Short Science Fiction

Electron Eat Electron

Supreme General Hoshawk, chief of staff, watched with piercing gray eyes while the President of the United States of the Western Hemisphere, Jeffrey Wadsworth, lay relaxed under a cosmic-ray lamp, with no covering but a towel over his loins.

The surgeon-general of the Hemispheric Armies raised his hand, and the lamp receded.

“Is that enough?” Hoshawk asked dryly.

“It’s the maximum, even for him,” said the surgeon-general. “His reflexes will be faster than light itself.”

Hoshawk grunted, his eyes narrow. As far as he could see, the speed of a man’s reflexes, even of a man who was about to champion seven hundred million persons, wasn’t as important as the man’s loyalty or his sense of personal responsibility. And Hoshawk did not have much use for Wadsworth.

Augusto Iraola of Brazil, deputy president for South America, stepped forward from the group of forty men. He asked the President anxiously, “How do you feel?” Iraola was old and bearded.

“Not bad,” said the President, and his voice squeaked a little as it changed pitch.

The Minister of State, with a big portfolio under his arm, said, “Shouldn’t we prepare the vice president?”

Morrison, vice president for Canada, spoke pedantically, “It would be a tragedy to lose President Wadsworth. Last month his I.Q. was 340, nearly twenty points above any other member of the Mutant College.”

Hoshawk barely caught himself in time to repress a snort. A boy of sixteen, no matter what his I.Q., was just a kid. You couldn’t expect him to exhibit initiative or even to take things seriously. That was why Hoshawk had almost broken with the Hemispheric Congress thirty years before⁠—almost two of President Jeffrey’s lifetimes, Hoshawk reflected wryly.

The voice of the President, slightly amused, came to them. “I’m all right now,” he said. “I think I ate too much ice cream last night. Nine dishes.”

There were gasps. Hoshawk held back his sarcasm, but he could not refrain from a triumphant glance at the ancient Minister of State, who avoided his eyes.

Iraola was volatile. “Sabotage!” he said.

President Wadsworth licked his lips with the tip of his tongue. “No, the new pineapple-avocado. Very good, gentlemen. I recommend it.”

The neuro-analyst whipped a graph from his machine. Hoshawk barely looked at the graph. “Speed of reaction down to zero, point, nine zeros, three, four⁠—three times normal speed. Let’s get on with the war.”

The President’s eyes had been fixed hopefully on Hoshawk’s grizzled face, and at Hoshawk’s words he relaxed. His muscles rippled an instant, and then he was standing.

It was always a little shock to Hoshawk to see him move. It wasn’t right that any man, even a Superior Mutant, should be able to move faster than light-speed. You didn’t dare to trust a man like that.

Forty august heads⁠—all but Hoshawk’s⁠—inclined as the President stood there, but the President just smiled at them and yawned and stretched luxuriously.

Hoshawk was annoyed, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Hemispheric Congress had set up the Mutant College two hundred years ago, and every child with I.Q. above 200 and physique to match, became a member, for the sole purpose of selecting a President whose primary duty would be to fight a war, if it should come in his term, on one of the giant keyboards. This had been a concession to left-wing agitation that, if there was to be another war, it should be fought by the leaders and not by the ranks.

The Mutant College had been established when the Hunyas had overrun Europe and Asia, and now for two centuries there had been no war, but only preparation for war, East against West, through systems of selection and training closely parallel, but with a difference that was forever in Hoshawk’s mind⁠—if he was a capable man, the Hunyas kept him for twenty-one years. And obviously you could depend a lot more on a man of thirty-five than you could on a boy of sixteen.

Forgacs, president of the Hunyas, was thirty-three⁠—an old man for a mutant, and smart and clever as only a mutant could be at that age.

Yesterday the Hunyas had challenged.

It was sudden, but not unexpected. There was no reason for delay. At six o’clock tonight the two hemispheres would match force, and by eight o’clock it would be over.

Jeffrey Wadsworth moved. One instant he was before them with a towel around the middle of his bronze body, the next instant he was standing there dressed in light plastic slippers, red trunks and a sleeveless blue shirt. If Hoshawk hadn’t been so old, he would have been envious of the President’s physique.

“Gentlemen,” Jeffrey said, “I am ready to go to the Chamber.” He rubbed his bare midriff in the region of his stomach.

“Are you ill?” Hoshawk asked quickly.

“No,” Jeffrey watched the forty statesmen file out.

“Sire,” said Hoshawk, and his manner was respectful, for this boy of sixteen was his commander-in-chief, “I still wish we had trained a few thousand men in the use of weapons. I don’t see how we can fight a war with electronic tubes.”

Jeffrey looked at him gravely. “War with men is primitive. Lives can’t be replaced.”

Hoshawk sputtered. “There’s never been any civilized war.”

“This time there will be,” Jeffrey said confidently.

“But⁠—”

“We’ll win,” Jeffrey repeated. “We must win.” And Hoshawk caught a flash of something deep in his eyes. Hoshawk could not quite identify it, and yet he knew it spoke of the inner wisdom and conviction of the young. And in that direction, Hoshawk reasoned, lay their weakness.

“There’ll be trickery from Forgacs,” Hoshawk predicted.

“Quite possible,” said Wadsworth. “I don’t trust him, myself. He challenged on a technicality.”

Hoshawk was gratified to hear a worried note in the President’s voice. “He claimed we violated the Agreement of 2118,” he said, probing, “by keeping scientific discoveries to ourselves.”

Wadsworth answered quietly, “Then he challenged because he himself had secrets that he believed more potent.”

“Nevertheless,” said Hoshawk, “a few hundred men trained in the use of tanks⁠—”

Jeffrey shook his head. “And revert to the primitive,” he pointed out. “If the world is ever to get away from that kind of war, this is the time to prove it.”

“And if we lose, we do so at the expense of a hemisphere.”

“That’s true,” Jeffrey said calmly. “But if we should win by using men and destroying lives, we would do so at the expense of a civilization. By the act of reverting to the use of human fighters, we would convince the world that war could not be fought electronically.”

They reached the door of the Chamber. The President shook hands with Iraola and with Hoshawk.

“Wish me luck,” he said lightly.

They inclined their heads, and when they looked up, the President was seated on a beryllium stool that traveled a three-quarter circle before the great bank of keys like the keyboard of a giant organ. He pulled on a glass helmet and adjusted the sonic amplifiers to his mastoids. He flicked the oxygen valve open and shut, and then looked at it and listened intently.

Hoshawk saw an instant’s doubt on the President’s face. Hoshawk wondered if the valve was leaking, and frowned. The Chamber had been tested exhaustively, but with hundreds of thousands of circuits, cutbacks, bypasses, and relays, it was possible the oxygen valve had been overlooked.

Jeffrey strapped himself into the chair. The chronometer showed five minutes before the Hour. The President looked at the huge curved map of the Atlantic, now aglow with light above the big keyboard. His eyes swept the thousands of ivory keys and he rubbed his hands together for a final limbering of his fingers.

He spoke, and his intent voice came to them through the amplifier: “H.H.Q.”

“North America is completely evacuated, Sire, to the Polar icecap. There is now no human being on the continent. The Hunyas refused our request to declare New York an open city, and it was evacuated thirty minutes ago.”

The President called for a chronometer check. The instrument in the Chamber had lost two hundredths of a second, and Hoshawk could see that Jeffrey was making a mental note of that. He was forced to admit that the young mutant was thorough.

There were two minutes left. Jeffrey sat straight before the great keyboard, poised an instant, and then his incredibly facile fingers played the keys, flashing from one bank to the next, shooting the chair to right and to left, while he watched the map above him and the great bank of lights on each side. Then he leaned back, relaxed.

Hoshawk was glad now they were playing it safe. Jeffrey had insisted on the Midwest Chamber in preference to the Pacific or Atlantic station. For this was modern war. There would be only one person killed. This was a war of electronics, deadly and final, but no one would be actually killed but the losing President. That was decreed by the Six-Continent Council.

It was one minute before the hour. The President pressed a key.

The Starter answered: “President Wadsworth, are you ready?”

“Ready,” said Jeffrey in a high voice.

Hoshawk heard the Starter’s voice: “President Forgacs, are you ready?”

“Ja,” came the deep voice of the Hunyas president.

Jeffrey flicked the oxygen valve for a second, snapped it off, and Hoshawk saw him glance down at it. Then Jeffrey sat poised, all the alertness of his incredible mind bearing intently on the map before him.

A bell sounded. The war was on!

Jeffrey did not move. He waited, and watched. Ten trillion electronic tubes would flash their information on the Map. He waited⁠—one minute, two minutes, five minutes. The Map was dark.

So Forgacs wanted him to move first.

Jeffrey flicked the oxygen and his chair shot to the left. His fingers blurred into movement. He shot back to the center of the keyboard and focused his entire intellect on the Map.

A dozen tiny red lights rose off the coast of Newfoundland and raced eastward. Each light represented a thousand rockets loaded with thirty tons of D.T.N. One of those rockets would wipe Berlin from the earth⁠—if it struck.

But Hoshawk knew the President did not expect them to reach Europe.

They did not. Near the coast of Holland they began to wink out. One got as far as Cologne.

If the Chamber had been above ground instead of three hundred feet deep in solid rock, they would have felt the concussion, for D.T.N.’s powerful waves traveled at the speed of light.

Still there was no answer.

Jeffrey’s fingers played for an instant on the keys. Red lights rose from Labrador, from near Boston, from Florida, and streaked east⁠—not for Berlin this time, but for Marseilles.

Jeffrey was testing Forgacs’ explosive screen. It was wholly effective; one after the other, the trains of red lights winked out.

But now there was an answer. From the Bay of Biscay red lights with black dots on them began to wink on as the mammoth tabulating machine in the room below recorded the information from thousands of hidden electronic tubes, totaled it, and presented it on the Map.

The President hardly watched them. His screen with its principal power plant in Philadelphia would stop the rockets, up to a total of some seventy-five octillion macro-ergs.

On the off chance that Forgacs would forget to close his screen after his rockets had passed it, Jeffrey fired a salvo from the Bahamas.

Forgacs answered with three salvos from Brest, and Jeffrey gave him back ten from Long Island, then Hoshawk frowned as he saw the President rub his stomach. Hoshawk had always opposed that abominable atavistic confection called ice cream.

It was a game of incredibly swift calculation and rapier thrusts from strong point to strong point in the effort to break through the screen. Once the screen should be broken, anything might happen.

Jeffrey could see when his own screen was up, but their science had devised no way to detect the enemy’s screen except by firing into it. Jeffrey pressed a pedal with his left foot, and a thin golden line flashed on in a flattened arc from Greenland down through the Atlantic and curved around the Falkland Islands.

Jeffrey’s screen was up. The Biscay salvos began to wink out against it. Jeffrey’s hands began to flash. Red lights winking up along the coast of Europe and from North Africa showed that Forgacs was opening up.

Jeffrey cut in the oxygen for a second and flicked it off, then his left foot slashed at the pedal as he cut his screen to let his own rockets through and then threw it on again to stop the enemy.

Forgacs was beginning a drive on Philadelphia, the site of the power plant. Jeffrey was watching for an opening to Marseilles, vulnerable for the same reason.

Jeffrey kept firing rockets, but his mutant mind would be racing ahead, calculating with infinite precision the times of discharge and times of arrival.

It was apparent by now that Forgacs’ most powerful defenses were centered around Marseilles, because Forgacs was not using them. This meant he was not taking a chance on opening the Marseilles sector of the screen.

Jeffrey calculated the probable interchange of batteries for some sixty moves ahead, Hoshawk knew, then he began to fire the Philadelphia batteries at intervals.

The firing rose in intensity, and Jeffrey’s faster-than-light fingers played the great keyboard like a master organ. A bell sounded and his right foot threw on the western screen with its automatic cutout.

And all the time Jeffrey fired his big Philadelphia batteries at intervals with a definite rhythm⁠—five, three, and six seconds.

He shot to the right and manipulated a bank of keys and was back in the center almost instantaneously.

He did not pause in his rocket salvos, but in three minutes and eight seconds his first salvo of one-ton atom bombs would reach the Marseilles screen. If he had calculated correctly, the Marseilles screen would be open for an instant just as the atom bombs reached it. He didn’t think Forgacs could resist the temptation to blast Philadelphia with his Marseilles batteries.

Presently a thousand red lights winked up from the screen at Marseilles. But Forgacs overlooked the atom bombs. They were slower than the rockets, and there was no way to tell, from the Map, which was which.

Jeffrey shot a look at the chronometer, and Hoshawk saw the atom bombs go through. A few seconds later the glow in Marseilles began to redden, and Hoshawk exulted. The atom bombs had done their work. The Marseilles screen was weakening.

Jeffrey played the keys with fantastic speed. The war would soon be over. Thousands of little red lights began streaking toward Marseilles. At first they exploded in air as they hit the screen, but as the explosive force of the D.T.N. began to drain the screen, those behind began to pour through.

But there was a flash from Philadelphia, and a shock went through Hoshawk. Something was wrong there. Jeffrey hadn’t intended that. Forgacs had used atom bombs and had broken through when the screen was down.

Jeffrey’s fingers snatched at the oxygen valve. He tore it off and threw it on the floor. He still held one important advantage. He was ahead of Forgacs by forty seconds.

Philadelphia went out and the golden defensive screen began to fade, but Jeffrey, tensely erect, stayed on the attack. Hundreds of green lights began to rise around Marseilles⁠—great submarines, controlled by electronics and carrying tanks and guns and explosives.

The green lights converged on Marseilles. They got through the screen. Now was the big gamble. Jeffrey guessed that Forgacs would operate from an underground chamber near Marseilles itself.

It wasn’t a logical thing to do, and so Forgacs would do it, believing that Jeffrey would pass Marseilles and go inland to find the Chamber.

Jeffrey let him believe that. He sent eight thousand giant electron-controlled bombers through the Marseilles gap and straight for Berlin.

The green lights started winking on the coast of France, showing the submarines were unloading amphibious tanks. Jeffrey started them out across France at high speed. Near Paris they met heavy resistance from Forgacs’ tank-killers.

But now Jeffrey had more trouble. Forgacs had slipped a salvo of atom bombs into the Labrador power station, and the entire north quadrant of Jeffrey’s screen was down. And just at that instant, the automatic breaker failed and a tube burned out in the Montevideo power station, and the southern half of South America was exposed. Green lights began to wink up at the open spaces.

Jeffrey was grim. It was near the end. Dog eat dog. His flying fingers chose to ignore Forgacs’ attack, beyond firing millions of salvos of small rockets which were little better than a delaying action.

There were only two targets in this war⁠—the Chambers.

Jeffrey released his trump⁠—thirty-five hundred flying robot tanks.

They rocketed through the Marseilles screen and came on the city from the land side, firing eight-inch rockets and shooting flames out half a mile ahead.

But this was a feint, too. From the sea now rose a great armada of robot submarine carriers that spewed out tanks that were little more than armored tank-cars filled with jellied X.P.R., which exploded always down, toward the center of gravitation. They poured out the jelly on the surface around Marseilles for a distance of twenty miles until according to Jeffrey’s figures the ground was covered a foot thick. The flamethrowers roared into it and Jeffrey stopped them there.

Then he fired his last salvo of atom-bombs from the Bahamas.

In the meantime, Forgacs’ tanks had overrun Boston, searching for the American Chamber.

The lights began to wink out, and Hoshawk knew that Boston was being destroyed.

Orange lights, indicating bombers, were heading for Chicago, and Hoshawk knew that if Jeffrey’s guess on Marseilles was bad, he had not much longer to live.

He looked at the Map. The atom-bombs were at Marseilles. A glow showed around the twenty-mile circle that he had covered with jelly, and Hoshawk knew the atom-bombs had landed.

He knew that on the other continent, the most tremendous explosion in man’s history was taking place. And when it was over there would be a mile-deep crater where Marseilles had been, and anything, no matter how deep it was buried, would be destroyed by concussion.

Jeffrey still played the keys, but his eyes were on the orange lights approaching Chicago.

They reached Chicago, perhaps directly over their heads, but Hoshawk felt no bombs. A moment later the planes were still going westward.

Jeffrey called the Starter. “Does Forgacs concede?” he asked.

There was a moment’s delay, then, “Forgacs does not answer.”

The President let out an undignified whoop. He tore off the straps that held him in the chair, threw his helmet across the Chamber. “We won!”

The Hemispheric diplomats were gathering excitedly in the corridor. Jeffrey unsealed the Chamber.

Hoshawk shook hands with him. “You did it,” he said gruffly. “I apologize for ever thinking⁠—”

The Chamber shuddered, and Hoshawk paled, but Jeffrey held up his hand. He glanced at the chronometer. “That was Marseilles blowing up,” he said.

His feet moved and he was gone. In a moment he was back. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he begged. “I’ve got to see the squad. Just figured out a way to beat the Blues. If you⁠—”

He stopped, frowned.

He had felt it before they did⁠—a distant blast. Then they heard it⁠—a dull explosion through three hundred feet of solid rock above them. The floor shuddered under their feet.

It came again, and again, farther away. A pattern. Then off somewhere else came another string of explosions.

The forty august heads stared at the ceiling. Mouths were open, but the President’s mutant brain in seconds analyzed the possibilities and came up with the answer:

“Atom-bombs!”

“Impossible!” growled Hoshawk. “Forgacs’ Chamber was destroyed.”

The President was already back in the Chamber. He pressed a key.

“Starter,” came the answer. “Forgacs’ Chamber is destroyed. You have won the war.”

Hoshawk was behind him. “But he’s still firing, isn’t he?”

“No.” The President was icily alert. He pointed to the big map. There were no red pinpoints that would indicate rockets or bombs coming from the European continent. “The Chamber is gone. Undeniably gone.”

A new pattern of bomb-bursts came from above. “Chicago must be destroyed by now,” said the President harshly. He pointed to a blacked-out area on the ground-glass screen above. “There are no detector tubes left above us. But look⁠—orange lights. Thousands of them coming from the sea on the Maryland coast. And look there, to the right. One⁠—two⁠—fifteen thousand bombers coming!”

Hoshawk nodded as if he had known it all the time. “Sure. He has men in those planes. Live men who can observe and act independently. He’s throwing hundreds of thousands of planes and submarine tractors and mobile bomb-throwers at us⁠—all operated by men. And Forgacs himself is here, leading them. We’re whipped, Sire! Where is your civilization now?”

Wadsworth was calm. He was taking it like a man, anyway. He threw a lever and poised at the great keyboard, then his mutant fingers began to work in blurred movement.

Hoshawk watched the screen above. The Atlantic filled with long trains of red lights that arose from their American bases and streamed eastward.

Hoshawk blinked. “You’re firing everything. And you’ve locked the controls.”

Wadsworth didn’t look up. “In five minutes,” he said, “there won’t be an ounce of explosive left in any emplacement in America.”

“But that’s⁠—” Hoshawk started to say “foolish,” but he changed it. “That won’t help, Sire. Forgacs’ equipment is all over here, now.”

But Wadsworth leaned back. Their golden explosive screen showed no longer on the Map. Already some of the emplacements had ceased to spew out red lights, and the tail-ends of their trains were disappearing to the east.

Hoshawk shuddered as he saw that now America was completely defenseless.

But Wadsworth spoke into his transmitter. “Radio. Give me special frequency three-hundred-eighty-one thousand, six hundred kilocycles. Clear all airlines.”

“Yes, sire.”

The President pressed the scrambler button and then spoke. The words came out of the amplifier. “Three tons of butter unloaded a fast curve day before tomorrow because the baby was yelling for its morning highball. The soapsuds are thick enough for whipping but who knows where or when.”

The President leaned back and smiled. “That’s an order to all sixteen thousand mutants over the country to be on the alert at their predetermined stations.”

Hoshawk frowned. “But everybody’s been evacuated.”

“Not the mutants. You see General, we ourselves haven’t trusted Forgacs.”

Hoshawk’s grim face lighted up. “Do you mean you have secretly made some fighting equipment?”

Wadsworth shook his head. “No. We could have. There’s a loophole in the Twenty-one Eighteen Agreement. But we have observed the spirit⁠—ah!”

Up on the ground-glass screen, purple lights had been flashing on at intervals over the United States, until now there were nineteen, and Wadsworth spoke: “Those represent transmitter stations equally spaced over the country. They are all manned by mutants.”

Hoshawk actually snorted. “Transmitter stations! You can’t fight with words! And, anyway, there won’t be any power at all within a half hour.”

“They each have their own power plant,” The President said quietly.

Hoshawk looked at the map again and groaned. The nation was almost covered by a canopy of orange lights marked with black crosses. “There must be at least a million bombers over us! They’ll wipe out the whole country within an hour. If there’s anything you can do, do it!”

The President was pale, but he sat quietly. “Stalled,” Hoshawk thought sardonically. It took something besides smartness to win a war. It took character, too.

Wadsworth pointed to the American shores. Long lines of green and white and black and yellow dots coming from the sea, crawling in among the orange lights that swarmed over America like a gigantic swarm of hornets. “Submarines, amphibian battleships, flamethrowers, tanks,” he said.

Hoshawk stood erect. “If it were not against regulations, Sire, I would be tempted to blow my head off. We shall be destroyed as a people and as a continent.”

The President’s hands were clenched, but he answered slowly, “As a continent, perhaps. But the buildings can be built again. As a people⁠—no, I don’t think so. As a civilization, I hope we can be saved.”

Hoshawk’s eyes narrowed. “How?” he demanded.

“Those purple lights represent sonic transmitters. In other words, generating stations for sound frequencies above the narrow band which can be heard by humans. They were developed, built, and financed by graduate mutants. They broadcast on different frequencies that we have determined most effective in upsetting the equilibrium of unstable chemical compounds.”

