Assassin-President: I am sure no one could act in that capacity more satisfactorily.”

“Well, when would it be most convenient to arrange the details?” Klarnood inquired. “I am completely at your disposal, gentlemen.”

“Why, here and now, while we’re all together,” Verkan Vall replied.

“I object to that!” Marnark of Bashad vociferated. “We can’t make arrangements here; why, all these hotel people, from the manager down, are nothing but tipsters for the newscast services!”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Verkan Vall demanded. “You knew that when you slandered the Lady Dallona in their hearing.”

“The Lord Virzal of Verkan is correct,” Klarnood ruled. “And the offenses for which you have challenged him were also committed in public. By all means, let’s discuss the arrangements now.” He turned to Verkan Vall. “As the challenged party, you have the choice of weapons; your opponents, then, have the right to name the conditions under which they are to be used.”

Marnark of Bashad raised another outcry over that. The assault upon him by the Lord Virzal of Verkan was deliberately provocative, and therefore tantamount to a challenge; he, himself, had the right to name the weapons. Klarnood upheld him.

“Do the other gentlemen make the same claim?” Verkan Vall wanted to know.

“If they do, I won’t allow it,” Klarnood replied. “You deliberately provoked Honorable Marnark, but the offenses of provoking him at Honorable Sirzob’s table, and of throwing Honorable Yirzol’s soup at him, were not given with intent to provoke. These gentlemen have a right to challenge, but not to consider themselves provoked.”

“Well, I choose knives, then,” Marnark hastened to say.

Verkan Vall smiled thinly. He had learned knife-play among the greatest masters of that art in all paratime, the Third Level Khanga pirates of the Caribbean Islands.

“And we fight barefoot, stripped to the waist, and without any parrying weapon in the left hand,” Verkan Vall stipulated.

The beefy Marnark fairly licked his chops in anticipation. He outweighed Verkan Vall by forty pounds; he saw an easy victory ahead. Verkan Vall’s own confidence increased at these signs of his opponent’s assurance.

“And as for Honorable Sirzob and Honorable Yirzol, I chose pistols,” he added.

Sirzob and Yirzol held a hasty whispered conference.

“Speaking both for Honorable Yirzol and for myself,” Sirzob announced, “we stipulate that the distance shall be twenty meters, that the pistols shall be fully loaded, and that fire shall be at will after the command.”

“Twenty rounds, fire at will, at twenty meters!” Olirzon hooted. “You must think our principal’s as bad a shot as you are!”

The four Assassins stepped aside and held a long discussion about something, with considerable argument and gesticulation. Klarnood, observing Verkan Vall’s impatience, leaned close to him and whispered:

“This is highly irregular; we must pretend ignorance and be patient. They’re laying bets on the outcome. You must do your best, Lord Virzal; you don’t want your supporters to lose money.”

He said it quite seriously, as though the outcome were otherwise a matter of indifference to Verkan Vall.

Marnark wanted to discuss time and place, and proposed that all three duels be fought at dawn, on the fourth landing stage of Darsh Central Hospital; that was closest to the maternity wards, and statistics showed that most births occurred just before that hour.

“Certainly not,” Verkan Vall vetoed. “We’ll fight here and now; I don’t propose going a couple of hundred miles to meet you at any such unholy hour. We’ll fight in the nearest hallway that provides twenty meters’ shooting distance.”

Marnark, Sirzob and Yirzol all clamored in protest. Verkan Vall shouted them down, drawing on his hypnotically acquired knowledge of Akor-Neb duelling customs. “The code explicitly states that satisfaction shall be rendered as promptly as possible, and I insist on a literal interpretation. I’m not going to inconvenience myself and Assassin-President Klarnood and these four Gentlemen-Assassins just to humor Statisticalist superstitions.”

The manager of the hotel, drawn to the Martian Room by the uproar, offered a hallway connecting the kitchens with the refrigerator rooms; it was fifty meters long by five in width, was well-lighted and soundproof, and had a bay in which the seconds and other could stand during the firing.

They repaired thither in a body, Klarnood gathering up several hotel servants on the way through the kitchen. Verkan Vall stripped to the waist, pulled off his ankle boots, and examined Olirzon’s knife. Its tapering eight-inch blade was double-edged at the point, and its handle was covered with black velvet to afford a good grip, and wound with gold wire. He nodded approvingly, gripped it with his index finger crooked around the cross-guard, and advanced to meet Marnark of Bashad.

As he had expected, the burly politician was depending upon his greater brawn to overpower his antagonist. He advanced with a sidling, spread-legged gait, his knife hand against his right hip and his left hand extended in front. Verkan Vall nodded with pleased satisfaction; a wrist-grabber. Then he blinked. Why, the fellow was actually holding his knife reversed, his little finger to the guard and his thumb on the pommel!

Verkan Vall went briskly to meet him, made a feint at his knife hand with his own left, and then sidestepped quickly to the right. As Marnark’s left hand grabbed at his right wrist, his left hand brushed against it and closed into a fist, with Marnark’s left thumb inside of it, He gave a quick downward twist with his wrist, pulling Marnark off balance.

Caught by surprise, Marnark stumbled, his knife flailing wildly away from Verkan Vall. As he stumbled forward, Verkan Vall pivoted on his left heel and drove the point of his knife into the back of Marnark’s neck, twisting it as he jerked it free. At the same time, he released Marnark’s thumb. The politician continued his stumble and fell forward on his face, blood spurting from his neck. He gave a twitch or so, and was still.

Verkan Vall stooped and wiped the knife on the dead man’s clothes⁠—another Khanga pirate gesture⁠—and then returned it to Olirzon.

“Nice weapon, Olirzon,” he said. “It fitted my hand as though I’d been born holding it.”

“You used it as though you had, Lord Virzal,” the Assassin replied. “Only eight seconds from the time you closed with him.”

The function of the hotel servants whom Klarnood had gathered up now became apparent; they advanced, took the body of Marnark by the heels, and dragged it out of the way. The others watched this removal with mixed emotions. The two remaining principals were impassive and frozen-faced. Their two Assassins, who had probably bet heavily on Marnark, were chagrined. And Klarnood was looking at Verkan Vall with a considerable accretion of respect. Verkan Vall pulled on his boots and resumed his clothing.

There followed some argument about the pistols; it was finally decided that each combatant should use his own shoulder-holster weapon. All three were nearly enough alike⁠—small weapons, rather heavier than they looked, firing a tiny ten-grain bullet at ten thousand foot-seconds. On impact, such a bullet would almost disintegrate; a man hit anywhere in the body with one would be killed instantly, his nervous system paralyzed and his heart stopped by internal pressure. Each of the pistols carried twenty rounds in the magazine.

Verkan Vall and Sirzob of Abo took their places, their pistols lowered at their sides, facing each other across a measured twenty meters.

“Are you ready, gentlemen?” Klarnood asked. “You will not raise your pistols until the command to fire; you may fire at will after it. Ready. Fire!”

Both pistols swung up to level. Verkan Vall found Sirzob’s head in his sights and squeezed; the pistol kicked back in his hand, and he saw a lance of blue flame jump from the muzzle of Sirzob’s. Both weapons barked together, and with the double report came the whip-cracking sound of Sirzob’s bullet passing Verkan Vall’s head. Then Sirzob’s face altered its appearance unpleasantly, and he pitched forward. Verkan Vall thumbed on his safety and stood motionless, while the servants advanced, took Sirzob’s body by the heels, and dragged it over beside Marnark’s.

“All right; Honorable Yirzol, you’re next,” Verkan Vall called out.

“The Lord Virzal has fired one shot,” one of the opposing seconds objected, “and Honorable Yirzol has a full magazine. The Lord Virzal should put in another magazine.”

“I grant him the advantage; let’s get on with it,” Verkan Vall said.

Yirzol of Narva advanced to the firing point. He was not afraid of death⁠—none of the Akor-Neb people were; their language contained no word to express the concept of total and final extinction⁠—and discarnation by gunshot was almost entirely painless. But he was beginning to suspect that he had made a fool of himself by getting into this affair, he had work in his present reincarnation which he wanted to finish, and his political party would suffer loss, both of his services and of prestige.

“Are you ready, gentlemen?” Klarnood intoned ritualistically. “You will not raise your pistols until the command to fire; you may fire at will after it. Ready, Fire!”

Verkan Vall shot Yirzol of Narva through the head before the latter had his pistol half raised. Yirzol fell forward on the splash of blood Sirzob had made, and the servants came forward and dragged his body over with the others. It reminded Verkan Vail of some sort of industrial assembly-line operation. He replaced the two expended rounds in his magazine with fresh ones and slid the pistol back into its holster. The two Assassins whose principals had been so expeditiously massacred were beginning to count up their losses and pay off the winners.

Klarnood, the President-General of the Society of Assassins, came over, hooking fingers and clapping shoulders with Verkan Vall.

“Lord Virzal, I’ve seen quite a few duels, but nothing quite like that,” he said. “You should have been an Assassin!”

That was a considerable compliment. Verkan Vall thanked him modestly.

“I’d like to talk to you privately,” the Assassin-President continued. “I think it’ll be worth your while if we have a few words together.”

Verkan Vall nodded. “My suite is on the fifteenth floor above; will that be all right?” He waited until the losers had finished settling their bets, then motioned to his own pair of Assassins.

As they emerged into the Martian Room again, the manager was waiting; he looked as though he were about to demand that Verkan Vall vacate his suite. However, when he saw the arm of the President-General of the Society of Assassins draped amicably over his guest’s shoulder, he came forward bowing and smiling.

“Larnorm, I want you to put five of your best Assassins to guarding the approaches to the Lord Virzal’s suite,” Klarnood told him. “I’ll send five more from Assassins’ Hall to replace them at their ordinary duties. And I’ll hold you responsible with your carnate existence for the Lord Virzal’s safety in this hotel. Understand?”

“Oh, yes, Honorable Assassin-President; you may trust me. The Lord Virzal will be perfectly safe.”

In Verkan Vall’s suite, above, Klarnood sat down and got out his pipe, filling it with tobacco lightly mixed with zerfa. To his surprise, he saw his host light a plain tobacco cigarette.

“Don’t you use zerfa?” he asked.

“Very little,” Verkan Vall replied. “I grow it. If you’d see the bums who hang around our drying sheds, on Venus, cadging rejected leaves and smoking themselves into a stupor, you’d be frugal in using it, too.”

Klarnood nodded. “You know, most men would want a pipe of fifty percent, or a straight zerfa cigarette, after what you’ve been through,” he said.

“I’d need something like that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden,” Verkan Vall said. “As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn’t handle a pistol at all. I suppose the old fellow, Sirzob, was a fair shot, but dropping him wasn’t any great feat of arms, either.”

Klarnood looked at him curiously for a moment. “You know,” he said, at length, “I believe you actually mean that. Well, until he met you, Marnark of Bashad was rated as the best knife-fighter in Darsh. Sirzob had ten dueling victories to his credit, and young Yirzol four.” He puffed slowly on his pipe. “I like you, Lord Virzal; a great Assassin was lost when you decided to reincarnate as a Venusian landowner. I’d hate to see you discarnated without proper warning. I take it you’re ignorant of the intricacies of Terran politics?”

“To a large extent, yes.”

“Well, do you know who those three men were?” When Verkan Vall shook his head, Klarnood continued: “Marnark was the son and right-hand associate of old Mirzark of Bashad, the Statisticalist Party leader. Sirzob of Abo was their propaganda director. And Yirzol of Narva was their leading socioeconomic theorist, and their candidate for Executive Chairman. In six minutes, with one knife thrust and two shots, you did the Statisticalist Party an injury second only to that done them by the young lady in whose name you were fighting. In two weeks, there will be a planetwide general election. As it stands, the Statisticalists have a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. As a result of your work and the Lady Dallona’s, they’ll lose that majority, and more, when the votes are tallied.”

“Is that another reason why you like me?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Unofficially, yes. As President-General of the Society of Assassins, I must be nonpolitical. The Society is rigidly so; if we let ourselves become involved, as an organization, in politics, we could control the System Government inside of five years, and we’d be wiped out of existence in fifty years by the very forces we sought to control,” Klarnood said. “But personally, I would like to see the Statisticalist Party destroyed. If they succeed in their program of socialization, the Society would be finished. A socialist state is, in its final development, an absolute, total, state; no total state can tolerate extralegal and para-governmental organizations. So we have adopted the policy of giving a little inconspicuous aid, here and there, to people who are dangerous to the Statisticalists. The Lady Dallona of Hadron, and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh, are such persons. You appear to be another. That’s why I ordered that fellow, Larnorm, to make sure you were safe in his hotel.”

“Where is the Lady Dallona?” Verkan Vall asked. “From your use of the present tense, I assume you believe her to be still carnate.”

Klarnood looked at Verkan Vall keenly. “That’s a pretty blunt question, Lord Virzal,” he said. “I wish I knew a little more about you. When you and your Assassins started inquiring about the Lady Dallona, I tried to check up on you. I found out that you had come to Darsh from Ghamma on a ship of the family of Zorda, accompanied by Brarnend of Zorda himself. And that’s all I could find out. You claim to be a Venusian planter, and you might be. Any Terran who can handle weapons as you can would have come to my notice long ago. But you have no more ascertainable history than if you’d stepped out of another dimension.”

That was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. In fact, it was the truth. Verkan Vall laughed.

“Well, confidentially,” he said, “I’m from the Arcturus System. I followed the Lady Dallona here from our home planet, and when I have rescued her from among you Solarians, I shall, according to our customs, receive her hand in marriage. As she is the daughter of the Emperor of Arcturus, that’ll be quite a good thing for me.”

Klarnood chuckled. “You know, you’d only have to tell me that about three or four times and I’d start believing it,” he said. “And Dr. Harnosh of Hosh would believe it the first time; he’s been talking to himself ever since the Lady Dallona started her experimental work here. Lord Virzal, I’m going to take a chance on you. The Lady Dallona is still carnate, or was four days ago, and the same for Dirzed. They both went into hiding after the discarnation feast of Garnon of Roxor, to escape the enmity of the Statisticalists. Two days after they disappeared, Dirzed called Assassins’ Hall and reported this, but told us nothing more. I suppose, in about three or four days, I could reestablish contact with him. We want the public to think that the Statisticalists made away with the Lady Dallona, at least until the election’s over.”

Verkan Vall nodded. “I was pretty sure that was the situation,” he said. “It may be that they will get in touch with me; if they don’t, I’ll need your help in reaching them.”

“Why do you think the Lady Dallona will try to reach you?”

“She needs all the help she can get. She knows she can get plenty from me. Why do you think I interrupted my search for her, and risked my carnate existence, to fight those people over a matter of verbalisms and political propaganda?” Verkan Vall went to the newscast visiplate and snapped it on. “We’ll see if I’m getting results, yet.”

The plate lighted, and a handsome young man in a gold-laced green suit was speaking out of it:

“… where he is heavily guarded by Assassins. However, in an exclusive interview with representatives of this service, the Assassin Hirzif, one of the two who seconded the men the Lord Virzal fought, said that in his opinion all of the three were so outclassed as to have had no chance whatever, and that he had already refused an offer of ten thousand System Monetary Units to discarnate the Lord Virzal for the Statisticalist Party. ‘When I want to discarnate,’ Hirzif the Assassin said, ‘I’ll invite in my friends and do it properly; until I do, I wouldn’t go up against the Lord Virzal of Verkan for ten million S.M.U.’ ”

Verkan Vall snapped off the visiplate. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I fought those politicians just for the advertising. If Dallona and Dirzed are anywhere near a visiplate, they’ll know how to reach me.”

“Hirzif shouldn’t have talked about refusing that retainer,” Klarnood frowned. “That isn’t good Assassin ethics. Why, yes, Lord Virzal; that was cleverly planned. It ought to get results. But I wish you’d get the Lady Dallona out of Darsh, and preferably off Terra, as soon as you can. We’ve benefited by this, so far, but I shouldn’t like to see things go much further. A real civil war could develop out of this situation, and I don’t want that. Call on me for help; I’ll give you a code word to use at Assassins’ Hall.”

A real civil war was developing even as Klarnood spoke; by midmorning of the next day, the fighting that had been partially suppressed by the Constabulary had broken out anew. The Assassins employed by the Solar Hotel⁠—heavily reinforced during the night⁠—had fought a pitched battle with Statisticalist partisans on the landing stage above Verkan Vall’s suite, and now several Constabulary airboats were patrolling around the building. The rule on Constabulary interference seemed to be that while individuals had an unquestionable right to shoot out their differences among themselves, any fighting likely to endanger nonparticipants was taboo.

Just how successful in enforcing this rule the Constabulary were was open to some doubt. Ever since arising, Verkan Vall had heard the crash of small arms and the hammering of automatic weapons in other parts of the towering city unit. There hadn’t been a civil war on the Akor-Neb Sector for over five centuries, he knew, but then, Hadron Dalla, Doctor of Psychic Science, and intertemporal trouble-carrier extraordinary, had only been on this sector for a little under a year. If anything, he was surprised that the explosion had taken so long to occur.

One of the servants furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic.

“Lord Virzal, there is a masked Assassin in the hallway who brought this under Assassins’ Truce,” he said.

Verkan Vall took the wafer and pared off three of the four edges, which showed black where they had been fused. Unfolding it, he found, as he had expected, that the pyrographed message within was in the alphabet and language of the First Paratime Level:

Vall, darling:

Am I glad you got here; this time I really am in the middle, but good! The Assassin, Dirzed, who brings this, is in my service. You can trust him implicitly; he’s about the only person in Darsh you can trust. He’ll bring you to where I am.

Verkan Vall grinned at the postscript. That had been twenty years ago, when he’d been eighty and she’d been seventy. He supposed she’d expect him to take up his old relationship with her again. It probably wouldn’t last any longer than it had, the other time; he recalled a Fourth Level proverb about the leopard and his spots. It certainly wouldn’t be boring, though.

“Tell the Assassin to come in,” he directed. Then he tossed the message down on a table. Outside of himself, nobody in Darsh could read it but the woman who had sent it; if, as he thought highly probable, the Statisticalists had spies among the hotel staff, it might serve to reduce some cryptanalyst to gibbering insanity.

The Assassin entered, drawing off a cowl-like mask. He was the man whose arm Dalla had been holding in the visiplate picture; Verkan Vall even recognized the extremely ornate pistol and knife on his belt.

“Dirzed the Assassin,” he named himself. “If you wish, we can visiphone Assassins’ Hall for verification of my identity.”

“Lord Virzal of Verkan. And my Assassins, Marnik and Olirzon.” They all hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with the newcomer. “That won’t be needed,” Verkan Vall told Dirzed. “I know you from seeing you with the Lady Dallona, on the visiplate; you’re ‘Dirzed, her faithful Assassin.’ ”

Dirzed’s face, normally the color of a good walnut gunstock, turned almost black. He used shockingly bad language.

“And that’s why I have to wear this abomination,” he finished, displaying the mask. “The Lady Dallona and I can’t show our faces anywhere; if we did, every Statisticalist and his six-year-old brat would know us, and we’d be fighting off an army of them in five minutes.”

“Where’s the Lady Dallona, now?”

“In hiding, Lord Virzal, at a private dwelling dome in the forest; she’s most anxious to see you. I’m to take you to her, and I would strongly advise that you bring your Assassins along. There are other people at this dome, and they are not personally loyal to the Lady Dallona. I’ve no reason to suspect them of secret enmity, but their friendship is based entirely on political expediency.”

“And political expediency is subject to change without notice,” Verkan Vall finished for him. “Have you an airboat?”

“On the landing stage below. Shall we go now, Lord Virzal?”

“Yes.” Verkan Vall made a two-handed gesture to his Assassins, as though gripping a submachine-gun; they nodded, went into another room, and returned carrying light automatic weapons in their hands and pouches of spare drums slung over their shoulders. “And may I suggest, Dirzed, that one of my Assassins drives the airboat? I want you on the back seat with me, to explain the situation as we go.”

Dirzed’s teeth flashed white against his brown skin as he gave Verkan Vall a quick smile.

“By all means, Lord Virzal; I would much rather be distrusted than to find that my client’s friends were not discreet.”

There were a couple of hotel Assassins guarding Dirzed’s airboat, on the landing stage. Marnik climbed in under the controls, with Olirzon beside him; Verkan Vall and Dirzed entered the rear seat. Dirzed gave Marnik the coordinate reference for their destination.

“Now, what sort of a place is this, where we’re going?” Verkan Vall asked. “And who’s there whom we may or may not trust?”

“Well, it’s a dome house belonging to the family of Starpha; they own a five-mile radius around it, oak and beech forest and underbrush, stocked with deer and boar. A hunting lodge. Prince Jirzyn of Starpha, Lord Girzon of Roxor, and a few other top-level Volitionalists, know that the Lady Dallona’s hiding there. They’re keeping her out of sight till after the election, for propaganda purposes. We’ve been hiding there since immediately after the discarnation feast of the Lord Garnon of Roxor.”

“What happened, after the feast?” Verkan Vall wanted to know.

“Well, you know how the Lady Dallona and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh had this telepathic-sensitive there, in a trance and drugged with a zerfa-derivative alkaloid the Lady Dallona had developed. I was Lord Garnon’s Assassin; I discarnated him, myself. Why, I hadn’t even put my pistol away before he was in control of this sensitive, in a room five stories above the banquet hall; he began communicating at once. We had visiplates to show us what was going on.

“Right away, Nirzav of Shonna, one of the Statisticalist leaders who was a personal friend of Lord Garnon’s in spite of his politics, renounced Statisticalism and went over to the Volitionalists, on the strength of this communication. Prince Jirzyn, and Lord Girzon, the new family-head of Roxor, decided that there would be trouble in the next few days, so they advised the Lady Dallona to come to this hunting lodge for safety. She and I came here in her airboat, directly from the feast. A good thing we did, too; if we’d gone to her apartment, we’d have walked in before that lethal gas had time to clear.

“There are four Assassins of the family of Starpha, and six menservants, and an upper-servant named Tarnod, the gamekeeper. The Starpha Assassins and I have been keeping the rest under observation. I left one of the Starpha Assassins guarding the Lady Dallona when I came for you, under brotherly oath to protect her in my name till I returned.”

The airboat was skimming rapidly above the treetops, toward the northern part of the city.

“What’s known about that package bomb?” Verkan Vall asked. “Who sent it?”

Dirzed shrugged. “The Statisticalists, of course. The wrapper was stolen from the Reincarnation Research Institute; so was the case. The Constabulary are working on it.” Dirzed shrugged again.

The dome, about a hundred and fifty feet in width and some fifty in height, stood among the trees ahead. It was almost invisible from any distance; the concrete dome was of mottled green and gray concrete, trees grew so close as to brush it with their branches, and the little pavilion on the flattened top was roofed with translucent green plastic. As the airboat came in, a couple of men in Assassins’ garb emerged from the pavilion to meet them.

“Marnik, stay at the controls,” Verkan Vall directed. “I’ll send Olirzon up for you if I want you. If there’s any trouble, take off for Assassins’ Hall and give the code word, then come back with twice as many men as you think you’ll need.”

Dirzed raised his eyebrows over this. “I hadn’t known the Assassin-President had given you a code word, Lord Virzal,” he commented. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

“The Assassin-President has honored me with his friendship,” Verkan Vall replied noncommittally, as he, Dirzed and Olirzon climbed out of the airboat. Marnik was holding it an unobtrusive inch or so above the flat top of the dome, away from the edge of the pavilion roof.

The two Assassins greeted him, and a man in upper-servants’ garb and wearing a hunting knife and a long hunting pistol approached.

“Lord Virzal of Verkan? Welcome to Starpha Dome. The Lady Dallona awaits you below.”

Verkan Vall had never been in an Akor-Neb dwelling dome, but a description of such structures had been included in his hypno-mech indoctrination. Originally, they had been the standard structure for all purposes; about two thousand elapsed years ago, when nationalism had still existed on the Akor-Neb Sector, the cities had been almost entirely under ground, as protection from air attack. Even now, the design had been retained by those who wished to live apart from the towering city units, to preserve the natural appearance of the landscape. The Starpha hunting lodge was typical of such domes. Under it was a circular well, eighty feet in depth and fifty in width, with a fountain and a shallow circular pool at the bottom. The storerooms, kitchens and servants’ quarters were at the top, the living quarters at the bottom, in segments of a wide circle around the well, back of balconies.

“Tarnod, the gamekeeper,” Dirzed performed the introductions. “And Erarno and Kirzol, Assassins.”

Verkan Vall hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with them. Tarnod accompanied them to the lifter tubes⁠—two percent positive gravitation for descent and two percent negative for ascent⁠—and they all floated down the former, like air-filled balloons, to the bottom level.

“The Lady Dallona is in the gun room,” Tarnod informed Verkan Vall, making as though to guide him.

“Thanks, Tarnod; we know the way,” Dirzed told him shortly, turning his back on the upper-servant and walking toward a closed door on the other side of the fountain. Verkan Vall and Olirzon followed; for a moment, Tarnod stood looking after them, then he followed the other two Assassins into the ascent tube.

“I don’t relish that fellow,” Dirzed explained. “The family of Starpha use him for work they couldn’t hire an Assassin to do at any price. I’ve been here often, when I was with the Lord Garnon; I’ve always thought he had something on Prince Jirzyn.”

He knocked sharply on the closed door with the butt of his pistol. In a moment, it slid open, and a young Assassin with a narrow mustache and a tuft of chin beard looked out.

“Ah, Dirzed.” He stepped outside. “The Lady Dallona is within; I return her to your care.”

Verkan Vall entered, followed by Dirzed and Olirzon. The big room was fitted with reclining chairs and couches and low tables; its walls were hung with the heads of deer and boar and wolves, and with racks holding rifles and hunting pistols and fowling pieces. It was filled with the soft glow of indirect cold light. At the far side of the room, a young woman was seated at a desk, speaking softly into a sound transcriber. As they entered, she snapped it off and rose.

Hadron Dalla wore the same costume Verkan Vall had seen on the visiplate: he recognized her instantly. It took her a second or two to perceive Verkan Vall under the brown skin and black hair of the Lord Virzal of Verkan. Then her face lighted with a happy smile.

“Why, Va-a-a-ll!” she whooped, running across the room and tossing herself into his not particularly reluctant arms. After all, it had been twenty years⁠—“I didn’t know you, at first!”

“You mean, in these clothes?” he asked, seeing that she had forgotten, for the moment, the presence of the two Assassins. She had even called him by his First Level name, but that was unimportant⁠—the Akor-Neb affectionate diminutive was formed by omitting the -irz- or -arn-. “Well, they’re not exactly what I generally wear on the plantation.” He kissed her again, then turned to his companions. “Your pardon, Gentlemen-Assassins; it’s been something over a year since we’ve seen each other.”

Olirzon was smiling at the affectionate reunion; Dirzed wore a look of amused resignation, as though he might have expected something like this to happen. Verkan Vall and Dalla sat down on a couch near the desk.

“That was really sweet of you, Vall, fighting those men for talking about me,” she began. “You took an awful chance, though. But if you hadn’t, I’d never have known you were in Darsh⁠—Oh-oh! That was why you did it, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I had to do something. Everybody either didn’t know or weren’t saying where you were. I assumed, from the circumstances, that you were hiding somewhere. Tell me, Dalla; do you really have scientific proof of reincarnation? I mean, as an established fact?”

“Oh, yes; these people on this sector have had that for over ten centuries. They have hypnotic techniques for getting back into a part of the subconscious mind that we’ve never been able to reach. And after I found out how they did it, I was able to adapt some of our hypno-epistemological techniques to it, and⁠—”

“All right; that’s what I wanted to know,” he cut her off. “We’re getting out of here, right away.”

“But where?”

“Ghamma, in an airboat I have outside, and then back to the First Level. Unless there’s a paratime-transposition conveyor somewhere nearer.”

“But why, Vall? I’m not ready to go back; I have a lot of work to do here, yet. They’re getting ready to set up a series of control-experiments at the Institute, and then, I’m in the middle of an experiment, a two-hundred-subject memory-recall experiment. See, I distributed two hundred sets of equipment for my new technique⁠—injection-ampoules of this zerfa-derivative drug, and sound records of the hypnotic suggestion formula, which can be played on an ordinary reproducer. It’s just a crude variant of our hypno-mech process, except that instead of implanting information in the subconscious mind, to be brought at will to the level of consciousness, it works the other way, and draws into conscious knowledge information already in the subconscious mind. The way these people have always done has been to put the subject in an hypnotic trance and then record verbal statements made in the trance-state; when the subject comes out of the trance, the record is all there is, because the memories of past reincarnations have never been in the conscious mind. But with my process, the subject can consciously remember everything about his last reincarnation, and as many reincarnations before that as he wishes to. I haven’t heard from any of the people who received these auto-recall kits, and I really must⁠—”

“Dalla, I don’t want to have to pull Paratime Police authority on you, but, so help me, if you don’t come back voluntarily with me, I will. Security of the secret of paratime transposition.”

“Oh, my eye!” Dalla exclaimed. “Don’t give me that, Vall!”

“Look, Dalla. Suppose you get discarnated here,” Verkan Vall said. “You say reincarnation is a scientific fact. Well, you’d reincarnate on this sector, and then you’d take a memory-recall, under hypnosis. And when you did, the paratime secret wouldn’t be a secret any more.”

“Oh!” Dalla’s hand went to her mouth in consternation. Like every paratimer, she was conditioned to shrink with all her being from the mere thought of revealing to any outtime dweller the secret ability of her race to pass to other timelines, or even the existence of alternate lines of probability. “And if I took one of the old-fashioned trance-recalls, I’d blat out everything; I wouldn’t be able to keep a thing back. And I even know the principles of transposition!” She looked at him, aghast.

“When I get back, I’m going to put a recommendation through department channels that this whole sector be declared out of bounds for all paratime transposition, until you people at Rhogom Foundation work out the problem of discarnate return to the First Level,” he told her. “Now, have you any notes or anything you want to take back with you?”

She rose. “Yes; just what’s on the desk. Find me something to put the tape spools and notebooks in, while I’m getting them in order.”

He secured a large game bag from under a rack of fowling pieces, and held it while she sorted the material rapidly, stuffing spools of record tape and notebooks into it. They had barely begun when the door slid open and Olirzon, who had gone outside, sprang into the room, his pistol drawn, swearing vilely.

“They’ve double-crossed us!” he cried. “The servants of Starpha have turned on us.” He holstered his pistol and snatched up his submachine-gun, taking cover behind the edge of the door and letting go with a burst in the direction of the lifter tubes. “Got that one!” he grunted.

“What happened, Olirzon?” Verkan Vall asked, dropping the game bag on the table and hurrying across the room.

“I went up to see how Marnik was making out. As I came out of the lifter tube, one of the obscenities took a shot at me with a hunting pistol. He missed me; I didn’t miss him. Then a couple more of them were coming up, with fowling pieces; I shot one of them before they could fire, and jumped into the descent tube and came down heels over ears. I don’t know what’s happened to Marnik.” He fired another burst, and swore. “Missed him!”

“Assassins’ Truce! Assassins’ Truce!” a voice howled out of the descent tube. “Hold your fire, we want to parley.”

“Who is it?” Dirzed shouted, over Olirzon’s shoulder. “You, Sarnax? Come on out; we won’t shoot.”

The young Assassin with the mustache and chin beard emerged from the descent tube, his weapons sheathed and his clasped hands extended in front of him in a peculiarly ecclesiastical-looking manner. Dirzed and Olirzon stepped out of the gun room, followed by Verkan Vall and Hadron Dalla. Olirzon had left his submachine-gun behind. They met the other Assassin by the rim of the fountain pool.

“Lady Dallona of Hadron,” the Starpha Assassin began. “I and my colleagues, in the employ of the family of Starpha, have received orders from our clients to withdraw our protection from you, and to discarnate you, and all with you who undertake to protect or support you.” That much sounded like a recitation of some established formula; then his voice became more conversational. “I and my colleagues, Erarno and Kirzol and Harnif, offer our apologies for the barbarity of the servants of the family of Starpha, in attacking without declaration of cessation of friendship. Was anybody hurt or discarnated?”

“None of us,” Olirzon said. “How about Marnik?”

“He was warned before hostilities were begun against him,” Sarnax replied. “We will allow five minutes until⁠—”

Olirzon, who had been looking up the well, suddenly sprang at Dalla, knocking her flat, and at the same time jerking out his pistol. Before he could raise it, a shot banged from above and he fell on his face. Dirzed, Verkan Vall, and Sarnax, all drew their pistols, but whoever had fired the shot had vanished. There was an outburst of shouting above.

“Get to cover,” Sarnax told the others. “We’ll let you know when we’re ready to attack; we’ll have to deal with whoever fired that shot, first.” He looked at the dead body on the floor, exclaimed angrily, and hurried to the ascent tube, springing upward.

Verkan Vall replaced the small pistol in his shoulder holster and took Olirzon’s belt, with his knife and heavier pistol.

“Well, there you see,” Dirzed said, as they went back to the gun room. “So much for political expediency.”

“I think I understand why your picture and the Lady Dallona’s were exhibited so widely,” Verkan Vall said. “Now, anybody would recognize your bodies, and blame the Statisticalists for discarnating you.”

“That thought had occurred to me, Lord Virzal,” Dirzed said. “I suppose our bodies will be atrociously but not unidentifiably mutilated, to further enrage the public,” he added placidly. “If I get out of this carnate, I’m going to pay somebody off for it.”

After a few minutes, there was more shouting of: “Assassins’ Truce!” from the descent tube. The two Assassins, Erarno and Kirzol, emerged, dragging the gamekeeper, Tarnod, between them. The upper-servant’s face was bloody, and his jaw seemed to be broken. Sarnax followed, carrying a long hunting pistol in his hand.

“Here he is!” he announced. “He fired during Assassins’ Truce; he’s subject to Assassins’ Justice!”

He nodded to the others. They threw the gamekeeper forward on the floor, and Sarnax shot him through the head, then tossed the pistol down beside him. “Any more of these people who violate the decencies will be treated similarly,” he promised.

“Thank you, Sarnax,” Dirzed spoke up. “But we lost an Assassin: discarnating this lackey won’t equalize that. We think you should retire one of your number.”

“That at least, Dirzed; wait a moment.”

The three Assassins conferred at some length. Then Sarnax hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with his companions.

“See you in the next reincarnation, brothers,” he told them, walking toward the gun-room door, where Verkan Vall, Dalla and Dirzed stood. “I’m joining you people. You had two Assassins when the parley began, you’ll have two when the shooting starts.”

Verkan Vall looked at Dirzed in some surprise. Hadron Dalla’s Assassin nodded.

“He’s entitled to do that, Lord Virzal; the Assassins’ code provides for such changes of allegiance.”

“Welcome, Sarnax,” Verkan Vall said, hooking fingers with him. “I hope we’ll all be together when this is over.”

“We will be,” Sarnax assured him cheerfully. “Discarnate. We won’t get out of this in the body, Lord Virzal.”

A submachine-gun hammered from above, the bullets lashing the fountain pool; the water actually steamed, so great was their velocity.

“All right!” a voice called down. “Assassins’ Truce is over!”

Another burst of automatic fire smashed out the lights at the bottom of the ascent tube. Dirzed and Dalla struggled across the room, pushing a heavy steel cabinet between them; Verkan Vall, who was holding Olirzon’s submachine-gun, moved aside to allow them to drop it on edge in the open doorway, then wedged the door half-shut against it. Sarnax came over, bringing rifles, hunting pistols, and ammunition.

“What’s the situation, up there?” Verkan Vall asked him. “What force have they, and why did they turn against us?”

“Lord Virzal!” Dirzed objected, scandalized. “You have no right to ask Sarnax to betray confidences!”