“Do you mean,” asked Hoshawk, “that you are going to try to detonate the explosives carried by Forgacs’ planes?”

“His planes, and anything else that carries them. We have analyzed samples of his explosives to determine the critical frequency of each. These nineteen stations cover the country. Any known explosive in the continental United States will be detonated when these stations go into operation.”

“What if Forgacs has some unknown explosive?”

Wadsworth was solemn. “We take that chance,” he said. “But the range of possible explosive combinations is well known, and something entirely different is unlikely. At any rate⁠—”

“They’re starting to drop bombs!” Hoshawk said.

The President watched the red glow around Kansas City. His face was taut. “There will be many cities destroyed,” he said. “But we must wait for all of Forgacs’ equipment to be within our continental limits. It must all be destroyed at once.”

“But the bombers are in action,” said Hoshawk. “Denver is getting it now.”

Wadsworth’s eyes were on the coastlines. “It will be twenty minutes at least before we can open the transmitters. We may lose most of our cities by that time, but there is nothing we can do.”

The red glows began to spread. Dallas and Fort Worth, New Orleans, Atlanta, Miami, San Diego and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The bombers were systematically destroying America’s population centers. And still Wadsworth waited. He sat tense before the Map, watching the endless stream of lights come from the sea.

But they were beginning to end. Many were far inland, attacking the smaller cities, cleaning up the big ones.

“The bombers won’t be destroyed,” said Hoshawk, “if they’ve already dropped their bombs.”

“I think they will, for all practical purposes,” said the President. “Their ammunition, their signal flares⁠—everything explosive will be detonated.”

“How can you cover them all at once?”

“There are over nine hundred frequencies⁠—but we don’t know that they will be enough,” Jeffrey pointed out gravely. “We can only hope.”

Hoshawk couldn’t stand still any longer. He paced the floor before the Map. “Every city in America of more than a hundred thousand is gone⁠—obliterated,” he said tonelessly. “Can’t we ever⁠—”

“Wait!” The President was alert. “The last line of flamethrowers is coming on land.” He pointed to the black dots streaming up on the west coast. He spoke into the audio transmitter. He didn’t bother with the scrambler now. “Sonic stations on. Emergency force. Sonic stations on. Emergency force. Situation critical.”

He pointed to the Map and sat back. Within a few seconds the purple lights began to flash intermittently.

“They’re on,” said the President. “But it will take a few minutes for them to reach full intensity. The sonic devices operate at high speeds⁠—some at two hundred thousand r.p.m.”

Hoshawk watched, almost without breathing. For the first time he was aware that the forty statesmen of the Western Hemisphere were watching through the glass windows of the Chamber.

At that instant purple glows began to surround the green lights, starting on the east coast of Florida and spreading upward.

“Amphibian submarines,” whispered the President. “Their aerial torpedoes are exploding!”

“And up around the Great Lakes,” said Hoshawk. “There it’s amphibian tanks.”

The President sat, and watched. The glows spread. They absorbed flamethrowers, tractors, mine-heavers. The Map of America was a clustered mass of lights, with the purple glow beginning to consume everything in its reach.

“The planes,” said Jeffrey. “They’re still untouched. They anticipated something like this.” He barked into the microphone. “All stations, ascending frequency!” he ordered, and turned to Hoshawk. “We don’t know how effective this will be. It isn’t as powerful as the static ranges. But⁠—”

“It is! They’ve got the range!” cried Hoshawk.

Jeffrey looked. Near Albuquerque, New Mexico, a cluster of orange lights was being consumed by the purple glow. Jeffrey shot a glance at a dial. “All stations! All stations! Frequency seventy-two thousand, nine eighty. Emergency. Frequency seventy-two thousand, nine eighty.”

And the purple glow rolled and spread and consumed Forgacs’ bombers by the thousands.

At last Wadsworth looked at the Map, with nothing left but the dead embers of a mighty army.

Hoshawk shook hands with him and then looked for a place to sit down for a moment. “Sire,” he said at last, licking his lips with the tip of his tongue, “if it isn’t presumptuous, I’d stand the check for a dish of that new ice cream.”

Jeffrey looked at him and smiled. “You’d better have one yourself.”

Hoshawk’s grizzled face was solemn. “I’m going to,” he said.

Parking, Unlimited

I could have taken that three hundred dollars and gone to school for a year, by washing dishes two hours a night. I had worked for that money, too; shocking wheat for twelve hours a day in the August sun is no vacation. But Slim Coleman convinced me that we could run that three hundred into enough to take us both for four years.

I hadn’t even had time to get a haircut⁠—and I did want a haircut; now it was pretty shaggy.

But Slim, diplomat that he is, didn’t even seem to notice my hair. “I’ve got a real deal,” he said, and his deep eyes were shining with enthusiasm. “Have you got any money?”

“Some,” I said cautiously.

“It takes three hundred. Have you got that much?”

I had intended to say no, but Slim has a way of fixing his deep, somber eyes on you that gives ineffable dignity even to a touch. “Okay,” I said hopelessly. “What’s the bite?”

“Well, you see, it’s like this.” We went into a drug store and ordered cokes, and Slim characteristically insisted on paying for them when he probably couldn’t have bought a package of cigarettes. I let him pay, too. I had three hundred and one dollars, and I had no intention of parting with a nickel of it⁠—except a dollar for a haircut.

“I was using the brain-finder and I ran across the owner of this unused garage in the Loop. His name is Richard LaBombard and he’s got a lot of parking lots through the Loop, and you know what he’s doing?”

I saw the waitress stare at me. I swallowed and tried to listen to Slim. “No.”

Slim was staring at the waitress. “He loads them up with used cars every day so those who are hunting a parking place can’t get in,” he said absently. “You know what he wants?”

“Well, no.” I never could figure those things, but Slim could see the angles a mile away. He was always good at that.

“He’s made an application for a permit to build a parking ramp that will cover a solid block down in the middle of the Loop. Now, if he can build a place to park eight or ten thousand cars, naturally that one spot is going to be the best business spot in the city. And Richard LaBombard holds leases or options on half the store space around that block. He stands to make millions.”

“Where does my three hundred come in?”

Slim ignored the acidulousness in my voice. “Well, as I say, I followed him with the brain-finder and found him holding hands with the mayor’s wife at a skating rink⁠—and the next day I⁠—ah⁠—persuaded him to give me an option to lease this building on the edge of the Loop.”

“You mean you blackmailed him.”

“That’s a harsh word. I prefer ‘persuaded’ myself. After all, he wouldn’t want something like that to come up just when he’s finagling for that permit, would he? Anyway, I paid five dollars for the option.”

“That’s unusual. You’ve got some of your own money in this deal.”

Like a gentleman, Slim ignored that thrust. “Tomorrow is the first. I’ve got to raise two hundred and fifty for a month’s rent. We’ll need fifty more for deposits on light, heat, and power. We’ll make a million within a month. We split fifty-fifty.”

“How do you make the million?”

Slim looked around. Nobody was near; he leaned close and whispered. “This is the invention of the century. We can solve the parking problem of the entire city. You know how it is⁠—you can’t even get into a parking lot after ten a.m. Lots of businesses are threatening to put branches out in the suburbs.”

“Yes?”

“The parking problem must be solved if the city is to survive,” Slim said dramatically.

“Okay, but how can you make any more out of an old building than anybody else?”

He whispered again. “I can create a magnetic field that will slow electrons down to almost zero velocity. A car will shrink to about four inches long.” He stared at me intently. “Do you see what that will mean?”

I sighed. “I’m afraid I do. If it works, you can pack a million cars in a space that ordinarily would hold about a thousand.” I tried to stop my enthusiasm, but it was too late. The idea was taking hold. “And that garage is right across the street from Newton’s, the biggest department store in the city.”

“The parking problem was intensified last week when they abolished parking on the street so the afternoon traffic could get through. Boy, this is the spot for us!” Slim said.

“Will it take all of three hundred dollars?” I asked Slim.

He nodded gravely, “Every cent. And then it will be a shoestring.”

“Wouldn’t two hundred and ninety-nine be enough?”

“No,” said Slim. He looked back at me. He had always been that way; he never compromised with my money.

I shuddered when I saw my hair in the mirror as we left. But, I knew I’d better keep the dollar for cigarettes.⁠ ⁠…

We paid the first month’s rent; I put up the deposits, and Slim brought a bunch of wire and stuff from his basement, and we worked till one o’clock winding gadgets and building a regular stall to run a car into. This garage had a ramp going to the basement floor, and we decided to use that floor. Also, there was an old freight elevator up to the second and third floors, and we could park a few on the main floor and send a few upstairs when we had time, because of course we didn’t want the secret to get out.

Slim tried the squeezer-upper when he got it finished. He set a couple of old sawhorses inside and, turned on the juice. It was uncanny to see those things shrink. You could even hear the legs scrape on the concrete floor as they pulled together. In just about three seconds the sawhorses were an inch high. Then Slim reversed the current and they expanded to normal size again. All this in about one breath.

“But look,” I said, suddenly stricken with a horrible thought. “What if you don’t get a car back exactly the size it was at first? Then new tires wouldn’t fit, new parts wouldn’t fit⁠—oh, my goodness!” I was abruptly overwhelmed with the enormity of such damage.

“That’s all taken care of,” he assured me. “The electrons in any given object seem to have a tendency to resume their former orbits if they get a chance. In other words, if I expand a car to almost its normal size and then cut off the power, the electrons will sort of coast into their original orbits and the car will resume its exact former size. Sort of a quantum jump, I suppose.”

I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

“Of course, if you go too far, you’ll have an oversize car, but you could reduce it again,” said Slim. “Now in the morning we’ll hang out a parking sign and let them drive onto the main floor. You run the cars into the basement, and we’ll have this thing down under the ramp, out of sight.” Slim’s deep eyes were glowing. “We’ll make a million,” he said, rubbing his hands.

Well, by the end of the next day it began to look as if we had, indeed, solved the most urgent problem of modern civilization⁠—the parking problem. We had a sign out that said, Parking All Day 50c⁠—No one Turned Away, and by the end of the day we had taken in nearly five hundred dollars.

But it was a mankiller. I handed out claim checks and drove cars to the basement. Slim reduced them and hauled them across the room to a lineup. That was funny⁠—seeing a car shrink to three or four inches long. It was an irresistible impulse to pick it up, but when you tried, you changed your mind. The cars were practically as heavy in their small size as in their big size, and that made it something of a problem to get them moved around.

We had borrowed a toe-and-heel, a sort of crowbar with rollers on it, and with the reduced friction from the extremely small tires of the cars, it wasn’t too hard to move them, but it was still a mankiller to move a thousand in one day, and move each twice. We took turns at the reducer. I could handle them best by catching them under the front axle, but we decided to make them six inches long so it would be easier. The metal in its smaller size seemed as tough as it had been normally, but the parts were pretty small to get hold of with anything strong enough to handle them.

Slim solved this problem the second day when he put a long piece of gas-pipe on the heel-and-toe and shrank it considerably. The second day, too, we had two men working upstairs. The third day we had a gadget made so that we could roll a car’s front wheel on it and then pull the car anywhere. That was when we began to get our breath. The other way had been tough. I don’t know how Slim stood it at all; if I hadn’t worked in the wheat-fields all summer I would have fallen from exhaustion.

We had two of those gadgets made and then we tilted the reducing stall a little. We’d block the wheels with a two-by-four after we had a car inside, then reduce it, take out the block, let the car roll onto the gadget and haul it away. We arranged them on the concrete floor in rows about four feet apart. When somebody came back to get their car out we had to pinch-bar the car back up on the gadget and wheel it to the stall.

The second week we had two stalls, one reducing and one expanding, and Slim was talking of having a new sloping floor put in to help in handling. By that time we were handling two thousand cars a day; you can do your own arithmetic.

On the last day of the month, LaBombard came in to collect his next month’s rent. He was all eyes and he said he didn’t see how we could do it. “You took in twenty-two hundred cars yesterday and this building won’t hold over six hundred,” he said, his eyes darting all around. “You must have a fast turnover.”

Slim kidded him. “We put ’em on the roof,” he said, and paid him and pushed him out. I didn’t like the look in that man’s eyes as he left.

“Well,” said Slim exuberantly to me, “we’re sitting on thirty thousand dollars. Think you can get through college on that?”

“I hope I can take time off to get a haircut,” I said fervently. It was embarrassing to have people look at me and suddenly snicker and turn away to hide their faces. The trouble was, we didn’t dare turn the reducing over to anybody else, and so we both worked like robots.

By the beginning of the second month we had a moving ramp. The boys upstairs put the car on the ramp, the car came downstairs and went through the reducer, came out on the other side and onto a platform. We had a tow-truck that just backed up, reached down a steel platform under the front axle, and walked away. It was funny to see that two-ton truck hauling a toy car across the floor.

Yes, we had a deal. Late at night, after we’d closed up and had time for some coffee, Slim would talk about how we were going to build a chain of parking ramps across the country.

“We’ll make billions,” he said, his deep eyes shining with a faraway fanaticism that only Slim Coleman can exhibit, “and we’ll be known as the saviors of civilization. We’ll call ourselves Parking Unlimited.”

Then one night the building inspector came. We were just resting for a moment, with no cars in sight, when we looked around and there he stood. It startled us, because absolutely no one was allowed in the basement.

“What do you want?” Slim asked, and just then a car appeared on the ramp, coming down to the reducer.

“I’m the building inspector. I’m checking on the weight you’re putting in this building. It’s an old building, you know.” And all the time his eyes were darting everywhere.

“Did LaBombard send you?” asked Slim. The car was halfway down.

“Well, not exactly; we’re interested in this from the safety angle.”

A second car’s nose showed around the curve. I began to sweat.

“Okay,” said Slim. “Look us over. We do the parking upstairs.”

“What do you do down here?” The inspector stared at the reducing stall.

“That’s a newfangled washing apparatus.”

“What are all these toy cars on the floor down here?”

I practically swallowed my tongue. I had known that was coming.

But Slim said casually, “Oh, we’re making Christmas presents in our spare time.” The first car was about to enter the reducing stall.

The inspector stared at the two thousand cars on the basement floor. “They look plenty real.”

I held my breath. If he should ever try to pick up one of those cars, it would be all over for us. I could just imagine what two thousand owners would say if they should find out their cars had been reduced to six inches. People are not too broad-minded about such things.

But Slim had him by the elbow. With the savage shake of his head at me and the reducing stall, he said, “I’ll take you up and show you around.” They rode the ramp upstairs.

Right then I wanted to lie down and pass out with sheer relief, but the cars were beginning to pile up. I worked like a horse for half an hour, doing double duty. Then Slim came back with a haunting sadness in his eyes, and a faraway look that was not encouraging.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “He knows too much. Too many parking-lot people are putting on the heat.”

“You mean he knows how we are packing them in?”

“No, but he knows that we are taking in as many as three thousand cars a day, while half the parking lots in town are begging for customers.”

I sighed. “When are we leaving?”

Slim’s eyes were looking far away. “At the end of the week,” he said. “We’ve got enough money in the bank to pay all our bills. We’ve got a couple thousand in the safe, and we’ll take in three or four more. Tomorrow’s Friday. The next day will be Saturday and we should handle four thousand cars. We blow Saturday night. We’ll go to the coast.”

“Will I have time to get a haircut?” I asked hopefully.

“No. Get your hair cut in L.A.” He went on dreamily, “We should have five thousand. We can start up again, and this time we’ll start off right, so we can run indefinitely without anybody catching on. We’ve got some capital to work with now.”

Friday was a good day. Slim only chuckled when I told him there was a man sitting across the street with a pad of paper and a pencil, tallying the cars that came in and those that went out.

“We’re good for tomorrow,” said Slim, “then they can have it. I’ve got plane reservations for two a.m.”

He didn’t say so, but I think he was getting as tight inside as I was. We were close⁠—thirty hours from five thousand dollars⁠—enough to go through college in good shape.

Saturday was a bell-ringer. By six o’clock in the evening we had parked over four thousand cars, and they were still coming. The safe was full of tens and twenties, all nicely wrapped and labeled, and our two suitcases were beside it. Still the money was pouring in. Nine cars a minute. One every seven seconds. Two hundred and fifty dollars an hour. It was better than a mint. The basement floor was beginning to fill up.

At six thirty Slim was bringing a car back to full size and saying to me, “Watch this one. This is the building inspector’s car; he’s trying to get a clue.”

At that exact moment a voice spoke behind us. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen.” It was one of those clear, soft voices with little tinkling bells in it. Know what I mean?

Slim turned and stared. “Madam,” he said, “don’t you know the sign says ‘No Admittance’?”

She looked repentant. “I’m sorry.” She looked hurt. “I didn’t think you gentlemen would mind.” She turned as if to go.

I saw Slim melting down. I didn’t blame him. That girl could have melted tungsten. Yes, I recognized her from her pictures in the society section⁠—the mayor’s wife.

Slim was apologizing. “I beg your pardon, Madam. It’s quite all right. Your loveliness and radiant beauty just startled us. We⁠—”

While Slim was laying it on thick, the building inspector’s car was expanding. Now it became considerably too big for the stall and split it like a stick of dynamite going off in a shoebox. It split it into a thousand pieces and then stood there, a passenger car seven feet tall.

The mayor’s wife gave a little scream of delight. Slim gave a horrified gasp. I tried to faint.

“Oh,” she said, “such a big car!”

Slim moaned. “Please, Madam, will you leave now?”

She looked hurt again. “Yes, but will you please put this package in my car?”

“I will,” said Slim, through tight jaws. “But⁠—”

“Why, that looks just like the building inspector’s car,” she said, wide-eyed. “It’s his number, too.”

“Madam,” begged Slim, “you’re no dummy; please leave now and let us get on with our work.”

She walked upstairs dubiously. Slim was studying the enormous car with a hopeless look on his face. Orders for cars to be taken out were pouring down the chute.

“What are we going to do now? We can’t run that car into the other stall, because it’s too big. It will take all night to build another stall, and no doubt the inspector is waiting up there with a squad of cops, hoping something will happen. After all, we’re costing LaBombard a million bucks.” His eyes opened suddenly. “I’ll bet he sent the woman down here to spy on us.”

A car came down the ramp and went into the reducing stall, and Slim automatically set the dial.

The telephone rang, and I could hear the voice from where I stood. “The building inspector wants his car.”

“Coming right up,” Slim said.

Then he looked at me. I looked at him. “Get that safe open,” he jerked out. I dived for it.

I was spinning the combination when I heard the voices. The building inspector was riding the ramp down to the basement. Then I heard more voices and saw the bottom half of two cops and Richard LaBombard on the freight elevator.

Slim hissed to me. “Make it snappy!”

I was trying to, but I couldn’t get the thing open. Five thousand dollars in that safe and I couldn’t get it. I spun the dial frantically and started over.

But now the ramp was filled with people. The cops were getting off the elevator. I jumped up and ran over to where Steve was standing.

The building inspector was staring bug-eyed at his huge car. Somebody went around the stall and saw the six-inch car crawling out. Somebody else took hold of the stall and shook it. “Where’s my car? What’s going on?”

Well, a mob is a funny thing. In about half a minute there were eight hundred people in that basement, and all of them tearing apart the reducing stall.

Slim and I hesitated no longer. We ran up the stairway and sifted out through the crowd.⁠ ⁠…

At three o’clock in the morning Slim said to me, “You think that brakeman will kick us off?”

The brakeman came to us, sitting up there in the fresh night breeze on top of a carload of lettuce going east from California. He looked at me and then, as if he didn’t believe it, he held his lantern up and examined my head all the way around.

“Why don’t you go back to the farm? This ain’t no life for you,” he growled.

“I am considering that very seriously,” I said with as much dignity as I could.

The Bryd

The Bryd was awakened with a rude jolt. It didn’t even have time for a mental yawn. Something terrible was going on in Dale Stevenson’s mind, and the turmoil there made the Bryd most uncomfortable. It shook off the lethargy of its long sleep. It knew instinctively that Dale Stevenson was about to get in trouble and make his mind unsuitable for the Bryd’s occupancy.

The Bryd sighed. These humans were so unstable, so impulsive. The Bryd took a look around.

They⁠—Dale Stevenson and he⁠—were not on Earth. They seemed to be in space somewhere, 5,100 miles from Earth. Well, well, so men finally were breaking the shackles of gravitation. The Bryd became a little more interested.

But Dale Stevenson was reaching for a button that would fire a rocket to position the mirror and burn a path across the biggest city in Europe. Hey! what was going on here, anyway?

The Bryd had about a quarter of a second to do a lot of research. What was Dale Stevenson doing up here? What had he done with himself in the twenty-four years since the Bryd had curled up in the boy’s cozy four-year-old mind and settled down for a long nap?

The Bryd could have stayed Dale’s hand for a while, but the Bryd very much believed in minding its own business. It didn’t like to interfere with humans; that was policy. So it decided to get busy. It had a quarter of a second to find out things and decide what, if anything, to do about them. Certainly it couldn’t expect to stay comfortably in a mind as upset as Dale Stevenson’s⁠ ⁠… so it got busy.

The first thing to do was get oriented. The Bryd took a quick look around. Dale Stevenson, doctor of physics, was in charge of this sun-station, which was a man-made island in space, some three miles in diameter. The rim of the island was composed mainly of a steel framework like the rim of a wheel, with little cabins at various intervals to house a power plant, various controls, rocket berths, repair shops, and living quarters for the sun-station’s crew.

The center area of the sun-station was a giant mirror, three miles across, made up of thin sheets of metallic sodium fastened to a skeleton of wire nets. The sodium was very light in weight, and being in airless and heatless space, was inert. Also it was highly reflective.

The whole business was kept at a point approximately 5,100 miles from Earth, where Earth’s gravitational attraction approached neutrality and where the entire space station could be maintained in a given position or moved at will with a minimum expenditure of energy.