Sarnax spat against the door. “In the face of Jirzyn of Starpha!” he said. “And in the face of his zortan mother, and of his father, whoever he was! Dirzed, do not talk foolishly; one does not speak of betraying betrayers.” He turned to Verkan Vall. “They have three menservants of the family of Starpha; your Assassin, Olirzon, discarnated the other three. There is one of Prince Jirzyn’s poor relations, named Girzad. There are three other men, Volitionalist precinct workers, who came with Girzad, and four Assassins, the three who were here, and one who came with Girzad. Eleven, against the three of us.”

“The four of us, Sarnax,” Dalla corrected. She had buckled on a hunting pistol, and had a light deer rifle under her arm.

Something moved at the bottom of the descent tube. Verkan Vall gave it a short burst, though it was probably only a dummy, dropped to draw fire.

“The four of us, Lady Dallona,” Sarnax agreed. “As to your other Assassin, the one who stayed in the airboat, I don’t know how he fared. You see, about twenty minutes ago, this Girzad arrived in an airboat, with an Assassin and these three Volitionalist workers. Erarno and I were at the top of the dome when he came in. He told us that he had orders from Prince Jirzyn to discarnate the Lady Dallona and Dirzed at once. Tarnod, the gamekeeper”⁠—Sarnax spat ceremoniously against the door again⁠—“told him you were here, and that Marnik was one of your men. He was going to shoot Marnik at once, but Erarno and I and his Assassin stopped him. We warned Marnik about the change in the situation, according to the code, expecting Marnik to go down here and join you. Instead, he lifted the airboat, zoomed over Girzad’s boat, and let go a rocket blast, setting Girzad’s boat on fire. Well, that was a hostile act, so we all fired after him. We must have hit something, because the boat went down, trailing smoke, about ten miles away. Girzad got another airboat out of the hangar and he and his Assassin started after your man. About that time, your Assassin, Olirzon⁠—happy reincarnation to him⁠—came up, and the Starpha servants fired at him, and he fired back and discarnated two of them, and then jumped down the descent tube. One of the servants jumped after him; I found his body at the bottom when I came down to warn you formally. You know what happened after that.”

“But why did Prince Jirzyn order our discarnation?” Dalla wanted to know. “Was it to blame the Statisticalists with it?”

Sarnax, about to answer, broke off suddenly and began firing at the opening of the ascent tube with a hunting pistol.

“I got him,” he said, in a pleased tone. “That was Erarno; he was always playing tricks with the tubes, climbing down against negative gravity and up against positive gravity. His body will float up to the top⁠—Why, Lady Dallona, that was only part of it. You didn’t hear about the big scandal, on the newscast, then?”

“We didn’t have it on. What scandal?”

Sarnax laughed. “Oh, the very father and family-head of all scandals! You ought to know about it, because you started it; that’s why Prince Jirzyn wants you out of the body⁠—You devised a process by which people could give themselves memory-recalls of previous reincarnations, didn’t you? And distributed apparatus to do it with? And gave one set to young Tarnov, the son of Lord Tirzov of Fastor?”

Dalla nodded. Sarnax continued:

“Well, last evening, Tarnov of Fastor used his recall outfit, and what do you think? It seems that thirty years ago, in his last reincarnation, he was Jirzid of Starpha, Jirzyn’s older brother. Jirzid was betrothed to the Lady Annitra of Zabna. Well, his younger brother was carrying on a clandestine affair with the Lady Annitra, and he also wanted the title of Prince and family-head of Starpha. So he bribed this fellow Tarnod, whom I had the pleasure of discarnating, and who was an underservant here at the hunting lodge. Between them, they shot Jirzid during a boar hunt. An accident, of course. So Jirzyn married the Lady Annitra, and when old Prince Jarnid, his father, discarnated a year later, he succeeded to the title. And immediately, Tarnod was made head gamekeeper here.”

“What did I tell you, Lord Virzal? I knew that son of a zortan had something on Jirzyn of Starpha!” Dirzed exclaimed. “A nice family, this of Starpha!”

“Well, that’s not the end of it,” Sarnax continued. “This morning, Tarnov of Fastor, late Jirzid of Starpha, went before the High Court of Estates and entered suit to change his name to Jirzid of Starpha and laid claim to the title of Starpha family-head. The case has just been entered, so there’s been no hearing, but there’s the blazes of an argument among all the nobles about it⁠—some are claiming that the individuality doesn’t change from one reincarnation to the next, and others claiming that property and titles should pass along the line of physical descent, no matter what individuality has reincarnated into what body. They’re the ones who want the Lady Dallona discarnated and her discoveries suppressed. And there’s talk about revising the entire system of estate-ownership and estate-inheritance. Oh, it’s an utter obscenity of a business!”

“This,” Verkan Vall told Dalla, “is something we will not emphasize when we get home.” That was as close as he dared come to it, but she caught his meaning. The working of major changes in outtime social structures was not viewed with approval by the Paratime Commission on the First Level. “If we get home,” he added. Then an idea occurred to him.

“Dirzed, Sarnax; this place must have been used by the leaders of the Volitionalists for top-level conferences. Is there a secret passage anywhere?”

Sarnax shook his head. “Not from here. There is one, on the floor above, but they control it. And even if there were one down here, they would be guarding the outlet.”

“That’s what I was counting on. I’d hoped to simulate an escape that way, and then make a rush up the regular tubes.” Verkan Vall shrugged. “I suppose Marnik’s our only chance. I hope he got away safely.”

“He was going for help? I was surprised that an Assassin would desert his client; I should have thought of that,” Sarnax said. “Well, even if he got down carnate, and if Girzad didn’t catch him, he’d still be afoot ten miles from the nearest city unit. That gives us a little chance⁠—about one in a thousand.”

“Is there any way they can get at us, except by those tubes?” Dalla asked.

“They could cut a hole in the floor, or burn one through,” Sarnax replied. “They have plenty of thermite. They could detonate a charge of explosives over our heads, or clear out of the dome and drop one down the well. They could use lethal gas or radio-dust, but their Assassins wouldn’t permit such illegal methods. Or they could shoot sleep-gas down at us, and then come down and cut our throats at their leisure.”

“We’ll have to get out of this room, then,” Verkan Vall decided. “They know we’ve barricaded ourselves in here; this is where they’ll attack. So we’ll patrol the perimeter of the well; we’ll be out of danger from above if we keep close to the wall. And we’ll inspect all the rooms on this floor for evidence of cutting through from above.”

Sarnax nodded. “That’s sense, Lord Virzal. How about the lifter tubes?”

“We’ll have to barricade them. Sarnax, you and Dirzed know the layout of this place better than the Lady Dallona or I; suppose you two check the rooms, while we cover the tubes and the well,” Verkan Vall directed. “Come on, now.”

They pushed the door wide-open and went out past the cabinet. Hugging the wall, they began a slow circuit of the well, Verkan Vall in the lead with the submachine-gun, then Sarnax and Dirzed, the former with a heavy boar-rifle and the latter with a hunting pistol in each hand, and Hadron Dalla brought up in the rear with her rifle. It was she who noticed a movement along the rim of the balcony above and snapped a shot at it; there was a crash above, and a shower of glass and plastic and metal fragments rattled on the pavement of the court. Somebody had been trying to lower a scanner or a visiplate-pickup, or something of the sort; the exact nature of the instrument was not evident from the wreckage Dalla’s bullet had made of it.

The rooms Dirzed and Sarnax entered were all quiet; nobody seemed to be attempting to cut through the ceiling, fifteen feet above. They dragged furniture from a couple of rooms, blocking the openings of the lifter tubes, and continued around the well until they had reached the gun room again.

Dirzed suggested that they move some of the weapons and ammunition stored there to Prince Jirzyn’s private apartment, halfway around to the lifter tubes, so that another place of refuge would be stocked with munitions in event of their being driven from the gun room.

Leaving him on guard outside, Verkan Vall, Dalla and Sarnax entered the gun room and began gathering weapons and boxes of ammunition. Dalla finished packing her game bag with the recorded data and notes of her experiments. Verkan Vall selected four more of the heavy hunting pistols, more accurate than his shoulder-holster weapon or the dead Olirzon’s belt arm, and capable of either full or semiautomatic fire. Sarnax chose a couple more boar rifles. Dalla slung her bag of recorded notes, and another bag of ammunition, and secured another deer rifle. They carried this accumulation of munitions to the private apartments of Prince Jirzyn, dumping everything in the middle of the drawing room, except the bag of notes, from which Dalla refused to separate herself.

“Maybe we’d better put some stuff over in one of the rooms on the other side of the well,” Dirzed suggested. “They haven’t really begun to come after us; when they do, we’ll probably be attacked from two or three directions at once.”

They returned to the gun room, casting anxious glances at the edge of the balcony above and at the barricade they had erected across the openings to the lifter tubes. Verkan Vall was not satisfied with this last; it looked to him as though they had provided a breastwork for somebody to fire on them from, more than anything else.

He was about to step around the cabinet which partially blocked the gun-room door when he glanced up, and saw a six-foot circle on the ceiling turning slowly brown. There was a smell of scorched plastic. He grabbed Sarnax by the arm and pointed.

“Thermite,” the Assassin whispered. “The ceiling’s got six inches of spaceship-insulation between it and the floor above; it’ll take them a few minutes to burn through it.” He stooped and pushed on the barricade, shoving it into the room. “Keep back; they’ll probably drop a grenade or so through, first, before they jump down. If we’re quick, we can get a couple of them.”

Dirzed and Sarnax crouched, one at either side of the door, with weapons ready. Verkan Vall and Dalla had been ordered, rather peremptorily, to stay behind them; in a place of danger, an Assassin was obliged to shield his client. Verkan Vall, unable to see what was going on inside the room, kept his eyes and his gun muzzle on the barricade across the openings to the lifter tubes, the erection of which he was now regretting as a major tactical error.

Inside the gun room, there was a sudden crash, as the circle of thermite burned through and a section of ceiling dropped out and hit the floor. Instantly, Dirzed flung himself back against Verkan Vall, and there was a tremendous explosion inside, followed by another and another. A second or so passed, then Dirzed, leaning around the corner of the door, began firing rapidly into the room. From the other side of the door, Sarnax began blazing away with his rifle. Verkan Vall kept his position, covering the lifter tubes.

Suddenly, from behind the barricade, a blue-white gun flash leaped into being, and a pistol banged. He sprayed the opening between a couch and a section of bookcase from whence it had come, releasing his trigger as the gun rose with the recoil, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again. Then he jumped to his feet.

“Come on, the other place; hurry!” he ordered.

Sarnax swore in exasperation. “Help me with her, Dirzed!” he implored.

Verkan Vall turned his head, to see the two Assassins drag Dalla to her feet and hustle her away from the gun room; she was quite senseless, and they had to drag her between them. Verkan Vall gave a quick glance into the gun room; two of the Starpha servants and a man in rather flashy civil dress were lying on the floor, where they had been shot as they had jumped down from above. He saw a movement at the edge of the irregular, smoking, hole in the ceiling, and gave it a short burst, then fired another at the exit from the descent tube. Then he took to his heels and followed the Assassins and Hadron Dalla into Prince Jirzyn’s apartment.

As he ran through the open door, the Assassins were letting Dalla down into a chair; they instantly threw themselves into the work of barricading the doorway so as to provide cover and at the same time allow them to fire out into the central well.

For an instant, as he bent over her, he thought Dalla had been killed, an assumption justified by his knowledge of the deadliness of Akor-Neb bullets. Then he saw her eyelids flicker. A moment later, he had the explanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at her side; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notes in written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring fastened into metal binders. Because of their extreme velocity, Akor-Neb bullets were sure killers when they struck animal tissue, but for the same reason, they had very poor penetration on hard objects. The alloy-steel tape, and the steel spools and spool cases, and the notebook binders, had been enough to shatter the little bullet into splinters of magnesium-nickel alloy, and the stout leather back of the game bag had stopped all of these. But the impact, even distributed as it had been through the contents of the bag, had been enough to knock the girl unconscious.

He found a bottle of some sort of brandy and a glass on a serving table nearby and poured her a drink, holding it to her lips. She spluttered over the first mouthful, then took the glass from him and sipped the rest.

“What happened?” she asked. “I thought those bullets were sure death.”

“Your notes. The bullet hit the bag. Are you all right, now?”

She finished the brandy. “I think so.” She put a hand into the game bag and brought out a snarled and tangled mess of steel tape. “Oh, blast! That stuff was important; all the records on the preliminary auto-recall experiments.” She shrugged. “Well, it wouldn’t have been worth much more if I’d stopped that bullet, myself.” She slipped the strap over her shoulder and started to rise.

As she did, a bedlam of firing broke out, both from the two Assassins at the door and from outside. They both hit the floor and crawled out of line of the partly-open door; Verkan Vall recovered his submachine-gun, which he had set down beside Dalla’s chair. Sarnax was firing with his rifle at some target in the direction of the lifter tubes; Dirzed lay slumped over the barricade, and one glance at his crumpled figure was enough to tell Verkan Vall that he was dead.

“You fill magazines for us,” he told Dalla, then crawled to Dirzed’s place at the door. “What happened, Sarnax?”

“They shoved over the barricade at the lifter tubes and came out into the well. I got a couple, they got Dirzed, and now they’re holed up in rooms all around the circle. They⁠—Aah!” He fired three shots, quickly, around the edge of the door. “That stopped that.” The Assassin crouched to insert a fresh magazine into his rifle.

Verkan Vall risked one eye around the corner of the doorway, and as he did, there was a red flash and a dull roar, unlike the blue flashes and sharp cracking reports of the pistols and rifles, from the doorway of the gun room. He wondered, for a split second, if it might be one of the fowling pieces he had seen there, and then something whizzed past his head and exploded with a soft plop behind him. Turning, he saw a pool of gray vapor beginning to spread in the middle of the room. Dalla must have got a breath of it, for she was slumped over the chair from which she had just risen.

Dropping the submachine-gun and gulping a lungful of fresh air from outside, Verkan Vall rushed to her, caught her by the heels, and dragged her into Prince Jirzyn’s bedroom, beyond. Leaving her in the middle of the floor, he took another deep breath and returned to the drawing room, where Sarnax was already overcome by the sleep-gas.

He saw the serving table from which he had got the brandy, and dragged it over to the bedroom door, overturning it and laying it across the doorway, its legs in the air. Like most Akor-Neb serving tables, it had a gravity-counteraction unit under it; he set this for double minus-gravitation and snapped it on. As it was now above the inverted table, the table did not rise, but a tendril, of sleep-gas, curling toward it, bent upward and drifted away from the doorway. Satisfied that he had made a temporary barrier against the sleep-gas, Verkan Vall secured Dalla’s hunting pistol and spare magazines and lay down at the bedroom door.

For some time, there was silence outside. Then the besiegers evidently decided that the sleep-gas attack had been a success. An Assassin, wearing a gas mask and carrying a submachine-gun, appeared in the doorway, and behind him came a tall man in a tan tunic, similarly masked. They stepped into the room and looked around.

Knowing that he would be shooting over a two hundred percent negative gravitation-field, Verkan Vall aimed for the Assassin’s belt-buckle and squeezed. The bullet caught him in the throat. Evidently the bullet had not only been lifted in the negative gravitation, but lifted point-first and deflected upward. He held his front sight just above the other man’s knee, and hit him in the chest.

As he fired, he saw a wisp of gas come sliding around the edge of the inverted table. There was silence outside, and for an instant, he was tempted to abandon his post and go to the bathroom, back of the bedroom, for wet towels to improvise a mask. Then, when he tried to crawl backward, he could not. There was an impression of distant shouting which turned to a roaring sound in his head. He tried to lift his pistol, but it slipped from his fingers.

When consciousness returned, he was lying on his back, and something cold and rubbery was pressing into his face. He raised his arms to fight off whatever it was, and opened his eyes, to find that he was staring directly at the red oval and winged bullet of the Society of Assassins. A hand caught his wrist as he reached for the small pistol under his arm. The pressure on his face eased.

“It’s all right, Lord Virzal,” a voice came to him. “Assassins’ Truce!”

He nodded stupidly and repeated the words. “Assassins’ Truce; I won’t shoot. What happened?”

Then he sat up and looked around. Prince Jirzyn’s bedchamber was full of Assassins. Dalla, recovering from her touch of sleep-gas, was sitting groggily in a chair, while five or six of them fussed around her, getting in each others’ way, handing her drinks, chaffing her wrists, holding damp cloths on her brow. That was standard procedure, when any group of males thought Dalla needed any help. Another Assassin, beside the bed, was putting away an oxygen-mask outfit, and the Assassin who had prevented Verkan Vall from drawing his pistol was his own follower, Marnik. And Klarnood, the Assassin-President, was sitting on the foot of the bed, smoking one of Prince Jirzyn’s monogrammed and crested cigarettes critically.

Verkan Vall looked at Marnik, and then at Klarnood, and back to Marnik.

“You got through,” he said. “Good work, Marnik; I thought they’d downed you.”

“They did; I had to crash-land in the woods. I went about a mile on foot, and then I found a man and woman and two children, hiding in one of these little log rain shelters. They had an airboat, a good one. It seemed that rioting had broken out in the city unit where they lived, and they’d taken to the woods till things quieted down again. I offered them Assassins’ protection if they’d take me to Assassins’ Hall, and they did.”

“By luck, I was in when Marnik arrived,” Klarnood took over. “We brought three boatloads of men, and came here at once. Just as we got here, two boatloads of Starpha dependents arrived; they tried to give us an argument, and we discarnated the lot of them. Then we came down here, crying Assassins’ Truce. One of the Starpha Assassins, Kirzol, was still carnate; he told us what had been going on.” The President-General’s face-became grim. “You know, I take a rather poor view of Prince Jirzyn’s procedure in this matter, not to mention that of his underlings. I’ll have to speak to him about this. Now, how about you and the Lady Dallona? What do you intend doing?”

“We’re getting out of here,” Verkan Vall said. “I’d like air transport and protection as far as Ghamma, to the establishment of the family of Zorda. Brarnend of Zorda has a private space yacht; he’ll get us to Venus.”

Klarnood gave a sigh of obvious relief. “I’ll have you and the Lady Dallona airborne and off for Ghamma as soon as you wish,” he promised. “I will, frankly, be delighted to see the last of both of you. The Lady Dallona has started a fire here at Darsh that won’t burn out in a half-century, and who knows what it may consume.” He was interrupted by a heaving shock that made the underground dome dwelling shake like a light airboat in turbulence. Even eighty feet under the ground, they could hear a continued crashing roar. It was an appreciable interval before the sound and the shock ceased.

For an instant, there was silence, and then an excited bedlam of shouting broke from the Assassins in the room: Klarnood’s face was frozen in horror.

“That was a fission bomb!” he exclaimed. “The first one that has been exploded on this planet in hostility in a thousand years!” He turned to Verkan Vall. “If you feel well enough to walk, Lord Virzal, come with us. I must see what’s happened.”

They hurried from the room and went streaming up the ascent tube to the top of the dome. About forty miles away, to the south, Verkan Vall saw the sinister thing that he had seen on so many other timelines, in so many other paratime sectors⁠—a great pillar of varicolored fire-shot smoke, rising to a mushroom head fifty thousand feet above.

“Well, that’s it,” Klarnood said sadly. “That is civil war.”

“May I make a suggestion, Assassin-President?” Verkan Vall asked. “I understand that Assassins’ Truce is binding even upon non-Assassins; is that correct?”

“Well, not exactly; it’s generally kept by such non-Assassins as want to remain in their present reincarnations, though.”

“That’s what I meant. Well, suppose you declare a general, planetwide Assassins’ Truce in this political war, and make the leaders of both parties responsible for keeping it. Publish lists of the top two or three thousand Statisticalists and Volitionalists, starting with Mirzark of Bashad and Prince Jirzyn of Starpha, and inform them that they will be assassinated, in order, if the fighting doesn’t cease.”

“Well!” A smile grew on Klarnood’s face. “Lord Virzal, my thanks; a good suggestion. I’ll try it. And furthermore, I’ll withdraw all Assassin protection permanently from anybody involved in political activity, and forbid any Assassin to accept any retainer connected with political factionalism. It’s about time our members stopped discarnating each other in these political squabbles.” He pointed to the three airboats drawn up on the top of the dome; speedy black craft, bearing the red oval and winged bullet. “Take your choice, Lord Virzal. I’ll lend you a couple of my men, and you’ll be in Ghamma in three hours.” He hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with Verkan Vall, bent over Dalla’s hand. “I still like you, Lord Virzal, and I have seldom met a more charming lady than you, Lady Dallona. But I sincerely hope I never see either of you again.”

The ship for Dhergabar was driving north and west; at seventy thousand feet, it was still daylight, but the world below was wrapping itself in darkness. In the big visiscreens, which served in lieu of the windows which could never have withstood the pressure and friction heat of the ship’s speed, the sun was sliding out of sight over the horizon to port. Verkan Vall and Dalla sat together, watching the blazing western sky⁠—the sky of their own First Level timeline.

“I blame myself terribly, Vall,” Dalla was saying. “And I didn’t mean any of them the least harm. All I was interested in was learning the facts. I know, that sounds like ‘I didn’t know it was loaded,’ but⁠—”

“It sounds to me like those Fourth Level Europo-American Sector physicists who are giving themselves guilt-complexes because they designed an atomic bomb,” Verkan Vall replied. “All you were interested in was learning the facts. Well, as a scientist, that’s all you’re supposed to be interested in. You don’t have to worry about any social or political implications. People have to learn to live with newly-discovered facts; if they don’t, they die of them.”

“But, Vall; that sounds dreadfully irresponsible⁠—”

“Does it? You’re worrying about the results of your reincarnation memory-recall discoveries, the shootings and riotings and the bombing we saw.” He touched the pommel of Olirzon’s knife, which he still wore. “You’re no more guilty of that than the man who forged this blade is guilty of the death of Marnark of Bashad; if he’d never lived, I’d have killed Marnark with some other knife somebody else made. And what’s more, you can’t know the results of your discoveries. All you can see is a thin film of events on the surface of an immediate situation, so you can’t say whether the long-term results will be beneficial or calamitous.

“Take this Fourth Level Europo-American atomic bomb, for example. I choose that because we both know that sector, but I could think of a hundred other examples in other paratime areas. Those people, because of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement, are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and, for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any rational program of birth-control and population-limitation.

“But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass-effect. And their racial, nationalistic and ideological conflicts are rapidly reaching the explosion point. A series of all-out atomic wars is just what that sector needs, to bring their population down to their world’s carrying capacity; in a century or so, the inventors of the atomic bomb will be hailed as the saviors of their species.”

“But how about my work on the Akor-Neb Sector?” Dalla asked. “It seems that my memory-recall technique is more explosive than any fission bomb. I’ve laid the train for a century-long reign of anarchy!”

“I doubt that; I think Klarnood will take hold, now that he has committed himself to it. You know, in spite of his sanguinary profession, he’s the nearest thing to a real man of good will I’ve found on that sector. And here’s something else you haven’t considered. Our own First Level life expectancy is from four to five hundred years. That’s the main reason why we’ve accomplished as much as we have. We have, individually, time to accomplish things. On the Akor-Neb Sector, a scientist or artist or scholar or statesman will grow senile and die before he’s as old as either of us. But now, a young student of twenty or so can take one of your auto-recall treatments and immediately have available all the knowledge and experience gained in four or five previous lives. He can start where he left off in his last reincarnation. In other words, you’ve made those people time-binders, individually as well as racially. Isn’t that worth the temporary discarnation of a lot of ward-heelers and plug-uglies, or even a few decent types like Dirzed and Olirzon? If it isn’t, I don’t know what scales of values you’re using.”

“Vall!” Dalla’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “I never thought of that! And you said, ‘temporary discarnation.’ That’s just what it is. Dirzed and Olirzon and the others aren’t dead; they’re just waiting, discarnate, between physical lives. You know, in the sacred writings of one of the Fourth Level peoples it is stated: ‘Death is the last enemy.’ By proving that death is just a cyclic condition of continued individual existence, these people have conquered their last enemy.”

“Last enemy but one,” Verkan Vall corrected. “They still have one enemy to go, an enemy within themselves. Call it semantic confusion, or illogic, or incomprehension, or just plain stupidity. Like Klarnood, stymied by verbal objections to something labeled ‘political intervention.’ He’d never have consented to use the power of his Society if he hadn’t been shocked out of his inhibitions by that nuclear bomb. Or the Statisticalists, trying to create a classless order of society through a political program which would only result in universal servitude to an omnipotent government. Or the Volitionalist nobles, trying to preserve their hereditary feudal privileges, and now they can’t even agree on a definition of the term ‘hereditary.’ Might they not recover all the silly prejudices of their past lives, along with the knowledge and wisdom?”

“Bu.⁠ ⁠… I thought you said⁠—” Dalla was puzzled, a little hurt.

Verkan Vall’s arm squeezed around her waist, and he laughed comfortingly.

“You see? Any sort of result is possible, good or bad. So don’t blame yourself in advance for something you can’t possibly estimate.” An idea occurred to him, and he straightened in the seat. “Tell you what; if you people at Rhogom Foundation get the problem of discarnate paratime transposition licked by then, let’s you and I go back to the Akor-Neb Sector in about a hundred years and see what sort of a mess those people have made of things.”

“A hundred years: that would be Year Twenty-Two of the next millennium. It’s a date, Vall; we’ll do it.”

They bent to light their cigarettes together at his lighter. When they raised their heads again and got the flame glare out of their eyes, the sky was purple-black, dusted with stars, and dead ahead, spilling up over the horizon, was a golden glow⁠—the lights of Dhergabar and home.

Flight from Tomorrow

Rebel Raider

It was almost midnight, on January 2, 1863, and the impromptu party at the Ratcliffe home was breaking up. The guest of honor, General J. E. B. Stuart, felt that he was overstaying his welcome⁠—not at the Ratcliffe home, where everybody was soundly Confederate, but in Fairfax County, then occupied by the Union Army.

About a week before, he had come raiding up from Culpepper with a strong force of cavalry, to spend a merry Christmas in northern Virginia and give the enemy a busy if somewhat less than happy New Year’s. He had shot up outposts, run off horses from remount stations, plundered supply depots, burned stores of forage; now, before returning to the main Confederate Army, he had paused to visit his friend Laura Ratcliffe. And, of course, there had been a party. There was always a party when Jeb Stuart was in any one place long enough to organize one.

They were all crowding into the hallway⁠—the officers of Stuart’s staff, receiving their hats and cloaks from the servants and buckling on their weapons; the young ladies, their gay dresses showing only the first traces of wartime shabbiness; the matrons who chaperoned them; Stuart himself, the center of attention, with his hostess on his arm.

“It’s a shame you can’t stay longer, General,” Laura Ratcliffe was saying. “It’s hard on us, living in conquered territory, under enemy rule.”

“Well, I won’t desert you entirely, Miss Ratcliffe,” Stuart told her. “I’m returning to Culpepper in the morning, as you know, but I mean to leave Captain Mosby behind with a few men, to look after the loyal Confederate people here until we can return in force and in victory.”

Hearing his name, one of the men in gray turned, his hands raised to hook the fastening at the throat of his cloak. Just four days short of his thirtieth birthday, he looked even more youthful; he was considerably below average height, and so slender as to give the impression of frailness. His hair and the beard he was wearing at the time were very light brown. He wore an officer’s uniform without insignia of rank, and instead of a saber he carried a pair of 1860-model Colt .44’s on his belt, with the butts to the front so that either revolver could be drawn with either hand, backhand or crossbody.

There was more than a touch of the dandy about him. The cloak he was fastening was lined with scarlet silk and the gray cock-brimmed hat the slave was holding for him was plumed with a squirrel tail. At first glance he seemed no more than one of the many young gentlemen of the planter class serving in the Confederate cavalry. But then one looked into his eyes and got the illusion of being covered by a pair of blued pistol muzzles. He had an aura of combined ruthlessness, self confidence, good humor and impudent audacity.

For an instant he stood looking inquiringly at the general. Then he realized what Stuart had said, and the blue eyes sparkled. This was the thing he had almost given up hoping for⁠—an independent command and a chance to operate in the enemy’s rear.

In 1855, John Singleton Mosby, newly graduated from the University of Virginia, had opened a law office at Bristol, Washington County, Virginia, and a year later he had married.

The son of a well-to-do farmer and slave-owner, his boyhood had been devoted to outdoor sports, especially hunting, and he was accounted an expert horseman and a dead shot, even in a society in which skill with guns and horses was taken for granted. Otherwise, the outbreak of the war had found him without military qualifications and completely uninterested in military matters. Moreover, he had been a rabid anti-secessionist.

It must be remembered, however, that, like most Southerners, he regarded secession as an entirely local issue, to be settled by the people of each state for themselves. He took no exception to the position that a state had the constitutional right to sever its connection with the Union if its people so desired. His objection to secession was based upon what he considered to be political logic. He realized that, once begun, secession was a process which could only end in reducing America to a cluster of impotent petty sovereignties, torn by hostilities, incapable of any concerted action, a fair prey to any outside aggressor.

However, he was also a believer in the paramount sovereignty of the states. He was first of all a Virginian. So, when Virginia voted in favor of secession, Mosby, while he deplored the choice, felt that he had no alternative but to accept it. He promptly enlisted in a locally organized cavalry company, the Washington Mounted Rifles, under a former U.S. officer and West Point graduate, William E. Jones.

His letters to his wife told of his early military experiences⁠—his pleasure at receiving one of the fine new Sharps carbines which Captain Jones had wangled for his company, and, later, a Colt .44 revolver: his first taste of fire in the Shenandoah Valley, where the company, now incorporated into Colonel Stuart’s First Virginia Cavalry, were covering Johnston’s march to reinforce Beauregard: his rather passive participation in the big battle at Manassas. He was keenly disappointed at being held in reserve throughout the fighting. Long afterward, it was to be his expressed opinion that the Confederacy had lost the war by failing to follow the initial victory and exploit the rout of McDowell’s army.

The remainder of 1861 saw him doing picket duty in Fairfax County. When Stuart was promoted to brigadier general, and Captain Jones took his place as colonel of the First Virginia, Mosby became the latter’s adjutant. There should have been a commission along with this post, but this seems to have been snarled in red tape at Richmond and never came through. It was about this time that Mosby first came to Stuart’s personal attention. Mosby spent a night at headquarters after escorting a couple of young ladies who had been living outside the Confederate lines and were anxious to reach relatives living farther south.

Stuart had been quite favorably impressed with Mosby, and when, some time later, the latter lost his place as adjutant of the First by reason of Jones’ promotion to brigadier general and Fitzhugh Lee’s taking over the regiment, Mosby became one of Stuart’s headquarters scouts.

Scouting for Jeb Stuart was not the easiest work in the world, nor the safest, but Mosby appears to have enjoyed it, and certainly made good at it. It was he who scouted the route for Stuart’s celebrated “Ride Around MacClellan” in June, 1862, an exploit which brought his name to the favorable attention of General Lee. By this time, still without commission, he was accepted at Stuart’s headquarters as a sort of courtesy officer, and generally addressed as “Captain” Mosby. Stuart made several efforts to get him commissioned, but War Department red tape seems to have blocked all of them. By this time, too, Mosby had become convinced of the utter worthlessness of the saber as a cavalryman’s weapon, and for his own armament adopted a pair of Colts.

The revolver of the Civil War was, of course, a percussion-cap weapon. Even with the powder and bullet contained in a combustible paper cartridge, loading such an arm was a slow process: each bullet had to be forced in the front of the chamber on top of its propellant charge by means of a hinged rammer under the barrel, and a tiny copper cap had to be placed on each nipple. It was nothing to attempt on a prancing horse. The Union cavalryman was armed with a single-shot carbine⁠—the seven-shot Spencer repeater was not to make its battlefield appearance until late in 1863⁠—and one revolver, giving him a total of seven shots without reloading. With a pair of six-shooters, Mosby had a five-shot advantage over any opponent he was likely to encounter. As he saw it, tactical strength lay in the number of shots which could be delivered without reloading, rather than in the number of men firing them. Once he reached a position of independent command, he was to adhere consistently to this principle.

On July 14, 1862, General John Pope, who had taken over a newly created Union Army made up of the commands of McDowell, Banks and Fremont, issued a bombastic and tactless order to his new command, making invidious comparisons between the armies in the west and those in the east. He said, “I hear constantly of ‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and of ‘bases of supplies.’ Let us discard all such ideas. Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves.”

That intrigued Mosby. If General Pope wasn’t going to take care of his own rear, somebody ought to do it for him, and who better than John Mosby? He went promptly to Stuart, pointing out Pope’s disinterest in his own lines of supply and communication, and asked that he be given about twenty men and detailed to get into Pope’s rear and see what sort of disturbance he could create.

Stuart doubted the propriety of sending men into what was then Stonewall Jackson’s territory, but he gave Mosby a letter to Jackson, recommending the bearer highly and outlining what he proposed doing, with the request that he be given some men to try it. With this letter, Mosby set out for Jackson’s headquarters.

He never reached his destination. On the way, he was taken prisoner by a raiding force of New York cavalry, and arrived, instead, at Old Capitol jail in Washington. Stuart requested his exchange at once, and Mosby spent only about ten days in Old Capitol, and then was sent down the Potomac on an exchange boat, along with a number of other prisoners of war, for Hampton Roads.

The boatload of prisoners, about to be exchanged and returned to their own army, were allowed to pass through a busy port of military embarkation and debarkation, with every opportunity to observe everything that was going on, and, to make a bad matter worse, the steamboat captain was himself a Confederate sympathizer. So when Mosby, from the exchange boat, observed a number of transports lying at anchor, he had no trouble at all in learning that they carried Burnside’s men, newly brought north from the Carolinas. With the help of the steamboat captain, Mosby was able to learn that the transports were bound for Acquia Creek, on the Potomac; that meant that the reinforcements were for Pope.

As soon as he was exchanged, Mosby made all haste for Lee’s headquarters to report what he had discovered. Lee, remembering Mosby as the man who had scouted ahead of Stuart’s Ride Around MacClellan, knew that he had a hot bit of information from a credible source. A dispatch rider was started off at once for Jackson, and Jackson struck Pope at Cedar Mountain before he could be reinforced. Mosby returned to Stuart’s headquarters, losing no time in promoting a pair of .44’s to replace the ones lost when captured, and found his stock with Stuart at an all-time high as a result of his recent feat of espionage while in the hands of the enemy.

So he was with Stuart when Stuart stopped at Laura Ratcliffe’s home, and was on hand when Stuart wanted to make one of his characteristic gestures of gallantry. And so he finally got his independent command⁠—all of six men⁠—and orders to operate in the enemy’s rear.

Whatever Stuart might have had in mind in leaving him behind “to look after the loyal Confederate people,” John Mosby had no intention of posting himself in Laura Ratcliffe’s front yard as a guard of honor. He had a theory of guerrilla warfare which he wanted to test. In part, it derived from his experiences in the Shenandoah Valley and in Fairfax County, but in larger part, it was based upon his own understanding of the fundamental nature of war.

The majority of guerrilla leaders have always been severely tactical in their thinking. That is to say, they have been concerned almost exclusively with immediate results. A troop column is ambushed, a picket post attacked, or a supply dump destroyed for the sake of the immediate loss of personnel or materiel so inflicted upon the enemy. Mosby, however, had a well-conceived strategic theory. He knew, in view of the magnitude of the war, that the tactical effects of his operations would simply be lost in the overall picture. But, if he could create enough uproar in the Union rear, he believed that he could force the withdrawal from the front of a regiment or even a brigade to guard against his attacks and, in some future battle, the absence of that regiment or brigade might tip the scale of battle or, at least, make some future Confederate victory more complete or some defeat less crushing.

As soon as Stuart’s column started southward, Mosby took his six men across Bull Run Mountain to Middleburg, where he ordered them to scatter out, billet themselves at outlying farms, and meet him at the Middleburg hotel on the night of January 10. Meanwhile he returned alone to Fairfax County, spending the next week making contacts with the people and gathering information.