Technically the station was owned by Night Sun, Inc., along with nearly a hundred others around Earth, and this particular station, No. 18, was under contract to furnish illumination at night over Paris, France, by staying out of Earth’s shadow and reflecting sunlight on Paris during the night.

Management of such a station involved many mathematical factors in distance, triangulation with Paris, velocity and angulation, and control of the curve of the mirror. Normally this was a parabolic curve, but it was constantly varied with other factors to produce the desired degree of illumination.

No. 18 was under the sole control of Dale Stevenson, who had been psych-tested and certified by the United Nations licensing board.

That made the Bryd feel a little better. It looked as if he had made a mistake twenty-four years ago, but it also looked as if the licensing board had been fooled within the last year, for Dale certainly was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble in Paris. He could actuate the controls to expand or contract the rim of the station and thus vary the focal length of the sodium lens, and if he should actually concentrate the sun’s rays in a small area, he could draw a flaming path of ruin through the center of Paris.

Reluctantly the Bryd checked again, and found that that was exactly what Dale Stevenson was about to do. The Bryd wondered why. It groaned. Humans were always up to something. Why couldn’t they relax so the Bryd could rest?

The Bryd had been so happy back in 2250⁠—or let’s see, was it up in 2250? (This was 2045.) That was when Bob What’s-his-name and that cute girl had landed on Pluto and given him a chance to get away. The long, lonely eons in Pluto’s absolute zero had been quite monotonous to the Bryd, which was nothing but pure energy but which certainly had its feelings. After almost a third of a billion years marooned on Pluto it had sometimes almost wished it had not been so adventurous in its youth and hopped that stray comet as it had swept by its home on Arcturus.

For it had tired of the comet and jumped off on Pluto, and then had discovered it didn’t have enough range of its own to get from Pluto to another planet. Then it was that Bob and Alys had come along on their ’round-the-system honeymoon, and the Bryd had hitched a ride to Earth (unknown to them), for it was pretty darned lonesome by that time.

It lived very happily with them until they got old, and then it decided to go back in time to 1950. There it found a nice friendly mind in Joe Talbott, and after it saved Joe from blowing up the Lithium Mountain and half the earth with it, it had settled down to snooze in Joe’s mind and hadn’t awakened until Joe died of old age. Then the Bryd had hunted a nice, stable mind and had finally picked Dale Stevenson, who was four years old, and had curled up for another long, quiet snooze. But now it was only twenty-four years later and Dale was in a bother.

The Bryd went deeper into Dale’s mind to see what was going on. Dale was worried about something. In fact, he had worried so much it had upset his normal mental balance. It seemed to have started back about twenty years ago, a few years after the Bryd had entered Dale’s mind.

It seemed that Dale’s parents had been killed in an atomic blowup, and Dale, eight years old, had been taken care of by his older sister.

“Don’t you worry, Dale,” she had told him stoutly. “I’ll take good care of you. And I’ll buy your clothes and your schoolbooks and everything. You won’t have to go to a home. I won’t let them take you.”

That’s what Dale had been scared of⁠—going to a home. He was happy with Marillyn. She took good care of him, and somehow managed to keep the authorities from finding out that a thirteen-year-old girl was supporting a small boy.

Dale had understood all those things later, when he started to the university and they became curious about his background. He realized then what she had done.

“I’ll remember all those things,” he told her in the first fullness of young maturity and his sudden realization of her loyalty. “You’ve practically devoted your life to me. I appreciate it. You’ll see,” he said, embarrassed in this new knowledge, but humbly grateful.

He got a chance to show her; for six months after his graduation, while he was being trained at Station No. 18, he insisted that she should come to visit his new post. Marillyn never had ridden a rocket because she was afraid of them, but she recognized the honor he was conferring on her, for very few persons but employees had ever set foot on a sun-station. She agreed to go. Dale arranged passage. Then she was severely injured in the takeoff.

Dale was devastated. He called in specialists, consultants, diagnosticians.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything. You’ll be all right in no time.”

But she wasn’t. She was badly crippled, paralyzed from the waist down, and she became pitifully thin.

Dale spent most of his salary on her. Doctors told him it was useless, nothing could help, that a part of her brain cells had been destroyed and could not be rebuilt, that she might live fifty years but she would always be helpless.

Dale refused to believe it. “She’s got to get well,” he said. “It isn’t right⁠—after all the things she did for me. When she was just a kid and should have been skating and dancing and going with boys, she was working to keep me from going to a home. She’s entitled to some fun now.”

But she didn’t have a chance. Her recovery would have been contrary to all medical experience.

Dale’s salary grew until he was getting twenty-five hundred a month, but most of it he spent on Marillyn⁠—largely against her wishes.

“Dale, I wish you wouldn’t insist on trying every newfangled cure that comes along. I know what the situation is. I can read. I know I won’t get well. I can’t. When that brain-tissue is destroyed, it’s gone forever. You go out and have some fun. Please.”

But Dale, worried but stubborn, said, “Do you remember that winter you sold papers on the street so I could have skates and a sled? Do you think I can forget that?”

“I didn’t mean it to become a burden to you,” she said softly.

He smiled. “It isn’t a burden. I’m doing these things because I want to⁠—because I want to see you active and pretty again. I’ll do it, too. You’ll see. Next month you’re going to the spa at Carlsbad.”

She tried to dissuade him, but next month she was bundled up and carried to the train to go to Prague.

It was in Prague that Dale met Ann Wondra, last daughter of a long line of Polish nobility. Ann was dark-haired, quick-eyed, and she could laugh in a way that warmed a man’s blood. At any rate, she warmed Dale Stevenson’s.

They went hunting together. They ate dinner together. They rode together. They visited Marillyn together, and after they came away from Marillyn in her wheelchair, Ann said, when he stopped the car on the top of a high hill in the moonlight from where they could see her ancestral castle, “You’re determined that she shall get well, aren’t you, Dale?”

“Of course,” he said.

“What will you do if she doesn’t?”

He refused to consider that. “She will,” he said confidently.

By that time Dale’s arms were tightly around her. So, for that matter, were Ann’s around Dale.

“You are quite sure,” Ann said cautiously.

“I suppose,” he said, in an abrupt humbleness, “it’s a fixation by now. It’s something I recognize as a problem, and the best way to cure it is to cure Marillyn. When I go out on a party, or when I am extravagant, it nicks my conscience, because Marillyn made all these things possible for me in the first place.”

“It isn’t your fault that she’s an invalid, is it?”

“Not directly, no, although she didn’t want to take that trip. However, I don’t think it’s that as much as it is the feeling that if I get too much interested in other things I might neglect her⁠—that is, I might be somewhere else doing something for fun just at the time when the opportunity would come to get her cured. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” she said gently.

“For instance,” he went on, very much concerned with making her understand, “if I should spend a lot of money on other things⁠—say, for instance, that I should marry you and we’d build a home and all⁠—that would take a lot of money and it would make me unconsciously less eager to find a cure for Marillyn because deep down I’d know I might not be able to pay for it.”

Ann drew back in her arms. Her black eyes reflected the starlight. “Dale, what did you say? Did you say ‘if I should marry you’?”

He looked back at her. “Uh-huh.”

“You’ve never even said you loved me.”

He kissed her very tenderly on the lips. “I do,” he said.

Then they kissed so fiercely that the Bryd, listening in solely to get an angle on this whole business, got excited and very nearly got stuck crosswise in the time-stream.

But two weeks later Dale went to his post on sun-station No. 18, and started making Paris days last all night. Six months later he was back for a visit, and Marillyn said, “I’d like to go home, Dale. After all, you’ve done your part and much more. And this isn’t helping me. It’s pleasant and all that, but it won’t make me walk. I could go to the sanatorium in Florida and it would be just as pleasant and much less expensive. Then you could pursue a normal course of life.”

Dale pretended to bristle. “What do you mean by that?”

Marillyn smiled. “Ann is in love with you, Dale. She visits me often, and you should see her eyes sparkle when we mention you. Dale, will you see her tonight?”

“Maybe I will,” he said, “but there won’t be any marriage until you are well.”

“You’ve been apart six months now,” Marillyn said softly. “Maybe if you see her you will change your mind.”

Ann would be a wonderful wife. She was much like Marillyn⁠—dark-haired, quick-moving, dignified but warm, affectionate, and loyal. His wife would have to be loyal, of course, like Marillyn. That was essential.

He hired a car that afternoon and drove out to the castle to surprise Ann. He reached the grounds just before dark, so he parked the car on the hill where Ann and he had been that last night. Maybe she and he would walk back there later.

He started to walk through the grounds, and when he reached the flower garden it was almost dark. He walked along the cinder-path by the roses, then cut across the grass. He heard murmuring voices, and a moment later he saw Ann walking in the garden. With her was a man, and his arm was around her. The man stopped to snap off a rose. He turned to Ann with a graceful, almost feminine gesture, and she smiled. Then with elaborate and intimate motions he pinned the rose in her hair.

Dale was hurt. He went back quietly to the car. Of course he had not asked her to marry him, but then he had mentioned it⁠—and couldn’t she be loyal to his memory? Dale was filled with unexpected jealousy.

After a restless night he had just about rationalized the entire situation. He knew the scene in the garden did not necessarily mean anything. He would phone Ann, mention last night, and of course she would explain. Then he picked up the morning telepaper from London and read in the gossip column that Ann Wondra, the Polish beauty, might soon announce her engagement to Georges Raoul Dumont, son of the French ambassador. Dale was stricken⁠—

And was still in that state of mind, the Bryd saw, when a man came to his hotel room that afternoon. “You are in charge of sun-station No. 18, over Paris, I believe.”

This was very interesting to the Bryd, because it saw that the man was cleverly masked with a plastiform shell that did not at all appear to be a mask.

“Yes,” Dale said glumly.

The man’s eyes looked speculative. He glanced at the telepaper on Dale’s bed, and the Bryd, figuratively speaking⁠—for of course the Bryd was nothing but pure energy⁠—opened its eyes. For the Bryd knew the man’s thought, and was astonished to learn that Dale had been closely watched for some time. Following the scene in the flower garden, the item in the telepaper had been especially arranged to produce a certain reaction in Dale Stevenson without Ann Wondra’s knowledge.

“You know, of course,” the man said, “that France is about to disturb world peace by invading Spain.”

Dale sat up and frowned. “No, I didn’t know it.”

“It is true,” the man said, watching him intently.

“Why are you telling me?”

The man cleared his throat significantly. “You might be in a position to save the world from an atomic war.”

Dale stiffened. “You must know,” he said coldly, “what my position is. I am in the employ of the United Nations, and any attempt to control my actions is coercion and the penalty is death.”

The man did not back away. He moved closer, and his eyes became black points of force. The Bryd saw that the man had mental powers unusual for that period of Earth’s history.

“Look at me, Dale Stevenson.”

Dale fought against it, but the man’s will was powerful. Dale’s resistance weakened. The man’s eyes never wavered from Dale’s. He moved still closer and spoke in a low tone. “Our information is that France will drop atomic bombs on Spain’s principal cities at three a.m. one week from today. Suppose⁠—just suppose⁠—that some other nation⁠—some nation powerful enough to do so⁠—should be in a position to warn France at two thirty that France would not be permitted to attack. Suppose this warning were backed up with a show of force to prove the warning meant business.”

“Isn’t that the job of the U.N.?”

The man’s face was only inches now from Dale’s. The Bryd shivered in its figurative boots. This man was a master hypnotist. Only they wouldn’t call him a hypnotist in these days. They’d call him a psyche-man. Psyche-control was much more powerful than hypnosis. Psyche-control touched the moral inhibitions, which hypnosis never had been able to do.

Dale was lost. In the end he agreed, for a cash-on-delivery fee of one hundred thousand dollars, to concentrate his sodium mirror beam on Paris at two thirty of the morning designated, and thereby, with a smoking path of fire and ruin, help the other nation to warn France that she must keep hands off Spain.

Perhaps Dale’s jealousy of Georges Raoul Dumont had a bearing on the agreement.

Dale had been so much under the foreign agent’s influence that he had not considered the ethics of the idea at all until time to press the button that would concentrate the sun-energy into a consuming column of fire. The time was now⁠ ⁠… and it was only now, with the hypnosis just beginning to wear off at the edges, that he found himself wondering vaguely about angles of the situation that previously had not occurred to him.

Who was the man who had talked to him? Whom did he represent? Why hadn’t he gone to the U.N. if he knew so much?

But then it was true, as the man had said⁠—if France planned to start dropping atomic bombs at three o’clock, it would be too late to appeal to the U.N. Dale didn’t like Frenchmen anyway.

Altogether, the Bryd concluded, Dale Stevenson was pretty muddled up in his mind. The man needed a rest, but that could be worked out later. Right now his finger was on the firing-button, and the psyche-control, though weakened, was pushing him to finish the job.

Oh dear, these humans certainly could muddle things.

The Bryd decided to have a look at Ann Wondra’s mind. And there it got somewhat startled, for Ann’s, which previously had been all warm and cozy as toast, was very low indeed. She was looking at a snapshot of Dale, and it wasn’t even a very good picture, but it exhilarated her and at the same time it depressed her, because she wanted Dale but couldn’t have him.

Ann was sitting cross-legged on a thick rug, drinking Darjeeling tea, and talking to her mother.

“I’m glad M. Dumont has gone back home,” she said, and the Bryd noted that there wasn’t any jump in her blood-pressure when she mentioned Georges’ name⁠—well, not much, anyway.

“He’s very handsome,” said her mother, knitting busily. The old lady’s blood-pressure jumped more than Ann’s.

“But he isn’t as nice as Dale Stevenson.”

“My sakes, Ann, I hope you don’t grow to be an old maid, mooning over that tongue-tied⁠—”

“Mother!” Ann got to her feet. She was long-legged and clean-limbed. The Bryd approved of her. It could imagine by now what she had done to Dale’s mind. It didn’t see how it had slept through it.

So the Bryd took a quick transition back to America and had a look at the mind of the doctor who took care of Marillyn Stevenson. The physician was having lunch with a consultation expert.

“You know,” the doctor said, fingering a Manhattan⁠—“I don’t know what to do about young Dale Stevenson. He’s still trying to cure his sister.”

“Maybe there’s a reason.”

“Sure there’s a reason. He has this feeling of gratitude and loyalty and all. That’s all there is to it, but he’s butting his head against the infinite inertia. He’s spending two thousand a month on that girl⁠—and the worst of it is, she doesn’t want him to. She knows what the score is and she’s resigned to it.”

“Well, loyalty is a wonderful thing, but I suppose it can go too far, and overshadow reason, especially in the young. Is there any chance at all for the girl?”

“No possibility. Progressive degeneration of the brain-tissue.” He tossed off the Manhattan and the Bryd shuddered⁠—it preferred Martinis, itself. “The only thing would be a miracle, and you know how scarce they are in the medical world.” He smiled. They both smiled. The Bryd mentally snorted. Who were they, to laugh at miracles? They thought they were pretty damn smart, didn’t they?

The Bryd decided it had better look in on Marillyn.

It found her in a glassed-in porch of the sanatorium, with her reclining chair facing south, and the sun pouring down through the magnolias. The Bryd liked this. Everything was restful and peaceful and pleasant⁠—

But something was wrong as hell in Marillyn’s mind.

She had a small bottle of something in one hand under the light blanket, and she was lying back running over everything in her mind. Dale loved Ann and Ann loved Dale. But they couldn’t get married because of Dale’s exaggerated sense of duty.

Marillyn didn’t want to keep them apart. She could adjust herself to a very pleasant life in a place like this, but Dale wouldn’t let her. As fast as he could save some money, he’d dream up some new scheme to get her cured.

Well, Marillyn reasoned, she wasn’t of any use to anybody. Why should she stay in Dale’s way? The Bryd was puzzled. What did she think she could do?

She had the little bottle under the blanket, she was thinking. A few drops of that and⁠—the Bryd was positively flabbergasted. The girl was getting ready to kill herself. The Bryd probed into her mind for an instant and discovered that she wasn’t being a martyr and had no complexes; she was just trying to straighten things out for Dale and Ann.

Oh, beans, thought the Bryd. If humans weren’t the dumbest beings ever! It watched Marillyn raise the bottle to her lips. It simultaneously took the form of a nurse, standing there at Marillyn’s side, and Marillyn gasped and said, “Oh, nurse, I didn’t know you were there.”

“I am,” said the Bryd in its best contralto voice. “Did you wish something, Miss?”

The hand with the bottle of poison fell back under the blanket. “No, I didn’t call.”

“May I move your chair out of the sun, Miss?”

“It isn’t in the sun,” Marillyn said.

The Bryd raised its eyebrows. It did some quick work on the wind, and there was the sun, shining steadily through an opening in the magnolia trees.

“Perhaps it is too bright,” said Marillyn. “If you’d just move it over there⁠—”

The Bryd was delighted. In the process of moving the chair, it got its figurative hands on the bottle and disintegrated it. Then it said, “Miss, don’t you think you will get well?”

Marillyn said calmly, resignedly, “There’s no chance. None whatever. When brain-tissue is gone, there is nothing medical science can do. They can’t build tissue, you know.”

“Oh?” said the Bryd.

“Only a miracle,” said Marillyn. “And miracles don’t happen in medical science.”

The Bryd almost snorted aloud. Oh, they didn’t, hey? It⁠—

The head nurse came striding up, her leather heels clacking on the tile floor. “Miss⁠—” She looked puzzled. “Who are you, anyway?” she demanded. “I’ve never seen you before.”

These women! Maybe the Bryd was getting peevish in its old age, but why couldn’t people mind their own business for a change?

It resolved itself into a doctor, and it was gratified to watch the head nurse’s eyes shoot open.

“Madam,” the Bryd said in its best baritone, “were you addressing me?”

“I⁠—” The head nurse swallowed. “No, sir, I⁠—I beg your pardon, sir.” She recovered slightly. “Have I seen you before, sir?”

Oh, bother! Details, details! Humans wouldn’t be happy if they weren’t tied up in details all the time. The Bryd dematerialized and went inside the sanatorium by the simple process of flowing through the spaces around the nuclei of the atoms in the wall. Then, on second thought, it went back and erased some memories from the mind of the head nurse; then it took Marillyn through the wall into the sanatorium. It went into her mind and did some repair work that would have amazed the finest brain surgeons on Earth. In a few months Marillyn’s paralysis would be gone and she would be well and happy. Miracles, did they say? Well, they’d asked for it.

The Bryd was somewhat irked with itself for having interfered⁠—but it had been for the best.

It got on a tight beam and went back to sun-station No. 18. Dale Stevenson’s finger was just starting to move the button. There was maybe a fiftieth of a second left.

The Bryd carefully implanted the knowledge of Marillyn’s cure in a corner of Dale’s brain and sat back to await results. But in the next hundredth of a second there was no response. Dale still was about to turn the sun on Paris.

So the Bryd, now thoroughly disgusted, implanted the knowledge of Ann’s love in another corner of Dale’s mind and then to its astonishment had to jump fast to get out of the way.

Did that ever get results! Dale held his finger. He got up and rubbed his forehead a moment. Then he went to the radiophone. “Get me the U.N. police headquarters in London,” he said.

He stood there beating his brains to figure out what had gotten into him, so the Bryd just felt around and erased a few memories, and everything was all right. Then the Bryd climbed into its favorite cozy spot in Dale’s mind. The spot was still warm and snuggly. It began to settle down⁠—but then it remembered something.

It got up. It went back to Earth and hunted up the minds of the men who were flying atom-bombs over France. The Bryd knew by now, of course, that France herself had never had any atom-bombs.

The Bryd went into the minds of the foreign fliers and sent them back to drop the atom-bombs on their own cities. After all, they had those bombs and they apparently were the kind who wouldn’t be satisfied until they could drop them. The Bryd dusted off its hands and headed wearily for sun-station No. 18. It hoped for many restful years ahead with Dale and Ann.

If it didn’t get them, the Bryd thought disgustedly, it had better try to hitch a ride back to Pluto. At least it had had rest and quiet there.

Remember the 4th!

This was a warm day in August⁠—a very warm day. Slim Coleman, my partner in detection work, says the sun is ninety million miles away, but this day it must have sneaked up pretty close. You could even see the heat waves coming up off the sidewalk. You can’t fry an egg on the pavement in Fort Worth, though, because you can’t stay out in the sun that long.

I mopped my brow, slung the water off my fingertips, and went into the lobby of the National Bank Building. The washed air made it cool and nice in there, and I slowed down to enjoy it. But one of the elevators came down, the door slid open, and the first man to get off was Swanberg, the building manager⁠—our landlord⁠—all dressed up in striped trousers and a fancy vest and wearing a high wing collar and a genuine cravat. He looked impeccable, immaculate⁠—and cool.

I wheeled and marched back outside into the sun. Slim and I were three months behind with the rent, and I figured the only reason Swanberg hadn’t ordered us out was that he just hadn’t gotten around to it. I didn’t want to run into him. If we could have paid our rent I wouldn’t have been carrying ham sandwiches and a bottle of coffee in my coat-pockets up to Slim Coleman while he worked on the Brain-Finder.

The heat almost smothered me after the coolness of the lobby. Damn that guy Swanberg, anyway. He was always so perfect, so completely unaffected by the weather, so supercilious and so cold, so mechanical. You knew he’d never had any trouble and never would have, because he would never be swayed by anything but cold logic. It’s only we humans with sentiments who get in trouble.

It was his untouchableness that griped me. He was so inhumanly perfect he always made me feel rough and uncouth. You know how it is. If I could just get something on him to throw off that complex, I’d be happy even if we did have to vacate. I guess I spent my time daydreaming about Swanberg⁠—Swanberg wearing an old-fashioned nightcap, Swanberg slurping his coffee, Swanberg sleeping with his socks on⁠—anything human.

What wouldn’t I have given to have a picture of him in the roller coaster the way I had been the night of July the Fourth, with a perfectly strange, perfectly gorgeous, slim blonde throwing her arms around his neck the way that one had around mine. I was willing to bet he had a big, hefty wife at home who made him step.

I shivered whenever I thought about that blonde. She was the kind I would have liked to marry, only one like that was way out of my reach. I didn’t have much education and I didn’t always know what to do around a real high-class female. That’s why I had been riding the roller coaster alone.

Well, there was nothing for it now but the coal-chute. A truck was backed up to the sidewalk and two very black-faced men were pushing coal down a steel chute through a manhole in the sidewalk. I ducked into the alley, unrolled the bundle under my arm, and threw out a pair of khaki coveralls. I hated this, but I did it anyway; I had to. We couldn’t afford to have my suit cleaned every time I went in through the sidewalk, so I got into the coveralls and zipped them up. I watched around the corner. When the truckers raised the steel bed, I walked up to the open hole in the sidewalk and dropped in casually.

I’m a short man anyway, a little on the chunky side, and that coal-hole was like a furnace. The sweat poured down my back and chest and the coal-dust poured into my nostrils. I got out of there as fast as I could and took the freight elevator to the twenty-second floor. I went through the hall, unlocked the door, got inside, and locked it again.

“That you, Doc?” came Slim Coleman’s deep voice.

“Yeah.” I held the coveralls out of the window, slapped the coal-dust out of them, took off my damp suit-coat and laid it on top of the desk, got the electric iron out of the desk-drawer and plugged it in. Our sign said Coleman & Hambright, Private Investigators, and we had to maintain appearances, but I wished we could afford a store-bought pressing. I brushed my pants, but they were damp, too, so I took them off and laid them out on the desktop, over some papers, with the creases pinched tight. I mopped my brow and went into the other room.

Slim Coleman looked up from a workbench covered with wires, tubes, condensers, and all kinds of electrical gadgets. He had a soldering-iron poised above something that looked like a forty-eight-tube radio. He had deep, deep brown eyes that always looked through everybody, but Slim was a hundred-percent. In fact, it was his loyalty that had us behind the eight-ball now. If he had dissolved partnership instead of offering to pay the damages the time I fell from a second-story window and went through a skylight into a whole tableful of expensive orchids⁠—but no, Slim paid it all⁠—twenty-two hundred dollars before he got through, because the cold air ruined a lot more orchids. And I hadn’t even gotten the evidence I was after. (No, it was just happenstance that I fell from the bedroom window of a movie star.)

“What luck?” said Slim in his husky voice.

“I served them, but look, Slim, I hope you get that Brain-Finder going pretty quick. Not that I mind crawling under the length of three pullman cars and cutting my ankles on the cinders to serve divorce papers on Tom Ellingbery, who’s worth a million. Not that I mind doing all that for a measly five bucks, but when I have to come through the sidewalk in the summertime to duck the landlord⁠—”

Coleman’s face lighted up. “The Brain-Finder is ready for a tryout,” he said. “Shall I show you yourself the night of July the Fourth?”

Well, partly because I guess I didn’t have much real faith in the gadget, I said “Okay,” and went to get the four ham sandwiches and the coffee in a milk-bottle out of my coat-pockets. That was why I couldn’t take off the coat when I put on the coveralls⁠—for fear of spilling the coffee. Then I groaned and ran for the desk. There was a brown puddle spreading on the desk and soaking up my coat. I very nearly said “Damn!”

“I’ve got your brain wavelength,” Slim was saying. I started mopping up with my handkerchief while I hung the coat up to dry. “Now, all I have to do is⁠—come here, Doc!”

I put the sandwiches on the bench in front of him, but for once Slim didn’t even reach. He looked at me and his deep-set eyes were burning. “We are going to be the greatest private investigators in history,” he said. “In fact, we’ll make history. Doc, we’ll be the most important men in America.”

I should have been more enthusiastic, but things were going so badly⁠—“I don’t care,” I told him, “about being a great man, if I can just quit ducking the landlord. I want to walk in under his nose and not be scared of him. If you want to fill my cup to overflowing, just let me use that thing long enough to get something on him.”

Slim was already turning dials. Tubes were lighting up. The set was humming. Pretty soon he pointed to a screen, and I damn near lost my breath. There on a screen about twelve by eighteen inches, big enough so there wasn’t any mistake, I saw myself on the night of July Fourth, just as I bought one ticket for the roller coaster.

I guess my eyes stuck out a foot, for Slim was looking at me with that kind of sad smile. “Roller coasters,” he said gently. “Got enough, Doc?”

I gulped. “Plenty. Cut it off, please.” In the screen I saw the blonde just behind me, and I didn’t want Slim to see her put her arms around me when the roller coaster went over the dip.

Slim smiled and snapped a bunch of switches. The lights in the tubes went out. “Think what this will mean in criminal prosecutions, to be able to follow a man in the past. Present-day testimony will be archaic. The courts won’t have to take anybody’s word for anything; they can follow a man and watch him in the past.”

“Judge Monday wouldn’t admit that kind of evidence,” I pointed out.

“Naturally not. It will take twenty-five years to get this kind of evidence admitted in court. In the meantime, we’ll have to go easy. But we can make millions, just by bluffing. When we know that a man was playing poker in Jones’s basement until six o’clock Sunday morning, then we can bluff and put it over. Just so we don’t tangle with a real tough guy the first time. For instance⁠—sh! Somebody’s at the door.”

Slim ran to the door while I ran for my pants. I ducked back into the other room and got them on. I heard the voice. It was a man’s voice, and I had heard it before⁠—just recently. I peeked out. Yes, it was Tom Ellingbery. I stayed quiet.

“A potbellied little guy just served divorce papers on me,” he said harshly. “I got off the train and came here. A friend of mine sent me; I want your services.”

“Yes,” said Slim.

“Here’s a hundred-dollar bill,” Tom Ellingbery said. “Start shadowing my wife; get something on her. I’ll give you five thousand to get something⁠—ten if it’s necessary,” he said with a slight leer.

Slim gravely picked up the C note. “We don’t do business that way,” he said; “but if your wife has been misbehaving we’ll find it out.”

Ellingbery was a big man with a sharp go-getter look about him. He stared hard at Slim and Slim stared back. Ellingbery’s expression didn’t show anything; then he left.

Slim locked the door after Ellingbery, and I took off my pants and set up the ironing-board on the desk. Slim went back to adjust the dials on his machine.

“This gadget is a sort of super-sensitive radar,” he said as it warmed up. “I can tune it to your brainwaves and pick you up anywhere within forty miles or three months.”

A purple indicator began to wink. “It proves I’ve got brains, anyway,” I pointed out.

“Yes, your waves come in at a frequency of approximately 1,832,956,000. That’s as close as I can tune it so far, but that’s plenty close enough. There are other characteristics, such as power and damping and height of crest and so on, that make it selective enough to pick out any one person in the United States if it could reach that far.”

“And then you can see everything I do?”

“No, I can see only what you see with your own eyes.”

Then I must have been staring at the blonde. I held my breath when I asked, “Can you tell what I’m thinking?”

“No.”

I breathed again.

“I can translate what you say into language, though. Something happens when I throw two hundred and twenty volts into this bank of tubes. As near as I can figure, it creates a ‘time-warp’⁠—which doesn’t mean much of anything objectively. I don’t know how it works; I couldn’t even duplicate it. I suppose some high-powered electronics engineer could figure it out, but I don’t want anybody but you and me even to know about it. What I’m interested in is what we can do with it.”

“What I’m interested in,” I said, “is how much money we can make with it.”

Slim looked at me with his great burning eyes while the steam rose from under the iron on my pants.

“You’re about to find out.” The ground-glass screen slowly lighted. A new bank of tubes began to sparkle and then settled down into a greenish glow. Slim turned dials, and there was the figure of a woman on the screen.

“That,” said Slim, “is Mrs. Tom Ellingbery.”

Well, of course I couldn’t see her face. She was playing bridge, apparently. Her hands looked nice. The woman at her left said, “I hear you’ve filed suit against your husband.”

Mrs. Ellingbery reached for a king, but her fingers were nervous. She played a six instead and lost the trick. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I have.” Her voice was sad.

I waited a minute. Then, “How did you know how to tune in on her?” I asked Slim.

“I got her wave-characteristics when she came up the other day to get us to serve the papers,” he said. “I got Tom’s today while we were talking. The machine was all set and the recording needles made a permanent record.”

I swallowed. “Can you get the landlord’s characteristics too?”

Slim held up a sheet of ruled paper. “Got his already. I was just practicing; I got him when he was trying to hammer the door down yesterday.”

Suddenly I felt a deep peace. I had the landlord in my power, now, and I didn’t have to hurry; I could take my time.

But Slim notched me down. “Get this hundred changed,” he said. “Give the landlord fifty and then have the telephone connected again.”

I took the hundred.

“Get some more sandwiches, too. We’ll be here late tonight.”

Well, the landlord wasn’t as sarcastic as I had feared. He defrosted slightly when he saw the fifty. Now we owed him only two hundred. I knew he was probably going to put us out on September the first, but I soothed my hurt feelings by imagining him walking around in his shorts. There is nothing else that will so undignify a man. But before long⁠—in fact, as soon as I could get to the Brain-Finder while Slim wasn’t watching⁠—I’d get the facts.

We watched Mrs. Ellingbery for four straight nights and days. She went visiting; she played bridge; she shopped. She never did give more than a second glance at any man, and she didn’t talk to any man over the phone. We could see her only when she looked at herself in the mirror. That was enough.

We followed her like two bloodhounds, from the time she ate breakfast until she went to bed at night, but Slim turned the machine off when she sat down to remove her stockings. Slim always was a gentleman.

We went back in “time”⁠—fast. Flashes here and there. But Mrs. Ellingbery was like Caesar’s wife. On the fifth day Slim called Tom Ellingbery and told him he was dropping the case, that his wife was above suspicion and it wasn’t worth while to watch her. I was glad, but Tom Ellingbery swore; anyway, he said he’d send a check for another hundred. Then Slim sat back and looked at me. “Now,” he said quietly, “we’ll turn this thing where it belongs.”

I’d been hoping he’d go out for a sandwich, now that we dared to use the passenger elevators, so that I could sneak a preview of the landlord biting his fingernails in seclusion, but no. Slim fixed his deep eyes on me and said, “We’ll see what Tom has been doing recently. Do you realize he hasn’t been in the picture but once in five days?”

Tom was it, all right. We trailed him that night to a big apartment house across town. Yes, it was a blonde, only this one had had considerable help from a bottle of peroxide.⁠ ⁠…

Slim made a deal with Mrs. Ellingbery’s lawyers. We were to get five triple-o’s if Mrs. Ellingbery won. So Slim spent the weekend trailing Tom for the past three months while I wrote it all down like a chronological history of the war. I was tickled over July the Fourth. On July the Fourth, Tom and the bleached blonde started out with a popcorn picnic and wound up⁠—you guess. Riding the roller coaster! I could just imagine what old Judge Monday would say to that; that little scene would be worth half of the property settlement.

We were short on time. Some way or another Tom Ellingbery had rushed the trial, and it was set for August 30. We turned over our notes to Mrs. Ellingbery’s lawyers and sat back and waited. Private investigators never go near the courts unless they have to.

At four thirty that day the telephone rang. Slim listened, then he hung up. “Tom has got a couple of shrewd, tough lawyers,” he said. “We have to go to court. Tom isn’t admitting anything and he isn’t taking any bluffs. He demands proof.”

“Well,” I said, “for five M notes I’ll tell everything.”

Slim was worried. He talked to her lawyers, Youngquist and Rubicam, that night. The next morning we were both in court. It was direct examination. Slim identified himself, then he was asked: “You have investigated Tom Ellingbery’s activities over the past three months?”

“Yes.” Slim was very self-composed.

“Did you, on the night of August 26, observe him going into an apartment house at this address?”

“Yes.”

And so on⁠—but never a word of where Slim was when he saw all this. Very clever, I thought, but when I looked at those sharp-eyed young fellows at Tom Ellingbery’s table, I knew it’d never get by.

Presently Mr. Youngquist said, “You may inquire.” I held my breath. But one of the young fellows looked up and said, “Are you going to put his partner on?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Youngquist.

“With that understanding, there are no questions of this witness, your honor.”

I jumped as if I had sat down on an electric griddle. It was plain even to me; they figured Slim was pretty sharp, so they’d wait for me, and in the meantime they wouldn’t tip me off by asking Slim any questions. I wished I could have held my breath for about three days.

I got along all right with Mr. Youngquist. I was careful not to say anything about where I had stood or sat or walked. I said, “Yes, I followed him,” because I did follow him with my eyes. Then Mr. Youngquist turned to the young fellow and said, “You may inquire.”

The young fellow got up slowly and looked at me easily and gently, but it was still August. I was sweating. I knew it was coming. I looked at Slim. Slim was sweating too. I looked at Mr. Youngquist. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

“You say,” the young fellow began softly, “that you and your partner followed Mr. Ellingbery from sometime in June?”

“Yes.”

“You testified, I believe, that on the night of July the Fourth, Tom Ellingbery and this girl were at the amusement park?”

“Yes.”

“And I believe you have cited some eight or nine dates up to the fifteenth of July.”

I looked at Mr. Youngquist and I was astonished to see his face the color of bleached muslin.

“Well, did you or did you not?”

I looked at Slim. He was puzzled, too. Finally I nodded.

“Will you say it for the record, please?”

“Yes.”

“That is to say, you are now testifying that you followed Mr. Ellingbery on each of eight or nine occasions prior to July 15, and each time with your partner at your side?”

“Yes.”

“And always at Mrs. Ellingbery’s request?”

“Yes.” That was a nasty question, but it had to be answered yes.

“Were you here in court yesterday?”

“No, sir.” I would have said, “No, your majesty,” if it would have helped.

“You didn’t hear Mrs. Ellingbery testify that her suspicions were first aroused when somebody reported to her that on July the Fourth Tom Ellingbery was riding the roller coaster with another girl?”

I wish I could have jumped into the Brain-Finder and gone back about two weeks. I would have walked through the sidewalk while the coal was being poured.

“No,” I said finally.

The young fellow looked triumphantly at Mr. Youngquist, who looked as if he would like to be buried in ashes up to his ears.

“That’s all.”

Mr. Youngquist rallied and put Slim back on the stand. Then there was a recess. Mr. Youngquist and Mr. Rubicam and Slim and Mrs. Ellingbery and I went into a big huddle out in the hall. “That’s what comes of messing around with imbecilic things like this Brain-Finder,” Mr. Youngquist moaned. “Why didn’t we stick to straight law?”

“Because we couldn’t win that way,” Mr. Rubicam reminded him. “We didn’t have any real evidence.”

Well, they decided the only chance to win the case was to have Slim tell about and demonstrate the Brain-Finder. Slim didn’t like to do that; but we needed those five G’s. That afternoon he told. The next morning we lugged it into court and set it on a table with the screen facing the judge.

There was a crowd in court that morning, thanks to a news story in the morning Herald. Slim groaned; crowds aren’t good for private investigators. I pricked up my ears when in marched Mr. Swanberg, our landlord, as austere as striped trousers could possibly make him, but with a beauteous blonde in a pink dress, clinging as if she was afraid he’d get away. That opened my eyes. Maybe the old iceberg was human after all, to rate that kind of devotion. Maybe he did have an occasional moment of abandonment when he would lick the butter from his knife. If we ever got through this mess I was going to find out. “That’s Mrs. Swanberg,” Youngquist said to Slim.

I looked his wife over in my best professional style. I thought I’d seen her some place, and a detective is supposed to remember faces, but I couldn’t quite place her. Anyway, there were now three blondes mixed in with that courtroom⁠—and that’s a lot of blondes. Mr. and Mrs. Swanberg sat down at one side opposite the jury-box where they could see the screen of the Brain-Finder as well as the judge. I suppose Swanberg had read the story and wanted to see what we were up to in his building. Mrs. Ellingbery sat across the counsel table from me. She was a winner if there ever was one.

Slim went on the stand. He demonstrated the Brain-Finder very feebly⁠—that is, innocuously. It was obvious that Youngquist was scared to death of what might happen.

And again Tom Ellingbery’s lawyers passed up cross examination of Slim. I knew they were waiting for me.

They were. “Do you understand this machine?” one asked me scornfully.

“No, sir.”

“You know how to work it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Do you mean to tell this court that you can adjust the dials and gadgets on this thing and see what I was doing last week or the week before?”

I tried to be cautious. “If it’s plugged in.”

“Okay, we’ll plug it in.”

He invited me to step down and turn on the switches. I looked at Slim. He nodded. After all, there was nothing else to do. I went.

Some of the tubes crackled and then settled down to a steady green glow, and one bank showed purple. Then the lawyer said, “Now, do you mean to tell me you can tune this contraption in on a man’s brain and find him anywhere in the past?” He sounded completely skeptical.

“Within three months,” I said defiantly.

“For instance, you testified that Tom Ellingbery was riding the roller coaster on the night of July the Fourth with the girl who has been named in this case. You saw this on this screen?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tune it in again?”

Well, I knew this was all preliminary. It would take something absolutely dynamic to convince Judge Monday that the Brain-Finder was the real thing and not a fake. So I wasn’t worrying⁠—yet. “Yes,” I said, and set the dials to Tom Ellingbery’s brainwaves. I picked up Tom and the bleached blonde just as they stepped into the roller-coaster car, and followed them around the ride. It wasn’t very sensational; she screamed and hid her eyes and grabbed Tom around the neck. Standard technique.

Then the lawyer said, “Can you pick up your own brainwave on this thing?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing on the night of July the Fourth?”

“I was⁠—” I swallowed. “I was riding the roller coaster.”

I think somebody snickered.

“Can you show us?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

I began to adjust the dials. Again the amusement park flickered over the ground glass, as seen through my eyes. I was in line. I put my money on the counter to buy a ticket. I saw a slim white hand reach up to the window from my left and I started to turn. Then it hit me!

That gorgeous blonde! That girl who had thrown her arms around me in the car a minute later. That was Swanberg’s wife.

I looked around at them in the courtroom. I knew what was happening on the screen. I hadn’t looked at her face until she got into the car after me. Mrs. Swanberg was leaning over, now, watching the screen. One arm was slipped through the landlord’s elbow and she was surreptitiously but affectionately patting the back of his hand. Swanberg himself looked completely blissful. What had she been out there alone for, that night? Well, no telling. Maybe he’d been out of town and she’d felt like doing something childish. Certainly there was no meanness or deceit in her face. She was in love with him. And he, in spite of all his austerity, was obviously in love with her.

I looked out the window. There was no doubt that the fame of the Brain-Finder by now would be all over town. Within a week we’d be flooded with work⁠—high-priced work. We’d take only the very best cases, the highest priced, the least messy. We’d pay the rent. We’d eat in restaurants instead of carrying sandwiches. In another three months we’d be rolling in money⁠—and almost without work. If we wanted to work hard with the Brain-Finder, we’d make millions. I could maybe find myself the right kind of girl to marry.

I looked back at the screen. I had just settled myself in the seat of the roller-coaster car. A pink dress came into my field of vision on the right. Yes, sir, this demonstration would do it. This, and those to follow. Whatever Judge Monday might say, there would be an appeal, and we’d have to take the thing to the Supreme Court, and how could any judge ignore it if Slim could show the judge himself working on his pet corn the night before? We were about to be what is vulgarly but happily known as “in the bucks.”

What would happen to Swanberg? I remembered how I’d always pictured his wife as unattractive, and all of a sudden it made me feel kind of ashamed. He had certainly shown good taste in his choice of a wife.

Well, pretty quick now I could afford to travel in that kind of company.

I wondered what would happen when Swanberg saw his wife throwing her arms around me on the roller coaster. I guessed maybe he wouldn’t be cold; he’d be jealous. Well, a man with a young and beautiful wife⁠—somehow it kind of got me. I mean that sort of calf-like happiness. He loved her and he felt secure in the knowledge that she loved him, and⁠—well, you know how it is.

Gosh, how I wanted that money. Here it was within our reach⁠—the thing we’d worked so hard for, the reason I’d crawled under pullman cars and gone through the sidewalk and sneaked in to evade the landlord⁠—all so Slim could keep working on the Brain-Finder. He had it now. Slim didn’t know how to duplicate it, but one was all we needed. That one was worth a fortune.

I looked back at the Swanbergs, sitting there so close together. Swanberg hadn’t really been tough with us. In fact, he’d been lenient. Three months was a lot to be behind. No, I guess the only thing I hadn’t really liked about him was the fact that he was always so perfectly dressed and so cool while I had to go through the sidewalk on a hot day in August and then press the sweat out of my clothes with a flatiron.

I looked at the girl. She was nice. She hadn’t been doing anything out of the way that night. She certainly hadn’t made any sort of pass at me. And they were in love.

I guess I had no business being an investigator. I looked at the judge, watching every move with his sharp old eyes. I glanced at Slim Coleman, sitting there, looking a little puzzled, his eyes deep and burning. I tried to ask Slim to forgive me. I looked at the screen. The roller-coaster car was pulling up to the top of the first hump.

I took hold of the Brain-Finder. It was heavy, but I picked it up and held it over my head, then I heaved it onto the floor, and it was nothing but a mass of loose wires and broken glass.

A woman screamed. Youngquist fainted. Slim came running with a question in his deep eyes. Tom Ellingbery’s lawyer was triumphant. The judge pounded for order.⁠ ⁠…

This is four days later. Tom Ellingbery and his wife made up. Last night’s paper showed them on the roller coaster. He was quoted as saying: “All I wanted was to ride the roller coaster.” And she had said: “Boys will be boys.”