On the night of Saturday, January 10, he took his men through the gap at Aldie and into Fairfax County. His first stop was at a farmhouse near Herndon Station, where he had friends, and there he met a woodsman, trapper and market hunter named John Underwood, who, with his two brothers, had been carrying on a private resistance movement against the Union occupation ever since the Confederate Army had moved out of the region. Overjoyed at the presence of regular Confederate troops, even as few as a half-dozen, Underwood offered to guide Mosby to a nearby Union picket post.

Capturing this post was no particularly spectacular feat of arms. Mosby’s party dismounted about 200 yards away from it and crept up on it, to find seven members of the Fifth New York squatting around a fire, smoking, drinking coffee and trying to keep warm. Their first intimation of the presence of any enemy nearer than the Rappahannock River came when Mosby and his men sprang to their feet, leveled revolvers and demanded their surrender. One cavalryman made a grab for his carbine and Mosby shot him; the others put up their hands. The wounded man was given first aid, wrapped in a blanket and placed beside the fire to wait until the post would be relieved. The others were mounted on their own horses and taken to Middleburg, where they were paroled i.e., released after they gave their word not to take up arms again against the Confederacy. This not entirely satisfactory handling of prisoners was the only means left open to Mosby with his small force, behind enemy lines.

The next night, Mosby stayed out of Fairfax County to allow the excitement to die down a little, but the night after, he and his men, accompanied by Underwood, raided a post where the Little River Turnpike crossed Cub Run. Then, after picking up a two-man road patrol en route, they raided another post near Fryingpan Church. This time they brought back fourteen prisoners and horses.

In all, he and his sextet had captured nineteen prisoners and twenty horses. But Mosby still wasn’t satisfied. What he wanted was a few more men and orders to operate behind the Union army on a permanent basis. So, after paroling the catch of the night before, he told John Underwood to get busy gathering information and establishing contacts, and he took his six men back to Culpepper, reporting his activities to Stuart and claiming that under his existing orders he had not felt justified in staying away from the army longer. At the same time, he asked for a larger detail and orders to continue operating in northern Virginia.

In doing so, he knew he was taking a chance that Stuart would keep him at Culpepper, but as both armies had gone into winter quarters after Fredericksburg with only a minimum of outpost activity, he reasoned that Stuart would be willing to send him back. As it happened, Stuart was so delighted with the success of Mosby’s brief activity that he gave him fifteen men, all from the First Virginia Cavalry, and orders to operate until recalled. On January 18, Mosby was back at Middleburg, ready to go to work in earnest.

As before, he scattered his men over the countryside, quartering them on the people. This time, before scattering them, he told them to meet him at Zion Church, just beyond the gap at Aldie, on the night of the 28th. During the intervening ten days, he was not only busy gathering information but also in an intensive recruiting campaign among the people of upper Fauquier and lower Loudoun Counties.

In this last, his best selling-point was a recent act of the Confederate States Congress called the Scott Partisan Ranger Law. This piece of legislation was, in effect, an extension of the principles of prize law and privateering to land warfare. It authorized the formation of independent cavalry companies, to be considered part of the armed forces of the Confederacy, their members to serve without pay and mount themselves, in return for which they were to be entitled to keep any spoil of war captured from the enemy. The terms “enemy” and “spoil of war” were defined so liberally as to cover almost anything not the property of the government or citizens of the Confederacy. There were provisions, also, entitling partisan companies to draw on the Confederate government for arms and ammunition and permitting them to turn in and receive payment for any spoil which they did not wish to keep for themselves.

The law had met with considerable opposition from the Confederate military authorities, who claimed that it would attract men and horses away from the regular service and into ineffective freebooting. There is no doubt that a number of independent companies organized under the Scott Law accomplished nothing of military value. Some degenerated into mere bandit gangs, full of deserters from both sides, and terrible only to the unfortunate Confederate citizens living within their range of operations. On the other hand, as Mosby was to demonstrate, a properly employed partisan company could be of considerable use.

It was the provision about booty, however, which appealed to Mosby. As he intended operating in the Union rear, where the richest plunder could be found, he hoped that the prospect would attract numerous recruits. The countryside contained many men capable of bearing arms who had remained at home to look after their farms but who would be more than willing to ride with him now and then in hope of securing a new horse for farm work, or some needed harness, or food and blankets for their families. The regular Mosby Men called them the “Conglomerates,” and Mosby himself once said that they resembled the Democrat party, being “held together only by the cohesive power of public plunder.”

Mosby’s first operation with his new force was in the pattern of the other two⁠—the stealthy dismounted approach and sudden surprise of an isolated picket post. He brought back eleven prisoners and twelve horses and sets of small arms, and, as on the night of the 10th, left one wounded enemy behind. As on the previous occasions, the prisoners were taken as far as Middleburg before being released on parole.

For this reason, Mosby was sure that Colonel Sir Percy Wyndham, commander of the brigade which included the Fifth New York, Eighteenth Pennsylvania and the First Vermont, would assume that this village was the raiders’ headquarters. Colonel Wyndham, a European-trained soldier, would scarcely conceive of any military force, however small, without a regular headquarters and a fixed camp. Therefore, Wyndham would come looking for him at Middleburg. So, with a companion named Fountain Beattie, Mosby put up for what remained of the night at the home of a Mr. Lorman Chancellor, on the road from Aldie a few miles east of Middleburg. The rest of the company were ordered to stay outside Middleburg.

Mosby’s estimate of his opponent was uncannily accurate. The next morning, about daybreak, he and Beattie were wakened by one of the Chancellor servants and warned that a large body of Union cavalry was approaching up the road from Aldie. Peering through the window shutters, they watched about 200 men of the Fifth New York ride by, with Colonel Wyndham himself in the lead. As soon as they were out of sight up the road, Mosby and Beattie, who had hastily dressed, dashed downstairs for their horses.

“I’m going to keep an eye on these people,” Mosby told Beattie. “Gather up as many men as you can, and meet me in about half an hour on the hill above Middleburg. But hurry! I’d rather have five men now than a hundred by noon.”

When Beattie with six men rejoined Mosby, he found the latter sitting on a stump, munching an apple and watching the enemy through his field glasses. Wyndham, who had been searching Middleburg for “Mosby’s headquarters,” was just forming his men for a push on to Upperville, where he had been assured by the canny Middleburgers that Mosby had his camp.

Mosby and his men cantered down the hillside to the road as Wyndham’s force moved out of the village and then broke into a mad gallop to overtake them.

It was always hard to be sure whether jackets were dirty gray or faded blue. As the Union soldier had a not unfounded belief that the Virginia woods were swarming with bushwhackers (Confederate guerillas), the haste of a few men left behind to rejoin the column was quite understandable. The rearguard pulled up and waited for them. Then, at about twenty yards’ range, one of the New Yorkers, a sergeant, realized what was happening and shouted a warning:

“They’re Rebs!”

Instantly one of Mosby’s men, Ned Hurst, shot him dead. Other revolvers, ready drawn, banged, and several Union cavalrymen were wounded. Mosby and his followers hastily snatched the bridles of three others, disarmed them and turned, galloping away with them.

By this time, the main column, which had not halted with the rearguard, was four or five hundred yards away. There was a brief uproar, a shouting of contradictory orders, and then the whole column turned and came back at a gallop. Mosby, four of his men, and the three prisoners, got away, but Beattie and two others were captured when their horses fell on a sheet of ice treacherously hidden under the snow. There was no possibility of rescuing them. After the capture of Beattie and his companions, the pursuit stopped. Halting at a distance, Mosby saw Wyndham form his force into a compact body and move off toward Aldie at a brisk trot. He sent off the prisoners under guard of two of his men and followed Wyndham’s retreat almost to Aldie without opportunity to inflict any more damage.

During his stop at Middleburg, Wyndham had heaped coals on a growing opposition to Mosby, fostered by pro-Unionists in the neighborhood. Wyndham informed the townspeople that he would burn the town and imprison the citizens if Mosby continued the attacks on his outposts. A group of citizens, taking the threat to heart, petitioned Stuart to recall Mosby, but the general sent a stinging rebuke, telling the Middleburgers that Mosby and his men were risking their lives which were worth considerably more than a few houses and barns.

Mosby was also worried about the antipathy to the Scott Law and the partisan ranger system which was growing among some of the general officers of the Confederacy. To counteract such opposition, he needed to achieve some spectacular feat of arms which would capture the popular imagination, make a public hero of himself, and place him above criticism.

And all the while, his force was growing. The booty from his raids excited the cupidity of the more venturesome farmers, and they were exchanging the hoe for the revolver and joining him. A number of the convalescents and furloughed soldiers were arranging transfers to his command. Others, with no permanent military attachment, were drifting to Middleburg, Upperville, or Rectortown, inquiring where they might find Mosby, and making their way to join him.

There was a young Irishman, Dick Moran. There was a Fauquier County blacksmith, Billy Hibbs, who reported armed with a huge broadsword which had been the last product of his forge. There were Walter Frankland, Joe Nelson, Frank Williams and George Whitescarver, among the first to join on a permanent basis. And, one day, there was the strangest recruit of all.

A meeting was held on the 25th of February at the Blackwell farm, near Upperville, and Mosby and most of his men were in the kitchen of the farmhouse, going over a map of the section they intended raiding, when a couple of men who had been on guard outside entered, pushing a Union cavalry sergeant ahead of them.

“This Yankee says he wants to see you, Captain,” one of the men announced. “He came on foot; says his horse broke a leg and had to be shot.”

“Well, I’m Mosby,” the guerrilla leader said. “What do you want?”

The man in blue came to attention and saluted.

“I’ve come here to join your company, sir,” he said calmly.

There was an excited outburst from the men in the kitchen, but Mosby took the announcement in stride.

“And what’s your name and unit, sergeant?”

“James F. Ames: late Fifth New York Cavalry, sir.”

After further conversation, Mosby decided that the big Yankee was sincere in his avowed decision to join the forces of the Confederacy. He had some doubts about his alleged motives: the man was animated with a most vindictive hatred of the Union government, all his former officers and most of his former comrades. No one ever learned what injury, real or fancied, had driven Sergeant Ames to desertion and treason, but in a few minutes Mosby was sure that the man was through with the Union Army.

Everybody else was equally sure that he was a spy, probably sent over by Wyndham to assassinate Mosby. Eventually Mosby proposed a test of Ames’ sincerity. The deserter should guide the company to a Union picket post, and should accompany the raiders unarmed: Mosby would ride behind him, ready to shoot him at the first sign of treachery. The others agreed to judge the new recruit by his conduct on the raid. A fairly strong post, at a schoolhouse at Thompson’s Corners, was selected as the objective, and they set out, sixteen men beside Ames and Mosby, through a storm of rain and sleet. Stopping at a nearby farm, Mosby learned that the post had been heavily reinforced since he had last raided it. There were now about a hundred men at the schoolhouse.

Pleased at this evidence that his campaign to force the enemy to increase his guard was bearing fruit, Mosby decided to abandon his customary tactics of dismounting at a distance and approaching on foot. On a night like this, the enemy would not be expecting him, so the raiders advanced boldly along the road, Mosby telling Ames to make whatever answer he thought would be believed in case they were challenged. However, a couple of trigger-happy vedettes let off their carbines at them, yelled, “The Rebs are coming!” and galloped for the schoolhouse.

There was nothing to do but gallop after them, and Mosby and his band came pelting in on the heels of the vedettes. Hitherto, his raids had been more or less bloodless, but this time he had a fight on his hands, and if the men in the schoolhouse had stayed inside and defended themselves with carbine fire, they would have driven off the attack. Instead, however, they rushed outside, each man trying to mount his horse. A lieutenant and seven men were killed, about twice that number wounded, and five prisoners were taken. The rest, believing themselves attacked by about twice their own strength, scattered into the woods and got away.

Ames, who had ridden unarmed, flung himself upon a Union cavalryman at the first collision and disarmed him, then threw himself into the fight with the captured saber. His conduct during the brief battle at the schoolhouse was such as to remove from everybody’s mind the suspicion that his conversion to the Confederate cause was anything but genuine. Thereafter, he was accepted as a Mosby man.

He was accepted by Mosby himself as a veritable godsend, since he was acquainted with the location of every Union force in Fairfax County, and knew of a corridor by which it would be possible to penetrate Wyndham’s entire system of cavalry posts as far as Fairfax Courthouse itself. Here, then, was the making of the spectacular coup which Mosby needed to answer his critics and enemies, both at Middleburg and at army headquarters. He decided to attempt nothing less than a raid upon Fairfax Courthouse, with the capture of Wyndham as its purpose.

This last would entail something of a sacrifice, for he had come to esteem Sir Percy highly as an opponent whose mind was an open book and whose every move could be predicted in advance. With Wyndham eliminated, he would have to go to the trouble of learning the mental processes of his successor.

However, Wyndham would be the ideal captive to grace a Mosby triumph, and a successful raid on Fairfax Courthouse, garrisoned as it was by between five and ten thousand Union troops, would not only secure Mosby’s position in his own army but would start just the sort of a panic which would result in demands that the Union rear be reinforced at the expense of the front.

So, on Sunday, March 8, Mosby led thirty-nine men through the gap at Aldie, the largest force that had followed him to date. It was the sort of a foul night that he liked for raiding, with a drizzling rain falling upon melting snow. It was pitch dark before they found the road between Centreville and Fairfax, along which a telegraph line had been strung to connect the main cavalry camp with General Stoughton’s headquarters. Mosby sent one of his men, Harry Hatcher, up a pole to cut the wire. They cut another telegraph line at Fairfax Station and left the road, moving through the woods toward Fairfax Courthouse. At this time, only Mosby and Yank Ames knew the purpose of the expedition.

It was therefore with surprise and some consternation that the others realized where they were as they rode into the courthouse square and halted. A buzz of excited whispers rose from the men.

“That’s right,” Mosby assured them calmly. “We’re in Fairfax Courthouse, right in the middle of ten thousand Yankees, but don’t let that worry you. All but about a dozen of them are asleep. Now, if you all keep your heads and do what you’re told, we’ll be as safe as though we were in Jeff Davis’ front parlor.”

He then began giving instructions, detailing parties to round up horses and capture any soldiers they found awake and moving about. He went, himself, with several men, to the home of a citizen named Murray, where he had been told that Wyndham had quartered himself, but here he received the disappointing news that the Englishman had gone to Washington that afternoon.

A few minutes later, however, Joe Nelson came up with a prisoner, an infantryman who had just been relieved from sentry duty at General Stoughton’s headquarters, who said that there had been a party there earlier in the evening and that Stoughton and several other officers were still there. Mosby, still disappointed at his failure to secure Wyndham, decided to accept Stoughton in his place. Taking several men, he went at once to the house where the prisoner said Stoughton had his headquarters.

Arriving there, he hammered loudly on the door with a revolver butt. An upstairs window opened, and a head, in a nightcap, was thrust out.

“What the devil’s all the noise about?” its owner demanded. “Don’t you know this is General Stoughton’s headquarters?”

“I’d hoped it was; I almost killed a horse getting here,” Mosby retorted. “Come down and open up; dispatches from Washington.”

In a few moments, a light appeared inside on the first floor, and the door opened. A man in a nightshirt, holding a candle, stood in the doorway.

“I’m Lieutenant Prentiss, on General Stoughton’s staff. The general’s asleep. If you’ll give me the dispatches.⁠ ⁠…”

Mosby caught the man by the throat with his left hand and shoved a Colt into his face with his right. Dan Thomas, beside him, lifted the candle out of the other man’s hand.

“And I’m Captain Mosby, General Stuart’s staff. We’ve just taken Fairfax Courthouse. Inside, now, and take me to the general at once.”

The general was in bed, lying on his face in a tangle of bedclothes. Mosby pulled the sheets off of him, lifted the tail of his nightshirt and slapped him across the bare rump.

The effect was electric. Stoughton sat up in bed, gobbling in fury. In the dim candlelight, he mistook the gray of Mosby’s tunic for blue, and began a string of bloodthirsty threats of court-martial and firing squad, interspersed with oaths.

“Easy, now, General,” the perpetrator of the outrage soothed. “You’ve heard of John Mosby, haven’t you?”

“Yes; have you captured him?” In the face of such tidings, Stoughton would gladly forget the assault on his person.

Mosby shook his head, smiling seraphically. “No, General. He’s captured you. I’m Mosby.”

“Oh my God!” Stoughton sank back on the pillow and closed his eyes, overcome.

Knowing the precarious nature of his present advantage, Mosby then undertook to deprive Stoughton of any hope of rescue or will to resist.

“Stuart’s cavalry is occupying Fairfax Courthouse,” he invented, “and Stonewall Jackson’s at Chantilly with his whole force. We’re all moving to occupy Alexandria by morning. You’ll have to hurry and dress, General.”

“Is Fitzhugh Lee here?” Stoughton asked. “He’s a friend of mine; we were classmates at West Point.”

“Why, no; he’s with Jackson at Chantilly. Do you want me to take you to him? I can do so easily if you hurry.”

It does not appear that Stoughton doubted as much as one syllable of this remarkable set of prevarications. The Union Army had learned by bitter experience that Stonewall Jackson was capable of materializing almost anywhere. So he climbed out of bed, putting on his clothes.

On the way back to the courthouse square, Prentiss got away from them in the darkness, but Mosby kept a tight hold on Stoughton’s bridle. By this time, the suspicion that all was not well in the county seat had begun to filter about. Men were beginning to turn out under arms all over town, and there was a confusion of challenges and replies and some occasional firing as hastily wakened soldiers mistook one another for the enemy. Mosby got his prisoners and horses together and started out of town as quickly as he could.

The withdrawal was made over much the same route as the approach, without serious incident. Thanks to the precaution of cutting the telegraph wires, the camp at Centreville knew nothing of what had happened at Fairfax Courthouse until long after the raiders were safely away. They lost all but thirty of the prisoners⁠—in the woods outside Fairfax Courthouse, they escaped in droves⁠—but they brought Stoughton and the two captains out safely.

The results were everything Mosby had hoped. He became a Confederate hero over night, and there was no longer any danger of his being recalled. There were several halfhearted attempts to kick him upstairs⁠—an offer of a commission in the now defunct Virginia Provisional Army, which he rejected scornfully, and a similar offer in the regular Confederate States Army, which he politely declined because it would deprive his men of their right to booty under the Scott Law. Finally he was given a majority in the Confederate States Army, with authorization to organize a partisan battalion under the Scott Law. This he accepted, becoming Major Mosby of the Forty-Third Virginia Partisan Ranger Battalion.

The effect upon the enemy was no less satisfactory. When full particulars of the Fairfax raid reached Washington, Wyndham vanished from the picture, being assigned to other duties where less depended upon him. There was a whole epidemic of courts-martial and inquiries, some of which were still smouldering when the war ended. And Stoughton, the principal victim, found scant sympathy. President Lincoln, when told that the rebels had raided Fairfax to the tune of one general, two captains, thirty men and fifty-eight horses, remarked that he could make all the generals he wanted, but that he was sorry to lose the horses, as he couldn’t make horses. As yet, there was no visible reinforcement of the cavalry in Fairfax County from the front, but the line of picket posts was noticeably shortened.

About two weeks later, with forty men, Mosby raided a post at Herndon Station, bringing off a major, a captain, two lieutenants and twenty-one men, with a horse apiece. A week later, with fifty-odd men, he cut up about three times his strength of Union cavalry at Chantilly. Having surprised a small party, he had driven them into a much larger force, and the hunted had turned to hunt the hunters. Fighting a delaying action with a few men while the bulk of his force fell back on an old roadblock of felled trees dating from the second Manassas campaign, he held off the enemy until he was sure his ambuscade was set, then, by feigning headlong flight, led them into a trap and chased the survivors for five or six miles. Wyndham and Stoughton had found Mosby an annoying nuisance; their successors were finding him a serious menace.

This attitude was not confined to the local level, but extended all the way to the top echelons. The word passed down, “Get Mosby!” and it was understood that the officer responsible for his elimination would find his military career made for him. One of the Union officers who saw visions of rapid advancement over the wreckage of Mosby’s Rangers was a captain of the First Vermont, Josiah Flint by name. He was soon to have a chance at it.

On March 31, Mosby’s Rangers met at Middleburg and moved across the mountain to Chantilly, expecting to take a strong outpost which had been located there. On arriving, they found the campsite deserted. The post had been pulled back closer to Fairfax after the fight of four days before. Mosby decided to move up to the Potomac and attack a Union force on the other side of Dranesville⁠—Captain Josiah Flint’s Vermonters.

They passed the night at John Miskel’s farm, near Chantilly. The following morning, April 1, at about daybreak, Mosby was wakened by one of his men who had been sleeping in the barn. This man, having gone outside, had observed a small party of Union troops on the Maryland side of the river who were making semaphore signals to somebody on the Virginia side. Mosby ordered everybody to turn out as quickly as possible and went out to watch the signalmen with his field glasses. While he was watching, Dick Moran, a Mosby man who had billeted with friends down the road, arrived at a breakneck gallop from across the fields, shouting: “Mount your horses! The Yankees are coming!”

It appeared that he had been wakened, shortly before, by the noise of a column of cavalry on the road in front of the house where he had been sleeping, and had seen a strong force of Union cavalry on the march in the direction of Broad Run and the Miskel farm. Waiting until they had passed, he had gotten his horse and circled at a gallop through the woods, reaching the farm just ahead of them. It later developed that a woman of the neighborhood, whose head had been turned by the attentions of Union officers, had betrayed Mosby to Flint.

The Miskel farmhouse stood on the crest of a low hill, facing the river. Behind it stood the big barn, with a large barnyard enclosed by a high pole fence. As this was a horse farm, all the fences were eight feet high and quite strongly built. A lane ran down the slope of the hill between two such fences, and at the southern end of the slope another fence separated the meadows from a belt of woods, beyond which was the road from Dranesville, along which Flint’s column was advancing.

It was a nasty spot for Mosby. He had between fifty and sixty men, newly roused from sleep, their horses unsaddled, and he was penned in by strong fences which would have to be breached if he were to escape. His only hope lay in a prompt counterattack. The men who had come out of the house and barn were frantically saddling horses, without much attention to whose saddle went on whose mount. Harry Hatcher, who had gotten his horse saddled, gave it to Mosby and appropriated somebody else’s mount.

As Flint, at the head of his cavalry, emerged from the woods, Mosby had about twenty of his men mounted and was ready to receive him. The Union cavalry paused, somebody pulled out the gate bars at the foot of the lane, and the whole force started up toward the farm. Having opened the barnyard end of the lane, Mosby waited until Flint had come about halfway, then gave him a blast of revolver fire and followed this with a headlong charge down the lane. Flint was killed at the first salvo, as were several of the men behind him. By the time Mosby’s charge rammed into the head of the Union attack, the narrow lane was blocked with riderless horses, preventing each force from coming to grips with the other. Here Mosby’s insistence upon at least two revolvers for each man paid off, as did the target practice upon which he was always willing to expend precious ammunition. The Union column, constricted by the fences on either side of the lane and shaken by the death of their leader and by the savage attack of men whom they had believed hopelessly trapped, turned and tried to retreat, but when they reached the foot of the lane it was discovered that some fool, probably meaning to deny Mosby an avenue of escape, had replaced the gatebars. By this time, the rest of Mosby’s force had mounted their horses, breaches had been torn in the fence at either side of the lane, and there were Confederates in both meadows, firing into the trapped men. Until the gate at the lower end gave way under the weight of horses crowded against it, there was a bloody slaughter. Within a few minutes Flint and nine of his men were killed, some fifteen more were given disabling wounds, eighty-two prisoners were taken, and over a hundred horses and large quantities of arms and ammunition were captured. The remains of Flint’s force was chased as far as Dranesville. Mosby was still getting the prisoners sorted out, rounding up loose horses, gathering weapons and ammunition from casualties, and giving the wounded first aid, when a Union lieutenant rode up under a flag of truce, followed by several enlisted men and two civilians of the Sanitary Commission, the Civil War equivalent of the Red Cross, to pick up the wounded and bury the dead. This officer offered to care for Mosby’s wounded with his own, an offer which was declined with thanks. Mosby said he would carry his casualties with him, and the Union officer could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw only three wounded men on horse litters and one dead man tied to his saddle.

The sutlers at Dranesville had heard the firing and were about to move away when Mosby’s column appeared. Seeing the preponderance of blue uniforms, they mistook the victors for prisoners and, anticipating a lively and profitable business, unpacked their loads and set up their counters. The business was lively, but anything but profitable. The Mosby men looted them unmercifully, taking their money, their horses, and everything else they had.

All through the spring of 1863, Mosby kept jabbing at Union lines of communication in northern Virginia. In June, his majority came through, and with it authority to organize a battalion under the Scott Law. From that time on, he was on his own, and there was no longer any danger of his being recalled to the regular Army. He was responsible only to Jeb Stuart until the general’s death at Yellow Tavern a year later; thereafter, he took orders from no source below General Lee and the Secretary of War.

Even before this regularization of status, Mosby’s force was beginning to look like a regular outfit. From the fifteen men he had brought up from Culpepper in mid-January, its effective and dependable strength had grown to about sixty riders, augmented from raid to raid by the “Conglomerate” fringe, who were now accepted as guerrillas-pro-tem without too much enthusiasm. A new type of recruit had begun to appear, the man who came to enlist on a permanent basis. Some were Maryland secessionists, like James Williamson, who, after the war, wrote an authoritative and well-documented history of the organization, Mosby’s Rangers. Some were boys like John Edmonds and John Munson, who had come of something approaching military age since the outbreak of the war. Some were men who had wangled transfers from other Confederate units. Not infrequently these men had given up commissions in the regular army to enlist as privates with Mosby. For example, there was the former clergyman, Sam Chapman, who had been a captain of artillery, or the Prussian uhlan lieutenant, Baron Robert von Massow, who gave up a captaincy on Stuart’s staff, or the Englishman, Captain Hoskins, who was shortly to lose his life because of his preference for the saber over the revolver, or Captain Bill Kennon, late of Wheat’s Louisiana Tigers, who had also served with Walker in Nicaragua. As a general thing, the new Mosby recruit was a man of high intelligence, reckless bravery and ultra-rugged individualism.

For his home territory, Mosby now chose a rough quadrangle between the Blue Ridge and Bull Run Mountain, bounded at its four corners by Snicker’s Gap and Manassas Gap along the former and Thoroughfare Gap and Aldie Gap along the latter. Here, when not in action, the Mosby men billeted themselves, keeping widely dispersed, and an elaborate system, involving most of the inhabitants, free or slave, was set up to transmit messages, orders and warnings. In time this district came to be known as “Mosby’s Confederacy,” and, in the absence of any effective Confederate States civil authority, Mosby became the lawgiver and chief magistrate as well as military commander. John Munson, who also wrote a book of reminiscences after the war, said that Mosby’s Confederacy was an absolute monarchy, and that none was ever better governed in history.

Adhering to his belief in the paramount importance of firepower, Mosby saw to it that none of his men carried fewer than two revolvers, and the great majority carried four, one pair on the belt and another on the saddle. Some extremists even carried a third pair down their boot-tops, giving them thirty-six shots without reloading. Nor did he underestimate the power of mobility. Each man had his string of horses, kept where they could be picked up at need. Unlike the regular cavalryman with his one mount, a Mosby man had only to drop an exhausted animal at one of these private remount stations and change his saddle to a fresh one. As a result of these two practices, Union combat reports throughout the war consistently credited Mosby with from three to five times his actual strength.

In time, the entire economy of Mosby’s Confederacy came to be geared to Mosby’s operations, just as the inhabitants of seventeenth century Tortugas or Port Royal depended for their livelihood on the loot of the buccaneers. The Mosby man who lived with some farmer’s family paid for his lodging with gifts of foodstuffs and blankets looted from the enemy. There was always a brisk trade in captured U.S. Army horses and mules. And there was a steady flow of United States currency into the section, so that in time Confederate money was driven out of circulation in a sort of reversal of Gresham’s law. Every prisoner taken reasonably close to Army pay day could be counted on for a few dollars, and in each company there would be some lucky or skillful gambler who would have a fairly sizeable roll of greenbacks. And, of course, there was the sutler, the real prize catch; any Mosby man would pass up a general in order to capture a sutler.

And Northern-manufactured goods filtered south by the wagonload. Many of the Mosby men wore Confederate uniforms that had been tailored for them in Baltimore and even in Washington and run through the Union lines.

By mid-June, Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania had begun and the countryside along Bull Run Mountain and the Blue Ridge exploded into a series of cavalry actions as the Confederate Army moved north along the Union right. Mosby kept his little force out of the main fighting, hacking away at the Union troops from behind and confusing their combat intelligence with reports of Rebel cavalry appearing where none ought to be. In the midst of this work, he took time out to dash across into Fairfax County with sixty men, shooting up a wagon train, burning wagons, and carrying off prisoners and mules, the latter being turned over to haul Lee’s invasion transport. After the two armies had passed over the Potomac, he gathered his force and launched an invasion of Pennsylvania on his own, getting as far as Mercersburg and bringing home a drove of over 200 beef cattle.

He got back to Mosby’s Confederacy in time to learn of Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. Realizing that Lee’s retreat would be followed by a pursuing Union army, he began making preparations to withstand the coming deluge. For one thing, he decided to do something he had not done before⁠—concentrate his force in a single camp on the top of Bull Run Mountain. In the days while Lee’s army was trudging southward, Mosby gathered every horse and mule and cow he could find and drove them into the mountains, putting boys and slaves to work herding them. He commandeered wagons, and hauled grain and hay to his temporary camp. His men erected huts, and built corrals for horses and a stockade for prisoners. They even moved a blacksmith shop to the hidden camp. Then Mosby sat down and waited.

A few days later, Meade’s army began coming through. The Forty-Third Partisan Ranger Battalion went to work immediately. For two weeks, they galloped in and out among the Union columns, returning to their hidden camp only long enough to change horses and leave the prisoners they had taken. They cut into wagon trains, scattering cavalry escorts, burning wagons, destroying supplies, blowing up ammunition, disabling cannon, running off mules. They ambushed marching infantry, flitting away before their victims had recovered from the initial surprise. Sometimes, fleeing from the scene of one attack, they would burst through a column on another road, leaving confusion behind to delay the pursuit.

Finally, the invaders passed on, the camp on the mountain top was abandoned, the Mosby men went back to their old billets, and the Forty-Third Battalion could take it easy again. That is to say, they only made a raid every couple of days and seldom fought a pitched battle more than once a week.

The summer passed; the Virginia hills turned from green to red and from red to brown. Mosby was severely wounded in the side and thigh during a fight at Gooding’s Tavern on August 23, when two of his men were killed, but the raiders brought off eighty-five horses and twelve prisoners and left six enemy dead behind. The old days of bloodless sneak raids on isolated picket posts were past, now that they had enough men for two companies and Mosby rarely took the field with fewer than a hundred riders behind him.

Back in the saddle again after recovering from his wounds, Mosby devoted more attention to attacking the Orange and Alexandria and the Manassas Gap railroads and to harassing attacks for the rest of the winter.

In January, 1864, Major Cole, of the Union Maryland cavalry, began going out of his way to collide with the Forty-Third Virginia, the more so since he had secured the services of a deserter from Mosby, a man named Binns who had been expelled from the Rangers for some piece of rascality and was thirsting for revenge. Cole hoped to capitalize on Binns’ defection as Mosby had upon the desertion of Sergeant Ames, and he made several raids into Mosby’s Confederacy, taking a number of prisoners before the Mosby men learned the facts of the situation and everybody found a new lodging place.

On the morning of February 20, Mosby was having breakfast at a farmhouse near Piedmont Depot, on the Manassas Gap Railroad, along with John Munson and John Edmonds, the teenage terrors, and a gunsmith named Jake Lavender, who was the battalion ordnance sergeant and engaged to young Edmonds’ sister. Edmonds had with him a couple of Sharps carbines he had repaired for other members of the battalion and was carrying to return to the owners. Suddenly John Edmonds’ younger brother, Jimmy, burst into the room with the news that several hundred Union cavalrymen were approaching. Lavender grabbed the two carbines, for which he had a quantity of ammunition, and they all ran outside.

Sending the younger Edmonds boy to bring reinforcements, Mosby, accompanied by John Edmonds, Munson, and Jake Lavender, started to follow the enemy. He and Munson each took one of Lavender’s carbines and opened fire on them, Munson killing a horse and Mosby a man. That started things off properly. Cole’s Marylanders turned and gave chase, and Mosby led them toward the rendezvous with Jimmy Edmonds and the reinforcements. Everybody arrived together, Mosby’s party, the pursuers, and the reinforcements, and a running fight ensued, with Cole’s men running ahead. This mounted chase, in the best horse-opera manner, came thundering down a road past a schoolhouse just as the pupils were being let out for recess. One of these, a 14-year-old boy named Cabell Maddox, jumped onto the pony on which he had ridden to school and joined in the pursuit, armed only with a McGuffy’s Third Reader. Overtaking a fleeing Yank, he aimed the book at him and demanded his surrender; before the flustered soldier realized that his captor was unarmed, the boy had snatched the Colt from his belt and was covering him in earnest. This marked the suspension, for the duration of hostilities, of young Maddox’s formal education. From that hour on he was a Mosby man, and he served with distinction to the end of the war.

The chase broke off, finally, when the pursuers halted to get their prisoners and captured horses together. Then they discovered that one of their number, a man named Cobb, had been killed. Putting the dead man across his saddle, they carried the body back to Piedmont, and the next day assembled there for the funeral. The services had not yet started, and Mosby was finishing writing a report to Stuart on the previous day’s action, when a scout came pelting in to report Union cavalry in the vicinity of Middleburg.

Leaving the funeral in the hands of the preacher and the civilian mourners, Mosby and the 150 men who had assembled mounted and started off. Sam Chapman, the ex-artillery captain, who had worked up from the ranks to a lieutenancy with Mosby, was left in charge of the main force, while Mosby and a small party galloped ahead to reconnoiter. The enemy, they discovered, were not Cole’s men but a California battalion. They learned that this force had turned in the direction of Leesburg, and that they were accompanied by the deserter, Binns.

Mosby made up his mind to ambush the Californians on their way back to their camp at Vienna. He had plans, involving a length of rope, for his former trooper, Binns. The next morning, having crossed Bull Run Mountain the night before, he took up a position near Dranesville, with scouts out to the west. When the enemy were finally reported approaching, he was ready for them. Twenty of his 150, with carbines and rifles, were dismounted and placed in the center, under Lieutenant Mountjoy. The rest of the force was divided into two equal sections, under Chapman and Frank Williams, and kept mounted on the flanks. Mosby himself took his place with Williams on the right. While they waited, they could hear the faint boom of cannon from Washington, firing salutes in honor of Washington’s Birthday.

A couple of men, posted in advance, acted as decoys, and the Union cavalry, returning empty-handed from their raid, started after them in hopes of bringing home at least something to show for their efforts. Before they knew it, they were within range of Mountjoy’s concealed riflemen. While they were still in disorder from the surprise volley, the two mounted sections swept in on them in a blaze of revolver fire, and they broke and fled. There was a nasty jam in a section of fenced road, with mounted Mosby men in the woods on either side and Mountjoy’s rifles behind them. Before they could get clear of this, they lost fifteen killed, fifteen more wounded, and over seventy prisoners, and the victorious Mosby men brought home over a hundred captured horses and large quantities of arms and ammunition. To their deep regret, however, Binns was not to be found either among the casualties or the prisoners. As soon as he had seen how the fight was going, the deserter had spurred off northward, never to appear in Virginia again. Mosby’s own loss had been one man killed and four wounded.

For the rest of the spring, operations were routine⁠—attacks on wagon trains and train wrecking and bridge burning on the railroads. With the cut-and-try shifting of command of the Union Army of the Potomac over and Grant in command, there was activity all over northern Virginia. About this time, Mosby got hold of a second twelve-pound howitzer, and, later, a twelve-pound Napoleon and added the Shenandoah Valley to his field of operations.