Slim brings me four ham sandwiches and coffee twice a day. He got acquainted with the blonde that Tom Ellingbery was riding the roller coasters with, and they went out to the park and had five dollars worth of rides the night that Tom Ellingbery paid Slim the five G’s. (Tom said it was worth that much to have his wife back.) And do you know whom Slim and the blonde ran into at the Park? Mr. and Mrs. Swanberg. First thing I ever heard of a man in a tailcoat riding the roller coaster.

In fact, everybody’s got a blonde but me, and everybody’s riding the roller coaster but me. I’m not riding them now. I got thirty days for contempt of court.

The Mischievous Typesetter

The judge reared back. High-Pockets waited. “In my opinion,” his honor began a little ambiguously, “a linotype operator is very near the bottom of the scale of humanity. There is only one person who stands beneath him. That is the poet.” The judge’s eyes turned full on High-Pockets, all seven gangling feet of him. “You,” the judge said ominously, “are both.”

High-Pockets waited in dread. He had a premonition that this wasn’t even going to be a nice jail sentence where he could meditate and reflect on his strange power over linotypes. This was going to be the workhouse. The situation was desperate indeed.

“You profess to be a barnstormer and a student of mechanical nature.” The judge smiled sarcastically. “I can offer you an unusual opportunity for research. As an old proofreader, I occasionally help out on the Daily News, and it has come to my attention that there is a linotype on the News known as No. 7 that recently has begun to misbehave. Without apparent reason, it has become almost useless.”

High-Pockets cringed with the impact of the knowledge that His Honor had once been a proofreader. The traditional enmity between proofreaders and operators, High-Pockets perceived, was about to be judicially resolved. So he cringed. He was very sad.

“Suppose you go up there and try your wizardry on No. 7.” His Honor suggested. “In the meantime, thirty days suspended sentence. If you’re back here before your time is up, it will be sixty days. And if there is drunkenness connected with it,” he said, looking disdainfully at High-Pockets’ red nose, “it will be ninety. Is that clear?”

“Yes, your honor.” High-Pockets mumbled, but he was thinking of other things. He had been sentenced to work at his trade. That meant contact with proofreaders, and High-Pockets bristled. But the bristling subsided rapidly, as High-Pockets, simulating a grateful smile from long habit, realized with a sickly feeling that for perhaps the first time in his long career, a proofreader had had the complete and final word, and High-Pockets did not dare to answer back.⁠ ⁠…

They spotted High-Pockets coming across the composing-room of the Daily News when they saw a red nose following an eccentric orbit up among the fluorescent lights. High-Pockets didn’t exactly duck the lights. When he came face to face with one, his incredibly tall knees limbered up and he sort of weaved under it.

The union chairman met him with a handshake. “High-Pockets Jones,” he said, grinning, “Dean of Barnstormers and Wizard of the Linotype. I know you from your picture. Can you really make a linotype stand up on its hind legs and talk?”

“Well,” High-Pockets said in a modest, booming voice, “I will admit that’s one of my more difficult stunts.”

The chairman guffawed, and they steered High-Pockets to the slip-board. “I can put you on a week’s stretch.”

High-Pockets stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall. “No!” he boomed. “Can’t do it! Haven’t worked five days straight in twenty years.”

“But look, High-Pockets. Look at it this way. You’re an old-time barnstormer, aren’t you?”

High-Pockets winced.

“Well,” the chairman said diplomatically, “there’s not as much call for barnstormers as there used to be, but⁠—” he said it quickly⁠—“here’s a new field. It needs a good barnstormer as much as they ever did.”

High-Pockets listened intently.

“This poor guy has to sit on No. 7. That’s the linotype nobody can do anything with. The poor devil had to lay off because she pretty nearly drove him crazy. Now you are the guy who can make a linotype behave.” His voice was persuasive. “Won’t you help this guy out for a few nights?”

For twenty years it had been High-Pockets’ unbroken rule not to hire out for more than a day at a time. “Short-term contracts,” he insisted. But now⁠—well, the world was changed. Maybe this was to be the future of barnstorming⁠—taming machines instead of foremen. If so, it meant he still had a place in the world. And to fulfill that destiny he would even accept a whole week’s work. He took off his rain-wrinkled coat with a sigh.

He was waiting for time to be called when Arturius Wickware, the linotype machinist on the News, came up to him with short, mincing steps and a scowl that undoubtedly was a habit. “Are you the guy that has such wonderful control over a linotype?” he demanded. He wouldn’t give High-Pockets the satisfaction of looking up at him. He scowled at High-Pockets’ breastbone.

High-Pockets was solemn as he stared over Arturius’ head. “I get along well with them.” He smiled gently then. “Somehow a linotype always does what I want it to do.” He looked down and saw the crowd around him and decided he owed them an explanation. “My theory is that any piece of machinery is electrified by some force that I call personal electricity. I don’t exactly know what that is but it seems to bind the piece of machinery as a whole. I think maybe it’s a negative charge, and I think most men are charged positively with that same force, so that men get along well with machines. Opposite poles attract, you know.”

Arturius Wickware sputtered, but now High-Pockets had to go on. “Sometimes a man comes along who happens to be negatively charged, and he can’t handle a piece of machinery at all. But now I⁠—you see this scar in the middle of my forehead⁠—” he removed his faded hat, “I was struck by lightning on a freight train out in Utah, and I think it multiplied my ‘personal’ electricity potential a lot⁠—maybe millions of times⁠—so machinery just has to do what I want it to, because it wants to do it. You see?”

There was an odd silence; then the chairman spoke. “Old No. 7 started acting up when they built the first uranium pile south of town here, but it really went bad when it was hit by lightning that followed down the ventilation pipe two months ago.”

High-Pockets’ blue eyes opened wide. “Maybe its negative field was reversed by some stray rays from the pile, and then when the lightning hit it, it intensified the field so that the machine is now strongly positive. You know how it is,” he said earnestly. “A body illuminated by ultraviolet light becomes positively charged, and even a hot body becomes positively charged by what they call thermionic emission. Well, that’s okay. A linotype is exactly like a woman. It has a soul⁠—if you know how to reach it.”

Old Arturius snorted so loudly the electric relay on No. 7 made contact and the heating switch came on with a clatter. “You can work on No. 7 tonight,” he said acidly. “Let’s see if it’s got a soul.” He turned on his heel and stamped back to his bench.⁠ ⁠…

It never occurred to High-Pockets to doubt his success with No. 7. He carefully hung his ten-year-old coat in an empty locker and made sure the pint of bourbon was safely in the inside pocket of the coat. Then he walked into the composing-room and over to No. 7, and stood for a moment looking her over. He frowned. “It’s almost as if she was laying her ears back and getting ready to snarl at me,” he said wonderingly.

“She’ll snarl,” said Arturius at his back. “She’ll bite, before the night’s over.”

High-Pockets tried to look amused. “I’ll have her setting type by herself before lunch time,” he promised.

High-Pockets got the lowest chair in the composing-room, to bring his arms down near the keyboard. His nose was still red and he weaved a little in the chair, but he began to fold in his arms until his hands were over the keyboard.

The first take went smoothly. High-Pockets could feel a clash of wills, but he was slow and careful. He set two more takes, and nothing happened, so he began to relax. His third take was a short piece of telegraph copy for the second edition. He put it in the copy holder and then decided to get a drink of water. He ran into some friends and they spent five minutes around the fountain before the foreman came by.

High-Pockets went back to the machine. He sat down and got his arms tucked in, then reached for a slug with his name on it and started to put it in the stick. Then he frowned and rang the bell for the machinist.

“Somebody’s playing tricks on me,” he said. “Who’s been working here?”

“Nobody but you,” Arturius said nastily.

High-Pockets licked his lips. “I’d swear I didn’t set this take.” But Arturius looked intensely satisfied and went away. Thoughtfully High-Pockets took the type out of the stick and put his take slug on it and went to the dump. When he sat down again he shook his head and rubbed his eyes before he went to work. “No. 7 musta set that take herself,” he muttered, “but that’s not according to union rules.” He said it without actually believing it.

He got along all right until nearly lunch time. By then, he was dry again, and he got a long take of the next day’s editorial and stuck it in the copy board, then went to the fountain, and finally decided to go to the washroom and smoke a cigarette.

When he got back to the machine he picked up a take slug and pulled back the slug-stacker⁠—and then he froze tight.

High-Pockets looked a little scared. He licked his lips and took the stick out of the machine. It was a long take, about ten inches of type. He laid it across his knees and compared it with the copy. It checked. He read it over upside down. Not a single error.

“Well, I didn’t set it, anyway,” he muttered. “I couldn’t possibly set an okay proof, the way I feel.”

Somewhat resignedly he took the type to the dump.

The dump-man looked at him. “Turning ’em out pretty fast. Whatta you think this is, a piecework town?”

High-Pockets looked chastened, but said nothing.

He went to the copy desk. There was nothing now but want ads. He got a take and then he had a bright idea. He put the want ads on the copy board and went for a drink of water. He was dry again, anyway. He took plenty of time, and then came back and confidently picked up a take slug.

But he got a jolt when he looked at the stick. It was empty.

High-Pockets nodded wisely. “So it doesn’t like want ads any better than anybody else,” he said to himself. “Now, that’s a dirty shame.”

He got all folded in and started to operate. But at the first letter he touched, the keyboard belt broke. He called Arturius and had it fixed, and tried again. The mats jammed up in the chute.

He cleaned them out and then started carefully hitting one letter at a time. But the very first one came to the star wheel, and rang the bell again. “Star wheel spring is loose,” he said. “She won’t bring the mats down.”

Arturius looked at him with a scowl that bore the heavy responsibility of the entire world, and then without a word sat down to fix it. He stood by while High-Pockets tried again. The line finally was filled and High-Pockets sent it in and started on the second line.

“Wait a minute,” said Arturius. “You didn’t get a slug.” He opened the vise. “Short-line stop is out of adjustment,” he growled. “What’s the matter with this machine, anyway?”

High-Pockets looked worried. “Maybe she don’t like want ads,” he said. “Maybe I better set this take somewhere else.”

Arturius grunted. High-Pockets went to No. 8. He set the want ads with one eye on No. 7. He was quite sober now.

The copy-cutter wasn’t looking when High-Pockets got back to the desk, and High-Pockets did something he’d never done before in his life. He “worked the hook”⁠—instead of taking want ads, he very quietly took a piece of minion, and then looked around guiltily to see if anybody noticed.

He wound his way back to No. 7 and got all set. Arturius was gone. High-Pockets by now realized that he was up against worthy opposition. If he had reached No. 7’s soul, he had stirred it the wrong way. From now on he would be extremely careful.

Things went all right until after the cast. The line went up to transfer⁠—and there it stuck. High-Pockets sighed and rang the bell. Arturius came, but the scowl on his face was diluted with self-satisfaction.

He started to lock the spaceband lever, but when he touched the latch, the spaceband lever went over with a crash and the line of mats spilled out in the intermediate channel.

High-Pockets sighed noisily and got up. Arturius was using some uncomplimentary language, and the gleam of satisfaction was all in High-Pockets’ eyes now.

They picked up the mats, and Arturius pulled out the clutch lever to let the machine finish its revolution. But it stuck on ejection. The clutch grabbed and chattered. He threw the clutch lever in and went around behind. He backed the machine by hand and hammered with the ejector lever. The slug wouldn’t come out.

He came back, looked at the knife, looked at the ejector blade, examined the mouthpiece. “This mill is nuts,” he said in his sourest tone, and added some explanatory remarks that verged on redundancy. He held up the ejector lug while High-Pockets pulled the clutch lever and let the machine go on over.

Arturius had to loosen the mold-cap to get the slug out. Then he stood back for High-Pockets to sit down. But by this time High-Pockets had awakened. He looked hard at the copy and whispered to himself, “Oh-oh, no wonder. We’ve got society. Don’t blame her.” He told Arturius he had to get a drink. When he came back, Arturius was gone, and very quietly High-Pockets went over to No. 8 and set the type.

His next take was a nice piece of telegraph on green copy paper. “She ought to like this.” High-Pockets thought, but his face had a wondering look.

He put the copy in the holder and got ready to massage the keyboard. But he’d just got his arms folded up and his fingers stretched out when the mats began to drop into the assembling elevator. They dropped with perfect timing. The assembling elevator filled and High-Pockets’ eyes began to gleam. “She’ll have to wait for me to send the line in,” he thought. But old No. 7 wouldn’t be denied. The elevator went up, the line went in, the elevator came down, and mats started dropping again. High-Pockets got up and went to a window. He leaned out and breathed the crisp night air.

When he got back the take was finished.

He got the second take of the same story and went back to the machine. He put the take in the copy holder and then, out of habit, he looked at the stick. It was already half full of type. He was almost afraid to compare it with his copy, but he did.

After he checked it, he got up and went to the locker room. Nobody else was there. He pulled the pint bottle out of his coal pocket and without hesitation violated another strict office rule⁠—he took a good, long, healthy drink of bourbon.

He wiped his lips and came back. No. 7 was still running over. He looked at the type. There was a guideline that said “Third Add⁠—Nazi Werewolves.” High-Pockets turned on his heel and went back to the locker room. This time he had two drinks, and when he finished he weaved a little more.

“Monkeying with souls,” he muttered, “is dangerous business.”

He was thankful the story had only three takes. First he thought he would dump the third take in the metal pot, but when he picked it up it was so hot that even he, with calloused fingertips from handling hot slugs for twenty years, couldn’t hold it. So he dumped both takes and turned off the motor, then went to lunch.

That is, he borrowed a dollar from the chairman and started for the restaurant. But he passed a saloon on the way, and decided he was more in need of a drink.

When he got back he had a little trouble with the fluorescent lights. They weaved when he weaved, and it took some rather delicate navigation to beat them to the punch. It was fortunate that the light tubes were fixed securely in their sockets, and fortunate that the foreman had gone into the office to check the time cards.

When High-Pockets got back to the copy desk, he was pretty fuzzy around the edges. He looked over his first take as soon as he got behind the desk. Then he gave a relieved sigh. This was Editorial. No. 7 wouldn’t be so fussy⁠—he hoped.

He got four paragraphs through before he ran into trouble. Then some mats jammed up at the top of the assembler entrance cover. High-Pockets started to ring the bell, but decided not to. He could dig it out himself. He’d had enough trouble with Arturius for one night.

He opened the entrance cover, and a hundred mats fell down over his arm and onto the keyboard with an ominous tinkle. Their weight depressed some twenty keys, and the power drive immediately began to function, and the mats from those twenty channels dropped in twenty curving streams on the keyboard, which depressed still more keys and made more mats drop, and in about two minutes No. 7 had poured fifteen hundred mats into High-Pockets’ lap.

He did one thing before he rang the bell. He brushed the mats off the copy holder and looked at the rest of the paragraph. It ended, “⁠—and the blame for Pearl Harbor thus lay at the door of the White House.”

High-Pockets got up, shedding mats by the hundreds. Arturius came, looking as if he were about to detonate. Half the operators in the shop were there to enjoy the fact that at least there was one man who wasn’t afraid to have trouble with No. 7.

Somebody chuckled and said. “Get a basket,” but High-Pockets knew it wasn’t meant for him and nobly disdained a reply. He was muttering to himself, “I’ve heard these machines called a lot of things in my time, but this is the first one I ever saw that could justifiably be called a Republican.”

The machinist was verbose, a little on the vicariously obscene side. High-Pockets helped him pick the mats off the floor, but it was almost an hour before they got the machine going again.

When they did, High-Pockets went back to look at the slip-board. He studied it for a few minutes with a queer look on his face, then started for the chairman. But halfway there, he changed his mind. No machine had ever got the best of him before, and he’d been up against some tough ones. He was a barnstormer, wasn’t he?

So he went back to the battle. But now there wasn’t any copy, so he wandered around with that queer look on his face, and finally wound up in the locker room where he decided he might as well kill the pint. He smoked a cigarette and stuck his head out of the window into the fresh air.

When the pint was thoroughly defunct he returned. The machine was quiet again, but the stick was half full. He didn’t even look at it. There wasn’t any copy, but he took the type to the dump.

The next take was copy for “Good Morning, Glory,” the paper’s star columnist. That seemed to go very well. No. 7 perhaps couldn’t quite make out what was happening. Well, that was nothing. Most columnists were like that.

Then again there wasn’t any copy. A young fellow came down from the newsroom and spoke to the copy-cutter. “There’ll be a story down for the eleven-fifteen edition,” he said. “ ‘Two Women Murdered.’ About a column.”

The copy-cutter looked at the clock. “It’s eleven o’clock now,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Just starting to write it upstairs. We’ll get it down as fast as we can.”

The copy-cutter grumbled. “Better have a makeover, then. We won’t have time to handle it.”

But High-Pockets knew better. He poked his head over the desk and sneaked a look at No. 7. She was grinding away. High-Pockets went back to the dump and looked at the guideline of his stickful without copy. It said, “Two Women Murdered.”

But nobody would ever give out a long take like that so near closing time. He looked again. He should have known. The half-a-stickful was divided into thirds, carefully guided “First Add” and “Second Add,” and at the bottom of the last add was a turned slug and a line, “More to Come.”

The copy tube swished, and a carrier thumped in the box. “Here,” the copy-cutter said, “here’s a precede on that atomic bomb explosion. You might as well set that while we’re waiting.”

“Okay,” said High-Pockets, and in the now hazy recesses of his mind he made a mighty resolution: he would set this take himself; No. 7 be damned.

He went straight to the machine. Mats were dropping, but High-Pockets just raised his eyebrows and reached up and turned off the power. That would stop her.

He got his copy all fixed and his arms folded in, and then he unfolded one arm and turned on the power while his right hand hovered over the keyboard. Apparently No. 7 didn’t quite know what to make of this new attack, and he was able to get several lines through before she figured it out. Then she seemed to sit back and get her breath, and High-Pockets, with a wide grin on his face, manipulated the keyboard fast enough to keep the machine hung so she wouldn’t get a chance on her own hook.

But eventually he had a pileup of mats and had to miss a line. He was crestfallen. But strangely enough, she didn’t start in when he got the assembling elevator clear. He watched her out of the corner of his eye while he gingerly assembled the line, but nothing happened. He sent that line in and watched it go through without any disturbance, then he sat back a moment and he and the machine sized each other up. Still no mats dropped of their own volition. High-Pockets grinned. Maybe he was beginning to sober up.

He set a line and sent it in, watching. It justified and the pot came forward to cast. “Hmp,” said High-Pockets. “Who said she’s human? Subhuman, I call it.”

Something happened when he said that. The second justification lever went up with a bang that shook the whole machine, and High-Pockets reached for the clutch lever with his left hand.

But he was so long he had to grab something with his right hand to balance, and just then the line delivery came back with a snap and smashed his right thumb.

“Ouch!” said High-Pockets, and jumped up and then he swore and shook his hand.

A minute later he sat down again with a determined gleam in his eyes. He tightened the vise-locking screws and leaned over to look at the line, down in the jaws, to be sure the mats were in alignment before he pulled the clutch. And just then the right hand locking stud came loose with a snap and spun clockwise, and the cross-handle cracked him on the chin.

High-Pockets took it like a man. He didn’t even swear this time. He got out of his chair. “I will see if that line is all right,” he muttered. “If I don’t⁠—”

He tightened the screw, then he got his head in under the intermediate bar to look. And at that moment a gust of air blew a cloud of graphite out of the intermediate channel and filled his right eye. He was nearly blinded, but he didn’t ask for help. Very quietly he wound his way to the washroom. He cleaned his face and worked the graphite out of his eye as well as he could, and then, with a determined look on his face, went back.

Arturius reached the machine about the same time he did, “What did you leave her on the cast for?” he barked.

High-Pockets didn’t answer.

Arturius indulged in some choice blasphemy with its direction divided equally between High-Pockets and No. 7. High-Pockets felt sorry for Arturius. He went to the locker room and determined to his satisfaction that the pint was still dead, then he came back. The boy had left some proofs on his machine. High-Pockets picked them up to scan them. Then he swore vigorously. “Proofreaders!” he sputtered. “Comma chasers! Look at this!” he invited the world. “Put a hyphen in the word ‘good-will.’ Marked a double e in ‘employe.’ Changed ‘thous‑and’ to ‘thou‑sand!’ ” He clenched his fists and raised them far above his head. “Give me strength!” he groaned. “Give me strength! On top of everything else, the proofreaders have to go nuts too.”

He started for the proof room, clutching the proofs in one hand. His long arms swung as he weaved among the lights. He went in the door of the proof room and stood there a moment. His head was above the lights and for a moment he couldn’t see very clearly, but he demanded in his booming voice: “Who signed these proofs ‘R. M. S.’?”

There was a stir in the proofroom, and then a man at the far end of the table got to his feet. “I did,” he said in thunderous voice.

High-Pockets didn’t back down. “What the hell do you think this is⁠—1910?” he demanded, waving the proofs. “This is a newspaper, isn’t it, not a dictionary?”

“Is it indeed?” said the man ominously, and High-Pockets thought he had heard that voice before. He stared toward the man and his eyes began to focus and then he saw who it was. A gulp started in High-Pockets’ adam’s-apple and traveled visibly down the full length of his body to the floor. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. His eyes became glazed like those of a man walking in his sleep.

“Your honor,” he said, at last, struggling to force words from his larynx and looking like a man in a very blue funk, “there are extenuating circumstances.”

Then he seemed to awaken. He looked around him. Through the glass windows of the proof room he saw a makeup man pushing a turtle to the stereotype room, and this seemed to give him a little grip on reality. He turned back with a certain air of assurance, as if he was about to take things decisively into his own hands. But he looked into His Honor’s stern countenance and that assurance wilted visibly. High-Pockets retreated in confusion.

Maybe No. 7 sympathized with him. At least she allowed him to correct the proofs without any trouble. High-Pockets even began to feel that there was some feeling of friendliness flowing between them.

He was working on his next take when he felt a presence behind him. He revolved in his chair, and he very nearly fell over when he once again faced His Honor, the Judge. His Honor had a long piece of pasted copy in one hand and was waving a proof in the other. “So,” His Honor said malevolently, “you’re the poet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” His Honor waved the proof under High-Pockets’ nose. “You set this verse. It isn’t in the copy at all.”

High-Pockets felt uneasy. “Let’s see.” He read aloud:

“ ’Tis dawn in the woods. A gentleman slumbers
Beneath the protection of wild cucumbers.
The woodpeckers woodpeck, the rattlesnakes rattle,
And all the cockroaches prepare to do battle.”

High-Pockets gulped. He handed the proof back to His Honor: he revolved again and folded himself into the chair. He started to set type. Then he remembered. “Your Honor,” he said, “I had nothing to do with it. No. 7 did it.”

His Honor, goaded by High-Pockets’ temporary amnesia which looked very much like disrespect, exploded. “A machine! A machine did this?”

High-Pockets sent in the line and started another.

“Are you imputing intelligence to a machine?” His Honor demanded, and No. 7 seemed to hesitate for an instant. “No machine on earth could compose such awful poetry as this,” His Honor thundered.

No. 7 was casting. For no reason at all the plunger stuck in the bottom of the well and No. 7’s clutch chattered and shook the entire machine before High-Pockets shut off the power. High-Pockets revolved and looked at the judge and raised his eyebrows, then rang the bell.

This time the machinist was entirely speechless. High-Pockets pointed to the plunger. Arturius worked on it but couldn’t get it loose. He got a Crescent wrench. “Get hold of the first-elevator cam,” he said, “and back her up while I twist the plunger.”

His Honor stood by, waiting to take up the battle with High-Pockets.

High-Pockets got hold of the cam with a sardonic set to his lips. He yanked hard. No. 7 would find out who was boss.

But when he pulled, the screw holding the end of the second elevator starting spring came loose and the spring shot the screw into High-Pockets’ ribs with the force of a bullet. High-Pockets merely grunted.

“Wait, I’ll take the drive clutch,” Arturius said, as if he was beginning to be concerned.

High-Pockets shut off the power, and Arturius took hold of the clutch, one hand on each end, and turned forward.

The plunger started to lift. It came halfway up, and then the machine suddenly rolled backward again, with the heavy plunger spring helping it. The clutch spun like a top.

Arturius backed away holding the fingers of one hand.

“Get hurt?”

Arturius bit his lip. “No,” he said, “but pull that plunger pin before I try it again.”

High-Pockets pulled the pin, and Arturius got No. 7 off the cast. Then he went around to the front, took the controlling lever, and started to pull it out to finish the machine’s revolution.

He saw a loose mat on the vise and reached for it with his left hand. At that instant his hand slipped off the controlling lever, and the first elevator head came down with a crash.

But Arturius’ fingers were not there. He backed off and did the most thoroughly human thing he’d done in years. He thumbed his nose at No. 7. The judge looked skeptical.

“Look out!” High-Pockets yelled. “She’s backing!”

His long arms moved with astonishing speed. He practically snatched the judge up from the place where he stood and set him down again two feet away. And just in time, for a stream of silvery, molten metal rose in a wide arc from the vise-jaws of No. 7 and came down exactly where His Honor’s bald head had been. About three pounds of it descended to the floor and lay there hardening and smoking like an overdone pancake.

Sweat popped out on the judge’s bald head. His Honor’s eyes were bulging. “She squirted hot lead at me!” he said accusingly. “Maliciously and with malice aforethought.” He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his bald head. His hands were steady. “If that lead had fallen on me,” he said plaintively, “it would have baked my skull. Why did she try to do that to me?”

“You made fun of her poetry,” High-Pockets pointed out. With a certain amount of pleasure he reflected that His Honor could hardly allege contempt, under the circumstances.

But his honor looked at High-Pockets with a new light in his eyes. “You may have saved my life,” he said thoughtfully.

Arturius Wickware looked desperate. “It can’t squirt,” he said. “The plunger pin isn’t in.”

High-Pockets pointed to the metal on the floor. “It did,” he said.

Arturius looked at No. 7 dourly and shut off the motor. “Please take No. 8,” he begged High-Pockets. It was the first time he had said “please” in thirty years.

High-Pockets was staring at the proof like a man in a trance.

Suddenly he made half a dozen long strides to the machinist’s bench. He laid hands on a twelve-pound sledgehammer. He came back with it over his shoulder, and before the horrified Arturius could utter a word, High-Pockets had gone to the rear of No. 7 and swung the sledge in one devastating left-handed blow that sheared through the ninth and tenth cams. Then he stepped to the right and crashed the hammer down on the pot-pump cam.

He stepped back, breathing hard, the hammer over his shoulder. Pieces of cast iron tinkled to the floor. “Well,” boomed High-Pockets, “I guess I fixed it, didn’t I?”

There was no answer. High-Pockets looked around. Arturius had quietly fainted. The judge looked horrified.

They revived Arturius by the simple expedient of putting a screwdriver in his big hand. He opened his eyes and stared at High-Pockets and shook his head slowly, incredulously.

High-Pockets helped him up. “Don’t worry,” he said.

Arturius sputtered and almost detonated. “Don’t worry!” he snorted. “Five hundred dollars worth of cams busted up and he says, ‘Don’t worry!’ ”

“It won’t cost that much,” said High-Pockets. “I’ll help you piece the cams together. You can get them welded.”

“No,” said Arturius. “I’ll get new ones.”

“It won’t work,” said High-Pockets.

“What won’t work?”

“I did that to chastise the machine. If it wants to be so independent, it will have to endure the penalties as well as enjoy the privileges. If you put in new cams, it will think it’s smart and go right ahead raising hell. But if you have the old ones welded and put back in, the welds, like scars, will remind No. 7 that she’s supposed to be a lady. As long as they are there, No. 7 will behave. I guarantee it.”

The judge wiped his bald head again. “I do believe you’ve got something there, Mr. Jones. If a machine assumes the right of self-determination, what would be more natural than to treat it as you would treat any other self-determining creature?”

High-Pockets heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. He saw now that his stay in the city would not be terminated as a guest in the workhouse. High-Pockets was very happy indeed.

“How can you be sure?” Arturius demanded.

“I’ll show you,” said High-Pockets. “Turn on the motor.”

Arturius did. A strange thing happened. No. 7 began to turn. She pulled herself off of the cast. Somehow she broke loose the hardened metal on her vise-jaws. It dropped to the floor in one big piece. She came to a normal stop and stood there obediently.

“That’s utterly impossible!” Arturius shouted. “It can’t even turn over⁠—with those cams broken out.”

“She’s chastened,” High-Pockets said gently. “All you have to do from now on is to be firm.”

The judge came closer. “Mr. Jones,” he said, “I am beginning to believe that even a linotype operator has a place in this modern world. Suppose we all three go out and have a drink.”

High-Pockets turned off the motor. “I heard you the first time, Your Honor, and I am happy to report that there are no extenuating circumstances. Shall we go?”

The Wealth of Echindul

He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old Father Neptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from his cheap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp and weary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.

Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting to keep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the green sand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turned around slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadly swamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he had come.

With fingers that would hardly function from weariness he took off his diving-suit and straightened up. His stooping shoulders were free of that weight for the first time in forty days. He was a small man, hardly over four feet tall, and not well formed. It seemed incredible that he had crossed the Great Sea-Swamp on foot.

And as he looked back at the distant rim of green fire that marked the mountains it seemed incredible to him too. A great sigh of relief and gratefulness shook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve and colossal willpower that had carried him for six months, suddenly flowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot about the ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitched forward on his face in the sand, and slept.

Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awake instantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often as had his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from the Acid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.

He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue flame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Not even the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hour later he heard another warning⁠—a rasping sound⁠—and through the stench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness that meant danger.

This time as he turned he rolled to his feet. He saw the huge coils of the Venusian water-constrictor. One lidless phosphorescent eye gleamed evilly at him, but its great jaws were spread and the dead fish was halfway down its bone-plated throat.

Grant Russell relaxed. Ordinarily he would have been scared to death to be within miles of the big saurian. But now for a few hours, with the fish in its throat it would be comparatively harmless.

Grant rubbed his eyes and stretched. How wonderful sleep could be! For six weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to take off his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floating grass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundred feet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over his head, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting all his swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only the light gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determination to keep him going. But now he felt like a million.

No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. Few had crossed it in any fashion. Few would have tried it but Grant Russell because few wanted to do it as much as he did. In spite of his small size and his scrawny muscles, in spite of Venus which catered to big men and strong men, he had done it.

The food problem alone would have stopped most men, but Grant had spent a lot of time around the swamps of Venus. Often he had gone prospecting with food enough for only one week because he couldn’t buy more, and he had stayed four, five, six weeks.

To do that he had had to experiment. He’d eaten all sorts of things. Sometimes he had been ill but he had acquired immunity to certain poisonous plants that contained food values.

The oxygen problem for a diving-suit for forty days would have stopped most men but Grant had solved that too. If he had not, he never could have gone to the Red Lava Range after the fabulous gizzard-stones of Venus’s prehistoric echindul.

For oxygen, he had discovered a plant that grew in the bottom of the swamp. You could cut its stalk into sections and put them in a container and they would exude oxygen for several hours. But he had to carry at least one extra stalk all the time, and he had to keep his eyes sharp for more. Sometimes it had been close.

Grant looked at the Red Lava Range and felt the precious leather bag inside his shirt and smiled. Yes, he’d done it. He’d found one of the fabulous nests of the echindul⁠—and it had been loaded with stones, just as ancient Venusian legend insisted.

The extinct echindul had been a sort of flying lizard that had nested in the mysterious, almost inaccessible Red Lava Range. Every echindul had had two gizzard-stones, and each matched pair of stones had an unusual property.

Grant reached in his watch-pocket and brought out the one he had kept out of the bag. He held it up and watched the sunlight, filtering through Venus’s thick clouds, and the firelight, reflected from Red Lava Range two hundred miles away, play on the chatoyant interior of the stone as if they were chasing each other.

Those stones would be worth forty thousand Earth dollars a pair if he could get them to a reputable dealer in Aphrodite, Venus’s largest city. Therein lay Grant Russell’s next problem, and in spite of the satisfaction he felt at emerging from the Great Swamp, he knew that getting safely to Aphrodite might be an even more serious problem.

Aphrodite’s only approach over the Lead Vapor Mountains from the southern hemisphere was through The Pass, a legalized city of vice. On one side The Pass was flanked by the Bubbling Zinc Pits and on the other side it was skirted by the Fluoride River, and man had not yet devised any way to navigate either of these. It was doubtful, even, that any species native to Venus could cross those two areas, but on this authorities did not agree for in the year 2542 Venus and its natives were still largely unknown.

Not so far unknown, however, that Grant Russell failed to recognize the single luminous eye that had risen out of the water on a long, slender stalk. “A fish,” he thought, or as some would have said, a Venusian. It saw that he was looking at it, and it dropped out of sight. There was the swirl of brown water that marked its undersurface progress. It swam like a fish, but it wasn’t really a fish. It was one of Venus’s four dominant species and the most “human” of all.

The swirl moved fast across the surface of the water and disappeared in the direction of Aphrodite but Grant knew that its place would be taken within a few minutes by another. And if Grant had had any forlorn hope that he might be able to slip through The Pass, he gave it up, for he knew now that his movements were reported hourly and that his possession of the fabulous stones was undoubtedly known to Relegar, the Uranian.

Relegar was the master of The Pass. He was no human and he had no human feelings. Killings and stealing were a business to him, and he had the most efficient spying system on any planet. It was well known unofficially that he kept an underground factory busy extracting a drug from the stamen of the swamp-orchid. The drug was labeled “Venus-snow,” and Relegar found it highly profitable to trade it to the fish in the Sea-Swamp on the southwest and to the semiaquatic people in the great Gallium Bogs to the southeast⁠—some called them “frogs”⁠—for information.

Relegar’s spy-system was a monopoly by reason of a peculiar fact: the fish-people talked in a high sound-range that no solar being but a Uranian could hear; no Uranian trusted another Uranian, and so Relegar was the only entity in The Pass who knew the dialect of the fish-people. Seldom did any person or any entity find anything of value in the bottom half of Venus that was not promptly reported to the Uranian.

Therefore Grant Russell did not dare enter The Pass with the stones on his person. This was a quick way to lose them⁠—and perhaps his life. Some day, thought Grant wishfully, some big-shot would come along and clean out The Pass and then the little honest men would be safe. On the rare occasions when a prospector did find something of value and get back to land he would be allowed to keep it. Grant wished he had a lot of power or a lot of money. He’d take over the cleanup job. But a fellow like him, without friends, without influence, without money, didn’t have a chance.

Grant had thought about that a good many times on his long trip across the swamp, but he had worried more about how to dispose of his own stones before Relegar got hold of him. He would of course have to use deception. But how? If he could hide the stones some place he could go on into The Pass empty-handed and pretend that he’d had the usual lack of luck. Then he could see Netse, the Jovian fence, and make a deal for protection. He’d have to give up half, but that was the easiest way out, for Relegar would keep hands off if Netse got there first.

But where could he hide the stones? There was too much continual volcanic subterranean activity in the swamp, and on what little dry land Venus had it was doubtful that any hiding-place could be called permanent. It might be solid today and swallowed by an earthquake tomorrow.

The only real solution was to have somebody else keep them for a while, Grant thought, and that was a discouraging thought, for whom could he trust in The Pass even if he could reach them? For that matter, who in The Pass would risk his life to help out Grant Russell, the Hard-Luck Man of the Swamp?

He’d been known as a hard-luck man as far back as he could remember. His parents had been killed in a rocket crash on a trip to Mars; he’d been raised by one relative after another and they’d each one gotten rid of him as soon as they could. Finally he had married a nice girl and they had been happy until their daughter was born. Then the mother had died.

Grant had gone to pieces for a while. When he came to, he was broke, hungry, ragged. Then when it was too late he had become frantic over the safety of his small daughter, Beth. He found that she was safe in a child welfare home in New Jersey, but they would not release her to him until he could pay what he owed for her care and have enough left over to establish himself as a substantial citizen.

He had told her goodbye. She was the image of her mother, and she had held onto his hand as long as she could and said between sobs, “Daddy, can we have a farm some day, and raise strawberries, and have just us two? I don’t want to be an orphan.” He had gulped and said, “Sure,” and then he had come to Venus. It was a new planet, largely unexplored, full of opportunity.

That had been three years ago. Things had been tough at times but now he could afford to smile. He’d hit the jackpot⁠—a million-year-old nest of the echindul, with sixteen pairs of stones. He put the one stone safely back in his watch-pocket. He was keeping that one. When he sold the others he would have the dealer pick out the mate to this one, and he and Beth would keep this pair. They would be well able to afford it.

He felt the bag at his side. The stones didn’t weigh much, perhaps a couple of ounces apiece, but the famous telepathic stones of Venus were well known on Earth. Wealthy young lovers would carry a pair, if they could get them, so that each could know what the other was thinking.

Scientists said the stones were matched crystals so that each pair, in effect, was tuned in together. They said also that the stones were little more than nature’s ultimate extension of man’s feeble attempts at radio communication.

Grant Russell knew little about that. What he did know was that those stones were worth half a million dollars. He gathered up his patched diving-suit and packed it, from long habit. He raised his head and saw another eye watching him from the swamp. He watched the eye and listened to the rasping of the bone-plates in the constrictor’s throat.

Ordinarily he would have tried to kill the big saurian, for its skin had the property of turning slightly radioactive after death and it was worth a couple of hundred dollars delivered in Aphrodite, but a thought occurred to him. He watched the saurian and began to smile. The constrictor could be worth a lot more than two hundred dollars to him.

He flipped a handful of green sand at the eye in the swamp and it withdrew abruptly into the water. He ran, making a wide circle around the constrictor’s powerful tail. He darted in to the head and stood above the lidless eye. Three years ago he would not have walked this close to a dead constrictor, but now⁠—well, he’d learned not to be scared until there was need of it. He bent down. The fish was well inside the saurian’s mouth. The constrictor’s jaws were distended and it was helpless.

Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of sand at it.

He stayed there for two hours, until the bag of stones was well down the saurian’s throat. Then he set out for The Pass. He was painfully hungry now, but he was lighthearted. Never again would he have to risk the death that infested the Great Sea-Swamp. Within thirty days he would be home⁠—home on Earth. He and Beth would get a little house out in the country and have a little garden, and he could relax and watch his daughter grow up. She was only seven now. It wasn’t too late.

It was dark when he got to The Pass, the sinister city where he’d seen men killed for a twenty-dollar bill, where girls had been sold over the counter for fifty. He knew better than to go directly to Netse, for the Jovian and the Uranian had a sort of throat-cutting partnership in the underworld, and while Grant was sure Netse would help him directly to get a bigger cut, he knew also that Netse wouldn’t want to be too obvious about it.

So Grant, by this time weary in the shoulders from carrying his equipment, turned down Thorium Avenue toward Nellie’s Boarding House. But under the first streetlight he was stopped by a grimy boy. This was notable, because the boy was an Earthman. There weren’t too many Earthmen in The Pass.

“Where you been, Hard-Luck Russell?” the boy asked insolently.

Grant’s throat was dry. He knew what that meant. Nobody who knew Hard-Luck Russell would bother to stop him unless they had orders to do it⁠—orders that came from Relegar.

“In the Swamp,” Russell said, swallowing hard.

The kid stared at the diving-suit in Grant’s hand, stared at Grant’s face with a sharp, penetrating, unashamed inquisitiveness that made Grant use all of his willpower to stare back. The kid suddenly disappeared.

Grant forced himself not to walk faster. The kid had put the finger on him. It was the first time Relegar had ever done that. Those damned eyes! Relegar must know what Grant had found, and the knowledge that the Uranian knew about the stones made him weak. Relegar was a bad spider.

Grant’s impulse was to run but he forced himself to be steady. Now he didn’t dare go straight to Netse. He went on to Nellie’s place and hammered on the door. “Oh, it’s you. Come on in.” Nellie opened the door. Nellie was a Martian, a century-plant, and nobody knew whether it was he or she or whether it made any difference, but they called it “she” and they called it “Nellie.”

Grant went in. Nellie’s leaves rustled and that queer whispery voice came from her. “Do you want a cot?”

“I’ll have a room this time,” said Grant. “How much?”

“A buck,” said Nellie’s leaves. “Pay now.”

She collected. He took his diving-suit to the room. He didn’t like the smell of cabbage and garlic, and the fumes of chlorine were so strong he nearly choked. A Saturnian must be pickling insects somewhere up on the second floor. He sat down. He was starved but he didn’t want to go outside until he had a chance to figure things out. He thought maybe the first thing to do was to see Netse.

From the sounds he thought the two girls across the hall were getting ready to go out. He lay down on the bed to rest.

At ten o’clock they left, jabbering. It was good to hear Earth-people talk, even if it was French, which he didn’t understand. As soon as the front door closed after the girls he tiptoed across the hall and tried the doorknob. It was locked. He opened it with his skeleton key. The room was dark and he did not turn on a light. He opened the window and dropped softly to the ground in a narrow space between two buildings.

A grating voice said, “Where you going, punk?”

Grant froze. He wanted to run but couldn’t. He turned. Back at the alley, in the light, was a medium-size, solidly built man with black hair and a long scar on his left cheek. Grant wheeled, but stopped short. In front of him, at the street end, was a huge Neptunian. It was ten feet high. Grant shuddered. He didn’t want that thing too close to him with its razor-sharp teeth and its fondness for blood. He walked toward the Earthman.

They took him into a snow-joint over on Chloride Street. The man led, the Neptunian followed. They went down many flights of stairs carved in the solid purple lava and finally into an elevator. They went farther down.

This, then, was Relegar’s headquarters. The Uranian couldn’t stand radiation for any length of time. Out on Uranus they had almost none, and so Venus, with its very heavy clouds that filtered the sunlight, was one of the few planets where a Uranian could live. Even so, the Uranians on Venus, having an instinctive dread of sunlight because sunlight usually meant radiation, preferred to stay underground. Perhaps it was more like their native world that way, for they lived underground even on Uranus.

They got out of the elevator in a rock cavern and walked a hundred feet. They passed two guards and went through a steel door. They were in a big room, dimly lighted by red bulbs. Giant didn’t like the dimness and he didn’t like the smell. He tried to see.

“Here he is,” said the man.

There was an odd bass rambling which Grant recognized as the voice of a Uranian. He shivered. Then there were words, and Grant knew the Uranian, wherever he was⁠—maybe in a different room⁠—was using a modifier to turn his sounds into Earth-language: “Walk closer,” ordered the queer voice. “I want to watch your face.”

It scraped the marrow in his bones, that queer voice. He saw a big tunnel, and at the far end of it, barely discernible in the dim light, was Relegar. Grant stared, chilled. His eyes became used to the queer light, and then he began to make out details. The tunnel was round and big enough so that a man could have walked into it, and at the far end the big Uranian seemed to be standing on his side, with his sixteen huge jointed legs supporting him, half of them on the floor and half on the ceiling. His purple, hairy body was supported in the middle almost as from a web. His two semi-globular eyes, seemingly opaque, were surrounded by six smaller ones. Grant knew the smaller ones could detect infrared, and now he felt his face growing warm and knew they had on infra spot on him.

“What did you find in the swamp?” asked that dissonant voice.

Grant swallowed and licked his lips. “Nothing,” he said finally.

The great maw of the spider, rimmed in red, opened wide as if the Uranian was yawning. It showed long, curving white fangs. Then Relegar said, “You found stones of the echindul.”

“I have only one,” said Grant, and held it out fearfully.