From then on, Mosby was fighting a war on two fronts, dividing his attention between the valley and the country to the east of Bull Run Mountain, his men using their spare horses freely to keep the Union rear on both sides in an uproar. The enemy, knowing the section from whence Mosby was operating, resorted to frequent counter-raiding. Often, returning from a raid, the Mosby men would find their home territory invaded and would have to intercept or fight off the invaders. At this time, Mosby was giving top priority to attacks on Union transport whether on the roads or the railroads. Wagon trains were in constant movement, both moving up the Shenandoah Valley and bound for the Army of the Potomac, in front of Petersburg. To the east was the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, to the south, across the end of Mosby’s Confederacy, was the Manassas Gap, and at the upper end of the valley was the B. & O. The section of the Manassas Gap Railroad along the southern boundary of Mosby’s Confederacy came in for special attention, and the Union Army finally gave it up for a bad job and abandoned it. This writer’s grandfather, Captain H. B. Piper, of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, did a stint of duty guarding it, and until he died he spoke with respect of the abilities of John S. Mosby and his raiders. Locomotives were knocked out with one or another of Mosby’s twelve-pounders. Track was torn up and bridges were burned. Land-mines were planted. Trains were derailed and looted, usually with sharp fighting.

By mid-July, Mosby had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and had a total strength of around 300 men, divided into five companies. His younger brother, William Mosby, had joined him and was acting as his adjutant. He now had four guns, all twelve-pounders⁠—two howitzers, the Napoleon and a new rifle, presented to him by Jubal Early. He had a compact, well-disciplined and powerful army-in-miniature. After the Union defeat at Kernstown, Early moved back to the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley, and McCausland went off on his raid in to Pennsylvania, burning Chambersburg in retaliation for Hunter’s burnings at Lexington and Buchanan in Virginia. Following his customary practice, Mosby made a crossing at another point and raided into Maryland as far as Adamstown, skirmishing and picking up a few prisoners and horses.

Early’s invasion of Maryland, followed as it was by McCausland’s sack of Chambersburg, was simply too much for the Union command. The Shenandoah situation had to be cleaned up immediately, and, after some top-echelon dickering, Grant picked Phil Sheridan to do the cleaning. On August 7, Sheridan assumed command of the heterogeneous Union forces in the Shenandoah and began welding them into an army. On the 10th, he started south after Early, and Mosby, who generally had a good idea of what was going on at Union headquarters, took a small party into the valley, intending to kidnap the new commander as he had Stoughton. Due mainly to the vigilance of a camp sentry, the plan failed, but Mosby picked up the news that a large wagon train was being sent up the valley, and he decided to have a try at this.

On the evening of the 12th, he was back in the valley with 330 men and his two howitzers. Spending the night at a plantation on the right bank of the Shenandoah River, he was on the move before daybreak, crossing the river and pushing toward Berryville, with scouts probing ahead in the heavy fog. One of the howitzers broke a wheel and was pushed into the brush and left behind. As both pieces were of the same caliber, the caisson was taken along. A lieutenant and fifteen men, scouting ahead, discovered a small empty wagon train, going down the valley in the direction of Harper’s Ferry, and they were about to attack it when they heard, in the distance, the rumbling of many heavily loaded wagons. This was the real thing. They forgot about the empty wagons and hastened back to Mosby and the main force to report.

Swinging to the left to avoid premature contact with the train, Mosby hurried his column in the direction of Berryville. On the way, he found a disabled wagon, part of the northbound empty train, with the teamster and several infantrymen sleeping in it. These were promptly secured, and questioning elicited the information that the southbound train consisted of 150 wagons, escorted by 250 cavalry and a brigade of infantry. Getting into position on a low hill overlooking the road a little to the east of Berryville, the howitzer was unlimbered and the force was divided on either side of it, Captain Adolphus Richards taking the left wing and Sam Chapman the right. Mosby himself remained with the gun. Action was to be commenced with the gun, and the third shot was to be the signal for both Richards and Chapman to charge.

At just the right moment, the fog lifted. The gun was quickly laid on the wagon train and fired, the first shot beheading a mule. The second shell hit the best sort of target imaginable⁠—a mobile farrier’s forge. There was a deadly shower of horseshoes, hand-tools and assorted ironmongery, inflicting casualties and causing a local panic. The third shell landed among some cavalry who were galloping up, scattering them, and, on the signal, Richards and Chapman charged simultaneously.

Some infantry at the head of the train met Richards with a volley, costing him one man killed and several wounded and driving his charge off at an angle into the middle of the train. The howitzer, in turn, broke up the infantry. Chapman, who had hit the rear of the train, was having easier going: his men methodically dragged the teamsters from their wagons, unhitched mules, overturned, looted and burned wagons. The bulk of the escort, including the infantry, were at the front of the train, with Richards’ men between them and Chapman. Richards, while he had his hands full with these, was not neglecting the wagons, either, though he was making less of a ceremony of it. A teamster was shot and dragged from his wagon-seat, a lighted bundle of inflammables tossed into the wagon, and pistols were fired around the mules’ heads to start them running. The faster they ran, the more the flames behind them were fanned, and as the wagon went careening down the road, other wagons were ignited by it.

By 8 a.m., the whole thing was over. The escort had been scattered, the wagons were destroyed, and the victors moved off, in possession of 500-odd mules, thirty-six horses, about 200 head of beef cattle, 208 prisoners, four Negro slaves who had been forcibly emancipated to drive Army wagons, and large quantities of supplies. In one of the wagons, a number of violins, probably equipment for some prototype of the U.S.O., were found; the more musically inclined guerrillas appropriated these and enlivened the homeward march with music.

Of course, there was jubilation all over Mosby’s Confederacy on their return. The mules were herded into the mountains, held for about a week, and then started off for Early’s army. The beef herd was divided among the people, and there were barbecues and feasts. A shadow was cast over the spirits of the raiders, however, when the prisoners informed them, with considerable glee, that the train had been carrying upwards of a million dollars, the pay for Sheridan’s army. Even allowing for exaggeration, the fact that they had overlooked this treasure was a bitter pill for the Mosbyites. According to local tradition, however, the fortune was not lost completely; there were stories of a Berryville family who had been quite poor before the war but who blossomed into unexplained affluence afterward.

Less than a week later, on August 19, Mosby was in the valley again with 250 men, dividing his force into several parties after crossing the river at Castleman’s Ford. Richards, with “B” Company, set off toward Charlestown. Mosby himself took “A” toward Harper’s Ferry on an uneventful trip during which the only enemies he encountered were a couple of stragglers caught pillaging a springhouse. It was Chapman, with “C” and “D,” who saw the action on this occasion.

Going to the vicinity of Berryville, he came to a burning farmhouse, and learned that it had been fired only a few minutes before by some of Custer’s cavalry. Leaving a couple of men to help the family control the fire and salvage their possessions, he pressed on rapidly. Here was the thing every Mosby man had been hoping for⁠—a chance to catch house burners at work. They passed a second blazing house and barn, dropping off a couple more men to help fight fire, and caught up with the incendiaries, a company of Custer’s men, just as they were setting fire to a third house. Some of these, knowing the quality of mercy they might expect from Mosby men, made off immediately at a gallop. About ninety of them, however, tried to form ranks and put up a fight. The fight speedily became a massacre. Charging with shouts of “No quarters!,” Chapman’s men drove them into a maze of stone fences and killed about a third of them before the rest were able to extricate themselves.

This didn’t stop the house burnings, by any means. The devastation of the Shenandoah Valley had been decided upon as a matter of strategy, and Sheridan was going through with it. The men who were ordered to do the actual work did not have their morale improved any by the knowledge that Mosby’s Rangers were refusing quarter to incendiary details, however, and, coming as it did on the heels of the wagon train affair of the 13th, Sheridan was convinced that something drastic would have to be done about Mosby. Accordingly, he set up a special company, under a Captain William Blazer, each man armed with a pair of revolvers and a Spencer repeater, to devote their entire efforts to eliminating Mosby and his organized raiders.

On September 3, this company caught up with Joe Nelson and about 100 men in the valley and gave them a sound drubbing, the first that the Mosby men had experienced for some time. It was a humiliating defeat for them, and, on the other side, it was hailed as the beginning of the end of the Mosby nuisance. A few days later, while raiding to the east of Bull Run Mountain, Mosby was wounded again, and was taken to Lynchburg. He was joined by his wife, who remained with him at Lynchburg and at Mosby’s Confederacy until the end of the war.

During his absence, the outfit seems to have been run by a sort of presidium of the senior officers. On September 22, Sam Chapman took 120 men into the valley to try to capture a cavalry post supposed to be located near Front Royal, but, arriving there, he learned that his information had been incorrect and that no such post existed. Camping in the woods, he sent some men out as scouts, and the next morning they reported a small wagon train escorted by about 150 cavalry, moving toward Front Royal. Dividing his force and putting half of it under Walter Frankland, he planned to attack the train from the rear while Frankland hit it from in front. After getting into position, he kept his men concealed, waiting for the wagons to pass, and as it did, he realized that his scouts had seen only a small part of it. The escort looked to him like about three regiments. Ordering his men to slip away as quietly as possible, he hurried to reach Frankland.

“Turn around, Walter!” he yelled. “Get your men out of here! You’re attacking a whole brigade!”

“What of it?” Frankland replied. “Why, Sam, we have the bastards on the run already!”

Chapman, the erstwhile clergyman, turned loose a blast of theological language in purely secular connotation. Frankland, amazed at this blasphemous clamor from his usually pious comrade, realized that it must have been inspired by something more than a little serious, and began ordering his men to fall back. Before they had all gotten away, two of the three Union regiments accompanying the wagons came galloping up and swamped them. Most of the men got away but six of them, Anderson, Carter, Overby, Love, Rhodes and Jones, were captured.

Late that night some of the stragglers, making their way back to Mosby’s Confederacy on foot, reported the fate of these six men. They had been taken into Front Royal, and there, at the personal order of General George A. Custer, and under circumstances of extreme brutality, they had all been hanged. Rhodes’ mother, who lived in Front Royal, had been forced to witness the hanging of her son.

To put it conservatively, there was considerable excitement in Mosby’s Confederacy when the news of this atrocity was received. The senior officers managed to restore a measure of calmness, however, and it was decided to wait until Mosby returned before taking any action on the matter.

In addition to the hangings at Front Royal, Custer was acquiring a bad reputation because of his general brutality to the people of the Shenandoah Valley. After the battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull would have probably won any popularity contest in northern Virginia without serious competition.

On September 29, Mosby was back with his command; his wound had not been as serious as it might have been for the bullet had expended most of its force against the butt of one of the revolvers in his belt. Operations against the railroads had been allowed to slacken during Mosby’s absence; now they were stepped up again. Track was repeatedly torn up along the Manassas Gap line, and there were attacks on camps and strong points, and continual harassing of wood-cutting parties obtaining fuel for the locomotives. The artillery was taken out, and trains were shelled. All this, of course, occasioned a fresh wave of Union raids into the home territory of the raiders, during one of which Yank Ames, who had risen to a lieutenancy in the Forty-Third, was killed.

The most desperate efforts were being made, at this time, to keep the Manassas Gap Railroad open, and General C. C. Augur, who had charge of the railroad line at the time, was arresting citizens indiscriminately and forcing them to ride on the trains as hostages. Mosby obtained authorization from Lee’s headquarters to use reprisal measures on officers and train crews of trains on which citizens were being forced to ride, and also authority to execute prisoners from Custer’s command in equal number to the men hanged at Front Royal and elsewhere.

It was not until November that he was able to secure prisoners from Custer’s brigade, it being his intention to limit his retaliation to men from units actually involved in the hangings. On November 6, he paraded about twenty-five such prisoners and forced them to draw lots, selecting, in this manner, seven of them⁠—one for each of the men hanged at Front Royal and another for a man named Willis who had been hanged at Gaines’ Cross Roads several weeks later. It was decided that they should be taken into the Shenandoah Valley and hanged beside the Valley Pike, where their bodies could serve as an object lesson. On the way, one of them escaped. Four were hanged, and then, running out of rope, they prepared to shoot the other two. One of these got away during a delay caused by defective percussion caps on his executioner’s revolver.

A sign was placed over the bodies, setting forth the reason for their execution, and Mosby also sent one of his men under a flag of truce to Sheridan’s headquarters, with a statement of what had been done and why, reinforced with the intimation that he had more prisoners, including a number of officers, in case his messenger failed to return safely. Sheridan replied by disclaiming knowledge of the Front Royal hangings, agreeing that Mosby was justified in taking reprisals, and assuring the Confederate leader that hereafter his men would be given proper treatment as prisoners of war. There was no repetition of the hangings.

By this time the Shenandoah Valley campaign as such was over. The last Confederate effort to clear Sheridan out of the Valley had failed at Cedar Creek on October 19, and the victor was going methodically about his task of destroying the strategic and economic usefulness of the valley. How well he succeeded in this was best expressed in Sheridan’s own claim that a crow flying over the region would have to carry his own rations. The best Mosby could do was to launch small raiding parties to harass the work of destruction.

By the beginning of December, the northern or Loudoun County end of Mosby’s Confederacy was feeling the enemy scourge as keenly as the valley, and the winter nights were lighted with the flames of burning houses and barns. For about a week, while this was going on, Mosby abandoned any attempt at organized action. His men, singly and in small parties, darted in and out among the invaders, sniping and bushwhacking, attacking when they could and fleeing when they had to, and taking no prisoners. When it was over, the northern end of Mosby’s Confederacy was in ashes and most of the people had “refugeed out,” but Mosby’s Rangers, as a fighting force, was still intact. On December 17, for instance, while Mosby was in Richmond conferring with General Lee, they went into the valley again in force, waylaying a column of cavalry on the march, killing and wounding about thirty and bringing off 168 prisoners and horses.

When Mosby came back from Lee’s headquarters, a full colonel now, his brother William was made a lieutenant-colonel, and Richards became a major. The southern, or Fauquier County, end of Mosby’s Confederacy was still more or less intact, though crowded with refugees. There was even time, in spite of everything, for the wedding of the Forty-Third’s armorer, Jake Lavender, with John and Jimmy Edmonds’ sister.

While the wedding party was in progress, a report was brought in to the effect that Union cavalry were in the neighborhood of Salem, a few miles away. Mosby took one of his men, Tom Love, a relative of one of the Front Royal victims, and went to investigate, finding that the enemy had moved in the direction of Rectortown, where they were making camp for the night. Sending a resident of the neighborhood to alert Chapman and Richards for an attack at daybreak, Mosby and Love set out to collect others of his command.

By this time, it was dark, with a freezing rain covering everything with ice. Mosby and Love decided to stop at the farm of Ludwell Lake for something to eat before going on; Love wanted to stay outside on guard, but Mosby told him to get off his horse and come inside. As they would have been in any house in the neighborhood, Mosby and his companion were welcomed as honored guests and sat down with the family to a hearty meal of spareribs.

While they were eating, the house was surrounded by Union cavalry. Mosby rushed to the back door, to find the backyard full of soldiers. He started for the front door, but as he did, it burst open and a number of Yankees, officers and men, entered the house. At the same time, the soldiers behind, having seen the back door open and shut, began firing at the rear windows, and one bullet hit Mosby in the abdomen. In the confusion, with the women of the Lake family screaming, the soldiers cursing, and bullets coming through the windows, the kitchen table was overturned and the lights extinguished. Mosby in the dark, managed to crawl into a first-floor bedroom, where he got off his telltale belt and coat, stuffing them under the bed. Then he lay down on the floor.

After a while, the shooting outside stopped, the officers returned, and the candles were relighted. The Union officers found Mosby on the floor, bleeding badly, and asked the family who he was. They said, of course, that they did not know, and neither did Tom Love⁠—he was only a Confederate officer on his way to rejoin his command, who had stopped for a night’s lodging. There was a surgeon with the Union detachment. After they got most of Mosby’s clothes off and put him on the bed, he examined the wounded Confederate and pronounced his wound mortal. When asked his name and unit, Mosby, still conscious, hastily improvised a false identity, at the same time congratulating himself on having left all his documents behind when starting on this scouting trip. Having been assured, by medical authority, that he was as good as dead, the Union officers were no longer interested in him and soon went away.

Fortunately, on his visit to Lee’s headquarters, Mosby had met an old schoolmate, a Dr. Montiero, who was now a surgeon with the Confederate Army, and, persuading him to get a transfer, had brought him back with him. Montiero’s new C.O. was his first patient in his new outfit. Early the next morning, he extracted the bullet. The next night Mosby was taken to Lynchburg.

Despite the Union doctor’s pronouncement of his impending death, Mosby was back in action again near the end of February, 1865. His return was celebrated with another series of raids on both sides of the mountains. It was, of course, obvious to everybody that the sands of the Confederacy were running out, but the true extent of the debacle was somewhat obscured to Mosby’s followers by their own immediate successes. Peace rumors began drifting about, the favorite item of wish-thinking being that the Union government was going to recognize the Confederacy and negotiate a peace in return for Confederate help in throwing the French out of Mexico. Of course, Mosby himself never believed any such nonsense, but he continued his attacks as though victory were just around the corner. On April 5, two days after the Union army entered Richmond, a party of fifty Mosby men caught their old enemies, the Loudoun Rangers, in camp near Halltown and beat them badly. On April 9, the day of Lee’s surrender, “D” Company and the newly organized “H” Company fired the last shots for the Forty-Third Virginia in a skirmish in Fairfax County. Two days later, Mosby received a message from General Hancock, calling for his surrender.

He sent a group of his officers⁠—William Mosby, Sam Chapman, Walter Frankland and Dr. Montiero⁠—with a flag of truce, and, after several other meetings with Hancock, the command was disbanded and most of the men went in to take the parole.

When his armistice with Hancock expired, Mosby found himself with only about forty irreconcilables left out of his whole command. As General Joe Johnston had not yet surrendered, he did not feel justified in getting out of the fight, himself. With his bloodied but unbowed handful, he set out on the most ambitious project of his entire military career⁠—nothing less than a plan to penetrate into Richmond and abduct General Grant. If this scheme succeeded, it was his intention to dodge around the Union Army, carry his distinguished prisoner to Johnston, and present him with a real bargaining point for negotiating terms.

They reached the outskirts of Richmond and made a concealed camp across the river, waiting for darkness. In the meanwhile, two of the party, both natives of the city, Munson and Cole Jordan, went in to scout. Several hours passed, and neither returned. Mosby feared that they had been picked up by Union patrols. He was about to send an older man, Lieutenant Ben Palmer, when a canal-boat passed, and, hailing it, they learned of Johnston’s surrender.

That was the end of the scheme to kidnap Grant. As long as a Confederate force was still under arms, it would have been a legitimate act of war. Now, it would be mere brigandage, and Mosby had no intention of turning brigand.

So Mosby returned to Fauquier County to take the parole. For him, the fighting was over, but he was soon to discover that the war was not. At that time, Edwin M. Stanton was making frantic efforts to inculpate as many prominent Confederates as possible in the Booth conspiracy, and Mosby’s name was suggested as a worthy addition to Stanton’s long and fantastic list of alleged conspirators. A witness was produced to testify that Mosby had been in Washington on the night of the assassination, April 14. At that time, Stanton was able to produce a witness to almost anything he wanted to establish. Fortunately, Mosby had an alibi; at the time in question, he had been at Hancock’s headquarters, discussing armistice terms; even Stanton couldn’t get around that.

However, he was subjected to considerable petty persecution, and once he was flung into jail without charge and held incommunicado. His wife went to Washington to plead his case before President Johnson, who treated her with a great deal less than courtesy, and then before General Grant, who promptly gave her a written order for her husband’s release.

Then, in 1868, he did something which would have been social and political suicide for any Southerner with a less imposing war record. He supported Ulysses S. Grant for President. It was about as unexpected as any act in an extremely unconventional career, and, as usual, he had a well-reasoned purpose. Grant, he argued, was a professional soldier, not a politician. His enmity toward the South had been confined to the battlefield and had ended with the war. He had proven his magnanimity to the defeated enemy, and as President, he could be trusted to show fairness and clemency to the South.

While Virginia had not voted in the election of 1868, there is no question that Mosby’s declaration of support helped Grant, and Grant was grateful, inviting Mosby to the White House after his inauguration and later appointing him to the United States consulate at Hong Kong. After the expiration of his consular service, Mosby resumed his law practice, eventually taking up residence in Washington. He found time to write several books⁠—war reminiscences and memoirs, and a volume in vindication of his former commander, Jeb Stuart, on the Confederate cavalry in the Gettysburg campaign. He died in Washington, at the age of eighty-three, in 1916.

The really important part of John Mosby’s career, of course, was the two years and three months, from January, 1863, to April, 1865, in which he held independent command. With his tiny force⁠—it never exceeded 500 men⁠—he had compelled the Union army to employ at least one and often as high as three brigades to guard against his depredations, and these men, held in the rear, were as much out of the war proper as though they had been penned up in Andersonville or Libby Prison.

In addition to this, every northward movement of the Confederate Army after January, 1863, was accompanied by a diversionary operation of Mosby’s command, sometimes tactically insignificant but always contributing, during the critical time of the operation, to the uncertainty of Union intelligence. Likewise, every movement to the south of the Army of the Potomac was harassed from behind.

It may also be noted that Sheridan, quite capable of dealing with the menace of Stuart, proved helpless against the Mosby nuisance, although, until they were wiped out, Blazer’s Scouts were the most efficient anti-Mosby outfit ever employed. In spite of everything that was done against them, however, Mosby’s Rangers stayed in business longer than Lee’s army, and when they finally surrendered, it was not because they, themselves, had been defeated, but because the war had been literally jerked out from under them.

Mosby made the cavalry a formidable amalgamation of fire power and mobility and his influence on military history was felt directly, and survived him by many years. In his last days, while living in Washington, the old Confederate guerrilla had a youthful friend, a young cavalry lieutenant fresh from West Point, to whom he enjoyed telling the stories of his raids and battles and to whom he preached his gospel of fire and mobility. This young disciple of Mosby’s old age was to make that gospel his own, and to practice it, later, with great success. The name of this young officer was George S. Patton, Jr.

Operation R.S.V.P.

Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky, Foreign Minister, Union of East European Soviet Republics, to Wu Fung Tung, Foreign Minister, United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia:

15 Jan. 1984

Honored Sir:

Pursuant to our well known policy of exchanging military and scientific information with the Governments of friendly Powers, my Government takes great pleasure in announcing the completely successful final tests of our new nuclear-rocket guided missile Marxist Victory. The test launching was made from a position south of Lake Balkash; the target was located in the East Siberian Sea.

In order to assist you in appreciating the range of the new guided missile Marxist Victory, let me point out that the distance from launching-site to target is somewhat over 50 percent greater than the distance from launching-site to your capital, Nanking.

My Government is still hopeful that your Government will revise its present intransigeant position on the Khakum River dispute.

Wu Fung Tung, to Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky:

7 Feb., 1984

Estimable Sir:

My Government was most delighted to learn of the splendid triumph of your Government in developing the new guided missile Marxist Victory, and at the same time deeply relieved. We had, of course, detected the release of nuclear energy incident to the test, and inasmuch as it had obviously originated in the disintegration of a quantity of Uranium 235, we had feared that an explosion had occurred at your Government’s secret uranium plant at Khatanga. We have long known of the lax security measures in effect at this plant, and have, as a consequence, been expecting some disaster there.

I am therefore sure that your Government will be equally gratified to learn of the perfection, by my Government, of our own new guided missile Celestial Destroyer, which embodies, in greatly improved form, many of the features of your own Government’s guided missile Marxist Victory. Naturally, your own scientific warfare specialists have detected the release of energy incident to the explosion of our own improved thorium-hafnium interaction bomb; this bomb was exploded over the North Polar ice cap, about two hundred miles south of the Pole, on about 35 degrees East Longitude, almost due north of your capital city of Moscow. The launching was made from a site in Tibet.

Naturally, my Government cannot deviate from our present just and reasonable attitude in the Khakum River question. Trusting that your Government will realize this, I have the honor to be,

From N.Y. Times, Feb. 20, 1984:

Afghan Ruler Fêted at Nanking

Ameer Shere Ali Abdallah Confers
With
U.P.R.E.A. Pres. Sung Li-Yin

U.E.E.S.R. Foreign Minister Dzhoubinsky to Maxim G. Krylenkoff, Ambassador at Nanking:

3 March, 1984

Comrade Ambassador:

It is desired that you make immediate secret and confidential repeat secret and confidential inquiry as to the whereabouts of Dr. Dimitri O. Voronoff, the noted Soviet rocket expert, designer of the new guided missile Marxist Victory, who vanished a week ago from the Josef Vissarionovitch Djugashvli Reaction-Propulsion Laboratories at Molotovgorod. It is feared in Government circles that this noted scientist has been abducted by agents of the United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia, possibly to extract from him, under torture, information of a secret technical nature.

As you know, this is but the latest of a series of such disappearances, beginning about five years ago, when the Khakum River question first arose.

Your utmost activity in this matter is required.

Ambassador Krylenkoff to Foreign Minister Dzhoubinsky:

9 March, 1984

Comrade Foreign Minister:

Since receipt of yours of 3/3/’84, I have been utilizing all resources at my disposal in the matter of the noted scientist D. O. Voronoff, and availing myself of all sources of information, e.g., spies, secret agents, disaffected elements of the local population, and including two U.P.R.E.A. Cabinet Ministers on my payroll. I regret to report that results of this investigation have been entirely negative. No one here appears to know anything of the whereabouts of Dr. Voronoff.

At the same time, there is considerable concern in U.P.R.E.A. Government circles over the disappearances of certain prominent East Asian scientists, e.g. Dr. Hong Foo, the nuclear physicist; Dr. Hin Yang-Woo, the great theoretical mathematician; Dr. Mong Shing, the electronics expert. I am informed that U.P.R.E.A. Government sources are attributing these disappearances to us.

I can only say that I am sincerely sorry that this is not the case.

Wu Fung Tung to Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky:

21 April, 1984

Estimable Sir:

In accordance with our established policy of free exchange with friendly Powers of scientific information, permit me to inform your Government that a new mutated disease-virus has been developed in our biological laboratories, causing a highly contagious disease similar in symptoms to bubonic plague, but responding to none of the treatments for this latter disease. This new virus strain was accidentally produced in the course of some experiments with radioactivity.

In spite of the greatest care, it is feared that this virus has spread beyond the laboratory in which it was developed. We warn you most urgently of the danger that it may have spread to the U.E.E.S.R.; enclosed are a list of symptoms, etc.

My Government instructs me to advise your Government that the attitude of your Government in the Khakum River question is utterly unacceptable, and will require considerable revision before my Government can even consider negotiation with your Government on the subject.

From N.Y. Times, May 12, 1984:

Afghan Ruler Fêted At Moscow

Ameer sees Red Square Troop Review;
Confers with Premier-President Mouzorgin

Sing Yat, U.P.R.E.A. Ambassador at Moscow, to Wu Fung Tung:

26 June, 1984

Venerable and Honored Sir:

I regret humbly that I can learn nothing whatever about the fate of the learned scholars of science of whom you inquire, namely: Hong Foo, Hin Yang-Woo, Mong Shing, Yee Ho Li, Wong Fat, and Bao Hu-Shin. This inability may be in part due to incompetence of my unworthy self, but none of my many sources of information, including Soviet Minister of Police Morgodoff, who is on my payroll, can furnish any useful data whatever. I am informed, however, that the U.E.E.S.R. Government is deeply concerned about similar disappearances of some of the foremost of their own scientists, including Voronoff, Jirnikov, Kagorinoff, Bakhorin, Himmelfarber and Pavlovinsky, all of whose dossiers are on file with our Bureau of Foreign Intelligence. I am further informed that the Government of the U.E.E.S.R. ascribes these disappearances to our own activities.

Ah, Venerable and Honored Sir, if this were only true!

Dzhoubinsky to Wu Fung Tung:

6 October, 1984

Honored Sir:

Pursuant to our well known policy of exchanging scientific information with the Governments of friendly Powers, my Government takes the greatest pleasure in announcing a scientific discovery of inestimable value to the entire world. I refer to nothing less than a positive technique for liquidating rats as a species.

This technique involves treatment of male rats with certain types of hard radiations, which not only renders them reproductively sterile but leaves the rodents so treated in full possession of all other sexual functions and impulses. Furthermore, this condition of sterility is venereally contagious, so that one male rat so treated will sterilize all female rats with which it comes in contact, and these, in turn, will sterilize all male rats coming in contact with them. Our mathematicians estimate that under even moderately favorable circumstances, the entire rat population of the world could be sterilized from one male rat in approximately two hundred years.

Rats so treated have already been liberated in the granaries at Odessa; in three months, rat-trappings there have fallen by 26.4 percent, and grain-losses to rats by 32.09 percent.

We are shipping you six dozen sterilized male rats, which you can use for sterilization stock, and, by so augmenting their numbers, may duplicate our own successes.

Curiously enough, this effect of venereally contagious sterility was discovered quite accidentally, in connection with the use of hard radiations for human sterilization (criminals, mental defectives, etc.). Knowing the disastrous possible effects of an epidemic of contagious human sterility, all persons so sterilized were liquidated as soon as the contagious nature of their sterility had been discovered, with the exception of a dozen or so convicts, who had been released before this discovery was made. It is believed that at least some of them have made their way over the border and into the territory of the United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia. I must caution your Government to be on the lookout of them. Among a people still practicing ancestor-worship, an epidemic of sterility would be a disaster indeed.

My Government must insist that your Government take some definite step toward the solution of the Khakum River question; the present position of the Government of the United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia on this subject is utterly unacceptable to the Government of the Union of East European Soviet Republics, and must be revised very considerably.

Coded radiogram, Dzhoubinsky to Krylenkoff:

25 October, 1984

Ascertain Immediately Cause of Release of Nuclear Energy Vicinity of Nova Zembla This a.m.

Coded radiogram, Wu Fung Tung to Sing Yat:

25 October, 1984

Ascertain Immediately Cause of Release of Nuclear Energy Vicinity of Nova Zembla This a.m.

Letter from the Ameer of Afghanistan to U.E.E.S.R. Premier-President Mouzorgin and U.P.R.E.A. President Sung Li-Yin:

26 October, 1984

Shere Ali Abdallah, Ameer of Afghanistan, Master of Kabul, Lord of Herat and Kandahar, Keeper of Khyber Pass, Defender of the True Faith, Servant of the Most High and Sword-Hand of the Prophet; Ph. D. (Princeton); Sc.B. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); M.A. (Oxford): to their Excellencies A. A. Mouzorgin, Premier-President of the Union of East European Soviet Republics, and Sung Li-Yin, President of the United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia,

Greetings, in the name of Allah!

For the past five years, I have watched, with growing concern, the increasing tensions between your Excellencies’ respective Governments, allegedly arising out of the so-called Khakum River question. It is my conviction that this Khakum River dispute is the utterly fraudulent device by which both Governments hope to create a pretext for the invasion of India, each ostensibly to rescue that unhappy country from the rapacity of the other. Your Excellencies must surely realize that this is a contingency which the Government of the Kingdom of Afghanistan cannot and will not permit; it would mean nothing short of the national extinction of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, and the enslavement of the Afghan people.

Your Excellencies will recall that I discussed this matter most urgently on the occasions of my visits to your respective capitals of Moscow and Nanking, and your respective attitudes, on those occasions, has firmly convinced me that neither of your Excellencies is by nature capable of adopting a rational or civilized attitude toward this question. It appears that neither of your Excellencies has any intention of abandoning your present war of mutual threats and blackmail until forced to do so by some overt act on the part of one or the other of your Excellencies’ Governments, which would result in physical war of pan-Asiatic scope and magnitude. I am further convinced that this deplorable situation arises out of the megalomaniac ambitions of the Federal Governments of the U.E.E.S.R. and the U.P.R.E.A., respectively, and that the different peoples of what you unblushingly call your “autonomous” republics have no ambitions except, on a rapidly diminishing order of probability, to live out their natural span of years in peace. Therefore:

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate: We, Shere Ali Abdallah, Ameer of Afghanistan, etc., do decree and command that the political entities known as the Union of East European Soviet Republics and the United Peoples’ Republics of East Asia respectively are herewith abolished and dissolved into their constituent autonomous republics, each one of which shall hereafter enjoy complete sovereignty within its own borders as is right and proper.

Now, in case either of you gentlemen feel inclined to laugh this off, let me remind you of the series of mysterious disappearances of some of the most noted scientists of both the U.E.E.S.R. and the U.P.R.E.A., and let me advise your Excellencies that these scientists are now residents and subjects of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, and are here engaged in research and development work for my Government. These gentlemen were not abducted, as you gentlemen seem to believe; they came here of their own free will, and ask nothing better than to remain here, where they are treated with dignity and honor, given material rewards⁠—riches, palaces, harems, retinues of servants, etc.⁠—and are also free from the intellectual and ideological restraints which make life so intolerable in your respective countries to any man above the order of intelligence of a cretin. In return for these benefactions, these eminent scientists have developed, for my Government, certain weapons. For example:

1. A nuclear-rocket guided missile, officially designated as the Sword of Islam, vastly superior to your Excellencies’ respective guided missiles Marxist Victory and Celestial Destroyer. It should be; it was the product of the joint efforts of Dr. Voronoff and Dr. Bao Hu-Shin, whom your Excellencies know.

2. A new type of radar-radio-electronic defense screen, which can not only detect the approach of a guided missile, at any velocity whatever, but will automatically capture and redirect same. In case either of your Excellencies doubt this statement, you are invited to aim a rocket at some target in Afghanistan and see what happens.

3. Both the U.P.R.E.A. mutated virus and the U.E.E.S.R. contagious sterility, with positive vaccines against the former and means of instrumental detection of the latter.

4. A technique for initiating and controlling the Bethe carbon-hydrogen cycle. We are now using this as a source of heat for industrial and even domestic purposes, and we also have a carbon-hydrogen cycle bomb. Such a bomb, delivered by one of our Sword of Islam Mark IV’s, was activated yesterday over the Northern tip of Nova Zembla, at an altitude of four miles. I am enclosing photographic reproductions of views of this test, televised to Kabul by an accompanying Sword of Islam Mark V observation rocket. I am informed that expeditions have been sent by both the U.E.E.S.R. and the U.P.R.E.A. to investigate; they should find some very interesting conditions. For one thing, they won’t need their climbing equipment to get over the Nova Zembla Glacier; the Nova Zembla Glacier isn’t there, any more.

5. A lithium bomb. This has not been tested, yet. A lithium bomb is nothing for a country the size of Afghanistan to let off inside its own borders. We intend making a test with it within the next ten days, however If your Excellencies will designate a target, which must be at the center of an uninhabited area at least five hundred miles square, the test can be made in perfect safety. If not, I cannot answer the results; that will be in the hands of Allah, Who has ordained all things. No doubt Allah has ordained the destruction of either Moscow or Nanking; whichever city Allah has elected to erase, I will make it my personal responsibility to see to it that the other isn’t slighted, either.

However, if your Excellencies decide to accede to my modest and reasonable demands, not later than one week from today, this test-launching will be cancelled as unnecessary. Of course, that would leave unsettled a bet I have made with Dr. Hong Foo⁠—a star sapphire against his favorite Persian concubine⁠—that the explosion of a lithium bomb will not initiate a chain reaction in the Earth’s crust and so disintegrate this planet. This, of course, is a minor consideration, unworthy of Your notice.

Of course, I am aware that both your Excellencies have, in the past, fomented mutual jealousies and suspicions among the several “autonomous” republics under your respective jurisdictions, as an instrument of policy. If these peoples were, at this time, to receive full independence, the present inevitability of a pan-Asiatic war on a grand scale would be replaced only by the inevitability of a pan-Asiatic war by detail. Obviously, some single supranational sovereignty is needed to maintain peace, and such a sovereignty should be established under some leadership not hitherto associated with either the former U.E.E.S.R. or the former U.P.R.E.A. I humbly offer myself as President of such a supranational organization, counting as a matter of course upon the wholehearted support and cooperation of both your Excellencies. It might be well if both your Excellencies were to come here to Kabul to confer with me on this subject at your very earliest convenience.