A curious red began to creep over Relegar’s body. His next words were deadly: “One is no good. You found many. What did you do with them?”

Grant watched the great, gray poison-mandibles lift, and he was terrified. He wanted to speak but he could not.

“You’ve hidden them somewhere,” said the horrible voice. “You intended to go back after them. Well, I am going to let you do that. But I shall be after you. I, in person, shall be on your trail. How will you like that?”

“I⁠—I haven’t got them. I don’t know where they are,” Grant insisted, which, in a manner of speaking, was true.

Relegar’s two big bulbous eyes seemed to grow bigger and bigger, but still the light was reflected only from their surface. Grant took a step backward. Relegar swayed his body toward him, but the legs did not move. “Go get your stones,” he said. “But whenever you do, I’ll be right behind you. And don’t try to go to Aphrodite.”

The lights went out. The giant Neptunian was at Grant’s side. Grant felt the leathery skin against his hand. They took him up and kicked him out on the street.

Grant got dazedly to his feet. He had to see Netse the Jovian, quick. Netse would exact a steep price as soon as he found out that Relegar had threatened, but even one-third of the money would be better than nothing. And he knew what it meant to be trailed by Relegar. No being from any planet had ever come back sane from being hunted by Relegar. Most of them didn’t come back.

He stopped at the big jewelry house over on Curium Avenue. He saw that it was now nearly one o’clock in the morning, and of course the jewelry store was closed, but he knew that Netse seldom slept and that the Jovian probably did more business at night than during the day. He pressed the night button and waited.

The square of sidewalk dropped. Grant walked between X-ray scanners and remembered to deposit his heat-gun. He was met by an Earthman who took him up a long escalator. They went into a well-lighted room hung with rich tapestries and golden drapes. The man escorted Grant to a pedestal in the center of the room. The lights went out and it was inky black.

Then suddenly there sprang into sight on the pedestal a transparent dome the size of a small goldfish bowl. It was lighted by ultraviolet from the bottom. In the center of the dome a small golden ball hung by a platinum wire, and on the ball was a tiny butterfly⁠—Netse the Jovian. Netse’s wings moved slowly as he walked around the ball, and the violet light brought out the delicate green luminous tracery in his wings. Grant involuntarily stepped back.

There were whistling words and Grant was aware that they came through a speaker and amplification system. He knew the dome that protected the Jovian was almost indestructible. “You wished to see me?” The wings moved slowly back and forth. Each one had a purple spot in the center like an eye.

Grant gulped. “Yes. I⁠—I have something to show you. I need your help.” He wondered if the purple spots actually were eyes.

“Most people do,” said Netse dryly.

Grant, inordinately ill at ease, fumbled in his watch-pocket. It was incredible that this tiny butterfly that would hardly outweigh a cigarette paper should have the brain to conduct a ramified business such as this one, and it was even more incredible that men and everything else⁠—except perhaps Relegar⁠—would yield to its will. Will, of course, was the key factor. Will was dominant and men obeyed.

Grant held out the echindul stone. “This is one of a pair,” he said. “I found the other one too.”

“You have just come back from the Red Lava Range,” said the whistling voice. “How many pairs did you find?”

Grant stared at the butterfly. Some thought the Jovians could read minds. Grant wondered. Then he decided to be honest. “Sixteen.”

Netse’s wings quit moving for a minute. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to assure me safe passage to your office. I will give you three-fourths of them,” Grant blurted. He had not meant to make an offer like that. He had intended to let Netse ask but the delicacy of his situation hit him abruptly and fully and he was weighed down with sudden desperation.

“How can you find the others?” asked Netse.

“I⁠—” Grant got cautious. “I have provided for that.”

The butterfly fluttered to the top of the dome and hung upside down for a moment. Then the whistling came again. “I am sorry. I do not see where I can be of any assistance.”

Grant was stunned. He held out both hands. “But⁠—”

The lights went out. The Earthman was at his side, leading him out. He was given his heat-gun. “But what⁠—why?⁠—I don’t understand,” Grant said, bewildered.

His escort looked at him, opened his mouth, and showed Grant he was tongueless. He positioned Grant on the square and a moment later Grant was back on the sidewalk.

Discouragement was on him like a great weight. It deadened him. It smothered him. He paced the streets and eventually found himself before a restaurant. He remembered then that he had not eaten for a long time. He went in and ordered oysters. That was about the only meat you could buy in The Pass and be sure of not eating some sentient being. Then, waiting, he sat in a booth with his head between his hands.

It was apparent they didn’t want him to have any part of his stones⁠—the stones he had spent six months and risked his life for⁠—the stones that meant so much to him and to Beth. They wanted all of his stones. The dirty Shylocks. They weren’t willing to take half, or two-thirds, or three-fourths. They wanted all. They weren’t willing for him to have any part of them. He would have settled for ten percent, which would have been over fifty thousand dollars, but they didn’t offer him ten percent. They offered nothing. They wanted all.

Netse must have been contacted by Relegar and told to keep hands off. That was why Grant had wanted to see Netse first. But he had not dreamed that Netse would refuse him entirely. He had thought it would be merely a matter of the price.

Now what could he do? He didn’t dare let the constrictor have more than three day’s head-start, for the saurian would finish digesting the fish in about five days. That meant Grant would have to start back to the swamp tomorrow. But Relegar’s spies would report every move. The minute he set out, Relegar would be notified. And Relegar would come after him. Grant shuddered. Where his hands touched his face his finger tips were cold.

Relegar would find him. The spider had a locator sense that was infallible. He could set out days later and find Grant unerringly. And how could one fight the Uranian when they met? Relegar’s nervous system was so constructed that he was practically impossible to kill. You could boil him or freeze him without injuring him. Uranians had been boiled alive in prussic acid for forty hours without ill effects. You could cut off legs and even sever the head and they would still live. So what could a man do?

There was only one thing Grant knew. That was to go after the stones. They were his and he would never give them up. They might take the stones away from him, but he would never give them up.

So the next morning he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good meal and started out south again with the single stone in his watch-pocket.

It took him seven hours to reach the place where he had left the constrictor. It was gone, of course. How far, he could not know. He took the one telepathic stone from his pocket. He found a spot where he could sit in the open, cross-legged, with his eyes fixed on the stone. From the corner of his eye he saw a brown detached eye on a stalk pop up from the surface of the water, but he paid no attention. He concentrated on the stone.

The stone had a fair polish. He looked at its surface and shut out all the normal sounds from his ears. The stone seemed to be in motion on the inside, and presently that motion communicated itself to his mind. He had a picture of a constrictor, lying sleepily in a pool of brown water surrounded by heavy, deep grass that hung over the banks and grew down into the water.

He heard now the distant bellow of a swamp-ox, the buzzing of aquatic bees. Slowly he turned the stone on its edge and revolved it carefully. When the picture was clearest in his mind he picked out an orientation point in the distant mountains. Then, well pleased, he put the stone in his pocket, got into his diving-suit, screwed on the helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water of the swamp.

The bottom here was steep but it was good. It was hard and not more than knee-deep in mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white bull-root, shaped like women’s legs, because he knew the bull-root was always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through the seams of his diving-suit.

When he came out of the water he found his orientation point and kept going. He came to a wide stretch of water, and with the wind at his back, made fast time by climbing on an island of floating grass and going straight across. This was important. He needed to find the constrictor by the time Relegar started after him.

The spider could travel much faster than Grant for it walked on water where Grant was forced to wade on the bottom. But Relegar would wait a while. He wouldn’t want to be on the surface of Venus any longer than necessary, even for half a million dollars, so he would give Grant plenty of time, since there was no danger of his getting away.

Grant was encouraged by the fact that the constrictor did not appear to be far away. Everything here depended on his reaching the saurian two days ahead of Relegar. Not that he expected to run. That was hopeless. But he did have a partial plan. He thought he knew how to recover the stones and to face the Uranian without being immediately killed. And he hoped for some now unforeseen development that subsequently would help him to get through The Pass.

That last item was a weak point, a very weak point, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He could not wait for a plan. He had to go ahead and trust his own ingenuity to devise a means of getting to Aphrodite later. If he could keep Relegar from going back to The Pass until he himself could get through The Pass, then he would be unmolested, for Relegar was master of The Pass, and no entity of any sort, not even as powerful a one as Netse, would touch any being in whom Relegar was interested unless Relegar himself should order it.

If Grant could get through The Pass and across Division Street he would be safe, for Aphrodite proper was under the jurisdiction of the Planetary Police, and even Relegar respected them.

Grant found the constrictor on the second day, lying in a shallow pool with only its dorsal spines showing. Working slowly and carefully and entirely under water, he located the saurian’s head, concealed in a clump of floating grass. The reptile was still in something of a torpor from its meal, and Grant had no difficulty in approaching it through the water and attacking it with the heat-gun on the soft part of the neck below the head.

The first bolt must have gone through and severed its spinal column, but Grant risked destruction from the threshing body long enough to burn the head off entirely. He got out on solid ground and waited until sundown for the monster’s contortions to die. Then he worked fast. The flying scavenger-foxes were already settling on the constrictor’s back and tearing out great chunks of flesh. He went back under water and cut out the saurian’s gizzard with the heat-ray. He dragged it off to one side and tremblingly cut it open with his knife, and he was relieved and exultant when he recovered all fifteen of the stones. The bag had disintegrated, but he put the stones carefully in his pockets.

Then he went back once more. He cut off a piece of the hide two feet square. He took only the outer hide, which was dry and which held the great iridescent scales that formed isotopes after death. From some marsh-bamboo and some wire-vines he formed a shield. By that time it was midnight. He turned his light on the pool where the saurian had been, and shuddered. The water was dull red, and alive with creatures fighting each other to get to the carcass. The surface was covered with flying things, some small, some huge, all fighting, fighting. Life on Venus was an eternal, bloody fight. This slaughter, once started, would go on for weeks, until the fighting creatures in this immediate area of the swamp were exhausted.

Grant snapped off the light as clouds of flying things arose. He started down the neck of dry land and walked all night, going as far as he could without submerging, getting out of range of the holocaust around the dead constrictor. Eventually he came to a lavawood tree. He examined it carefully, then climbed it. He found a crotch in the limbs. He lay down and hung his arms and legs over the limbs, pulled the shield over him, and went to sleep.

From the brilliant, blinding light of the sun even through the clouds, and the vapor arising from the surface of the swamp, he knew it was mid-afternoon when he awoke. He started up, but long habit stopped him almost as soon as he moved. He opened his eyes and was fully awake, listening for the sound that had awakened him. He heard it, a rasping noise like the sound of a knife-blade scraped against the grain of a fresh hog-skin. He looked across the swamp. Less than fifty yards away was Relegar, walking toward him on the water. The sound came from the scraping of his gray poison-mandibles against each other.

Relegar’s mouth, as wide as his body, was open. The two bulbous eyes gleamed like pieces of polished metal. They saw Grant. The spider’s sixteen jointed legs, that held his purple body three feet above the water, moved too fast for Grant to follow them. The Uranian skittered across a hundred feet of water and walked out on the land.

His bone-scraping voice came to Grant in the tree. “I’ll take the stones now.” It was a sinister voice. Grant felt a crawling, instinctive horror as the spider came toward him, its jointed legs moving delicately. “You’ve saved me some trouble by finding them.”

Grant overcame his paralysis and reached for the heat-gun. Relegar saw the motion and stopped. “You can’t hurt me with that heat-projector,” he said. “You might shoot off a leg, but I’d have you half eaten before you could fire a second bolt.”

The knowledge hit Grant with what was almost a shock that there was some way he could get the best of Relegar, otherwise the big spider would not have spoken at all. He well knew that he couldn’t kill Relegar with the heat-gun. He could burn off a leg, yes, but he doubted that the infra-rays would affect the spider’s body at all. He moved a little on the limbs, got a hold on the snake-skin shield, and dropped to the ground.

Relegar darted forward to meet him. But ten feet away the spider stopped, and Grant knew he had felt the radiation from the snake-skin. Relegar’s mouth hung open, his white fangs gleaming in the red maw. The two bulbous eyes were suddenly shot with the red fire of anger. Grant did not hesitate. As he landed on the ground he fired a heat-bolt at one of Relegar’s left legs. It smoked. There was an odor of burned hair. The queer material of the leg glowed white for an instant and then burned in two and the bottom part dropped off.

Relegar squealed. His two eyes almost exploded in a rage of red. He wasn’t permanently injured⁠—he would grow a new leg⁠—but he was furious because he dared not come close to the shield. The radiation would paralyze him within a couple of seconds. Grant saw his body sag a little on the corner where the leg had been, and then he had one of those flashes of intuition that every being had to have, to live long in the swamp. He knew how to win this fight. He trained the heat-gun on the second leg on the same side and pressed the trigger. That leg burned in two and Relegar’s body sagged still more.

Grant started on the third one. A feeling of triumph was growing in him. Then Relegar charged.

Grant hadn’t expected that. There was little he could do but hold the shield frantically before him to try to ward off the fangs and the mandibles.

He had had no idea that the Uranian’s body was so heavy. It seemed to Grant the thing must weigh three or four hundred pounds. It thundered into him and knocked him over as if he had been a straw. The heavy hoofs galloped over him. He was surprised, but he rolled on over and came to his feet, shooting.

He got the fourth and fifth legs this time. Relegar’s body sagged considerably, but the spider, his entire body turning red with rage, spun around and charged again. This time the great mouth was open, the fangs ready, and the mandibles were extended. Grant left himself open until he could feel the spider’s fetid breath in his face, then he flung out his shield.

The sharp fangs struck it. Relegar turned into a tornado of fury for perhaps a second, trying to shake the skin from his teeth. But it was too late. The skin came loose, but the radiation had paralyzed the spider. He sank feebly to the ground with the shield under him. His eyes glared with unutterable malignant hate, but that was all. His muscles were impotent.

Grant stood a few feet away, getting his breath, feeling the trip-hammer in his temple slow down to normal. Then he aimed. The sixth, seventh, and eighth legs burned off. He put the pistol in its holster.

“I’m not going to try to kill you,” he said. “I suppose that’s impossible anyway, short of cutting you up into small pieces, and I don’t relish that idea. But I’ll leave you the snake-skin. It will have passed the peak of its radioactivity by tomorrow and you can start back for The Pass. But you won’t go back very fast. You’ve got legs on only one side. It’s going to be slow navigating, especially on water. In fact, I think maybe you’ll have to wait until you grow some new legs.”

He patted his pockets filled with half a million dollars’ worth of echindul stones. “Long before that I’ll be in Aphrodite depositing my stones at the First Interplanetary Bank.”

He watched Relegar’s eyes turn dead, cold black, then he screwed on his helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water. He felt rather good, wading through the mud at the bottom of the swamp. He was somewhat astonished that it had fallen to him, a nobody, to be the means of breaking up Relegar’s hold on The Pass. But it was a very satisfactory feeling. He thought about Beth and New Jersey and strawberries with fresh cream. He sighed happily. His luck had changed.

You Too Can Be a Millionaire

Mark Renner looked anxiously backward as he ran up the street to the place where the faded gold lettering on one window said “Jewelry.” That would be a good place to hide, he thought. Most of the plate-glass windows and doors along the street were broken out as in fact they were everywhere, and had been for twenty years⁠—but one of the jewelry windows and the door, protected by iron grating, were still whole and would help to conceal him.

With one final glance back at the corner, he climbed the grating, scuttled across it, and dropped down. Then, keeping low, he ducked in among the dusty old counters and stopped abruptly, listening.

He heard Conley’s slow, slapping footsteps as the tall man rounded the corner and came up the street. He forced himself to breathe softly in spite of the pounding of his heart. The dust rose a little around him and got in his nostrils and he wanted to sneeze, but by sheer willpower he choked it down.

Conley was from the Machine⁠—Central Audit Bureau⁠—and the Machine knew by now that Mark was three thousand points in the red. Three thousand points⁠—when you were supposed to be always within one day’s point of a balance. You were allowed twelve hundred points a day, so Mark was now two and a half days in debit.

He’d been walking the streets in a sort of daze, signing slips right and left while his own pad of slips stayed in his pocket. He hadn’t cared, either, until now, because in this brave new world of the one freedom⁠—freedom from work⁠—he was abominably unhappy.

Everybody struggled all day to get enough points to stay even with Central, and what good did it do them? You got even one day, but the next day you had to start all over. There wasn’t any point to it. So he’d said to hell with it, and for five days now he’d ignored the Machine entirely except to line up automatically once a day at the concourse to have his card audited. And for five straight days the balance had been in red.

Then, today, he had seen Conley on the street, coming toward him. All of a sudden Mark had been scared. He didn’t know what Central would do to him⁠—nobody knew⁠—but he didn’t want to find out, either. He ran from Conley.

Now he crouched in the dust behind an empty counter while Conley’s footsteps approached. He held his breath when they got close, and when they passed the broken window he was very thankful.

It was late afternoon and he thought Conley would go back to Central. Nobody knew much about Conley except that he represented the Machine and that he seemed to disappear within it every afternoon.

So, presently, Mark crawled out of the broken window and walked down to Main Street. He looked carefully right and left and then, not seeing Conley’s tall form above the traffic, he wandered slowly down the street, trying to figure things out. Why wasn’t there anything worth while to do? What was the reason for all the broken windows and empty stores? Had there once been places where people could buy things like food and clothes? Maybe⁠—before Central Audit Bureau had come into existence. Or had Central always been there?

Mark saw the old lady sitting in the wheelchair. He turned out absently to walk by her. He saw her put her foot in his way but his brain wasn’t working. He stumbled over her foot.

Instantly the old lady half arose from her chair as if in pain, shrieking and brandishing her cane, the leg held stiffly out in front of her. “You’ve injured me,” she shrieked in a raucous voice. “You’ve hurt my lame foot!”

Mark stood there dumbly. He was a young man and so he didn’t at once foresee what was about to happen.

A crowd gathered in no time. The old lady was putting on a show. Mark didn’t get it. He would have allowed her a thousand points⁠—even fifteen hundred⁠—without argument. But he got the shock of his young life.

“Thirty thousand points!” she screamed at him, and thrust a pad of slips at him. “Sign my slip, please.”

Mark took the pad automatically. He took the pencil she held out. He started to sign. He’d never get a credit balance at the Central Bureau now, but he didn’t care. Maybe he’d get in so deep they’d give him some work.

The old lady’s voice rose unexpectedly. “My feelings are hurt, too. He did it deliberately. Five thousand points for my injured feelings.”

Dazedly Mark wrote down “Thirty-five thousand and no more,” and signed his name. He handed the pad back to her and started on. The crowd was leaving.

But a voice stopped him. A soft voice. “Wait, son.” He looked back. He started to go on, then he saw the old lady’s eyes on his. “Stick around,” she said. There wasn’t any raucousness in her voice now. “Wait till the crowd goes. I want to talk to you.”

Presently he was walking beside her while she laboriously operated the two big hand-wheels that propelled the chair. Two blocks away she turned into an empty building marked “Groceries.” Mark helped her cross the threshold.

Inside, she amazed him by springing out of the chair and standing quite steadily. She was small and she wasn’t as old and wrinkled as he had thought. “You get in the chair,” she said. “I’ll push you. I need the exercise.”

A minute later she was pushing him briskly along the street while Mark sat, still half dazed, in the wicker chair, her old red shawl was across his lap.

“Get cramps in my legs, to say nothing of my bottom,” she observed, “sitting there all day.” She saw him stiffen. “Oh, you needn’t be shocked. After all, I’m old enough to be your grandmother. I was born in 1940, you know.”

“Nineteen-forty,” Mark repeated, wonderingly. “Gee, that was back in the days when everybody worked. I wish I could work.”

“Well, it’s a changed world,” she observed. “In those days, you had to work.”

At that instant Mark heard the ominous slapping footsteps. He looked ahead, and there was Conley, easily noticeable because of the type N hat a head above everybody else, coming toward them. Mark snatched up the red shawl and wrapped it around his face to the nose and pulled his hat low over his eyes. He watched from under the type L brim while Conley approached. He held his breath while Conley fixed his deep eyes on him for a moment, but Conley went by, and once more he was safe.

The old lady trotted briskly along. They passed a few people who stared at them, but Mark was thinking. “This is 2021,” he observed. “You’re eighty-one years old. You must know all about things.”

“I’m quite spry,” she pointed out, “though I must say I am working up a sweat right now. No, no⁠—” She pushed Mark back into the chair. “It’s good for me. Don’t get enough exercise any more. Now you just sit there. You’re in a bad way. Anybody who’d fall for such a phony act and release thirty-five thousand points without even an argument⁠—well, of course,” she said archly, “I do have a well-turned ankle.”

But the enormity of Mark’s debit with Central when the old lady should turn in his slip, began to worry him. He wondered if he could get it back from her. He wasn’t happy with the world, and things were all wrong, and all that, but still⁠—well, he did have to live in it. Thirty-five thousand points. He began to worry. He wished he knew what the penalty would be. He wondered if the old lady knew. What were these points all about anyway? “You must know,” he said, “how the world got into this mess.”

She chuckled, “For thirty-five thousand points, I guess you’ve got a right to the story.” She turned into the archway of a standard type B apartment house.

He wondered what she would do with all those points. What did anybody do with them? Everybody had about the same living quarters. Food was furnished by automatic vendors at the Hydroponic Farms. Clothes were provided, ready-made; all you had to do was put your credit card in a machine, punch the buttons for your measurements, and a suit would drop down the chute.

Mark got out of the chair and helped her inside with it. He took off his hat and started uncertainly to leave, but she put her hand on his arm, “No, no. Have supper with me. I’ll tell you all about everything. Glad to. There aren’t many who want to know about things any more.”