From N.Y. Times, Oct. 30, 1984:

Mouzorgin, Sun Li-Yin Fêted at Kabul

Confer With Ameer;
Discuss Peace Plans

Surprise Developments Seen.⁠ ⁠…

Dearest

Colonel Ashley Hampton chewed his cigar and forced himself to relax, his glance slowly traversing the room, lingering on the mosaic of book-spines in the tall cases, the sunlight splashed on the faded pastel colors of the carpet, the soft-tinted autumn landscape outside the French windows, the trophies of Indian and Filipino and German weapons on the walls. He could easily feign relaxation here in the library of Greyrock, as long as he looked only at these familiar inanimate things and avoided the five people gathered in the room with him, for all of them were enemies.

There was his nephew, Stephen Hampton, greying at the temples but youthfully dressed in sports-clothes, leaning with obvious if slightly premature proprietorship against the fireplace, a whiskey-and-soda in his hand. There was Myra, Stephen’s smart, sophisticated-looking blonde wife, reclining in a chair beside the desk. For these two, he felt an implacable hatred. The others were no less enemies, perhaps more dangerous enemies, but they were only the tools of Stephen and Myra. For instance, T. Barnwell Powell, prim and self-satisfied, sitting on the edge of his chair and clutching the briefcase on his lap as though it were a restless pet which might attempt to escape. He was an honest man, as lawyers went; painfully ethical. No doubt he had convinced himself that his clients were acting from the noblest and most disinterested motives. And Doctor Alexis Vehrner, with his Vandyke beard and his Viennese accent as phony as a Soviet-controlled election, who had preempted the chair at Colonel Hampton’s desk. That rankled the old soldier, but Doctor Vehrner would want to assume the position which would give him appearance of commanding the situation, and he probably felt that Colonel Hampton was no longer the master of Greyrock. The fifth, a Neanderthal type in a white jacket, was Doctor Vehrner’s attendant and bodyguard; he could be ignored, like an enlisted man unthinkingly obeying the orders of a superior.

“But you are not cooperating, Colonel Hampton,” the psychiatrist complained. “How can I help you if you do not cooperate?”

Colonel Hampton took the cigar from his mouth. His white mustache, tinged a faint yellow by habitual smoking, twitched angrily.

“Oh; you call it helping me, do you?” he asked acidly.

“But why else am I here?” the doctor parried.

“You’re here because my loving nephew and his charming wife can’t wait to see me buried in the family cemetery; they want to bury me alive in that private Bedlam of yours,” Colonel Hampton replied.

“See!” Myra Hampton turned to the psychiatrist. “We are persecuting him! We are all envious of him! We are plotting against him!”

“Of course; this sullen and suspicious silence is a common paranoid symptom; one often finds such symptoms in cases of senile dementia,” Doctor Vehrner agreed.

Colonel Hampton snorted contemptuously. Senile dementia! Well, he must have been senile and demented, to bring this pair of snakes into his home, because he felt an obligation to his dead brother’s memory. And he’d willed Greyrock, and his money, and everything, to Stephen. Only Myra couldn’t wait till he died; she’d Lady-Macbethed her husband into this insanity accusation.

“… however, I must fully satisfy myself, before I can sign the commitment,” the psychiatrist was saying. “After all, the patient is a man of advanced age. Seventy-eight, to be exact.”

Seventy-eight; almost eighty. Colonel Hampton could hardly realize that he had been around so long. He had been a little boy, playing soldiers. He had been a young man, breaking the family tradition of Harvard and wangling an appointment to West Point. He had been a new second lieutenant at a little post in Wyoming, in the last dying flicker of the Indian Wars. He had been a first lieutenant, trying to make soldiers of militiamen and hoping for orders to Cuba before the Spaniards gave up. He had been the hard-bitten captain of a hard-bitten company, fighting Moros in the jungles of Mindanao. Then, through the early years of the Twentieth Century, after his father’s death, he had been that rara avis in the American service, a really wealthy professional officer. He had played polo, and served a turn as military attaché at the Paris embassy. He had commanded a regiment in France in 1918, and in the postwar years, had rounded out his service in command of a regiment of Negro cavalry, before retiring to Greyrock. Too old for active service, or even a desk at the Pentagon, he had drilled a Home Guard company of 4-Fs and boys and paunchy middle-agers through the Second World War. Then he had been an old man, sitting alone in the sunlight⁠ ⁠… until a wonderful thing had happened.

“Get him to tell you about this invisible playmate of his,” Stephen suggested. “If that won’t satisfy you, I don’t know what will.”

It had begun a year ago last June. He had been sitting on a bench on the east lawn, watching a kitten playing with a crumpled bit of paper on the walk, circling warily around it as though it were some living prey, stalking cautiously, pouncing and striking the paper ball with a paw and then pursuing it madly. The kitten, whose name was Smokeball, was a friend of his; soon she would tire of her game and jump up beside him to be petted.

Then suddenly, he seemed to hear a girl’s voice beside him:

“Oh, what a darling little cat! What’s its name?”

“Smokeball,” he said, without thinking. “She’s about the color of a shrapnel-burst.⁠ ⁠…” Then he stopped short, looking about. There was nobody in sight, and he realized that the voice had been inside his head rather than in his ear.

“What the devil?” he asked himself. “Am I going nuts?”

There was a happy little laugh inside of him, like bubbles rising in a glass of champagne.

“Oh, no; I’m really here,” the voice, inaudible but mentally present, assured him. “You can’t see me, or touch me, or even really hear me, but I’m not something you just imagined. I’m just as real as⁠ ⁠… as Smokeball, there. Only I’m a different kind of reality. Watch.”

The voice stopped, and something that had seemed to be close to him left him. Immediately, the kitten stopped playing with the crumpled paper and cocked her head to one side, staring fixedly as at something above her. He’d seen cats do that before⁠—stare wide-eyed and entranced, as though at something wonderful which was hidden from human eyes. Then, still looking up and to the side, Smokeball trotted over and jumped onto his lap, but even as he stroked her, she was looking at an invisible something beside him. At the same time, he had a warm and pleasant feeling, as of a happy and affectionate presence near him.

“No,” he said, slowly and judicially. “That’s not just my imagination. But who⁠—or what⁠—are you?”

“I’m.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I don’t know how to think it so that you’ll understand.” The voice inside his head seemed baffled, like a physicist trying to explain atomic energy to a Hottentot. “I’m not material. If you can imagine a mind that doesn’t need a brain to think with.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I can’t explain it now! But when I’m talking to you, like this, I’m really thinking inside your brain, along with your own mind, and you hear the words without there being any sound. And you just don’t know any words that would express it.”

He had never thought much, one way or another, about spiritualism. There had been old people, when he had been a boy, who had told stories of ghosts and apparitions, with the firmest conviction that they were true. And there had been an Irishman, in his old company in the Philippines, who swore that the ghost of a dead comrade walked post with him when he was on guard.

“Are you a spirit?” he asked. “I mean, somebody who once lived in a body, like me?”

“N-no.” The voice inside him seemed doubtful. “That is, I don’t think so. I know about spirits; they’re all around, everywhere. But I don’t think I’m one. At least, I’ve always been like I am now, as long as I can remember. Most spirits don’t seem to sense me. I can’t reach most living people, either; their minds are closed to me, or they have such disgusting minds I can’t bear to touch them. Children are open to me, but when they tell their parents about me, they are laughed at, or punished for lying, and then they close up against me. You’re the first grown-up person I’ve been able to reach for a long time.”

“Probably getting into my second childhood,” Colonel Hampton grunted.

“Oh, but you mustn’t be ashamed of that!” the invisible entity told him. “That’s the beginning of real wisdom⁠—becoming childlike again. One of your religious teachers said something like that, long ago, and a long time before that, there was a Chinaman whom people called Venerable Child, because his wisdom had turned back again to a child’s simplicity.”

“That was Lao Tze,” Colonel Hampton said, a little surprised. “Don’t tell me you’ve been around that long.”

“Oh, but I have! Longer than that; oh, for very long.” And yet the voice he seemed to be hearing was the voice of a young girl. “You don’t mind my coming to talk to you?” it continued. “I get so lonely, so dreadfully lonely, you see.”

“Urmh! So do I,” Colonel Hampton admitted. “I’m probably going bats, but what the hell? It’s a nice way to go bats, I’ll say that.⁠ ⁠… Stick around; whoever you are, and let’s get acquainted. I sort of like you.”

A feeling of warmth suffused him, as though he had been hugged by someone young and happy and loving.

“Oh, I’m glad. I like you, too; you’re nice!”

“Yes, of course.” Doctor Vehrner nodded sagely. “That is a schizoid tendency; the flight from reality into a dreamworld peopled by creatures of the imagination. You understand, there is usually a mixture of psychotic conditions, in cases like this. We will say that this case begins with simple senile dementia⁠—physical brain degeneration, a result of advanced age. Then the paranoid symptoms appear; he imagines himself surrounded by envious enemies, who are conspiring against him. The patient then withdraws into himself, and in his self-imposed isolation, he conjures up imaginary companionship. I have no doubt.⁠ ⁠…”

In the beginning, he had suspected that this unseen visitor was no more than a figment of his own lonely imagination, but as the days passed, this suspicion vanished. Whatever this entity might be, an entity it was, entirely distinct from his own conscious or subconscious mind.

At first she⁠—he had early come to think of the being as feminine⁠—had seemed timid, fearful lest her intrusions into his mind prove a nuisance. It took some time for him to assure her that she was always welcome. With time, too, his impression of her grew stronger and more concrete. He found that he was able to visualize her, as he might visualize something remembered, or conceived of in imagination⁠—a lovely young girl, slender and clothed in something loose and filmy, with flowers in her honey-colored hair, and clear blue eyes, a pert, cheerful face, a wide, smiling mouth and an impudently up-tilted nose. He realized that this image was merely a sort of allegorical representation, his own private object-abstraction from a reality which his senses could never picture as it existed.

It was about this time that he had begun to call her Dearest. She had given him no name, and seemed quite satisfied with that one.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “I ought to have a name for you, too. Do you mind if I call you Popsy?”

“Huh?” He had been really startled at that. If he needed any further proof of Dearest’s independent existence, that was it. Never, in the uttermost depths of his subconscious, would he have been likely to label himself Popsy. “Know what they used to call me in the Army?” he asked. “Slaughterhouse Hampton. They claimed I needed a truckload of sawdust to follow me around and cover up the blood.” He chuckled. “Nobody but you would think of calling me Popsy.”

There was a price, he found, that he must pay for Dearest’s companionship⁠—the price of eternal vigilance. He found that he was acquiring the habit of opening doors and then needlessly standing aside to allow her to precede him. And, although she insisted that he need not speak aloud to her, that she could understand any thought which he directed to her, he could not help actually pronouncing the words, if only in a faint whisper. He was glad that he had learned, before the end of his plebe year at West Point, to speak without moving his lips.

Besides himself and the kitten, Smokeball, there was one other at Greyrock who was aware, if only faintly, of Dearest’s presence. That was old Sergeant Williamson, the Colonel’s Negro servant, a retired first sergeant from the regiment he had last commanded. With increasing frequency, he would notice the old Negro pause in his work, as though trying to identify something too subtle for his senses, and then shake his head in bewilderment.

One afternoon in early October⁠—just about a year ago⁠—he had been reclining in a chair on the west veranda, smoking a cigar and trying to recreate, for his companion, a mental picture of an Indian camp as he had seen it in Wyoming in the middle ’90’s, when Sergeant Williamson came out from the house, carrying a pair of the Colonel’s field-boots and a polishing-kit. Unaware of the Colonel’s presence, he set down his burden, squatted on the floor and began polishing the boots, humming softly to himself. Then he must have caught a whiff of the Colonel’s cigar. Raising his head, he saw the Colonel, and made as though to pick up the boots and polishing equipment.

“Oh, that’s all right, Sergeant,” the Colonel told him. “Carry on with what you’re doing. There’s room enough for both of us here.”

“Yessuh; thank yo,’ suh.” The old ex-sergeant resumed his soft humming, keeping time with the brush in his hand.

“You know, Popsy, I think he knows I’m here,” Dearest said. “Nothing definite, of course; he just feels there’s something here that he can’t see.”

“I wonder. I’ve noticed something like that. Funny, he doesn’t seem to mind, either. Colored people are usually scary about ghosts and spirits and the like.⁠ ⁠… I’m going to ask him.” He raised his voice. “Sergeant, do you seem to notice anything peculiar around here, lately?”

The repetitious little two-tone melody broke off short. The soldier-servant lifted his face and looked into the Colonel’s. His brow wrinkled, as though he were trying to express a thought for which he had no words.

“Yo’ notice dat, too, suh?” he asked. “Why, yessuh, Cunnel; Ah don’ know ’zackly how t’ say hit, but dey is som’n, at dat. Hit seems like⁠ ⁠… like a kinda⁠ ⁠… a kinda blessedness.” He chuckled. “Dat’s hit, Cunnel; dey’s a blessedness. Wondeh iffen Ah’s gittin’ r’ligion, now?”

“Well, all this is very interesting, I’m sure, Doctor,” T. Barnwell Powell was saying, polishing his glasses on a piece of tissue and keeping one elbow on his briefcase at the same time. “But really, it’s not getting us anywhere, so to say. You know, we must have that commitment signed by you. Now, is it or is it not your opinion that this man is of unsound mind?”

“Now, have patience, Mr. Powell,” the psychiatrist soothed him. “You must admit that as long as this gentleman refuses to talk, I cannot be said to have interviewed him.”

“What if he won’t talk?” Stephen Hampton burst out. “We’ve told you about his behavior; how he sits for hours mumbling to this imaginary person he thinks is with him, and how he always steps aside when he opens a door, to let somebody who isn’t there go through ahead of him, and how.⁠ ⁠… Oh, hell, what’s the use? If he were in his right mind, he’d speak up and try to prove it, wouldn’t he? What do you say, Myra?”

Myra was silent, and Colonel Hampton found himself watching her with interest. Her mouth had twisted into a wry grimace, and she was clutching the arms of her chair until her knuckles whitened. She seemed to be in some intense pain. Colonel Hampton hoped she were; preferably with something slightly fatal.

Sergeant Williamson’s suspicion that he might be getting religion became a reality, for a time, that winter, after The Miracle.

It had been a blustery day in mid-January, with a high wind driving swirls of snow across the fields, and Colonel Hampton, fretting indoors for several days, decided to go out and fill his lungs with fresh air. Bundled warmly, swinging his blackthorn cane, he had set out, accompanied by Dearest, to tramp cross-country to the village, three miles from Greyrock. They had enjoyed the walk through the white windswept desolation, the old man and his invisible companion, until the accident had happened.

A sheet of glassy ice had lain treacherously hidden under a skift of snow; when he stepped upon it, his feet shot from under him, the stick flew from his hand, and he went down. When he tried to rise, he found that he could not. Dearest had been almost frantic.

“Oh, Popsy, you must get up!” she cried. “You’ll freeze if you don’t. Come on, Popsy; try again!”

He tried, in vain. His old body would not obey his will.

“It’s no use, Dearest; I can’t. Maybe it’s just as well,” he said. “Freezing’s an easy death, and you say people live on as spirits, after they die. Maybe we can always be together, now.”

“I don’t know. I don’t want you to die yet, Popsy. I never was able to get through to a spirit, and I’m afraid.⁠ ⁠… Wait! Can you crawl a little? Enough to get over under those young pines?”

“I think so.” His left leg was numb, and he believed that it was broken. “I can try.”

He managed to roll onto his back, with his head toward the clump of pine seedlings. Using both hands and his right heel, he was able to propel himself slowly through the snow until he was out of the worst of the wind.

“That’s good; now try to cover yourself,” Dearest advised. “Put your hands in your coat pockets. And wait here; I’ll try to get help.”

Then she left him. For what seemed a long time, he lay motionless in the scant protection of the young pines, suffering miserably. He began to grow drowsy. As soon as he realized what was happening, he was frightened, and the fright pulled him awake again. Soon he felt himself drowsing again. By shifting his position, he caused a jab of pain from his broken leg, which brought him back to wakefulness. Then the deadly drowsiness returned.

This time, he was wakened by a sharp voice, mingled with a throbbing sound that seemed part of a dream of the cannonading in the Argonne.

“Dah! Look-a dah!” It was, he realized, Sergeant Williamson’s voice. “Gittin’ soft in de haid, is Ah, yo’ ol’ wuthless no-’count?”

He turned his face, to see the battered jeep from Greyrock, driven by Arthur, the stableman and gardener, with Sergeant Williamson beside him. The older Negro jumped to the ground and ran toward him. At the same time, he felt Dearest with him again.

“We made it, Popsy! We made it!” she was exulting. “I was afraid I’d never make him understand, but I did. And you should have seen him bully that other man into driving the jeep. Are you all right, Popsy?”

“Is yo’ all right, Cunnel?” Sergeant Williamson was asking.

“My leg’s broken, I think, but outside of that I’m all right,” he answered both of them. “How did you happen to find me, Sergeant?”

The old Negro soldier rolled his eyes upward. “Cunnel, hit war a mi’acle of de blessed Lawd!” he replied, solemnly. “An angel of de Lawd done appeahed unto me.” He shook his head slowly. “Ah’s a sinful man, Cunnel; Ah couldn’t see de angel face to face, but de glory of de angel was befoh me, an’ guided me.”

They used his cane and a broken-off bough to splint the leg; they wrapped him in a horse-blanket and hauled him back to Greyrock and put him to bed, with Dearest clinging solicitously to him. The fractured leg knit slowly, though the physician was amazed at the speed with which, considering his age, he made recovery, and with his unfailing cheerfulness. He did not know, of course, that he was being assisted by an invisible nurse. For all that, however, the leaves on the oaks around Greyrock were green again before Colonel Hampton could leave his bed and hobble about the house on a cane.

Arthur, the young Negro who had driven the jeep, had become one of the most solid pillars of the little A.M.E. church beyond the village, as a result. Sergeant Williamson had also become an attendant at church for a while, and then stopped. Without being able to define, or spell, or even pronounce the term, Sergeant Williamson was a strict pragmatist. Most Africans are, even five generations removed from the slave-ship that brought their forefathers from the Dark Continent. And Sergeant Williamson could not find the blessedness at the church. Instead, it seemed to center about the room where his employer and former regiment commander lay. That, to his mind, was quite reasonable. If an Angel of the Lord was going to tarry upon earth, the celestial being would naturally prefer the society of a retired U.S.A. colonel to that of a passel of triflin,’ no-’counts at an ol’ clapboard church house. Be that as it may, he could always find the blessedness in Colonel Hampton’s room, and sometimes, when the Colonel would be asleep, the blessedness would follow him out and linger with him for a while.

Colonel Hampton wondered, anxiously, where Dearest was, now. He had not felt her presence since his nephew had brought his lawyer and the psychiatrist into the house. He wondered if she had voluntarily separated herself from him for fear he might give her some sign of recognition that these harpies would fasten upon as an evidence of unsound mind. He could not believe that she had deserted him entirely, now when he needed her most.⁠ ⁠…

“Well, what can I do?” Doctor Vehrner was complaining. “You bring me here to interview him, and he just sits there and does nothing.⁠ ⁠… Will you consent to my giving him an injection of sodium pentathol?”

“Well, I don’t know, now,” T. Barnwell Powell objected. “I’ve heard of that drug⁠—one of the so-called ‘truth-serum’ drugs. I doubt if testimony taken under its influence would be admissible in a court.⁠ ⁠…”

“This is not a court, Mr. Powell,” the doctor explained patiently. “And I am not taking testimony; I am making a diagnosis. Pentathol is a recognized diagnostic agent.”

“Go ahead,” Stephen Hampton said. “Anything to get this over with.⁠ ⁠… You agree, Myra?”

Myra said nothing. She simply sat, with staring eyes, and clutched the arms of her chair as though to keep from slipping into some dreadful abyss. Once a low moan escaped from her lips.

“My wife is naturally overwrought by this painful business,” Stephen said. “I trust that you gentlemen will excuse her.⁠ ⁠… Hadn’t you better go and lie down somewhere, Myra?”

She shook her head violently, moaning again. Both the doctor and the attorney were looking at her curiously.

“Well, I object to being drugged,” Colonel Hampton said, rising. “And what’s more, I won’t submit to it.”

“Albert!” Doctor Vehrner said sharply, nodding toward the Colonel. The pithecanthropoid attendant in the white jacket hastened forward, pinned his arms behind him and dragged him down into the chair. For an instant, the old man tried to resist, then, realizing the futility and undignity of struggling, subsided. The psychiatrist had taken a leather case from his pocket and was selecting a hypodermic needle.

Then Myra Hampton leaped to her feet, her face working hideously.

“No! Stop! Stop!” she cried.

Everybody looked at her in surprise, Colonel Hampton no less than the others. Stephen Hampton called out her name sharply.

“No! You shan’t do this to me! You shan’t! You’re torturing me! you are all devils!” she screamed. “Devils! Devils!”

“Myra!” her husband barked, stepping forward.

With a twist, she eluded him, dashing around the desk and pulling open a drawer.

For an instant, she fumbled inside it, and when she brought her hand up, she had Colonel Hampton’s .45 automatic in it. She drew back the slide and released it, loading the chamber.

Doctor Vehrner, the hypodermic in his hand, turned. Stephen Hampton sprang at her, dropping his drink. And Albert, the prognathous attendant, released Colonel Hampton and leaped at the woman with the pistol, with the unthinking promptness of a dog whose master is in danger.

Stephen Hampton was the closest to her; she shot him first, point-blank in the chest. The heavy bullet knocked him backward against a small table; he and it fell over together. While he was falling, the woman turned, dipped the muzzle of her pistol slightly and fired again; Doctor Vehrner’s leg gave way under him and he went down, the hypodermic flying from his hand and landing at Colonel Hampton’s feet. At the same time, the attendant, Albert, was almost upon her. Quickly, she reversed the heavy Colt, pressed the muzzle against her heart, and fired a third shot.

T. Barnwell Powell had let the briefcase slip to the floor; he was staring, slack-jawed, at the tableau of violence which had been enacted before him. The attendant, having reached Myra, was looking down at her stupidly. Then he stooped, and straightened.

“She’s dead!” he said, unbelievingly.

Colonel Hampton rose, putting his heel on the hypodermic and crushing it.

“Of course she’s dead!” he barked. “You have any first-aid training? Then look after these other people. Doctor Vehrner first; the other man’s unconscious; he’ll wait.”

“No; look after the other man first,” Doctor Vehrner said.

Albert gaped back and forth between them.

“Goddammit, you heard me!” Colonel Hampton roared. It was Slaughterhouse Hampton, whose service-ribbons started with the Indian campaigns, speaking; an officer who never for an instant imagined that his orders would not be obeyed. “Get a tourniquet on that man’s leg, you!” He moderated his voice and manner about half a degree and spoke to Vehrner. “You are not the doctor, you’re the patient, now. You’ll do as you’re told. Don’t you know that a man shot in the leg with a .45 can bleed to death without half trying?”

“Yo’-all do like de Cunnel says, ’r foh Gawd, yo’-all gwine wish yo’ had,” Sergeant Williamson said, entering the room. “Git a move on.”

He stood just inside the doorway, holding a silver-banded malacca walking-stick that he had taken from the hall-stand. He was grasping it in his left hand, below the band, with the crook out, holding it at his side as though it were a sword in a scabbard, which was exactly what that walking-stick was. Albert looked at him, and then back at Colonel Hampton. Then, whipping off his necktie, he went down on his knees beside Doctor Vehrner, skillfully applying the improvised tourniquet, twisting it tight with an eighteen-inch ruler the Colonel took from the desk and handed to him.

“Go get the first-aid kit, Sergeant,” the Colonel said. “And hurry. Mr. Stephen’s been shot, too.”

“Yessuh!” Sergeant Williamson executed an automatic salute and about-face and raced from the room. The Colonel picked up the telephone on the desk.

The County Hospital was three miles from Greyrock; the State Police substation a good five. He dialed the State Police number first.

“Sergeant Mallard? Colonel Hampton, at Greyrock. We’ve had a little trouble here. My nephew’s wife just went juramentado with one of my pistols, shot and wounded her husband and another man, and then shot and killed herself.⁠ ⁠… Yes, indeed it is, Sergeant. I wish you’d send somebody over here, as soon as possible, to take charge.⁠ ⁠… Oh, you will? That’s good.⁠ ⁠… No, it’s all over, and nobody to arrest; just the formalities.⁠ ⁠… Well, thank you, Sergeant.”

The old Negro cavalryman re-entered the room, without the sword-cane and carrying a heavy leather box on a strap over his shoulder. He set this on the floor and opened it, then knelt beside Stephen Hampton. The Colonel was calling the hospital.

“… gunshot wounds,” he was saying. “One man in the chest and the other in the leg, both with a .45 pistol. And you’d better send a doctor who’s qualified to write a death certificate; there was a woman killed, too.⁠ ⁠… Yes, certainly; the State Police have been notified.”

“Dis ain’ so bad, Cunnel,” Sergeant Williamson raised his head to say. “Ah’s seen men shot wuss’n dis dat was ma’ked ‘Duty’ inside a month, suh.”

Colonel Hampton nodded. “Well, get him fixed up as best you can, till the ambulance gets here. And there’s whiskey and glasses on that table, over there. Better give Doctor Vehrner a drink.” He looked at T. Barnwell Powell, still frozen to his chair, aghast at the carnage around him. “And give Mr. Powell a drink, too. He needs one.”

He did, indeed. Colonel Hampton could have used a drink, too; the library looked like beef-day at an Indian agency. But he was still Slaughterhouse Hampton, and consequently could not afford to exhibit queasiness.

It was then, for the first time since the business had started that he felt the presence of Dearest.

“Oh, Popsy, are you all right?” the voice inside his head was asking. “It’s all over, now; you won’t have anything to worry about, any more. But, oh, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it!”

“My God, Dearest!” He almost spoke aloud. “Did you make her do that?”

“Popsy!” The voice in his mind was grief-stricken. “You.⁠ ⁠… You’re afraid of me! Never be afraid of Dearest, Popsy! And don’t hate me for this. It was the only thing I could do. If he’d given you that injection, he could have made you tell him all about us, and then he’d have been sure you were crazy, and they’d have taken you away. And they treat people dreadfully at that place of his. You’d have been driven really crazy before long, and then your mind would have been closed to me, so that I wouldn’t have been able to get through to you, any more. What I did was the only thing I could do.”

“I don’t hate you, Dearest,” he replied, mentally. “And I don’t blame you. It was a little disconcerting, though, to discover the extent of your capabilities.⁠ ⁠… How did you manage it?”

“You remember how I made the Sergeant see an angel, the time you were down in the snow?” Colonel Hampton nodded. “Well, I made her see⁠ ⁠… things that weren’t angels,” Dearest continued. “After I’d driven her almost to distraction, I was able to get into her mind and take control of her.” Colonel Hampton felt a shudder inside of him. “That was horrible; that woman had a mind like a sewer; I still feel dirty from it! But I made her get the pistol⁠—I knew where you kept it⁠—and I knew how to use it, even if she didn’t. Remember when we were shooting muskrats, that time, along the river?”

“Uhuh. I wondered how she knew enough to unlock the action and load the chamber.” He turned and faced the others.

Doctor Vehrner was sitting on the floor, with his back to the chair Colonel Hampton had occupied, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. Albert was hovering over him with mother-hen solicitude. T. Barnwell Powell was finishing his whiskey and recovering a fraction of his normal poise.

“Well, I suppose you gentlemen see, now, who was really crazy around here?” Colonel Hampton addressed them bitingly. “That woman has been dangerously close to the borderline of sanity for as long as she’s been here. I think my precious nephew trumped up this ridiculous insanity complaint against me as much to discredit any testimony I might ever give about his wife’s mental condition as because he wanted to get control of my estate. I also suppose that the tension she was under here, this afternoon, was too much for her, and the scheme boomeranged on its originators. Curious case of poetic justice, but I’m sorry you had to be included in it, Doctor.”

“Attaboy, Popsy!” Dearest enthused. “Now you have them on the run; don’t give them a chance to reform. You know what Patton always said⁠—Grab ’em by the nose and kick ’em in the pants.”

Colonel Hampton relighted his cigar. “Patton only said ‘pants’ when he was talking for publication,” he told her, sotto voce. Then he noticed the unsigned commitment paper lying on the desk. He picked it up, crumpled it, and threw it into the fire.

“I don’t think you’ll be needing that,” he said. “You know, this isn’t the first time my loving nephew has expressed doubts as to my sanity.” He sat down in the chair at the desk, motioning to his servant to bring him a drink. “And see to the other gentlemen’s glasses, Sergeant,” he directed. “Back in 1929, Stephen thought I was crazy as a bedbug to sell all my securities and take a paper loss, around the first of September. After October 24th, I bought them back at about twenty percent of what I’d sold them for, after he’d lost his shirt.” That, he knew, would have an effect on T. Barnwell Powell. “And in December, 1944, I was just plain nuts, selling all my munition shares and investing in a company that manufactured baby-food. Stephen thought that Rundstedt’s Ardennes counteroffensive would put off the end of the war for another year and a half!”

“Baby-food, eh?” Doctor Vehrner chuckled.

Colonel Hampton sipped his whiskey slowly, then puffed on his cigar. “No, this pair were competent liars,” he replied. “A good workmanlike liar never makes up a story out of the whole cloth; he always takes a fabric of truth and embroiders it to suit the situation.” He smiled grimly; that was an accurate description of his own tactical procedure at the moment. “I hadn’t intended this to come out, Doctor, but it happens that I am a convinced believer in spiritualism. I suppose you’ll think that’s a delusional belief, too?”

“Well.⁠ ⁠…” Doctor Vehrner pursed his lips. “I reject the idea of survival after death, myself, but I think that people who believe in such a theory are merely misevaluating evidence. It is definitely not, in itself, a symptom of a psychotic condition.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” The Colonel gestured with his cigar. “Now, I’ll admit their statements about my appearing to be in conversation with some invisible or imaginary being. That’s all quite true. I’m convinced that I’m in direct-voice communication with the spirit of a young girl who was killed by Indians in this section about a hundred and seventy-five years ago. At first, she communicated by automatic writing; later we established direct-voice communication. Well, naturally, a man in my position would dislike the label of spirit-medium; there are too many invidious associations connected with the term. But there it is. I trust both of you gentlemen will remember the ethics of your respective professions and keep this confidential.”

“Oh, brother!” Dearest was fairly hugging him with delight. “When bigger and better lies are told, we tell them, don’t we, Popsy?”

“Yes, and try and prove otherwise,” Colonel Hampton replied, around his cigar. Then he blew a jet of smoke and spoke to the men in front of him.

“I intend paying for my nephew’s hospitalization, and for his wife’s funeral,” he said. “And then, I’m going to pack up all his personal belongings, and all of hers; when he’s discharged from the hospital, I’ll ship them wherever he wants them. But he won’t be allowed to come back here. After this business, I’m through with him.”

T. Barnwell Powell nodded primly. “I don’t blame you, in the least, Colonel,” he said. “I think you have been abominably treated, and your attitude is most generous.” He was about to say something else, when the doorbell tinkled and Sergeant Williamson went out into the hall. “Oh, dear; I suppose that’s the police, now,” the lawyer said. He grimaced like a small boy in a dentist’s chair.

Colonel Hampton felt Dearest leave him for a moment. Then she was back.

“The ambulance.” Then he caught a sparkle of mischief in her mood. “Let’s have some fun, Popsy! The doctor is a young man, with brown hair and a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, a blue tie and a tan-leather bag. One of the ambulance men has red hair, and the other has a mercurochrome-stain on his left sleeve. Tell them your spirit-guide told you.”

The old soldier’s tobacco-yellowed mustache twitched with amusement.

“No, gentlemen, it is the ambulance,” he corrected. “My spirit-control says.⁠ ⁠…” He relayed Dearest’s descriptions to them.

T. Barnwell Powell blinked. A speculative look came into the psychiatrist’s eyes; he was probably wishing the commitment paper hadn’t been destroyed.

Then the doctor came bustling in, brown-mustached, blue-tied, spectacled, carrying a tan bag, and behind him followed the two ambulance men, one with a thatch of flaming red hair and the other with a stain of mercurochrome on his jacket-sleeve.

For an instant, the lawyer and the psychiatrist gaped at them. Then T. Barnwell Powell put one hand to his mouth and made a small gibbering sound, and Doctor Vehrner gave a faint squawk, and then both men grabbed, simultaneously, for the whiskey bottle.

The laughter of Dearest tinkled inaudibly through the rumbling mirth of Colonel Hampton.

Temple Trouble

Through a haze of incense and altar smoke, Yat-Zar looked down from his golden throne at the end of the dusky, many-pillared temple. Yat-Zar was an idol, of gigantic size and extraordinarily good workmanship; he had three eyes, made of turquoises as big as doorknobs, and six arms. In his three right hands, from top to bottom, he held a sword with a flame-shaped blade, a jeweled object of vaguely phallic appearance, and, by the ears, a rabbit. In his left hands were a bronze torch with burnished copper flames, a big goblet, and a pair of scales with an egg in one pan balanced against a skull in the other. He had a long bifurcate beard made of gold wire, feet like a bird’s, and other rather startling anatomical features. His throne was set upon a stone plinth about twenty feet high, into the front of which a doorway opened; behind him was a wooden screen, elaborately gilded and painted.

Directly in front of the idol, Ghullam the high priest knelt on a big blue and gold cushion. He wore a gold-fringed robe of dark blue, and a tall conical gold miter, and a bright blue false beard, forked like the idol’s golden one: he was intoning a prayer, and holding up, in both hands, for divine inspection and approval, a long curved knife. Behind him, about thirty feel away, stood a square stone altar, around which four of the lesser priests, in light blue robes with less gold fringe and dark-blue false beards, were busy with the preliminaries to the sacrifice. At considerable distance, about halfway down the length of the temple, some two hundred worshipers⁠—a few substantial citizens in gold-fringed tunics, artisans in tunics without gold fringe, soldiers in mail hauberks and plain steel caps, one officer in ornately gilded armor, a number of peasants in nondescript smocks, and women of all classes⁠—were beginning to prostrate themselves on the stone floor.

Ghullam rose to his feet, bowing deeply to Yat-Zar and holding the knife extended in front of him, and backed away toward the altar. As he did, one of the lesser priests reached into a fringed and embroidered sack and pulled out a live rabbit, a big one, obviously of domestic breed, holding it by the ears while one of his fellows took it by the hind legs. A third priest caught up a silver pitcher, while the fourth fanned the altar fire with a sheet-silver fan. As they began chanting antiphonally, Ghullam turned and quickly whipped the edge of his knife across the rabbit’s throat. The priest with the pitcher stepped in to catch the blood, and when the rabbit was bled, it was laid on the fire. Ghullam and his four assistants all shouted together, and the congregation shouted in response.

The high priest waited as long as was decently necessary and then, holding the knife in front of him, stepped around the prayer-cushion and went through the door under the idol into the Holy of Holies. A boy in novice’s white robes met him and took the knife, carrying it reverently to a fountain for washing. Eight or ten under-priests, sitting at a long table, rose and bowed, then sat down again and resumed their eating and drinking. At another table, a half-dozen upper priests nodded to him in casual greeting.