Her apartment was neat and clean. It was hard for Mark to connect it with an old woman shrieking points at him. “My name’s Pearl. Point-Plus-Pearlie, they call me. But my real name’s Penelope. You can call me Penelope.”

“Thank you,” Mark said gravely, and sat down. Penelope bustled into an apron and began pulling packages from the freezer. “We’ll have a feed, you and I⁠—a real feed.” She chuckled pleasantly. “After all, you’re paying for it.”

Mark squirmed uncomfortably.

“I’ll tell you how all this started,” Penelope said, popping open a can of high-content protein. “Back before you were born there were insurance companies. At first they were started to insure your life, and⁠—”

“Your life!” Mark frowned. “How⁠—”

“Never mind. Also, they insured you against loss by fire. Then it was loss by collision of vehicles⁠—you’ve never seen an auto, of course⁠—and so on. Finally they got to insuring you against hurting yourself when you slipped on a cake of soap in the bathtub, and then they insured against a suit for damages by someone who might stub his toe and fall down and break a leg on your sidewalk. Follow me?”

“I think so,” said Mark doubtfully.

“Well, there were all kinds of lawsuits. Two men would be in an accident. Both hurt. Their insurance companies would sue each other. Suppose A knocked over a ladder and B fell down on top of him. B’s fall broke A’s arm and it broke his own leg. A could sue B for breaking his arm. B could sue A for making him fall. Well, suppose A was insured by company X, and B was insured by company Y. A and B filed claims against each other’s companies, and everybody went to court.”

“You mean they didn’t agree on damages?” Mark asked incredulously.

“Exactly.” Penelope cut off the top of a bottle of enzymes. “It was pretty dumb. But pretty soon the companies got wise. They formed working agreements.

“When two companies carried insurance on two persons involved in an accident, the companies just presented their claims to each other, and the one with the biggest claim against him paid the difference, while each company paid off the claim of the one it represented. You can see what eventually happened.”

She punched a button and a dinette table popped out of the wall.

“Companies insured people for more and more types of damage, even against being insulted or against a claim for damages for being insulted. The big companies eliminated the small ones, and it was just a matter of bookkeeping among those that were left. Eventually the government took it over.”

“But look,” said Mark, “I don’t see⁠—”

“Don’t rush me.” Penelope put a can into the container-dissolver and punched the button that set out the plates and silverware on the tiny table. “You see, pretty soon everybody was insured for everything possible. People were collecting right and left, mostly small amounts but lots of them. But it took quite a bit of time to file claims and so on. And also, a man spent all he made buying insurance to protect himself. It was a wicked circle. Nobody could quit buying insurance and nobody dared quit filing claims. That’s when the government took over. They simplified things. Once a day you turn your slips into Central and the Machine audits your account. That’s all there is to it.”

“But there’s nothing else to do,” Mark objected. “No entertainment, no work.”

“Why should there be entertainment? Entertainment means work for somebody. No, Central⁠—which is the government, of course⁠—has eliminated work for everybody and at the same time has provided something to keep everybody busy. What work must be done is done by automatic, self-lubricating, self-repairing, self-renewing machinery.” She sighed. “It’s a brave new world. Everything is neatly worked out. Everybody spends all their time gathering points to offset the points they lose gathering points⁠—and nobody seems to mind except a few rebels like you and me. I saw that rebellious look in your eyes when you signed my slip. That’s why I invited you to come along with me. But, as I said, Central keeps everybody busy all day and half the night trying to balance themselves. There’s no labor problem, no unemployment, no relief, no worry about anything.” She paused, to dip the vitamins out of the dissolver. “The only catch is⁠—it’s so damned monotonous.”

Mark blinked, but Penelope whirled on him, the dissolver in one hand. “Why do you think I sit out there and put on my act all day long? Not to get points, though I confess the points are the measure of my success⁠—but because life is too dull otherwise.” She dished out the vitamins.

“You say the government did all this?”

“Yes.”

A thought struck Mark. “Who is the government?”

Penelope was filling glasses from the ice-water faucet. She turned her head and stared at him like a bright-eyed bird. “To tell you the truth, Mark, as far as I know the men who used to make up the government disappeared after the last war, about the time all this automatic machinery was put in. We used to have an election every so often, but I haven’t heard that word for twenty-five years. Do you know what I think?”

“No,” Mark said attentively.

“I don’t think there is any more government!” Penelope said dramatically. “I think all that’s left are the Machine and Central Audit Bureau⁠—which is nothing but a giant posting machine.”

“Have you seen it⁠—Central, I mean? I see the concourse where we line up every day to have our cards posted⁠—but what’s behind those twelve hundred windows?”

She nodded briskly. “I saw it from one of the last planes. Central covers miles and miles in both directions. They said then it was the biggest machine on earth⁠—and do you know, Mark”⁠—she paused dramatically⁠—“I think the Machine is the government! Roll up your chair, Mark.”

Mark did. “But doesn’t there have to be somebody to take care of the Machine?” he asked, holding her chair.

“Not that I know of. They said it was perfect⁠—that barring an earthquake it would run for a thousand years without a human hand.”

The iron-juice cocktail was pretty good, the way Penelope had flavored it with enzymes. But Mark inevitably got back to the thing that worried him. “What will happen when that release slip of mine goes through for thirty-five thousand points?”

Penelope raised her white eyebrows. “I don’t know, but undoubtedly something drastic. I’ll tell you what. I’ll hold your slip for a while and you go out and see if you can get some points on your credit side. Stir up a little trouble. Get the points first and argue after.”⁠ ⁠…

Mark went out and tried to get some points next day, but he couldn’t seem to get his heart in his work. It was all so pointless. Why couldn’t the old lady give him back that slip, anyway? Mark got pretty much in the dumps, and after he managed to get his foot stepped on and demanded three hundred points, only to be countered by a claim of four hundred for hurting the other man’s instep, he began to feel very low indeed.

At the end of the week he was walking slowly along the street watching for Conley, because he was getting further in the red every day, when he saw a foot stuck out in his way and heard a voice say, “Don’t you stumble over my lame foot,” and he looked up and saw the old lady. Her black eyes were soft. “You don’t look happy, Mark.”

“No.” He held out his card.

“Hm.” Her keen old eyes shot back to his. “Thirty-two hundred in the red. That’s more than before. You’ve lost two hundred points this week, Mark.”

“I know,” he said dully.

“Here. Push me, Mark.” She pulled the shawl around her and Mark started pushing the wheelchair. “You’re a nice boy,” she said when they reached a quiet street. “You just can’t adjust yourself to this modern world.”

“I want a job,” Mark said stubbornly. “Something to do besides⁠—well, some kind of mark to aim at, I guess. This point business is just putting in time. I’m not creating anything. Even if I could fasten zippers on featherbeds, I’d be doing something worth while, because it’d be used. But this way of living is like digging a hole and then filling it in again. Why, you don’t even dare to get into a fight. Somebody would collect a thousand points every time you hit him. The standard price of a black eye is three thousand. You have to be pretty careful about things like that. And there’s always Conley.”

“Well,” Penelope said, “I’m going to make you a proposition. I’ll hold up your slip for sixty days, and in the meantime I’ll teach you how to get ahead of the game. I’ll teach you the tricks of the trade, just as old Point-a-Minute Charlie taught me. They say he averaged a point a minute all his life.”

“Where is he now?” asked Mark, interested.

The old lady pondered. “Come to think of it, I don’t know. I remember the last time I talked to him his credit balance was 98,000.” She frowned at the tremendous, low-lying dome that covered the horizon in the distance and marked Central Audit Bureau. “I haven’t seen him since then.”

“Hm,” said Mark.

“Well, now,” Penelope said briskly. “I’ll make you a regular business deal. I’ll teach you, and for all you get, you give me twenty percent. See how many you can get. Try for ten thousand. That’ll give you something to shoot at.”

“Maybe I can beat the Machine,” Mark said eagerly.

Penelope swallowed. “They say you can’t beat the Machine. But I guess it won’t hurt to try.”

Mark did well. At first he just walked down the street stopping people as fast as he could get to them. “You didn’t recognize me, sir,” he would say indignantly. “I met you at Central concourse two years ago. Remember? You stood right in front of me in line for three hours, and we talked about our new suits. Remember? My feelings are injured because you ignored me just now. Fifty points. Will you sign my slip, please?”

His credit reached the black the first week. He was netting five hundred points a day, and it was fun, but Penelope said, “We’ll go for bigger stakes. This is kindergarten stuff. Now here’s the way you start.⁠ ⁠…”

So the next morning Mark managed to get himself knocked down four times, and each time he came up with a skinned knee and collected from five hundred to eight hundred and fifty points. He was learning, Penelope assured him when he gleefully showed her his card at the end of the day. Mark was elated. That day he had gathered fifty-one hundred points.

“But this can get monotonous, too,” Penelope said. “Anyway, you can’t go around forever with a sandpapered knee. You’re learning fast, and you’re learning right. Old Point-a-Minute Charlie was the best there was, in his day, and he always said you make more points guessing character than you do falling down. Know your victim before you have an accident, and then hit him for all he will pay and hit him quick⁠—the way I did you.” She chuckled. “My commission for today is one thousand and twenty points. Here, sign my slip, please.”

Mark signed. It was a cheap price to pay for the fact that life was no longer pointless. He decided he’d try to gather a credit of one hundred thousand points.

He worked on bigger stuff. He didn’t try just everybody. He picked his signers with care. He slept until nine every morning and he and Penelope played two-handed bridge at a tenth of a point a point until midnight. He felt sorry for the poor suckers who had to get out at sunup and tread the sidewalks until dark to get enough points to satisfy Central. They were working like slaves, while he was living the life of Point-a-Minute Charlie.

It was a lovely existence. He forgot about Penelope’s slip for thirty-five thousand. He could almost pay it off anyway. Then came the day when he pulled his grand coup.

He spent a week planning it, with Penelope’s shrewd advice. He remembered what she had said about the man on the ladder in the nineteen-forties. He sandpapered his back and painted an irregular spot with merthiolate and iodine, and practiced twisting his back until it looked out of shape. Then he went out and watched for an absentminded, nervous, excitable-looking man to try his next effort on.

Penelope’s biggest advice was, “Preparation is half the points,” so it was three days before Mark found the right person. After he found him it was very simple. He signaled Penelope to follow, and then he walked behind the man until they came to a high curb.

Mark moved out to the left. The man started to step up on the curb. Mark darted across in front of the man just as the man raised his foot. Mark managed to stumble exactly in front of the man. His arms went out and one hand caught the little man’s leg. The little man fell squarely on top of him, assisted by a slight push from Penelope.

Mark groaned heart-breakingly. In a moment there was a crowd. The little man was getting up, bewildered, and automatically trying to dust off his type K suit. Mark lay half on the curb, half off, squirming like a broken-back snake. “My back,” he moaned piteously. “Oh, my back.”

The little man seemed paralyzed at the enormity of the thing he had done. He stared at Mark and Mark squirmed harder and moaned louder. Then Penelope hobbled up and pulled Mark’s shirttail out of his trousers. The iodine spot on his back looked yellow and purple, and there were gasps from the crowd.

“He did it!” Mark said, glaring accusingly at the little man. “He tripped me. He tripped me and broke my back!”

Penelope was putting on a good act too, crying and wringing her hands and moaning. “My poor boy!” she said, over and over. A woman in the crowd came up and made a very expressive raspberry in the little man’s face. The little man was not only bewildered; he was frightened. Mark adjudged the time had come.

“Points for my broken back!” he cried. Penelope held out a slip to the little man. He signed it dazedly, then he slipped out of the crowd, while three men picked up Mark and laid him tenderly in Penelope’s reclining wheelchair.

Mark could hardly contain himself. As soon as they were safely out of sight he said excitedly, “Let me see the slip.”

Penelope looked around. She kept pushing him but she handed over the slip.

“Fifty thousand points!” Mark read under his breath. “Isn’t that wonderful!” He couldn’t remember ever having felt so elated in his life.

Penelope was shaking her head wonderingly. “That was a good act,” she said. “I’d never have had the nerve to try that myself.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.” Mark was enthusiastic. “As soon as I get fitted up with a magnelite brace so it’ll look good, I’m going to knock a piece out of that curbing, and then if I can find out who’s the registered owner of it I’ll hit him for twenty-five thousand.”

Mark got the twenty-five thousand. The owner of the sidewalk was finally convinced that Mark’s broken back was worth a lot. From then on there was no holding Mark. Pretending to act for the little man who had originally knocked him down, he located the woman who had made a raspberry in the little man’s face and collected another two thousand; the woman didn’t recognize Mark, because Mark’s features were changed a little.

Then Mark spotted two others who had made threatening noises and collected five hundred from each, and from another who expressed doubt that he was really hurt, Mark got a thousand points. There was nothing to it, really. Most people had regular beats, and all Mark had to do was sit at one side in Penelope’s wheelchair and wait for them to come by. He would have collected more if he could have remembered more faces. He saw Conley go by once a day but now he wasn’t afraid. He thought Conley looked at him disappointedly.

A couple of weeks later he got his card back from the Machine at Central and looked at it with great satisfaction. He had a hundred and thirteen thousand points to his credit. He met Penelope and they went to her apartment for dinner. Jubilantly Mark got all the fancy food⁠—even some synthetic meat⁠—that he could get on his card, and they prepared for a feast.

“The only thing is,” Penelope said as she punched the dishes on the table, “I’m scared. I have a feeling you shouldn’t have gone over a hundred thousand.”

“Is that why you never cashed my slip for thirty-five thousand?”

She nodded. “That’s mostly the reason. My balance is over eighty thousand and I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know. Just afraid.”

“Well,” said Mark, “I’m not. I don’t see what Central can do to a person for getting points. There’s no rule against it.”

“It’s dangerous,” Penelope insisted.

“Nevertheless, I have made a decision. A hundred thousand points⁠—that’s nothing.” His head was high. “I’m going after a million points!”

Penelope gasped. “Mark, you mustn’t do anything like that. You have no use for a million points.”

“No,” Mark said complacently, “but it’s a lot of fun getting them. And it gives me something worth while to do. We’ll sit up till three o’clock every morning and play bridge, and I’ll stay in bed till noon, and dream up new stunts. I’ll pull one a week. Life is going to be worth living.”

The announcing light showed at the door. Penelope pressed the admittance button. A tall, thin man came in a moment later. “Mark Renner?” he asked.

Mark jumped. “Conley!” Mark’s stomach had a funny feeling in it.

“They told me I would find you here,” Conley said.

Penelope had recovered enough to gasp. “What do you want?”

“I’m from Central Audit Bureau.”

“That’s just lovely,” Penelope said, “but it doesn’t mean anything to us but a place where we get our cards balanced.”

“It should mean something to you,” Conley said hollowly. “Central is the government.”

Penelope stared at him. “Sit down, please. I thought Central was just a machine.”

“It is something more than a machine. There is a small corps of persons who live inside the machine to service it and occasionally adjust it, and those persons really are the government⁠—that is, all the government we have.” He sat down stiffly, his back straight. “Now then, Mr. Renner, your card today showed a credit balance of a hundred and thirteen thousand points. Is that correct?”

Mark swallowed. “Yes.” He looked at Penelope. She was pale. With difficulty Mark asked, “Is it your job to check up on people, to see if they are entitled to their points?”

“Oh, my, no. Central doesn’t care about that. In fact, Central doesn’t care how much anybody’s debit is. We figure as long as a man is in debt he’ll try to pay it off. They always do, at least. No, we never bother with debits, and I don’t suppose we ever would.”

Mark breathed a sigh of relief.

“But a credit of over a hundred thousand is something else,” said Conley. “The machines won’t handle six figures without trouble, you see, so there has to be a penalty.” He looked very sad. “Now, then, I shall have to⁠—”

“Wait!” cried Penelope. “His credit is a hundred and thirteen thousand⁠—but I have his slip for thirty-five thousand. If I turn it in, that would fix it up for him, wouldn’t it.”

Mark felt a warm wave of gratitude toward Penelope. She was a million percent; no question about it.

“Well⁠—yes, I suppose so. We don’t like these last-minute adjustments, but I suppose⁠—”

She came waving the slip and thrust it into Conley’s face.

“There!” she said triumphantly. “Put that on my account.”

Conley looked a little sad. “This is your slip?” he asked Mark.

Mark nodded gratefully.

“Let me have your credit card, Miss Penelope. Now, then, I’ll transfer these points⁠—hm.” Conley’s eyebrows raised. “Do you know what your balance is now, Miss Penelope?”

Penelope’s mouth shot open and she popped her hand across it.

“You have now a hundred and twenty-two thousand,” Conley said. He got up from his chair. “Well, I’m sorry, folks. That’s the way it is.”

Mark gulped. “What way?”

“Miss Penelope will have to come with me.”

Mark was on his feet. “If she goes, I go,” he said dramatically.

Conley looked at him. “If you feel that way about it, there won’t be any trouble at all. You did go over, so I can take you in too.”

“In where?” Penelope demanded.

“A certain number of persons is required to keep Central going, as I said⁠—actually to be the government. But most of the population today is so apathetic they wouldn’t be of any use at all, so years ago some of us who were in Central got an idea. We discovered that whenever any citizen rebels against the monotony of life today, he or she eventually winds up trying to gather a lot of points, because that is the only outlet for energy and ambition. That is the kind of person we need, so when anybody gets over a hundred thousand, the machine warns us. We go after them.” Conley picked up his type N hat. “Well, see you in the morning. Punch in your cards at window 1000. We’ll do the rest. And by the way⁠—” He was at the door. “We start work at eight o’clock.”

Mark brightened. “Did you say work?”

“Oh, it’s only four hours a day, five days a week. The rest of the time is your own, only of course you can’t come Outside. It would upset things if the general public learned about us. Yes, it’s a regular job; not hard work, but steady work. Gives you something to aim for; there are promotions, you know, and extra bonuses for those who show promise.”

“Work!” Mark said. “Steady work? You mean there’ll be something to do all the time?”

“Five days a week,” said Conley.

Mark said, “This is so sudden. Why don’t you sit down a minute while we let it soak in? We have plenty of enzymes and stuff for a guest, don’t we, Miss Penelope? Why not stay for supper, Conley?”

“No, thanks,” said Conley. “We have beefsteak and hot biscuits for supper in Central.”

Penelope shrieked with joy. “Beef!”

Mark was puzzled. “What’s that?”

“It’s an old-fashioned food,” said Conley. “Rather tasty too.”

“Please sit down,” Penelope begged, “and tell us more.”

Conley looked at his watch. “Believe I will. My feet get a little tired all day from pounding the pavement. But there isn’t much more to tell. You’ll find out everything tomorrow. And I’m sure you’ll like it. We try to give each person work to challenge him.”

“What if a person wouldn’t want to go to Central?”

“Very few ever object. Once in a while they are afraid and run away, but we just register their number with all the machines, and whenever that number is presented for food or clothes, the machines reject the card.” He paused. “A very neat arrangement. Of course, inside of Central the point system as you know it now will be of no value whatever. We use money in Central.”

Penelope had a can of synthetic meat in her hands. “Beef!” she said suddenly, and hurled the can into the disintichute. “I’m going to starve all night so I can enjoy eating tomorrow.”

“So nobody ever gets away?” asked Mark.

“Very seldom, though there’s one fellow playing a game with Central. He must have gotten wind of us, and he keeps careful check on his points. About once every three months he starts going strong. He’ll be putting in eight or ten thousand points a day. Then his balance will shoot up over a hundred thousand and I’ll go after him, but he’s always just signed away a lot of points. Would you believe it, the last time he had given away fifty thousand points to a fellow who claimed a broken back. He said he knew it was a phony, but he had me there and he laughed at me, for he had signed away the points. The slip showed up next day.”

Mark looked at Penelope and grinned. “We should have known that nobody in his right mind would give away fifty thousand points.”

Conley raised his hand in a salute. “See you tomorrow at Central. If they don’t keep you busy, look me up.”

Mark watched him leave. Then he looked beamingly at Penelope. “Work! Every day! Eight o’clock! We’ll have to get up before breakfast! Isn’t it wonderful?”

But Penelope’s birdlike eyes were bright. “He said there would be promotions and bonuses for those who show promise,” she recalled. “I wish we had known that. We could have made a cleanup and gone into Central with a record that would make their eyes pop out. Anyhow”⁠—she dug her pad of release blanks out of her pocket and began to figure on the back. “Let’s see, fifty thousand from the little man who’s playing a game with Central, twenty-five from the owner of the sidewalk, two thousand for the raspberry, five hundred each from two who made noises of disrespect, and a thousand from the man who doubted that your back was really broken. You could have collected two thousand from that last one,” she said absently, “if you hadn’t got cold feet. Anyway, that’s seventy-nine thousand points. Now, then, twenty percent of that is fifteen thousand, eight hundred points.”

She wrote rapidly and held out the pad to Mark. “Sign my slip, please.”

Nine Men in Time

The receivers, two of them lawyers, had long faces when they sat down across from my desk in the office of the Imperial Printing Company.

“Frankly, Mr. Shane,” said the older one, “it is a very grave question in our minds whether we should try to continue to operate the business or whether we should close the plant and liquidate the machinery and equipment the best we can.”

I was stunned. “I don’t understand,” I said helplessly. “We’ve been doing a nice business⁠—and at a profit⁠—in the year I’ve been here.” It was my first big job, and I wanted to make good. I thought I had made good, but here they were jerking the floor out from under me, and I couldn’t make any sense out of it.

“Well,” said one, “the business isn’t showing the profit we expected.”

“What you need is a used-car lot,” I said pointedly.

The elder man cleared his throat. “Now look, Mr. Shane, suppose we say three months.”

“What do you mean⁠—three months?”

“We’ll allow you to go ahead for three months. If the business doesn’t show a distinct upturn by then⁠—” He raised his eyebrows.

I swallowed hard. So that was it, then.