Crossing the room, Ghullam went to the Triple Veil in front of the House of Yat-Zar, where only the highest of the priesthood might go, and parted the curtains, passing through, until he came to the great gilded door. Here he fumbled under his robe and produced a small object like a mechanical pencil, inserting the pointed end in a tiny hole in the door and pressing on the other end. The door opened, then swung shut behind him, and as it locked itself, the lights came on within. Ghullam removed his miter and his false beard, tossing them aside on a table, then undid his sash and peeled out of his robe. His regalia discarded, he stood for a moment in loose trousers and a soft white shirt, with a pistollike weapon in a shoulder holster under his left arm⁠—no longer Ghullam the high priest of Yat-Zar, but now Stranor Sleth, resident agent on this timeline of the Fourth Level Proto-Aryan Sector for the Transtemporal Mining Corporation. Then he opened a door at the other side of the anteroom and went to the antigrav shaft, stepping over the edge and floating downward.

There were temples of Yat-Zar on every timeline of the Proto-Aryan Sector, for the worship of Yat-Zar was ancient among the Hulgun people of that area of paratime, but there were only a few which had such installations as this, and all of them were owned and operated by Transtemporal Mining, which had the fissionable ores franchise for this sector. During the ten elapsed centuries since Transtemporal had begun operations on this sector, the process had become standardized. A few First Level paratimers would transpose to a selected timeline and abduct an upper-priest of Yat-Zar, preferably the high priest of the temple at Yoldav or Zurb. He would be drugged and transposed to the First Level, where he would receive hypnotic indoctrination and, while unconscious, have an operation performed on his ears which would enable him to hear sounds well above the normal audible range. He would be able to hear the shrill sonar-cries of bats, for instance, and, more important, he would be able to hear voices when the speaker used a First Level audio-frequency step-up phone. He would also receive a memory-obliteration from the moment of his abduction, and a set of pseudo-memories of a visit to the Heaven of Yat-Zar, on the other side of the sky. Then he would be returned to his own timeline and left on a mountain top far from his temple, where an unknown peasant, leading a donkey, would always find him, return him to the temple, and then vanish inexplicably.

Then the priest would begin hearing voices, usually while serving at the altar. They would warn of future events, which would always come to pass exactly as foretold. Or they might bring tidings of things happening at a distance, the news of which would not arrive by normal means for days or even weeks. Before long, the holy man who had been carried alive to the Heaven of Yat-Zar would acquire a most awesome reputation as a prophet, and would speedily rise to the very top of the priestly hierarchy.

Then he would receive two commandments from Yat-Zar. The first would ordain that all lower priests must travel about from temple to temple, never staying longer than a year at any one place. This would insure a steady influx of newcomers personally unknown to the local upper-priests, and many of them would be First Level paratimers. Then, there would be a second commandment: A house must be built for Yat-Zar, against the rear wall of each temple. Its dimensions were minutely stipulated; its walls were to be of stone, without windows, and there was to be a single door, opening into the Holy of Holies, and before the walls were finished, the door was to be barred from within. A triple veil of brocaded fabric was to be hung in front of this door. Sometimes such innovations met with opposition from the more conservative members of the hierarchy: when they did, the principal objector would be seized with a sudden and violent illness; he would recover if and when he withdrew his objections.

Very shortly after the House of Yat-Zar would be completed, strange noises would be heard from behind the thick walls. Then, after a while, one of the younger priests would announce that he had been commanded in a vision to go behind the veil and knock upon the door. Going behind the curtains, he would use his door-activator to let himself in, and return by paratime-conveyer to the First Level to enjoy a well-earned vacation. When the high priest would follow him behind the veil, after a few hours, and find that he had vanished, it would be announced as a miracle. A week later, an even greater miracle would be announced. The young priest would return from behind the Triple Veil, clad in such raiment as no man had ever seen, and bearing in his hands a strange box. He would announce that Yat-Zar had commanded him to build a new temple in the mountains, at a place to be made known by the voice of the god speaking out of the box.

This time, there would be no doubts and no objections. A procession would set out, headed by the new revelator bearing the box, and when the clicking voice of the god spoke rapidly out of it, the site would be marked and work would begin. No local labor would ever be employed on such temples; the masons and woodworkers would be strangers, come from afar and speaking a strange tongue, and when the temple was completed, they would never be seen to leave it. Men would say that they had been put to death by the priest and buried under the altar to preserve the secrets of the god. And there would always be an idol to preserve the secrets of the god. And there would always be an idol of Yat-Zar, obviously of heavenly origin, since its workmanship was beyond the powers of any local craftsman. The priests of such a temple would be exempt, by divine decree, from the rule of yearly travel.

Nobody, of course, would have the least idea that there was a uranium mine in operation under it, shipping ore to another timeline. The Hulgun people knew nothing about uranium, and neither did they as much as dream that there were other timelines. The secret of paratime transposition belonged exclusively to the First Level civilization which had discovered it, and it was a secret that was guarded well.

Stranor Sleth, dropping to the bottom of the antigrav shaft, cast a hasty and instinctive glance to the right, where the freight conveyers were. One was gone, taking its cargo over hundreds of thousands of parayears to the First Level. Another had just returned, empty, and a third was receiving its cargo from the robot mining machines far back under the mountain. Two young men and a girl, in First Level costumes, sat at a bank of instruments and visor-screens, handling the whole operation, and six or seven armed guards, having inspected the newly-arrived conveyer and finding that it had picked up nothing inimical en route, were relaxing and lighting cigarettes. Three of them, Stranor Sleth noticed, wore the green uniforms of the Paratime Police.

“When did those fellows get in?” he asked the people at the control desk, nodding toward the green-clad newcomers.

“About ten minutes ago, on the passenger conveyer,” the girl told him. “The Big Boy’s here. Brannad Klav. And a Paratime Police officer. They’re in your office.”

“Uh huh; I was expecting that,” Stranor Sleth nodded. Then he turned down the corridor to the left.

Two men were waiting for him, in his office. One was short and stocky, with an angry, impatient face⁠—Brannad Klav, Transtemporal’s vice president in charge of operations. The other was tall and slender with handsome and entirely expressionless features; he wore a Paratime Police officer’s uniform, with the blue badge of hereditary nobility on his breast, and carried a sigma-ray needler in a belt holster.

“Were you waiting long, gentlemen?” Stranor Sleth asked. “I was holding Sunset Sacrifice up in the temple.”

“No, we just got here,” Brannad Klav said. “This is Verkan Vall, Mavrad of Nerros, special assistant to Chief Tortha of the Paratime Police, Stranor Sleth, our resident agent here.”

Stranor Sleth touched hands with Verkan Vall.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, sir,” he said. “Everybody working in paratime has, of course. I’m sorry we have a situation here that calls for your presence, but since we have, I’m glad you’re here in person. You know what our trouble is, I suppose?”

“In a general way,” Verkan Vall replied. “Chief Tortha, and Brannad Klav, have given me the main outline, but I’d like to have you fill in the details.”

“Well, I told you everything,” Brannad Klav interrupted impatiently. “It’s just that Stranor’s let this blasted local king, Kurchuk, get out of control. If I⁠—” He stopped short, catching sight of the shoulder holster under Stranor Sleth’s left arm. “Were you wearing that needler up in the temple?” he demanded.

“You’re blasted right I was!” Stranor Sleth retorted. “And any time I can’t arm myself for my own protection on this timeline, you can have my resignation. I’m not getting into the same jam as those people at Zurb.”

“Well, never mind about that,” Verkan Vall intervened. “Of course Stranor Sleth has a right to arm himself; I wouldn’t think of being caught without a weapon on this timeline, myself. Now, Stranor, suppose you tell me what’s been happening, here, from the beginning of this trouble.”

“It started, really, about five years ago, when Kurchuk, the King of Zurb, married this Chuldun princess, Darith, from the country over beyond the Black Sea, and made her his queen, over the heads of about a dozen daughters of the local nobility, whom he’d married previously. Then he brought in this Chuldun scribe, Labdurg, and made him Overseer of the Kingdom⁠—roughly, prime minister. There was a lot of dissatisfaction about that, and for a while it looked as though he was going to have a revolution on his hands, but he brought in about five thousand Chuldun mercenaries, all archers⁠—these Hulguns can’t shoot a bow worth beans⁠—so the dissatisfaction died down, and so did most of the leaders of the disaffected group. The story I get is that this Labdurg arranged the marriage, in the first place. It looks to me as though the Chuldun emperor is intending to take over the Hulgun kingdoms, starting with Zurb.

“Well, these Chulduns all worship a god called Muz-Azin. Muz-Azin is a crocodile with wings like a bat and a lot of knife blades in his tail. He makes this Yat-Zar look downright beautiful. So do his habits. Muz-Azin fancies human sacrifices. The victims are strung up by the ankles on a triangular frame and lashed to death with iron-barbed whips. Nasty sort of a deity, but this is a nasty timeline. The people here get a big kick out of watching these sacrifices. Much better show than our bunny-killing. The victims are usually criminals, or overage or incorrigible slaves, or prisoners of war.

“Of course, when the Chulduns began infiltrating the palace, they brought in their crocodile-god, too, and a flock of priests, and King Kurchuk let them set up a temple in the palace. Naturally, we preached against this heathen idolatry in our temples, but religious bigotry isn’t one of the numerous imperfections of this sector. Everybody’s deity is as good as anybody else’s⁠—indifferentism, I believe, is the theological term. Anyhow, on that basis things went along fairly well, till two years ago, when we had this run of bad luck.”

“Bad luck!” Brannad Klav snorted. “That’s the standing excuse of every incompetent!”

“Go on, Stranor; what sort of bad luck?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Well, first we had a drought, beginning in early summer, that burned up most of the grain crop. Then, when that broke, we got heavy rains and hailstorms and floods, and that destroyed what got through the dry spell. When they harvested what little was left, it was obvious there’d be a famine, so we brought in a lot of grain by conveyer and distributed it from the temples⁠—miraculous gift of Yat-Zar, of course. Then the main office on First Level got scared about flooding this timeline with a lot of unaccountable grain and were afraid we’d make the people suspicious, and ordered it stopped.

“Then Kurchuk, and I might add that the kingdom of Zurb was the hardest hit by the famine, ordered his army mobilized and started an invasion of the Jumdun country, south of the Carpathians, to get grain. He got his army chopped up, and only about a quarter of them got back, with no grain. You ask me, I’d say that Labdurg framed it to happen that way. He advised Kurchuk to invade, in the first place, and I mentioned my suspicion that Chombrog, the Chuldun Emperor, is planning to move in on the Hulgun kingdoms. Well, what would be smarter than to get Kurchuk’s army smashed in advance?”

“How did the defeat occur?” Verkan Vall asked. “Any suspicion of treachery?”

“Nothing you could put your finger on, except that the Jumduns seemed to have pretty good intelligence about Kurchuk’s invasion route and battle plans. It could have been nothing worse than stupid tactics on Kurchuk’s part. See, these Hulguns, and particularly the Zurb Hulguns, are spearmen. They fight in a fairly thin line, with heavy-armed infantry in front and light infantry with throwing-spears behind. The nobles fight in light chariots, usually at the center of the line, and that’s where they were at this Battle of Jorm. Kurchuk himself was at the center, with his Chuldun archers massed around him.

“The Jumduns use a lot of cavalry, with long swords and lances, and a lot of big chariots with two javelin men and a driver. Well, instead of ramming into Kurchuk’s center, where he had his archers, they hit the extreme left and folded it up, and then swung around behind and hit the right from the rear. All the Chuldun archers did was stand fast around the king and shoot anybody who came close to them: they were left pretty much alone. But the Hulgun spearmen were cut to pieces. The battle ended with Kurchuk and his nobles and his archers making a fighting retreat, while the Jumdun cavalry were chasing the spearmen every which way and cutting them down or lancing them as they ran.

“Well, whether it was Labdurg’s treachery or Kurchuk’s stupidity, in either case, it was natural for the archers to come off easiest and the Hulgun spearmen to pay the butcher’s bill. But try and tell these knuckleheads anything like that! Muz-Azin protected the Chulduns, and Yat-Zar let the Hulguns down, and that was all there was to it. The Zurb temple started losing worshipers, particularly the families of the men who didn’t make it back from Jorm.

“If that had been all there’d been to it, though, it still wouldn’t have hurt the mining operations, and we could have got by. But what really tore it was when the rabbits started to die.” Stranor Sleth picked up a cigar from his desk and bit the end, spitting it out disgustedly. “Tularemia, of course,” he said, touching his lighter to the tip. “When that hit, they started going over to Muz-Azin in droves, not only at Zurb but all over the Six Kingdoms. You ought to have seen the house we had for Sunset Sacrifice, this evening! About two hundred, and we used to get two thousand. It used to be all two men could do to lift the offering box at the door, afterward, and all the money we took in tonight I could put in one pocket!” The high priest used language that would have been considered unclerical even among the Hulguns.

Verkan Vall nodded. Even without the quickie hypno-mech he had taken for this sector, he knew that the rabbit was domesticated among the Proto-Aryan Hulguns and was their chief meat animal. Hulgun rabbits were even a minor import on the First Level, and could be had at all the better restaurants in cities like Dhergabar. He mentioned that.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Stranor Sleth told him. “See, the rabbit’s sacred to Yat-Zar. Not taboo; just sacred. They have to use a specially consecrated knife to kill them⁠—consecrating rabbit knives has always been an item of temple revenue⁠—and they must say a special prayer before eating them. We could have got around the rest of it, even the Battle of Jorm⁠—punishment by Yat-Zar for the sin of apostasy⁠—but Yat-Zar just wouldn’t make rabbits sick. Yat-Zar thinks too well of rabbits to do that, and it’d not been any use claiming he would. So there you are.”

“Well, I take the attitude that this situation is the result of your incompetence,” Brannad Klav began, in a bullyragging tone. “You’re not only the high priest of this temple, you’re the acknowledged head of the religion in all the Hulgun kingdoms. You should have had more hold on the people than to allow anything like this to happen.”

“Hold on the people!” Stranor Sleth fairly howled, appealing to Verkan Vall. “What does he think a religion is, on this sector, anyhow? You think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there, to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize their moral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifices: when they can’t put out, they have to get out. How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in the Caucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow? Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley. They had a god, once, something basically like a billy goat, but he let them get licked in a couple of battles, so out he went. Why, all the deities on this sector have hyphenated names, because they’re combinations of several deities, worshiped in one person. Do you know anything about the history of this sector?” he asked the Paratime Police officer.

“Well, it develops from an alternate probability of what we call the Nilo-Mesopotamian Basic sector-group,” Verkan Vall said. “On most Nilo-Mesopotamian sectors, like the Macedonian Empire Sector, or the Alexandrian-Roman or Alexandrian-Punic or Indo-Turanian or Europo-American, there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor about four thousand elapsed years ago. On this sector, the ancestors of the Aryans came in about fifteen centuries earlier, as neolithic savages, about the time that the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations were first developing, and overran all southeast Europe, Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. They developed to the bronze-age culture of the civilizations they overthrew, and then, more slowly, to an iron-age culture. About two thousand years ago, they were using hardened steel and building large stone cities, just as they do now. At that time, they reached cultural stasis. But as for their religious beliefs, you’ve described them quite accurately. A god is only worshiped as long as the people think him powerful enough to aid and protect them; when they lose that confidence, he is discarded and the god of some neighboring people is adopted instead.” He turned to Brannad Klav. “Didn’t Stranor report this situation to you when it first developed?” he asked. “I know he did; he speaks of receiving shipments of grain by conveyer for temple distribution. Then why didn’t you report it to Paratime Police? That’s what we have a Paratime Police Force for.”

“Well, yes, of course, but I had enough confidence in Stranor Sleth to think that he could handle the situation himself. I didn’t know he’d gone slack⁠—”

“Look, I can’t make weather, even if my parishioners think I can,” Stranor Sleth defended himself. “And I can’t make a great military genius out of a blockhead like Kurchuk. And I can’t immunize all the rabbits on this timeline against tularemia, even if I’d had any reason to expect a tularemia epidemic, which I hadn’t because the disease is unknown on this sector; this is the only outbreak of it anybody’s ever heard of on any Proto-Aryan timeline.”

“No, but I’ll tell you what you could have done,” Verkan Vall told him. “When this Kurchuk started to apostatize, you could have gone to him at the head of a procession of priests, all paratimers and all armed with energy-weapons, and pointed out his spiritual duty to him, and if he gave you any back talk, you could have pulled out that needler and rayed him down and then cried, ‘Behold the vengeance of Yat-Zar upon the wicked king!’ I’ll bet any sum at any odds that his successor would have thought twice about going over to Muz-Azin, and none of these other kings would have even thought once about it.”

“Ha, that’s what I wanted to do!” Stranor Sleth exclaimed. “And who stopped me? I’ll give you just one guess.”

“Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn’t Stranor Sleth who was slack,” Verkan Vall commented.

“Well! I must say; I never thought I’d hear an officer of the Paratime Police criticizing me for trying to operate inside the Paratime Transposition Code!” Brannad Klav exclaimed.

Verkan Vall, sitting on the edge of Stranor Sleth’s desk, aimed his cigarette at Brannad Klav like a blaster.

“Now, look,” he began. “There is one, and only one, inflexible law regarding outtime activities. The secret of paratime transposition must be kept inviolate, and any activity tending to endanger it is prohibited. That’s why we don’t allow the transposition of any object of extraterrestrial origin to any timeline on which space travel has not been developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, after the local population begin exploring the planet from whence it came, there will be dangerous speculations and theories as to how it arrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches, literally, of getting myself killed, not long ago, cleaning up the result of a violation of that regulation. For the same reason, we don’t allow the export, to outtime natives, of manufactured goods too far in advance of their local culture. That’s why, for instance, you people have to hand-finish all those big Yat-Zar idols, to remove traces of machine work. One of those things may be around, a few thousand years from now, when these people develop a mechanical civilization. But as far as raying down this Kurchuk is concerned, these Hulguns are completely nonscientific. They wouldn’t have the least idea what happened. They’d believe that Yat-Zar struck him dead, as gods on this plane of culture are supposed to do, and if any of them noticed the needler at all, they’d think it was just a holy amulet of some kind.”

“But the law is the law⁠—” Brannad Klav began.

Verkan Vall shook his head. “Brannad, as I understand, you were promoted to your present position on the retirement of Salvan Marth, about ten years ago; up to that time, you were in your company’s financial department. You were accustomed to working subject to the First Level Commercial Regulation Code. Now, any law binding upon our people at home, on the First Level, is inflexible. It has to be. We found out, over fifty centuries ago, that laws have to be rigid and without discretionary powers in administration in order that people may be able to predict their effect and plan their activities accordingly. Naturally, you became conditioned to operating in such a climate of legal inflexibility.

“But in paratime, the situation is entirely different. There exist, within the range of the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal-field generator, a number of timelines of the order of ten to the hundred-thousandth power. In effect, that many different worlds. In the past ten thousand years, we have visited only the tiniest fraction of these, but we have found everything from timelines inhabited only by subhuman ape-men to Second Level civilizations which are our own equal in every respect but knowledge of paratemporal transposition. We even know of one Second Level civilization which is approaching the discovery of an interstellar hyperspatial drive, something we’ve never even come close to. And in between are every degree of savagery, barbarism and civilization. Now, it’s just not possible to frame any single code of laws applicable to conditions on all of these. The best we can do is prohibit certain flagrantly immoral types of activity, such as slave-trading, introduction of new types of narcotic drugs, or out-and-out piracy and brigandage. If you’re in doubt as to the legality of anything you want to do outtime, go to the Judicial Section of the Paratime Commission and get an opinion on it. That’s where you made your whole mistake. You didn’t find out just how far it was allowable for you to go.”

He turned to Stranor Sleth again. “Well, that’s the background, then. Now tell me about what happened yesterday at Zurb.”

“Well, a week ago, Kurchuk came out with this decree closing our temple at Zurb and ordering his subjects to perform worship and make money offerings to Muz-Azin. The Zurb temple isn’t a mask for a mine: Zurb’s too far south for the uranium deposits. It’s just a center for propaganda and that sort of thing. But they have a House of Yat-Zar, and a conveyer, and most of the upper-priests are paratimers. Well, our man there, Tammand Drav, alias Khoram, defied the king’s order, so Kurchuk sent a company of Chuldun archers to close the temple and arrest the priests. Tammand Drav got all his people who were in the temple at the time into the House of Yat-Zar and transposed them back to the First Level. He had orders”⁠—Stranor Sleth looked meaningly at Brannad Klav⁠—“not to resist with energy-weapons or even ultrasonic paralyzers. And while we’re on the subject of letting the local yokels see too much, about fifteen of the under-priests he took to the First Level were Hulgun natives.”

“Nothing wrong about that: they’ll get memory-obliteration and pseudo-memory treatment,” Verkan Vall said. “But he should have been allowed to needle about a dozen of those Chulduns. Teach the beggars to respect Yat-Zar in the future. Now, how about the six priests who were outside the temple at the time? All but one were paratimers. We’ll have to find out about them, and get them out of Zurb.”

“That’ll take some doing,” Stranor Sleth said. “And it’ll have to be done before sunset tomorrow. They are all in the dungeon of the palace citadel, and Kurchuk is going to give them to the priests of Muz-Azin to be sacrificed tomorrow evening.”

“How’d you learn that?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Oh, we have a man in Zurb, not connected with the temple,” Stranor Sleth said. “Name’s Crannar Jurth; calls himself Kranjur, locally. He has a swordmaker’s shop, employs about a dozen native journeymen and apprentices who hammer out the common blades he sells in the open market. Then, he imports a few high-class alloy-steel blades from the First Level, that’ll cut through this local low-carbon armor like cheese. Fits them with locally-made hilts and sells them at unbelievable prices to the nobility. He’s Swordsmith to the King; picks up all the inside palace dope. Of course, he was among the first to accept the New Gospel and go over to Muz-Azin. He has a secret room under his shop, with his conveyer and a radio.

“What happened was this: These six priests were at a consecration ceremony at a rabbit-ranch outside the city, and they didn’t know about the raid on the temple. On their way back, they were surrounded by Chuldun archers and taken prisoner. They had no weapons but their sacrificial knives.” He threw another dirty look at Brannad Klav. “So they’re due to go up on the triangles at sunset tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to get them out before then,” Verkan Vall stated. “They’re our people, and we can’t let them down; even the native is under our protection, whether he knows it or not. And in the second place, if those priests are sacrificed to Muz-Azin,” he told Brannad Klav, “you can shut down everything on this timeline, pull out or disintegrate your installations, and fill in your mine-tunnels. Yat-Zar will be through on this timeline, and you’ll be through along with him. And considering that your fissionables franchise for this sector comes up for renewal next year, your company will be through in this paratime area.”

“You believe that would happen?” Brannad Klav asked anxiously.

“I know it will, because I’ll put through a recommendation to that effect, if those six men are tortured to death tomorrow,” Verkan Vall replied. “And in the fifty years that I’ve been in the Police Department, I’ve only heard of five such recommendations being ignored by the commission. You know, Fourth Level Mineral Products Syndicate is after your franchise. Ordinarily, they wouldn’t have a chance of getting it, but with this, maybe they will, even without my recommendation. This was all your fault, for ignoring Stranor Sleth’s proposal and for denying those men the right to carry energy weapons.”

“Well, we were only trying to stay inside the Paratime Code,” Brannad Klav pleaded. “If it isn’t too late, now, you can count on me for every cooperation.” He fiddled with some papers on the desk. “What do you want me to do to help?”

“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Verkan Vall walked to the wall and looked at the map, then returned to Stranor Sleth’s desk. “How about these dungeons?” he asked. “How are they located, and how can we get in to them?”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” Stranor Sleth told him. “Not without fighting our way in. They’re under the palace citadel, a hundred feet below ground. They’re spatially coexistent with the heavy water barriers around one of our company’s plutonium piles on the First Level, and below surface on any unoccupied timeline I know of, so we can’t transpose in to them. This palace is really a walled city inside a city. Here, I’ll show you.”

Going around the desk, he sat down and, after looking in the index-screen, punched a combination on the keyboard. A picture, projected from the microfilm-bank, appeared on the viewscreen. It was an air-view of the city of Zurb⁠—taken, the high priest explained, by infrared light from an airboat over the city at night. It showed a city of an entirely pre-mechanical civilization, with narrow streets, lined on either side by low one and two story buildings. Although there would be considerable snow in winter, the roofs were usually flat, probably massive stone slabs supported by pillars within. Even in the poorer sections, this was true except for the very meanest houses and outbuildings, which were thatched. Here and there, some huge pile of masonry would rear itself above its lower neighbors, and, where the streets were wider, occasional groups of large buildings would be surrounded by battlemented walls. Stranor Sleth indicated one of the larger of these.

“Here’s the palace,” he said. “And here’s the temple of Yat-Zar, about half a mile away.” He touched a large building, occupying an entire block; between it and the palace was a block-wide park, with lawns and trees on either side of a wide roadway connecting the two.

“Now, here’s a detailed view of the palace.” He punched another combination; the view of the City was replaced by one, taken from directly overhead, of the walled palace area. “Here’s the main gate, in front, at the end of the road from the temple,” he pointed out. “Over here, on the left, are the slaves’ quarters and the stables and workshops and store houses and so on. Over here, on the other side, are the nobles’ quarters. And this,”⁠—he indicated a towering structure at the rear of the walled enclosure⁠—“is the citadel and the royal dwelling. Audience hall on this side; harem over here on this side. A wide stone platform, about fifteen feet high, runs completely across the front of the citadel, from the audience hall to the harem. Since this picture was taken, the new temple of Muz-Azin was built right about here.” He indicated that it extended out from the audience hall into the central courtyard. “And out here on the platform, they’ve put up about a dozen of these triangles, about twelve feet high, on which the sacrificial victims are whipped to death.”

“Yes. About the only way we could get down to the dungeons would be to make an airdrop onto the citadel roof and fight our way down with needlers and blasters, and I’m not willing to do that as long as there’s any other way,” Verkan Vall said. “We’d lose men, even with needlers against bows, and there’s a chance that some of our equipment might be lost in the melee and fall into outtime hands. You say this sacrifice comes off tomorrow at sunset?”

“That would be about actual sunset plus or minus an hour; these people aren’t astronomers, they don’t even have good sundials, and it might be a cloudy day,” Stranor Sleth said. “There will be a big idol of Muz-Azin on a cart, set about here.” He pointed. “After the sacrifice, it is to be dragged down this road, outside, to the temple of Yat-Zar, and set up there. The temple is now occupied by about twenty Chuldun mercenaries and five or six priests of Muz-Azin. They haven’t, of course, got into the House of Yat-Zar; the door’s of impervium steel, about six inches thick, with a plating of collapsed nickel under the gilding. It would take a couple of hours to cut through it with our best atomic torch; there isn’t a tool on this timeline that could even scratch it. And the insides of the walls are lined with the same thing.”

“Do you think our people have been tortured, yet?” Verkan Vall asked.

“No.” Stranor Sleth was positive. “They’ll be fairly well treated, until the sacrifice. The idea’s to make them last as long as possible on the triangles; Muz-Azin likes to see a slow killing, and so does the mob of spectators.”

“That’s good. Now, here’s my plan. We won’t try to rescue them from the dungeons. Instead, we’ll transpose back to the Zurb temple from the First Level, in considerable force⁠—say a hundred or so men⁠—and march on the palace, to force their release. You’re in constant radio communication with all the other temples on this timeline, I suppose?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“All right. Pass this out to everybody, authority Paratime Police, in my name, acting for Tortha Karf. I want all paratimers who can possibly be spared to transpose to First Level immediately and rendezvous at the First Level terminal of the Zurb temple conveyer as soon as possible. Close down all mining operations, and turn over temple routine to the native under-priests. You can tell them that the upper-priests are retiring to their respective Houses of Yat-Zar to pray for the deliverance of the priests in the hands of King Kurchuk. And everybody is to bring back his priestly regalia to the First Level; that will be needed.” He turned to Brannad Klav. “I suppose you keep spare regalia in stock on the First Level?”

“Yes, of course; we keep plenty of everything in stock. Robes, miters, false beards of different shades, everything.”

“And these big Yat-Zar idols: they’re mass-produced on the First Level? You have one available now? Good. I’ll want some alterations made on one. For one thing, I’ll want it plated heavily, all over, with collapsed nickel. For another, I’ll want it fitted with antigrav units and some sort of propulsion-units, and a loudspeaker, and remote control.

“And, Stranor, you get in touch with this swordmaker, Crannar Jurth, and alert him to cooperate with us. Tell him to start calling Zurb temple on his radio about noon tomorrow, and keep it up till he gets an answer. Or, better, tell him to run his conveyer to his First Level terminal, and bring with him an extra suit of clothes appropriate to the role of journeyman-mechanic. I’ll want to talk to him, and furnish him with special equipment. Got all that? Well, carry on with it, and bring your own paratimers, priests and mining operators, back with you as soon as you’ve taken care of everything. Brannad, you come with me, now. We’re returning to First Level immediately. We have a lot of work to do, so let’s get started.”

“Anything I can do to help, just call on me for it,” Brannad Klav promised earnestly. “And, Stranor, I want to apologize. I’ll admit, now, that I ought to have followed your recommendations, when this situation first developed.”

By noon of the next day, Verkan Vall had at least a hundred men gathered in the big room at the First Level fissionables refinery at Jarnabar, spatially coexistent with the Fourth Level temple of Yat-Zar at Zurb. He was having a little trouble distinguishing between them, for every man wore the fringed blue robe and golden miter of an upper-priest, and had his face masked behind a blue false beard. It was, he admitted to himself, a most ludicrous-looking assemblage; one of the most ludicrous things about it was the fact that it would have inspired only pious awe in a Hulgun of the Fourth Level Proto-Aryan Sector. About half of them were priests from the Transtemporal Mining Corporation’s temples; the other half were members of the Paratime Police. All of them wore, in addition to their temple knives, holstered sigma-ray needlers. Most of them carried ultrasonic paralyzers, eighteen-inch batonlike things with bulbous ends. Most of the Paratime Police and a few of the priests also carried either heat-ray pistols or neutron-disruption blasters; Verkan Vall wore one of the latter in a left-hand belt holster.

The Paratime Police were lined up separately for inspection, and Stranor Sleth, Tammand Drav of the Zurb temple, and several other high priests were checking the authenticity of their disguises. A little apart from the others, a Paratime Policeman, in high priest’s robes and beard, had a square box slung in front of him; he was fiddling with knobs and buttons on it, practicing. A big idol of Yat-Zar, on antigravity, was floating slowly about the room in obedience to its remote controls, rising and lowering, turning about and pirouetting gracefully.

“Hey, Vall!” he called to his superior. “How’s this?”

The idol rose about five feet, turned slowly in a half-circle, moved to the right a little, and then settled slowly toward the floor.

“Fine, fine, Horv,” Verkan Vall told him, “but don’t set it down on anything, or turn off the antigravity. There’s enough collapsed nickel-plating on that thing to sink it a yard in soft ground.”

“I don’t know what the idea of that was,” Brannad Klav, standing beside him, said. “Understand, I’m not criticizing. I haven’t any right to, under the circumstances. But it seems to me that armoring that thing in collapsed nickel was an unnecessary precaution.”

“Maybe it was,” Verkan Vall agreed. “I sincerely hope so. But we can’t take any chances. This operation has to be absolutely right. Ready, Tammand? All right; first detail into the conveyer.”

He turned and strode toward a big dome of fine metallic mesh, thirty feet high and sixty in diameter, at the other end of the room. Tammand Drav, and his ten paratimer priests, and Brannad Klav, and ten Paratime Police, followed him in. One of the latter slid shut the door and locked it; Verkan Vall went to the control desk, at the center of the dome, and picked up a two-foot globe of the same fine metallic mesh, opening it and making some adjustments inside, then attaching an electric cord and closing it. He laid the globe on the floor near the desk and picked up the hand battery at the other end of the attached cord.

“Not taking any chances at all, are you?” Brannad Klav asked, watching this operation with interest.

“I never do, unnecessarily. There are too many necessary chances that have to be taken, in this work.” Verkan Vall pressed the button on the hand battery. The globe on the floor flashed and vanished. “Yesterday, five paratimers were arrested. Any or all of them could have had door-activators with them. Stranor Sleth says they were not tortured, but that is a purely inferential statement. They may have been, and the use of the activator may have been extorted from one of them. So I want a look at the inside of that conveyer-chamber before we transpose into it.”

He laid the hand battery, with the loose-dangling wire that had been left behind, on the desk, then lit a cigarette. The others gathered around, smoking and watching, careful to avoid the place from which the globe had vanished. Thirty minutes passed, and then, in a queer iridescence, the globe reappeared. Verkan Vall counted ten seconds and picked it up, taking it to the desk and opening it to remove a small square box. This he slid into a space under the desk and flipped a switch. Instantly, a viewscreen lit up and a three-dimensional picture appeared⁠—the interior of a big room a hundred feet square and some seventy in height. There was a big desk and a radio; tables, couches, chairs and an arms-rack full of weapons, and at one end, a remarkably clean sixty-foot circle on the concrete floor, outlined in faintly luminous red.

“How about it?” Verkan Vall asked Tammand Drav. “Anything wrong?”

The Zurb high priest shook his head. “Just as we left it,” he said. “Nobody’s been inside since we left.”

One of the policemen took Verkan Vall’s place at the control desk and threw the master switch, after checking the instruments. Immediately, the paratemporal-transposition field went on with a humming sound that mounted to a high scream, then settled to a steady drone. The mesh dome flickered with a cold iridescence and vanished, and they were looking into the interior of a great fissionables refinery plant, operated by paratimers on another First Level timeline. The structural details altered, from timeline to timeline, as they watched. Buildings appeared and vanished. Once, for a few seconds, they were inside a cool, insulated bubble in the midst of molten lead. Tammand Drav jerked a thumb at it, before it vanished.

“That always bothers me,” he said. “Bad place for the field to go weak. I’m fussy as an old hen about inspection of the conveyer, on account of that.”

“Don’t blame you,” Verkan Vall agreed. “Probably the cooling system of a breeder-pile.”

They passed more swiftly, now, across the Second Level and the Third. Once they were in the midst of a huge land battle, with great tanklike vehicles spouting flame at one another. Another moment was spent in an air bombardment. On any timeline, this section of East Europe was a natural battleground. Once a great procession marched toward them, carrying red banners and huge pictures of a coarse-faced man with a black mustache⁠—Verkan Vall recognized the environment as Fourth Level Europo-American Sector. Finally, as the transposition-rate slowed, they saw a clutter of miserable thatched huts, in the rear of a granite wall of a Fourth Level Hulgun temple of Yat-Zar⁠—a temple not yet infiltrated by Transtemporal Mining Corporation agents. Finally, they were at their destination. The dome around them became visible, and an overhead green light flashed slowly on and off.

Verkan Vall opened the door and stepped outside, his needler drawn. The House of Yat-Zar was just as he had seen it in the picture photographed by the automatic reconnaissance-conveyer. The others crowded outside after him. One of the regular priests pulled off his miter and beard and went to the radio, putting on a headset. Verkan Vall and Tammand Drav snapped on the visiscreen, getting a view of the Holy of Holies outside.

There were six men there, seated at the upper-priests’ banquet table, drinking from golden goblets. Five of them wore the black robes with green facings which marked them as priests of Muz-Azin; the sixth was an officer of the Chuldun archers, in gilded mail and helmet.

“Why, those are the sacred vessels of the temple!” Tammand Drav cried, scandalized. Then he laughed in self-ridicule. “I’m beginning to take this stuff seriously, myself; time I put in for a long vacation. I was actually shocked at the sacrilege!”

“Well, let’s overtake the infidels in their sins,” Verkan Vall said. “Paralyzers will be good enough.”

He picked up one of the bulb-headed weapons, and unlocked the door. Tammand Drav and another of the priests of the Zurb temple following and the others crowding behind, they passed out through the veils, and burst into the Holy of Holies. Verkan Vall pointed the bulb of his paralyzer at the six seated men and pressed the button; other paralyzers came into action, and the whole sextet were knocked senseless. The officer rolled from his chair and fell to the floor in a clatter of armor. Two of the priests slumped forward on the table. The others merely sank back in their chairs, dropping their goblets.

“Give each one of them another dose, to make sure,” Verkan Vall directed a couple of his own men. “Now, Tammand; any other way into the main temple beside that door?”

“Up those steps,” Tammand Drav pointed. “There’s a gallery along the side; we can cover the whole room from there.”

“Take your men and go up there. I’ll take a few through the door. There’ll be about twenty archers out there, and we don’t want any of them loosing any arrows before we can knock them out. Three minutes be time enough?”

“Easily. Make it two,” Tammand Drav said.

He took his priests up the stairway and vanished into the gallery of the temple. Verkan Vall waited until one minute had passed and then, followed by Brannad Klav and a couple of Paratime Policemen, he went under the plinth and peered out into the temple. Five or six archers, in steel caps and sleeveless leather jackets sewn with steel rings, were gathered around the altar, cooking something in a pot on the fire. Most of the others, like veteran soldiers, were sprawled on the floor, trying to catch a short nap, except half a dozen, who crouched in a circle, playing some game with dice⁠—another almost universal military practice.

The two minutes were up. He aimed his paralyzer at the men around the altar and squeezed the button, swinging it from one to another and knocking them down with a bludgeon of inaudible sound. At the same time, Tammand Drav and his detail were stunning the gamblers. Stepping forward and to one side, Verkan Vall, Brannad Klav and the others took care of the sleepers on the floor. In less than thirty seconds, every Chuldun in the temple was incapacitated.

“All right, make sure none of them come out of it prematurely,” Verkan Vall directed. “Get their weapons, and be sure nobody has a knife or anything hidden on him. Who has the syringe and the sleep-drug ampoules?”

Somebody had, it developed, who was still on the First Level, to come up with the second conveyer load. Verkan Vall swore. Something like this always happened, on any operation involving more than half a dozen men.

“Well, some of you stay here: patrol around, and use your paralyzers on anybody who even twitches a muscle.” Ultrasonics were nice, effective, humane police weapons, but they were unreliable. The same dose that would keep one man out for an hour would paralyze another for no more than ten or fifteen minutes. “And be sure none of them are playing ‘possum.’ ”

He went back through the door under the plinth, glancing up at the decorated wooden screen and wondering how much work it would take to move the new Yat-Zar in from the conveyers. The five priests and the archer-captain were still unconscious; one of the policemen was searching them.

“Here’s the sort of weapons these priests carry,” he said, holding up a short iron mace with a spiked head. “Carry them on their belts.” He tossed it on the table, and began searching another knocked-out hierophant. “Like this⁠—Hey! Look at this, will you!”

He drew his hand from under the left side of the senseless man’s robe and held up a sigma-ray needler. Verkan Vall looked at it and nodded grimly.

“Had it in a regular shoulder holster,” the policeman said, handing the weapon across the table. “What do you think?”

“Find anything else funny on him?”

“Wait a minute.” The policeman pulled open the robe and began stripping the priest of Muz-Azin; Verkan Vall came around the table to help. There was nothing else of a suspicious nature.

“Could have got it from one of the prisoners, but I don’t like the familiar way he’s wearing that holster,” Verkan Vall said. “Has the conveyer gone back, yet?” When the policeman nodded, he continued: “When it returns, take him to the First Level. I hope they bring up the sleep-drug with the next load. When you get him back, take him to Dhergabar by strato-rocket immediately, and make sure he gets back alive. I want him questioned under narco-hypnosis by a regular Paratime Commission psycho-technician, in the presence of Chief Tortha Karf and some responsible Commission official. This is going to be hot stuff.”

Within an hour, the whole force was assembled in the temple. The wooden screen had presented no problem⁠—it slid easily to one side⁠—and the big idol floated on antigravity in the middle of the temple. Verkan Vall was looking anxiously at his watch.

“It’s about two hours to sunset,” he said, to Stranor Sleth. “But as you pointed out, these Hulguns aren’t astronomers, and it’s a bit cloudy. I wish Crannar Jurth would call in with something definite.”

Another twenty minutes passed. Then the man at the radio came out into the temple.

“OK!” he called. “The man at Crannar Jurth’s called in. Crannar Jurth contacted him with a midget radio he has up his sleeve; he’s in the palace courtyard now. They haven’t brought out the victims, yet, but Kurchuk has just been carried out on his throne to that platform in front of the citadel. Big crowd gathering in the inner courtyard; more in the streets outside. Palace gates are wide open.”

“That’s it!” Verkan Vall cried. “Form up; the parade’s starting. Brannad, you and Tammand and Stranor and I in front; about ten men with paralyzers a little behind us. Then Yat-Zar, about ten feet off the ground, and then the others. Forward⁠—ho-o!”

They emerged from the temple and started down the broad roadway toward the palace. There was not much of a crowd, at first. Most of Zurb had flocked to the palace earlier; the lucky ones in the courtyard and the late comers outside. Those whom they did meet stared at them in open-mouthed amazement, and then some, remembering their doubts and blasphemies, began howling for forgiveness. Others⁠—a substantial majority⁠—realizing that it would be upon King Kurchuk that the real weight of Yat-Zar’s six hands would fall, took to their heels, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the palace before the blow fell.

As the procession approached the palace gates, the crowds were thicker, made up of those who had been unable to squeeze themselves inside. The panic was worse, here, too. A good many were trampled and hurt in the rush to escape, and it became necessary to use paralyzers to clear a way. That made it worse: everybody was sure that Yat-Zar was striking sinners dead left and right.

Fortunately, the gates were high enough to let the god through without losing altitude appreciably. Inside, the mob surged back, clearing a way across the courtyard. It was only necessary to paralyze a few here, and the levitated idol and its priestly attendants advanced toward the stone platform, where the king sat on his throne, flanked by court functionaries and black-robed priests of Muz-Azin. In front of this, a rank of Chuldun archers had been drawn up.

“Horv; move Yat-Zar forward about a hundred feet and up about fifty,” Verkan Vall directed. “Quickly!”

As the six-armed anthropomorphic idol rose and moved closer toward its saurian rival, Verkan Vall drew his needler, scanning the assemblage around the throne anxiously.

“Where is the wicked King?” a voice thundered⁠—the voice of Stranor Sleth, speaking into a midget radio tuned to the loudspeaker inside the idol. “Where is the blasphemer and desecrator, Kurchuk?”

“There’s Labdurg, in the red tunic, beside the throne,” Tammand Drav whispered. “And that’s Ghromdur, the Muz-Azin high priest, beside him.”

Verkan Vall nodded, keeping his eyes on the group on the platform. Ghromdur, the high priest of Muz-Azin, was edging backward and reaching under his robe. At the same time, an officer shouted an order, and the Chuldun archers drew arrows from their quivers and fitted them to their bowstrings. Immediately, the ultrasonic paralyzers of the advancing paratimers went into action, and the mercenaries began dropping.

“Lay down your weapons, fools!” the amplified voice boomed at them. “Lay down your weapons or you shall surely die! Who are you, miserable wretches, to draw bows against Me?”

At first a few, then all of them, the Chulduns lowered or dropped their weapons and began edging away to the sides. At the center, in front of the throne, most of them had been knocked out. Verkan Vall was still watching the Muz-Azin high priest intently; as Ghromdur raised his arm, there was a flash and a puff of smoke from the front of Yat-Zar⁠—the paint over the collapsed nickel was burned off, but otherwise the idol was undamaged. Verkan Vall swung up his needler and rayed Ghromdur dead; as the man in the green-faced black robes fell, a blaster clattered on the stone platform.

“Is that your puny best, Muz-Azin?” the booming voice demanded. “Where is your high priest now?”

“Horv; face Yat-Zar toward Muz-Azin,” Verkan Vall said over his shoulder, drawing his blaster with his left hand. Like all First Level people, he was ambidextrous, although, like all paratimers, he habitually concealed the fact while outtime. As the levitated idol swung slowly to look down upon its enemy on the built-up cart, Verkan Vall aimed the blaster and squeezed.

In a spot less than a millimeter in diameter on the crocodile idol’s side, a certain number of neutrons in the atomic structure of the stone from which it was carved broke apart, becoming, in effect, atoms of hydrogen. With a flash and a bang, the idol burst and vanished. Yat-Zar gave a dirty laugh and turned his back on the cart, which was now burning fiercely facing King Kurchuk again.

“Get your hands up, all of you!” Verkan Vall shouted, in the First Level language, swinging the stubby muzzle of the blaster and the knob-tipped twin tubes of the needler to cover the group around the throne, “Come forward, before I start blasting!”

Labdurg raised his hands and stepped forward. So did two of the priests of Yat-Zar. They were quickly seized by Paratime Policemen who swarmed up onto the platform and disarmed. All three were carrying sigma-ray needlers, and Labdurg had a blaster as well.

King Kurchuk was clinging to the arms of his throne, a badly frightened monarch trying desperately not to show it. He was a big man, heavy-shouldered, black-bearded; under ordinary circumstances he would probably have cut an imposing figure, in his gold-washed mail and his golden crown. Now his face was a dirty gray, and he was biting nervously at his lower lip. The others on the platform were in even worse state. The Hulgun nobles were grouped together, trying to disassociate themselves from both the king and the priests of Muz-Azin. The latter were staring in a daze at the blazing cart from which their idol had just been blasted. And the dozen men who were to have done the actual work of the torture-sacrifice had all dropped their whips and were fairly gibbering in fear.

Yat-Zar, manipulated by the robed paratimer, had taken a position directly above the throne and was lowering slowly. Kurchuk stared up at the massive idol descending toward him, his knuckles white as he clung to the arms of his throne. He managed to hold out until he could feel the weight of the idol pressing on his head. Then, with a scream, he hurled himself from the throne and rolled forward almost to the edge of the platform. Yat-Zar moved to one side, swung slightly and knocked the throne toppling, and then settled down on the platform. To Kurchuk, who was rising cautiously on his hands and knees, the big idol seemed to be looking at him in contempt.

“Where are my holy priests, Kurchuk?” Stranor Sleth demanded in to his sleeve-hidden radio. “Let them be brought before me, alive and unharmed, or it shall be better for you had you never been born!”

The six priests of Yat-Zar, it seemed, were already being brought onto the platform by one of Kurchuk’s nobles. This noble, whose name was Yorzuk, knew a miracle when he saw one, and believed in being on the side of the god with the heaviest artillery. As soon as he had seen Yat-Zar coming through the gate without visible means of support, he had hastened to the dungeons with half a dozen of his personal retainers and ordered the release of the six captives. He was now escorting them onto the platform, assuring them that he had always been a faithful servant of Yat-Zar and had been deeply grieved at his sovereign’s apostasy.

“Hear my word, Kurchuk,” Stranor Sleth continued through the loudspeaker in the idol. “You have sinned most vilely against me, and were I a cruel god, your fate would be such as no man has ever before suffered. But I am a merciful god; behold, you may gain forgiveness in my sight. For thirty days, you shall neither eat meat nor drink wine, nor shall you wear gold nor fine raiment, and each day shall you go to my temple and beseech me for my forgiveness. And on the thirty-first day, you shall set out, barefoot and clad in the garb of a slave, and journey to my temple that is in the mountains over above Yoldav, and there will I forgive you, after you have made sacrifice to me. I, Yat-Zar, have spoken!”

The king started to rise, babbling thanks.

“Rise not before me until I have forgiven you!” Yat-Zar thundered. “Creep out of my sight upon your belly, wretch!”

The procession back to the temple was made quietly and sedately along an empty roadway. Yat-Zar seemed to be in a kindly humor; the people of Zurb had no intention of giving him any reason to change his mood. The priests of Muz-Azin and their torturers had been flung into the dungeon. Yorzuk, appointed regent for the duration of Kurchuk’s penance, had taken control and was employing Hulgun spearmen and hastily-converted Chuldun archers to restore order and, incidentally, purge a few of his personal enemies and political rivals. The priests, with the three prisoners who had been found carrying First Level weapons among them and Yat-Zar floating triumphantly in front, entered the temple. A few of the devout, who sought admission after them, were told that elaborate and secret rites were being held to cleanse the profaned altar, and sent away.

Verkan Vall and Brannad Klav and Stranor Sleth were in the conveyer chamber, with the Paratime Policemen and the extra priests; along with them were the three prisoners. Verkan Vall pulled off his false beard and turned to face these. He could see that they all recognized him.

“Now,” he began, “you people are in a bad jam. You’ve violated the Paratime Transposition Code, the Commercial Regulation Code, and the First Level Criminal Code, all together. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll start talking.”

“I’m not saying anything till I have legal advice,” the man who had been using the local alias of Labdurg replied. “And if you’re through searching me, I’d like to have my cigarettes and lighter back.”

“Smoke one of mine, for a change,” Verkan Vall told him. “I don’t know what’s in yours beside tobacco.” He offered his case and held a light for the prisoner before lighting his own cigarette. “I’m going to be sure you get back to the First Level alive.”

The former Overseer of the Kingdom of Zurb shrugged. “I’m still not talking,” he said.

“Well, we can get it all out of you by narco-hypnosis, anyhow,” Verkan Vall told him. “Besides, we got that man of yours who was here at the temple when we came in. He’s being given a full treatment, as a presumed outtime native found in possession of First Level weapons. If you talk now it’ll go easier with you.”

The prisoner dropped the cigarette on the floor and tramped it out.

“Anything you cops get out of me, you’ll have to get the hard way,” he said. “I have friends on the First Level who’ll take care of me.”

“I doubt that. They’ll have their hands full taking care of themselves, after this gets out.” Verkan Vall turned to the two in the black robes. “Either of you want to say anything?” When they shook their heads, he nodded to a group of his policemen; they were hustled into the conveyer. “Take them to the First Level terminal and hold them till I come in. I’ll be along with the next conveyer load.”

The conveyer flashed and vanished. Brannad Klav stared for a moment at the circle of concrete floor from whence it had disappeared. Then he turned to Verkan Vall.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Why, those fellows were First Level paratimers. So was that priest, Ghromdur: the one you rayed.”

“Yes, of course. They worked for your rivals, the Fourth Level Mineral Products Syndicate; the outfit that was trying to get your Proto-Aryan Sector fissionables franchise away from you. They operate on this sector already; have the petroleum franchise for the Chuldun country, east of the Caspian Sea. They export to some of these internal-combustion-engine sectors, like Europo-American. You know, most of the wars they’ve been fighting, lately, on the Europo-American Sector have been, at least in part, motivated by rivalry for oil fields. But now that the Europo-Americans have begun to release nuclear energy, fissionables have become more important than oil. In less than a century, it’s predicted that atomic energy will replace all other forms of power. Mineral Products Syndicate wanted to get a good source of supply for uranium, and your Proto-Aryan Sector franchise was worth grabbing.

“I had considered something like this as a possibility when Stranor, here, mentioned that tularemia was normally unknown in Eurasia on this sector. That epidemic must have been started by imported germs. And I knew that Mineral Products has agents at the court of the Chuldun emperor, Chombrog: they have to, to protect their oil wells on his eastern frontiers. I spent most of last night checking up on some stuff by video-transcription from the Paratime Commission’s microfilm library at Dhergabar. I found out, for one thing, that while there is a King Kurchuk of Zurb on every timeline for a hundred parayears on either side of this one, this is the only timeline on which he married a Princess Darith of Chuldun, and it’s the only timeline on which there is any trace of a Chuldun scribe named Labdurg.

“That’s why I went to all the trouble of having that Yat-Zar plated with collapsed nickel. If there were disguised paratimers among the Muz-Azin party at Kurchuk’s court, I expected one of them to try to blast our idol when we brought it into the palace. I was watching Ghromdur and Labdurg in particular; as soon as Ghromdur used his blaster, I needled him. After that, it was easy.”

“Was that why you insisted on sending that automatic viewer on ahead?”

“Yes. There was a chance that they might have planted a bomb in the House of Yat-Zar, here. I knew they’d either do that or let the place entirely alone. I suppose they were so confident of getting away with this that they didn’t want to damage the conveyer or the conveyer chamber. They expected to use them, themselves, after they took over your company’s franchise.”

“Well, what’s going to be done about it by the Commission?” Brannad Klav wanted to know.

“Plenty. The syndicate will probably lose their paratime license; any of its officials who had guilty knowledge of this will be dealt with according to law. You know, this was a pretty nasty business.”

“You’re telling me!” Stranor Sleth exclaimed. “Did you get a look at those whips they were going to use on our people? Pointed iron barbs a quarter-inch long braided into them, all over the lash-ends!”

“Yes. Any punitive action you’re thinking about taking on these priests of Muz-Azin⁠—the natives, I mean⁠—will be ignored on the First Level. And that reminds me: you’d better work out a line of policy, pretty soon.”

“Well, as for the priests and the torturers, I think I’ll tell Yorzuk to have them sold to the Bhunguns, to the east. They’re always in the market for galley slaves,” Stranor Sleth said. He turned to Brannad Klav. “And I’ll want six gold crowns made up, as soon as possible. Strictly Hulgun design, with Yat-Zar religious symbolism, very rich and ornate, all slightly different. When I give Kurchuk absolution, I’ll crown him at the altar in the name of Yat-Zar. Then I’ll invite in the other five Hulgun kings, lecture them on their religious duties, make them confess their secret doubts, forgive them, and crown them, too. From then on, they can all style themselves as ruling by the will of Yat-Zar.”

“And from then on, you’ll have all of them eating out of your hand,” Verkan Vall concluded. “You know, this will probably go down in Hulgun history as the Reformation of Ghullam the Holy. I’ve always wondered whether the theory of the divine right of kings was invented by the kings, to establish their authority over the people, or by the priests, to establish their authority over the kings. It works about as well one way as the other.”

“What I can’t understand is this,” Brannad Klav said. “It was entirely because of my respect for the Paratime Code that I kept Stranor Sleth from using Fourth Level weapons and other techniques to control these people with a show of apparent miraculous powers. But this Fourth Level Mineral Products Syndicate was operating in violation of the Paratime Code by invading our franchise area. Why didn’t they fake up a supernatural reign of terror to intimidate these natives?”

“Ha, exactly because they were operating illegally,” Verkan Vall replied. “Suppose they had started using needlers and blasters and antigravity and nuclear-energy around here. The natives would have thought it was the power of Muz-Azin, of course, but what would you have thought? You’d have known, as soon as they tried it, that First Level paratimers were working against you, and you’d have laid the facts before the Commission, and this timeline would have been flooded with Paratime Police. They had to conceal their operations not only from the natives, as you do, but also from us. So they didn’t dare make public use of First Level techniques.

“Of course, when we came marching into the palace with that idol on antigravity, they knew, at once, what was happening. I have an idea that they only tried to blast that idol to create a diversion which would permit them to escape⁠—if they could have got out of the palace, they’d have made their way, in disguise, to the nearest Mineral Products Syndicate conveyer and transposed out of here. I realized that they could best delay us by blasting our idol, and that’s why I had it plated with collapsed nickel. I think that where they made their mistake was in allowing Kurchuk to have those priests arrested, and insisting on sacrificing them to Muz-Azin. If it hadn’t been for that, the Paratime Police wouldn’t have been brought into this, at all.

“Well, Stranor, you’ll want to get back to your temple, and Brannad and I want to get back to the First Level. I’m supposed to take my wife to a banquet in Dhergabar, tonight, and with the fastest strato-rocket, I’ll just barely make it.”

Day of the Moron

There were still, in 1968, a few people who were afraid of the nuclear power plant. Oldsters, in whom the term “atomic energy” produced semantic reactions associated with Hiroshima. Those who saw, in the towering steam-column above it, a tempting target for enemy⁠—which still meant Soviet⁠—bombers and guided missiles. Some of the Central Intelligence and F.B.I. people, who realized how futile even the most elaborate security measures were against a resourceful and suicidally determined saboteur. And a minority of engineers and nuclear physicists who remained unpersuaded that accidental blowups at nuclear-reaction plants were impossible.

Scott Melroy was among these last. He knew, as a matter of fact, that there had been several nasty, meticulously unpublicized, near-catastrophes at the Long Island Nuclear Reaction Plant, all involving the new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors, and that there had been considerable carefully-hushed top-level acrimony before the Melroy Engineering Corporation had been given the contract to install the fully cybernetic control system intended to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.

That had been three months ago. Melroy and his people had moved in, been assigned sections of a couple of machine shops, set up an assembly shop and a set of plyboard-partitioned offices in a vacant warehouse just outside the reactor area, and tried to start work, only to run into the almost interminable procedural disputes and jurisdictional wranglings of the sort which he privately labeled “bureau bunk.” It was only now that he was ready to begin work on the reactors.

He sat at his desk, in the inner of three successively smaller offices on the second floor of the converted warehouse, checking over a symbolic-logic analysis of a relay system and, at the same time, sharpening a pencil, his knife paring off tiny feathery shavings of wood. He was a tall, sparely-built, man of indeterminate age, with thinning sandy hair, a long Gaelic upper lip, and a wide, half-humorous, half-weary mouth; he wore an open-necked shirt, and an old and shabby leather jacket, to the left shoulder of which a few clinging flecks of paint showed where some military emblem had been, long ago. While his fingers worked with the jackknife and his eyes traveled over the page of closely-written symbols, his mind was reviewing the eight different ways in which one of the efficient but treacherous Doernberg-Giardano reactors could be allowed to reach critical mass, and he was wondering if there might not be some unsuspected ninth way. That was a possibility which always lurked in the back of his mind, and lately it had been giving him surrealistic nightmares.

“Mr. Melroy!” the box on the desk in front of him said suddenly, in a feminine voice. “Mr. Melroy, Dr. Rives is here.”

Melroy picked up the handphone, thumbing on the switch.

“Dr. Rives?” he repeated.

“The psychologist who’s subbing for Dr. von Heydenreich,” the box told him patiently.

“Oh, yes. Show him in,” Melroy said.

“Right away, Mr. Melroy,” the box replied.

Replacing the handphone, Melroy wondered, for a moment, why there had been a hint of suppressed amusement in his secretary’s voice. Then the door opened and he stopped wondering. Dr. Rives wasn’t a him; she was a her. Very attractive looking her, too⁠—dark hair and eyes, rather long-oval features, clear, lightly tanned complexion, bright red lipstick put on with a micrometric exactitude that any engineer could appreciate. She was tall, within four inches of his own six-foot mark, and she wore a black tailored outfit, perfectly plain, which had probably cost around five hundred dollars and would have looked severe and mannish except that the figure under it curved and bulged in just the right places and to just the right degree.

Melroy rose, laying down knife and pencil and taking his pipe out of his mouth.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted. “Dr. von Heydenreich gave me quite a favorable account of you⁠—as far as it went. He might have included a few more data and made it more so.⁠ ⁠… Won’t you sit down?”

The woman laid her handbag on the desk and took the visitor’s chair, impish mirth sparking in her eyes.

“He probably omitted mentioning that the D. is for Doris,” she suggested. “Suppose I’d been an Englishman with a name like Evelyn or Vivian?”

Melroy tried to visualize her as a male Englishman named Vivian, gave up, and grinned at her.

“Let this be a lesson,” he said. “Inferences are to be drawn from objects, or descriptions of objects; never from verbal labels. Do you initial your first name just to see how people react when they meet you?”

“Well, no, though that’s an amusing and sometimes instructive byproduct. It started when I began contributing to some of the professional journals. There’s still a little of what used to be called male sex-chauvinism among my colleagues, and some who would be favorably impressed with an article signed D. Warren Rives might snort in contempt at the same article signed Doris Rives.”

“Well, fortunately, Dr. von Heydenreich isn’t one of those,” Melroy said. “How is the Herr Doktor, by the way, and just what happened to him? Miss Kourtakides merely told me that he’d been injured and was in a hospital in Pittsburgh.”

“The Herr Doktor got shot,” Doris Rives informed him. “With a charge of BB’s, in a most indelicate portion of his anatomy. He was out hunting, the last day of small-game season, and somebody mistook him for a turkey. Nothing really serious, but he’s face down in bed, cursing hideously in German, English, Russian, Italian and French, mainly because he’s missing deer hunting.”

“I might have known it,” Melroy said in disgust. “The ubiquitous lame-brain with a dangerous mechanism.⁠ ⁠… I suppose he briefed you on what I want done, here?”

“Well, not too completely. I gathered that you want me to give intelligence tests, or aptitude tests, or something of the sort, to some of your employees. I’m not really one of these so-called industrial anthropologists,” she explained. “Most of my work, for the past few years, has been for public-welfare organizations, with subnormal persons. I told him that, and he said that was why he selected me. He said one other thing. He said, ‘I used to think Melroy had an obsession about fools; well, after stopping this load of shot, I’m beginning to think it’s a good subject to be obsessed about.’ ”

Melroy nodded. “ ‘Obsession’ will probably do. ‘Phobia’ would be more exact. I’m afraid of fools, and the chance that I have one working for me, here, affects me like having a cobra crawling around my bedroom in the dark. I want you to locate any who might be in a gang of new men I’ve had to hire, so that I can get rid of them.”

“And just how do you define the term ‘fool,’ Mr. Melroy?” she asked. “Remember, it has no standard meaning. Republicans apply it to Democrats, and vice versa.”

“Well, I apply it to people who do things without considering possible consequences. People who pepper distinguished Austrian psychologists in the pants-seat with turkey-shot, for a starter. Or people who push buttons to see what’ll happen, or turn valves and twiddle with dial-knobs because they have nothing else to do with their hands. Or shoot insulators off power lines to see if they can hit them. People who don’t know it’s loaded. People who think warning signs are purely ornamental. People who play practical jokes. People who⁠—”

“I know what you mean. Just day-before-yesterday, I saw a woman toss a cocktail into an electric heater. She didn’t want to drink it, and she thought it would just go up in steam. The result was slightly spectacular.”

“Next time, she won’t do that. She’ll probably throw her drink into a lead-ladle, if there’s one around. Well, on a statistical basis, I’d judge that I have three or four such dud rounds among this new gang I’ve hired. I want you to put the finger on them, so I can bounce them before they blow the whole plant up, which could happen quite easily.”

“That,” Doris Rives said, “is not going to be as easy as it sounds. Ordinary intelligence-testing won’t be enough. The woman I was speaking of has an I.Q. well inside the meaning of normal intelligence. She just doesn’t use it.”

“Sure.” Melroy got a thick folder out of his desk and handed it across. “Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Sûreté test for mentally deficient criminals. Then there’s a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional makeup, and general mental attitude.”

She took the folder and leafed through it. “Yes, I see. I always liked this Sûreté test. And this memory test is a honey⁠—‘One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, four corpulent porpoises, five Limerick oysters, six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers.⁠ ⁠…’ I’d like to see some of these memory-course boys trying to make visual images of six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers. And I’m going to make a copy of this word-association list. It’s really a semantic reaction test; Korzybski would have loved it. And, of course, our old friend, the Rorschach Inkblots. I’ve always harbored the impious suspicion that you can prove almost anything you want to with that. But these question-suggestions for personal interview are really crafty. Did Heydenreich get them up himself?”

“Yes. And we have stacks and stacks of printed forms for the written portion of the test, and big cards to summarize each subject on. And we have a disk-recorder to use in the oral tests. There’ll have to be a pretty complete record of each test, in case⁠—”

The office door opened and a bulky man with a black mustache entered, beating the snow from his overcoat with a battered porkpie hat and commenting blasphemously on the weather. He advanced into the room until he saw the woman in the chair beside the desk, and then started to back out.

“Come on in, Sid,” Melroy told him. “Dr. Rives, this is our general foreman, Sid Keating. Sid, Dr. Rives, the new dimwit detector. Sid’s in direct charge of personnel,” he continued, “so you two’ll be working together quite a bit.”

“Glad to know you, doctor,” Keating said. Then he turned to Melroy. “Scott, you’re really going through with this, then?” he asked. “I’m afraid we’ll have trouble, then.”

“Look, Sid,” Melroy said. “We’ve been all over that. Once we start work on the reactors, you and Ned Puryear and Joe Ricci and Steve Chalmers can’t be everywhere at once. A cybernetic system will only do what it’s been assembled to do, and if some quarter-wit assembles one of these things wrong⁠—” He left the sentence dangling; both men knew what he meant.

Keating shook his head. “This union’s going to bawl like a branded calf about it,” he predicted. “And if any of the dear sirs and brothers get washed out⁠—” That sentence didn’t need to be completed, either.

“We have a right,” Melroy said, “to discharge any worker who is, quote, of unsound mind, deficient mentality or emotional instability, unquote. It says so right in our union contract, in nice big print.”

“Then they’ll claim the tests are wrong.”

“I can’t see how they can do that,” Doris Rives put in, faintly scandalized.

“Neither can I, and they probably won’t either,” Keating told her. “But they’ll go ahead and do it. Why, Scott, they’re pulling the Number One Doernberg-Giardano, tonight. By oh-eight-hundred, it ought to be cool enough to work on. Where will we hold the tests? Here?”

“We’ll have to, unless we can get Dr. Rives security-cleared.” Melroy turned to her. “Were you ever security-cleared by any Government agency?”

“Oh, yes. I was with Armed Forces Medical, Psychiatric Division, in Indonesia in ’62 and ’63, and I did some work with mental fatigue cases at Tonto Basin Research Establishment in ’64.”

Melroy looked at her sharply. Keating whistled.

“If she could get into Tonto Basin, she can get in here,” he declared.

“I should think so. I’ll call Colonel Bradshaw, the security officer.”

“That way, we can test them right on the job,” Keating was saying. “Take them in relays. I’ll talk to Ben about it, and we’ll work up some kind of a schedule.” He turned to Doris Rives. “You’ll need a wrist-Geiger, and a dosimeter. We’ll furnish them,” he told her. “I hope they don’t try to make you carry a pistol, too.”

“A pistol?” For a moment, she must have thought he was using some technical-jargon term, and then it dawned on her that he wasn’t. “You mean⁠—?” She cocked her thumb and crooked her index finger.

“Yeah. A rod. Roscoe. The Equalizer. We all have to.” He half-lifted one out of his side pocket. “We’re all United States deputy marshals. They don’t bother much with counterespionage, here, but they don’t fool when it comes to countersabotage. Well, I’ll get an order cut and posted. Be seeing you, doctor.”

“You think the union will make trouble about these tests?” she asked, after the general foreman had gone out.

“They’re sure to,” Melroy replied. “Here’s the situation. I have about fifty of my own men, from Pittsburgh, here, but they can’t work on the reactors because they don’t belong to the Industrial Federation of Atomic Workers, and I can’t just pay their initiation fees and union dues and get union cards for them, because admission to this union is on an annual quota basis, and this is December, and the quota’s full. So I have to use them outside the reactor area, on fabrication and assembly work. And I have to hire through the union, and that’s handled on a membership seniority basis, so I have to take what’s thrown at me. That’s why I was careful to get that clause I was quoting to Sid written into my contract.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen. Most of the men’ll take the test without protest, but a few of them’ll raise the roof about it. Nothing burns a moron worse than to have somebody question his fractional intelligence. The odds are that the ones that yell the loudest about taking the test will be the ones who get scrubbed out, and when the test shows that they’re deficient, they won’t believe it. A moron simply cannot conceive of his being anything less than perfectly intelligent, any more than a lunatic can conceive of his being less than perfectly sane. So they’ll claim we’re framing them, for an excuse to fire them. And the union will have to back them up, right or wrong, at least on the local level. That goes without saying. In any dispute, the employer is always wrong and the worker is always right, until proven otherwise. And that takes a lot of doing, believe me!”

“Well, if they’re hired through the union, on a seniority basis, wouldn’t they be likely to be experienced and competent workers?” she asked.

“Experienced, yes. That is, none of them has ever been caught doing anything downright calamitous⁠ ⁠… yet,” Melroy replied. “The moron I’m afraid of can go on for years, doing routine work under supervision, and nothing’ll happen. Then, some day, he does something on his own lame-brained initiative, and when he does, it’s only at the whim of whatever gods there be that the result isn’t a wholesale catastrophe. And people like that are the most serious threat facing our civilization today, atomic war not excepted.”

Dr. Doris Rives lifted a delicately penciled eyebrow over that. Melroy, pausing to relight his pipe, grinned at her.

“You think that’s the old obsession talking?” he asked. “Could be. But look at this plant, here. It generates every kilowatt of current used between Trenton and Albany, the New York metropolitan area included. Except for a few little storage-battery or Diesel generator systems, that couldn’t handle one tenth of one percent of the barest minimum load, it’s been the only source of electric current here since 1962, when the last coal-burning power plant was dismantled. Knock this plant out and you darken every house and office and factory and street in the area. You immobilize the elevators⁠—think what that would mean in lower and midtown Manhattan alone. And the subways. And the new endless-belt conveyors that handle eighty percent of the city’s freight traffic. And the railroads⁠—there aren’t a dozen steam or Diesel locomotives left in the whole area. And the pump stations for water and gas and fuel oil. And seventy percent of the space-heating is electric, now. Why, you can’t imagine what it’d be like. It’s too gigantic. But what you can imagine would be a nightmare.

“You know, it wasn’t so long ago, when every home lighted and heated itself, and every little industry was a self-contained unit, that a fool couldn’t do great damage unless he inherited a throne or was placed in command of an army, and that didn’t happen nearly as often as our leftist social historians would like us to think. But today, everything we depend upon is centralized, and vulnerable to blunder-damage. Even our food⁠—remember that poisoned soft-drink horror in Chicago, in 1963; three thousand hospitalized and six hundred dead because of one man’s stupid mistake at a bottling plant.” He shook himself slightly, as though to throw off some shadow that had fallen over him, and looked at his watch. “Sixteen hundred. How did you get here? Fly your own plane?”

“No; I came by T.W.A. from Pittsburgh. I have a room at the new Midtown City hotel, on Forty-seventh Street: I had my luggage sent on there from the airport and came out on the Long Island subway.”

“Fine. I have a room at Midtown City, myself, though I sleep here about half the time.” He nodded toward a door on the left. “Suppose we go in and have dinner together. This cafeteria, here, is a horrible place. It’s run by a dietitian instead of a chef, and everything’s so white-enamel antiseptic that I swear I smell belladonna-icthyol ointment every time I go in the place. Wait here till I change clothes.”

At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage⁠—neither the processes nor the equipment used there were secret⁠—but the countersabotage security was fantastically thorough. Every person or scrap of material entering the reactor area was searched; the life-history of every man and woman employed there was known back to the cradle. A broad highway encircled it outside the fence, patrolled night and day by twenty General Stuart cavalry-tanks. There were a thousand soldiers, and three hundred Atomic Power Authority police, and only God knew how many F.B.I. and Central Intelligence undercover agents. Every supervisor and inspector and salaried technician was an armed United States deputy marshal. And nobody, outside the Department of Defense, knew how much radar and counter-rocket and fighter protection the place had, but the air-defense zone extended from Boston to Philadelphia and as far inland as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The Long Island Nuclear Power Plant, Melroy thought, had all the invulnerability of Achilles⁠—and no more.

The six new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant. Beside their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished heat for the seawater distillation and chemical extraction system, processing the water that was run through the steam boilers at the main power reactors, condensed, redistilled, and finally pumped, pure, into the water mains of New York. Safe outside the shielding, in a corner of a high-ceilinged room, was the plyboard-screened on-the-job office of the Melroy Engineering Corporation’s timekeepers and foremen. Beyond, along the far wall, were the washroom and locker room and lunch room of the workmen.

Sixty or seventy men, mostly in white coveralls and all wearing identification badges and carrying dosimeters in their breast pockets and midget Geigers strapped to their wrists, were crowded about the bulletin-board in front of the makeshift office. There was a hum of voices⁠—some perplexed or angry, but mostly good-humored and bantering. As Melroy and Doris Rives approached, the talking died out and the men turned. In the sudden silence, one voice, harshly strident, continued:

“… do they think this is, anyhow? We don’t hafta take none of that.”

Somebody must have nudged the speaker, trying without success to hush him. The bellicose voice continued, and Melroy spotted the speaker⁠—short, thickset, his arms jutting out at an angle from his body, his heavy features soured with anger.

“Like we was a lotta halfwits, ’r nuts, ’r some’n! Well, we don’t hafta stand for this. They ain’t got no right⁠—”

Doris Rives clung tighter to Melroy’s arm as he pushed a way for himself and her through the crowd and into the temporary office. Inside, they were met by a young man with a deputy marshal’s badge on his flannel shirt and a .38 revolver on his hip.

“Ben Puryear: Dr. Rives,” Melroy introduced. “Who’s the mouthy character outside?”

“One of the roustabouts; name’s Burris,” Puryear replied. “Washroom lawyer.”

Melroy nodded. “You always get one or two like that. How’re the rest taking it?”

Puryear shrugged. “About how you’d expect. A lot of kidding about who’s got any intelligence to test. Burris seems to be the only one who’s trying to make an issue out of it.”

“Well, what are they doing ganged up here?” Melroy wanted to know. “It’s past oh-eight-hundred; why aren’t they at work?”

“Reactor’s still too hot. Temperature and radioactivity both too high; radioactivity’s still up around eight hundred rem’s.”

“Well, then, we’ll give them all the written portion of the test together, and start the personal interviews and oral tests as soon as they’re through.” He turned to Doris Rives. “Can you give all of them the written test together?” he asked. “And can Ben help you⁠—distributing forms, timing the test, seeing that there’s no fudging, and collecting the forms when they’re done?”

“Oh, yes; all they’ll have to do is follow the printed instructions.” She looked around. “I’ll need a desk, and an extra chair for the interview subject.”

“Right over here, doctor.” Puryear said. “And here are the forms and cards, and the sound-recorder, and blank sound disks.”

“Yes,” Melroy added. “Be sure you get a recording of every interview and oral test; we may need them for evidence.”

He broke off as a man in white coveralls came pushing into the office. He was a scrawny little fellow with a wide, loose-lipped mouth and a protuberant Adam’s apple; beside his identity badge, he wore a two-inch celluloid button lettered: I.F.A.W. Steward.

“Wanta use the phone,” he said. “Union business.”

Melroy gestured toward a telephone on the desk beside him. The newcomer shook his head, twisting his mouth into a smirk.

“Not that one; the one with the whisper mouthpiece,” he said. “This is private union business.”

Melroy shrugged and indicated another phone. The man with the union steward’s badge picked it up, dialed, and held a lengthy conversation into it, turning his head away in case Melroy might happen to be a lip reader. Finally he turned.

“Mr. Crandall wants to talk to you,” he said, grinning triumphantly, the phone extended to Melroy.

The engineer picked up another phone, snapping a button on the base of it.

“Melroy here,” he said.

Something on the line started going bee-beep-beep softly.

“Crandall, executive secretary, I.F.A.W.,” the man on the other end of the line identified himself. “Is there a recorder going on this line?”

“Naturally,” Melroy replied. “I record all business conversations; office routine.”

“Mr. Melroy, I’ve been informed that you propose forcing our members in your employ to submit to some kind of a mental test. Is that correct?”

“Not exactly. I’m not able to force anybody to submit to anything against his will. If anybody objects to taking these tests, he can say so, and I’ll have his time made out and pay him off.”

“That’s the same thing. A threat of dismissal is coercion, and if these men want to keep their jobs they’ll have to take this test.”

“Well, that’s stated more or less correctly,” Melroy conceded. “Let’s just put it that taking⁠—and passing⁠—this test is a condition of employment. My contract with your union recognizes my right to establish standards of intelligence; that’s implied by my recognized right to dismiss any person of ‘unsound mind, deficient mentality or emotional instability.’ Psychological testing is the only means of determining whether or not a person is classifiable in those terms.”

“Then, in case the test purports to show that one of these men is, let’s say, mentally deficient, you intend dismissing him?”

“With the customary two weeks’ severance-pay, yes.”

“Well, if you do dismiss anybody on those grounds, the union will have to insist on reviewing the grounds for dismissal.”

“My contract with your union says nothing whatever about any right of review being reserved by the union in such cases. Only in cases of disciplinary dismissal, which this is not. I take the position that certain minimum standards of intelligence and mental stability are essentials in this sort of work, just as, say, certain minimum standards of literacy are essential in clerical work.”

“Then you’re going to make these men take these tests, whatever they are?”

“If they want to work for me, yes. And anybody who fails to pass them will be dropped from my payroll.”

“And who’s going to decide whether or not these men have successfully passed these tests?” Crandall asked. “You?”

“Good Lord, no! I’m an electronics engineer, not a psychologist. The tests are being given, and will be evaluated, by a graduate psychologist, Dr. D. Warren Rives, who has a diploma from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is a member of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Rives will be the final arbiter on who is or is not disqualified by these tests.”

“Well, our man Koffler says you have some girl there to give the tests,” Crandall accused.

“I suppose he means Dr. Rives,” Melroy replied. “I can assure you, she is an extremely competent psychologist, however. She came to me most highly recommended by Dr. Karl von Heydenreich, who is not inclined to be careless with his recommendations.”

“Well, Mr. Melroy, we don’t want any more trouble with you than we have to have,” Crandall told him, “but we will insist on reviewing any dismissals which occur as a result of these tests.”

“You can do that. I’d advise, first, that you read over the contract you signed with me. Get a qualified lawyer to tell you what we’ve agreed to and what we haven’t. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about.⁠ ⁠… No.⁠ ⁠… Then good morning, Mr. Crandall.”

He hung up. “All right; let’s get on with it,” he said. “Ben, you get them into the lunch room; there are enough tables and benches in there for everybody to take the written test in two relays.”

“The union’s gotta be represented while these tests is going on,” the union steward announced. “Mr. Crandall says I’m to stay here an’ watch what you do to these guys.”

“This man working for us?” Melroy asked Puryear.

“Yes. Koffler, Julius. Electrical fitter; Joe Ricci’s gang.”

“All right. See to it that he gets placed in the first relay for the written test, and gets first turn for the orals. That way he can spend the rest of his time on duty here for the union, and will know in advance what the test is like.” He turned to Koffler. “But understand this. You keep your mouth out of it. If you see anything that looks objectionable, make a note of it, but don’t try to interfere.”

The written tests, done on printed forms, required about twenty minutes. Melroy watched the process of oral testing and personal interviewing for a while, then picked up a big flashlight and dropped it into his overcoat pocket, preparatory to going out to inspect some equipment that had been assembled outside the reactor area and brought in. As he went out, Koffler was straddling a chair, glowering at Doris Rives and making occasional ostentatious notes on a pad.

For about an hour, he poked around the newly assembled apparatus, checking the wiring, and peering into it. When he returned to the temporary office, the oral testing was still going on; Koffler was still on duty as watcher for the union, but the sport had evidently palled on him, for he was now studying a comic book.

Melroy left the reactor area and returned to the office in the converted area. During the midafternoon, somebody named Leighton called him from the Atomic Power Authority executive office, wanting to know what was the trouble between him and the I.F.A.W. and saying that a protest against his alleged high-handed and arbitrary conduct had been received from the union.

Melroy explained, at length. He finished: “You people have twenty Stuart tanks, and a couple of thousand soldiers and cops and undercover-men, here, guarding against sabotage. Don’t you realize that a workman who makes stupid or careless or impulsive mistakes is just as dangerous to the plant as any saboteur? If somebody shoots you through the head, it doesn’t matter whether he planned to murder you for a year or just didn’t know the gun was loaded; you’re as dead one way as the other. I should think you’d thank me for trying to eliminate a serious source of danger.”

“Now, don’t misunderstand my position, Mr. Melroy,” the other man hastened to say. “I sympathize with your attitude, entirely. But these people are going to make trouble.”

“If they do, it’ll be my trouble. I’m under contract to install this cybernetic system for you; you aren’t responsible for my labor policy,” Melroy replied. “Oh, have you had much to do with this man Crandall, yourself?”

“Have I had⁠—!” Leighton sputtered for a moment. “I’m in charge of personnel, here; that makes me his top-priority target, all the time.”

“Well, what sort of a character is he, anyhow? When I contracted with the I.F.A.W., my lawyer and their lawyer handled everything; I never even met him.”

“Well⁠—He has his job to do, the same as I have,” Leighton said. “He does it conscientiously. But it’s like this⁠—anything a workman tells him is the truth, and anything an employer tells him is a dirty lie. Until proven differently, of course, but that takes a lot of doing. And he goes off half-cocked a lot of times. He doesn’t stop to analyze situations very closely.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, you tell him you don’t have any control over my labor relations. Tell him to bring his gripes to me.”

At sixteen-thirty, Doris Rives came in, finding him still at his desk.

“I have the written tests all finished, and I have about twenty of the tests and interviews completed,” she said. “I’ll have to evaluate the results, though. I wonder if there’s a vacant desk around here, anywhere, and a record player.”

“Yes, sure. Ask Joan to fix you up; she’ll find a place for you to work. And if you’re going to be working late, I’ll order some dinner for you from the cafeteria. I’m going to be here all evening, myself.”

Sid Keating came in, a short while later, peeling out of his overcoat, jacket and shoulder holster.

“I don’t think they got everything out of that reactor,” he said. “Radioactivity’s still almost active-normal⁠—about eight hundred rem’s⁠—and the temperature’s away up, too. That isn’t lingering radiation; that’s prompt radiation.”

“Radioactivity hasn’t dropped since morning; I’d think so, too,” Melroy said. “What are they getting on the breakdown counter?”

“Mostly neutrons and alpha-particles. I talked to Fred Hausinger, the maintenance boss; he doesn’t like it, either.”

“Well, I’m no nuclear physicist,” Melroy disclaimed, “but all that alpha stuff looks like a big chunk of Pu-239 left inside. What’s Fred doing about it?”

“Oh, poking around inside the reactor with telemetered scanners and remote-control equipment. When I left, he had a gang pulling out graphite blocks with RC-tongs. We probably won’t get a chance to work on it much before thirteen-hundred tomorrow.” He unzipped a bulky brief case he had brought in under his arm and dumped papers onto his desk. “I still have this stuff to get straightened out, too.”

“Had anything to eat? Then call the cafeteria and have them send up three dinners. Dr. Rives is eating here, too. Find out what she wants; I want pork chops.”

“Uh-huh; Li’l Abner Melroy; po’k chops unless otherwise specified.” Keating got up and went out into the middle office. As he opened the door. Melroy could hear a recording of somebody being given a word-association test.

Half an hour later, when the food arrived, they spread their table on a relatively clear desk in the middle office. Doris Rives had finished evaluating the completed tests; after dinner, she intended going over the written portions of the uncompleted tests.

“How’d the finished tests come out?” Melroy asked her.

“Better than I’d expected. Only two washouts,” she replied. “Harvey Burris and Julius Koffler.”

“Oh, no!” Keating wailed. “The I.F.A.W. steward, and the loudest-mouthed I-know-my-rights boy on the job!”

“Well, wasn’t that to be expected?” Melroy asked. “If you’d seen the act those two put on⁠—”

“They’re both inherently stupid, infantile, and deficient in reasoning ability and judgment,” Doris said. “Koffler is a typical adolescent problem-child show-off type, and Burris is an almost perfect twelve-year-old schoolyard bully. They both have inferiority complexes long enough to step on. If the purpose of this test is what I’m led to believe it is, I can’t, in professional good conscience, recommend anything but that you get rid of both of them.”

“What Bob’s getting at is that they’re the very ones who can claim, with the best show of plausibility, that the test is just a pretext to fire them for union activities,” Melroy explained. “And the worst of it is, they’re the only ones.”

“Maybe we can scrub out a couple more on the written tests alone. Then they’ll have company,” Keating suggested.

“No, I can’t do that.” Doris was firm on the point. “The written part of the test was solely for ability to reason logically. Just among the three of us, I know some university professors who’d flunk on that. But if the rest of the tests show stability, sense of responsibility, good judgment, and a tendency to think before acting, the subject can be classified as a safe and reliable workman.”

“Well, then, let’s don’t say anything till we have the tests all finished,” Keating proposed.

“No!” Melroy cried. “Every minute those two are on the job, there’s a chance they may do something disastrous. I’ll fire them at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

“All right,” Keating shook his head. “I only work here. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

By 0930 the next morning, Keating’s forebodings began to be realized. The first intimation came with a phone call to Melroy from Crandall, who accused him of having used the psychological tests as a fraudulent pretext for discharging Koffler and Burris for union activities. When Melroy rejected his demand that the two men be reinstated, Crandall demanded to see the records of the tests.

“They’re here at my office,” Melroy told him. “You’re welcome to look at them, and hear recordings of the oral portions of the tests. But I’d advise you to bring a professional psychologist along, because unless you’re a trained psychologist yourself, they’re not likely to mean much to you.”

“Oh, sure!” Crandall retorted. “They’d have to be unintelligible to ordinary people, or you couldn’t get away with this frame-up! Well, don’t worry, I’ll be along to see them.”

Within ten minutes, the phone rang again. This time it was Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man.

“We’re much disturbed about this dispute between your company and the I.F.A.W.,” he began.

“Well, frankly, so am I,” Melroy admitted. “I’m here to do a job, not play Hatfields and McCoys with this union. I’ve had union trouble before, and it isn’t fun. You’re the gentleman who called me last evening, aren’t you? Then you understand my position in the matter.”

“Certainly, Mr. Melroy. I was talking to Colonel Bradshaw, the security officer, last evening. He agrees that a stupid or careless workman is, under some circumstances, a more serious threat to security than any saboteur. And we realize fully how dangerous those Doernberg-Giardanos are, and how much more dangerous they’d be if these cybernetic controls were improperly assembled. But this man Crandall is talking about calling a strike.”

“Well, let him. In the first place, it’d be against me, not against the Atomic Power Authority. And, in the second place, if he does and it goes to Federal mediation, his demand for the reinstatement of those men will be thrown out, and his own organization will have to disavow his action, because he’ll be calling the strike against his own contract.”

“Well, I hope so.” Leighton’s tone indicated that the hope was rather dim. “I wish you luck; you’re going to need it.”

Within the hour, Crandall arrived at Melroy’s office. He was a young man; he gave Melroy the impression of having recently seen military service; probably in the Indonesian campaign of ’62 and ’63; he also seemed a little cocky and over-sure of himself.

“Mr. Melroy, we’re not going to stand for this,” he began, as soon as he came into the room. “You’re using these so-called tests as a pretext for getting rid of Mr. Koffler and Mr. Burris because of their legitimate union activities.”

“Who gave you that idea?” Melroy wanted to know. “Koffler and Burris?”

“That’s the complaint they made to me, and it’s borne out by the facts,” Crandall replied. “We have on record at least half a dozen complaints that Mr. Koffler has made to us about different unfair work-assignments, improper working conditions, inequities in allotting overtime work, and other infractions of union-shop conditions, on behalf of Mr. Burris. So you decided to get rid of both of them, and you think you can use this clause in our contract with your company about persons of deficient intelligence. The fact is, you’re known to have threatened on several occasions to get rid of both of them.”

“I am?” Melroy looked at Crandall curiously, wondering if the latter were serious, and deciding that he was. “You must believe anything those people tell you. Well, they lied to you if they told you that.”

“Naturally that’s what you’d say,” Crandall replied. “But how do you account for the fact that those two men, and only those two men, were dismissed for alleged deficient intelligence?”

“The tests aren’t all made,” Melroy replied. “Until they are, you can’t say that they are the only ones disqualified. And if you look over the records of the tests, you’ll see where Koffler and Burris failed and the others passed. Here.” He laid the pile of written-test forms and the summary and evaluation sheets on the desk. “Here’s Koffler’s, and here’s Burris’; these are the ones of the men who passed the test. Look them over if you want to.”

Crandall examined the forms and summaries for the two men who had been discharged, and compared them with several random samples from the satisfactory pile.

“Why, this stuff’s a lot of gibberish!” he exclaimed indignantly. “This thing, here⁠ ⁠… five Limerick oysters, six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers, seven hundred Macedonian warriors in full battle array, eight golden crowns from the ancient, secret crypts of Egypt, nine lymphatic, sympathetic, peripatetic old men on crutches, and ten revolving heliotropes from the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute!’ Great Lord, do you actually mean that you’re using this stuff as an excuse for depriving men of their jobs?”

“I warned you that you should have brought a professional psychologist along,” Melroy reminded him. “And maybe you ought to get Koffler and Burris to repeat their complaints on a lie-detector, while you’re at it. They took the same tests, in the same manner, as any of the others. They just didn’t have the mental equipment to cope with them and the others did. And for that reason, I won’t run the risk of having them working on this job.”

“That’s just your word against theirs,” Crandall insisted obstinately. “Their complaint is that you framed this whole thing up to get rid of them.”

“Why, I didn’t even know who either of them were, until yesterday morning.”

“That’s not the way they tell it,” Crandall retorted. “They say you and Keating have been out to get them ever since they were hired. You and your supervisors have been persecuting both of those men systematically. The fact that Burris has had grounds for all these previous complaints proves that.”

“It proves that Burris has a persecution complex, and that Koffler’s credulous enough to believe him,” Melroy replied. “And that tends to confirm the results of the tests they failed to pass.”

“Oh, so that’s the line you’re taking. You persecute a man, and then say he has a persecution complex if he recognizes the fact. Well, you’re not going to get away with it, that’s all I have to say to you.” Crandall flung the test-sheet he had been holding on to the desk. “That stuff’s not worth the paper it’s scribbled on!” He turned on his heel in an automatically correct about-face and strode out of the office.

Melroy straightened out the papers and put them away, then sat down at his desk, filling and lighting his pipe. He was still working at 1215 when Ben Puryear called him.

“They walked out on us,” he reported. “Harry Crandall was out here talking to them, and at noon the whole gang handed in their wrist-Geigers and dosimeters and cleared out their lockers. They say they aren’t coming back till Burris and Koffler come back to work with them.”

“Then they aren’t coming back, period,” Melroy replied. “Crandall was to see me, a couple of hours ago. He tells me that Burris and Koffler told him that we’ve been persecuting Burris; discriminating against him. You know of anything that really happened that might make them think anything like that?”

“No. Burris is always yelling about not getting enough overtime work, but you know how it is: he’s just a roustabout, a common laborer. Any overtime work that has to be done is usually skilled labor on this job. We generally have a few roustabouts to help out, but he’s been allowed to make overtime as much as any of the others.”

“Will the time-records show that?”

“They ought to. I don’t know what he and Koffler told Crandall, but whatever it was, I’ll bet they were lying.”

“That’s all right, then. How’s the reactor, now?”

“Hausinger says the count’s down to safe limits, and the temperature’s down to inactive normal. He and his gang found a big chunk of plutonium, about one-quarter C.M., inside. He got it out.”

“All right. Tell Dr. Rives to gather up all her completed or partially completed test records and come out to the office. You and the others stay on the job; we may have some men for you by this afternoon; tomorrow morning certainly.”

He hung up, then picked up the communicator phone and called his secretary.

“Joan, is Sid Keating out there? Send him in, will you?”

Keating, when he entered, was wearing the lugubriously gratified expression appropriate to the successful prophet of disaster.

“All right, Cassandra,” Melroy greeted him. “I’m not going to say you didn’t warn me. Look. This strike is illegal. It’s a violation of the Federal Labor Act of 1958, being called without due notice of intention, without preliminary negotiation, and without two weeks’ time-allowance.”

“They’re going to claim that it isn’t a strike. They’re going to call it a ‘spontaneous work-stoppage.’ ”

“Aah! I hope I can get Crandall on record to that effect; I’ll fire every one of those men for leaving their work without permission and absence from duty without leave. How many of our own men, from Pittsburgh, do we have working in these machine shops and in the assembly shop here? About sixty?”

“Sixty-three. Why? You’re not going to use them to work on the reactor, are you?”

“I just am. They’re all qualified cybernetics technicians; they can do this work better than this gang we’ve had to hire here. Just to be on the safe side, I’m promoting all of them, as of oh-eight-hundred this morning, to assistant gang-foremen, on salaries. That’ll take them outside union jurisdiction.”

“But how about our contract with the I.F.A.W.?”

“That’s been voided, by Crandall’s own act, in interfering with the execution of our contract with the Atomic Power Authority. You know what I think? I think the I.F.A.W. front office is going to have to disavow this. It’ll hurt them to do it, but they’ll have to. Crandall’s put them in the middle on this.”

“How about security clearance for our own men?”

“Nothing to that,” Melroy said. “Most of them are security-cleared, already, from the work we did installing that counter-rocket control system on the U.S.S. Alaska, and the work we did on that symbolic-logic computer for the Philadelphia Project. It may take all day to get the red tape unwound, but I think we can be ready to start by oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

By the time Keating had rounded up all the regular Melroy Engineering Corporation employees and Melroy had talked to Colonel Bradshaw about security-clearance, it was 1430. A little later, he was called on the phone by Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man.

“Melroy, what are you trying to do?” the Power Authority man demanded. “Get this whole plant struck shut? The I.F.A.W.’s madder than a shot-stung bobcat. They claim you’re going to bring in strikebreakers; they’re talking about picketing the whole reactor area.”

“News gets around fast, here, doesn’t it?” Melroy commented. He told Leighton what he had in mind. The Power Authority man was considerably shaken before he had finished.

“But they’ll call a strike on the whole plant! Have you any idea what that would mean?”

“Certainly I have. They’ll either call it in legal form, in which case the whole thing will go to mediation and get aired, which is what I want, or they’ll pull a Pearl Harbor on you, the way they did on me. And in that case, the President will have to intervene, and they’ll fly in technicians from some of the Armed Forces plants to keep this place running. And in that case, things’ll get settled that much quicker. This Crandall thinks these men I fired are martyrs, and he’s preaching a crusade. He ought to carry an advocatus diaboli on his payroll, to scrutinize the qualifications of his martyrs, before he starts canonizing them.”

A little later, Doris Rives came into the office, her hands full of papers and cards.

“I have twelve more tests completed,” she reported. “Only one washout.”

Melroy laughed. “Doctor, they’re all washed out,” he told her. “It seems there was an additional test, and they all flunked it. Evinced willingness to follow unwise leadership and allow themselves to be talked into improper courses of action. You go on in to New York, and take all the test-material, including sound records, with you. Stay at the hotel⁠—your pay will go on⁠—till I need you. There’ll be a Federal Mediation hearing in a day or so.”

He had two more telephone calls. The first, at 1530, was from Leighton. Melroy suspected that the latter had been medicating his morale with a couple of stiff drinks: his voice was almost jaunty.

“Well, the war’s on,” he announced. “The I.F.A.W.’s walking out on the whole plant, at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

“In violation of the Federal Labor Act, Section Eight, paragraphs four and five,” Melroy supplemented. “Crandall really has stuck his neck in the guillotine. What’s Washington doing?”

“President Hartley is ordering Navy personnel flown in from Kennebunkport Reaction Lab; they will be here by about oh-three-hundred tomorrow. And a couple of Federal mediators are coming in to La Guardia at seventeen hundred; they’re going to hold preliminary hearings at the new Federal Building on Washington Square beginning twenty hundred. A couple of I.F.A.W. negotiators are coming in from the national union headquarters at Oak Ridge: they should be getting in about the same time. You’d better be on hand, and have Dr. Rives there with you. There’s a good chance this thing may get cleared up in a day or so.”

“I will undoubtedly be there, complete with Dr. Rives,” Melroy replied. “It will be a pleasure!”

An hour later, Ben Puryear called from the reactor area, his voice strained with anger.

“Scott, do you know what those⁠—” He gargled obscenities for a moment. “You know what they’ve done? They’ve re-packed the Number One Doernberg-Giardano; got a chain-reaction started again.”

“Who?”

“Fred Hausinger’s gang. Apparently at Harry Crandall’s orders. The excuse was that it would be unsafe to leave the reactor in its dismantled condition during a prolonged shutdown⁠—they were assuming, I suppose, that the strike would be allowed to proceed unopposed⁠—but of course the real reason was that they wanted to get a chain-reaction started to keep our people from working on the reactor.”

“Well, didn’t Hausinger try to stop them?”

“Not very hard. I asked him what he had that deputy marshal’s badge on his shirt and that Luger on his hip for, but he said he had orders not to use force, for fear of prejudicing the mediators.”

Melroy swore disgustedly. “All right. Gather up all our private papers, and get Steve and Joe, and come on out. We only work here⁠—when we’re able.”

Doris Rives was waiting on the street level when Melroy reached the new Federal Building, in what had formerly been the Greenwich Village district of Manhattan, that evening. She had a heavy brief case with her, which he took.

“I was afraid I’d keep you waiting,” she said. “I came down from the hotel by cab, and there was a frightful jam at Fortieth Street, and another one just below Madison Square.”

“Yes, it gets worse every year. Pardon my obsession, but nine times out of ten⁠—ninety-nine out of a hundred⁠—it’s the fault of some fool doing something stupid. Speaking about doing stupid things, though⁠—I did one. Forgot to take that gun out of my overcoat pocket, and didn’t notice that I had it till I was on the subway, coming in. Have a big flashlight in the other pocket, but that doesn’t matter. What I’m worried about is that somebody’ll find out I have a gun and raise a howl about my coming armed to a mediation hearing.”

The hearing was to be held in one of the big conference rooms on the forty-second floor. Melroy was careful to remove his overcoat and lay it on a table in the corner, and then help Doris off with hers and lay it on top of his own. There were three men in the room when they arrived: Kenneth Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man, fiftyish, acquiring a waistline bulge and losing his hair: a Mr. Lyons, tall and slender, with white hair; and a Mr. Quillen, considerably younger, with plastic-rimmed glasses. The latter two were the Federal mediators. All three had been lounging in armchairs, talking about the new plays on Broadway. They all rose when Melroy and Doris Rives came over to join them.

“We mustn’t discuss business until the others get here,” Leighton warned. “It’s bad enough that all three of us got here ahead of them; they’ll be sure to think we’re trying to take an unfair advantage of them. I suppose neither of you have had time to see any of the new plays.”

Fortunately, Doris and Melroy had gone to the theater after dinner, the evening-before-last; they were able to join the conversation. Young Mr. Quillen wanted Doris Rives’ opinion, as a psychologist, of the mental processes of the heroine of the play they had seen; as nearly as she could determine, Doris replied, the heroine in question had exhibited nothing even loosely describable as mental processes of any sort. They were still on the subject when the two labor negotiators, Mr. Cronnin and Mr. Fields, arrived. Cronnin was in his sixties, with the nearsighted squint and compressed look of concentration of an old-time precision machinist; Fields was much younger, and sported a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Lyons, who seemed to be the senior mediator, thereupon called the meeting to order and they took their places at the table.

“Now, gentlemen⁠—and Dr. Rives⁠—this will be simply an informal discussion, so that everybody can see what everybody else’s position in the matter is. We won’t bother to make a sound recording. Then, if we have managed to reach some common understanding of the question this evening, we can start the regular hearing say at thirteen hundred tomorrow. Is that agreeable?”

It was. The younger mediator, Quillen, cleared his throat.

“It seems, from our information, that this entire dispute arises from the discharge, by Mr. Melroy, of two of his employees, named Koffler and Burris. Is that correct?”

“Well, there’s also the question of the Melroy Engineering Corporation’s attempting to use strikebreakers, and the Long Island Atomic Power Authority’s having condoned this unfair employment practice,” Cronnin said, acidly.

“And there’s also the question of the I.F.A.W.’s calling a Pearl Harbor strike on my company,” Melroy added.

“We resent that characterization!” Cronnin retorted.

“It’s a term in common usage; it denotes a strike called without warning or declaration of intention, which this was,” Melroy told him.

“And there’s also the question of the I.F.A.W. calling a general strike, in illegal manner, at the Long Island Reaction Plant,” Leighton spoke up. “On sixteen hours’ notice.”

“Well, that wasn’t the fault of the I.F.A.W. as an organization,” Fields argued. “Mr. Cronnin and I are agreed that the walkout date should be postponed for two weeks, in accordance with the provisions of the Federal Labor Act.”

“Well, how about my company?” Melroy wanted to know. “Your I.F.A.W. members walked out on me, without any notice whatever, at twelve hundred today. Am I to consider that an act of your union, or will you disavow it so that I can fire all of them for quitting without permission?”

“And how about the action of members of your union, acting on instructions from Harry Crandall, in re-packing the Number One Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactor at our plant, after the plutonium and the U-238 and the neutron-source containers had been removed, in order to re-initiate a chain reaction to prevent Mr. Melroy’s employees from working on the reactor?” Leighton demanded. “Am I to understand that the union sustains that action, too?”

“I hadn’t known about that,” Fields said, somewhat startled.

“Neither had I,” Cronnin added. “When did it happen?”

“About sixteen hundred today,” Melroy told him.

“We were on the plane from Oak Ridge, then,” Fields declared. “We know nothing about that.”

“Well, are you going to take the responsibility for it, or aren’t you?” Leighton insisted.

Lyons, who had been toying with a small metal paperweight, rapped on the table with it.

“Gentlemen,” he interrupted. “We’re trying to cover too many subjects at once. I suggest that we confine ourselves, at the beginning, to the question of the dismissal of these men, Burris and Koffler. If we find that the I.F.A.W. has a legitimate grievance in what we may call the Burris-Koffler question, we can settle that and then go on to these other questions.”

“I’m agreeable to that,” Melroy said.

“So are we,” Cronnin nodded.

“All right, then. Since the I.F.A.W. is the complaining party in this question, perhaps you gentlemen should state the grounds for your complaints.”

Fields and Cronnin exchanged glances: Cronnin nodded to Fields and the latter rose. The two employees in question, he stated, had been the victims of discrimination and persecution because of union activities. Koffler was the union shop-steward for the men employed by the Melroy Engineering Corporation, and Burris had been active in bringing complaints about unfair employment practices. Furthermore, it was the opinion of the I.F.A.W. that the psychological tests imposed on their members had been a fraudulent pretext for dismissing these two men, and, in any case, the practice of compelling workers to submit to such tests was insulting, degrading, and not a customary condition of employment.

With that, he sat down. Melroy was on his feet at once.

“I’ll deny those statements, categorically and seriatim,” he replied. “They are based entirely upon misrepresentations made by the two men who were disqualified by the tests and dropped from my payroll because of being, in the words of my contract with your union, ‘persons of unsound mind, deficient intelligence and/or emotional instability.’ What happened is that your local official, Crandall, accepted everything they told him uncritically, and you accepted everything Crandall told you, in the same spirit.

“Before I go on,” Melroy continued, turning to Lyons, “have I your permission to let Dr. Rives explain about these tests, herself, and tell how they were given and evaluated?”

Permission granted by Lyons, Doris Rives rose. At some length, she explained the nature and purpose of the tests, and her method of scoring and correlating them.

“Well, did Mr. Melroy suggest to you that any specific employee or employees of his were undesirable and ought to be eliminated?” Fields asked.

“Certainly not!” Doris Rives became angry. “And if he had, I’d have taken the first plane out of here. That suggestion is insulting! And for your information, I never met Mr. Melroy before day-before-yesterday afternoon; I am not dependent upon him for anything; I took this job as an accommodation to Dr. Karl von Heydenreich, who ordinarily does such work for the Melroy company, and I’m losing money by remaining here. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes, it does,” Fields admitted. He was obviously impressed by mention of the distinguished Austrian psychologist’s name. “If I may ask Mr. Melroy a question: I gather that these tests are given to all your employees. Why do you demand such an extraordinary level of intelligence from your employees, even common laborers?”

“Extraordinary?” Melroy echoed. “If the standards established by those tests are extraordinary, then God help this country; we are becoming a race of morons! I’ll leave that statement to Dr. Rives for confirmation; she’s already pointed out that all that is required to pass those tests is ordinary adult mental capacity.

“My company specializes in cybernetic-control systems,” he continued. “In spite of a lot of misleading colloquial jargon about ‘thinking machines’ and ‘giant brains,’ a cybernetic system doesn’t really think. It only does what it’s been designed and built to do, and if somebody builds a mistake into it, it will automatically and infallibly repeat that mistake in practice.”

“He’s right,” Cronnin said. “The men that build a machine like that have got to be as smart as the machine’s supposed to be, or the machine’ll be as dumb as they are.”

Fields turned on him angrily. “Which side are you supposed to be on, anyhow?” he demanded.

“You’re probably a lawyer,” Melroy said. “But I’ll bet Mr. Cronnin’s an old reaction-plant man.” Cronnin nodded unthinkingly in confirmation. “All right, then. Ask him what those Doernberg-Giardanos are like. And then let me ask you: Suppose some moron fixed up something that would go wrong, or made the wrong kind of a mistake himself, around one of those reactors?”

It was purely a rhetorical question, but, much later, when he would have time to think about it, Scott Melroy was to wonder if ever in history such a question had been answered so promptly and with such dramatic calamitousness.

Three seconds after he stopped speaking, the lights went out.

For a moment, they were silent and motionless. Then somebody across the table from Melroy began to say, “What the devil⁠—?” Doris Rives, beside him, clutched his arm. At the head of the table, Lyons was fuming impatiently, and Kenneth Leighton snapped a pocket-lighter and held it up.

The Venetian-screened windows across the room faced east. In the flicker of the lighter, Melroy made his way around to them and drew open the slats of one, looking out. Except for the headlights of cars, far down in the street, and the lights of ships in the harbor, the city was completely blacked out. But there was one other, horrible, light far away at the distant tip of Long Island⁠—a huge ball of flame, floating upward at the tip of a column of fiery gas. As he watched, there were twinkles of unbearable brightness at the base of the pillar of fire, spreading into awesome sheet-flashes, and other fireballs soared up. Then the sound and the shock-wave of the first blast reached them.

“The main power-reactors, too,” Melroy said to himself, not realizing that he spoke audibly. “Too well shielded for the blast to get them, but the heat melted the fissionables down to critical mass.”

Leighton, the lighter still burning, was beside him, now.

“That’s not⁠—God, it can’t be anything else! Why, the whole plant’s gone! There aren’t enough other generators in this area to handle a hundredth of the demand.”

“And don’t blame that on my alleged strikebreakers,” Melroy warned. “They hadn’t got security-cleared to enter the reactor area when this happened.”

“What do you think happened?” Cronnin asked. “One of the Doernberg-Giardanos let go?”

“Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it’s his bad luck,” Melroy said grimly. “Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter C.M. I don’t know what was done with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. Nobody’ll ever find out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were pretty ripe by that time, must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know how fast those D-G’s work. It just took this long to build up C.M. for a bomb-type reaction. You remember what I was saying before the lights went out? Well, it happened. Some moron⁠—some untested and undetected moron⁠—made the wrong kind of a mistake.”

“Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn’t stop to think often enough,” Cronnin said. “Well, I guess the strike’s off, now; that’s one thing.”

“But all those people, out there!” Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking particularly rather than generally and of humans rather than abstractions. “It must have killed everybody for miles around.”

Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve Chalmers, and all the workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh, to their death. Then he stopped thinking about them. It didn’t do any good to think of men who’d been killed; he’d learned that years ago, as a kid second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the millions in Greater New York, and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without heat in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skyscrapers and on railroads and interurban lines.

He turned to the woman beside him.

“Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology diploma, you had to qualify as a regular M.D., didn’t you?” he asked.

“Why, yes⁠—”

“Then you’d better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is going to be desperately needed, for the next day or so. Me, I still have a reserve major’s commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still working. Until I hear differently, I’m ordering myself on active duty as of now.” He looked around. “Anybody know where the nearest Army headquarters is?”

“There’s a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor,” Quillen said. “It’s probably closed, now, though.”

“Ground Defense Command; Midtown City,” Leighton said. “They have a medical section of their own; they’ll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too.”

Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then shrugged into his own overcoat and belted it about him, the weight of the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He’d need both, the gun as much as the light⁠—New York had more than its share of vicious criminals, to whom this power-failure would be a perfect devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

Genesis

Null-A.B.C.

By H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire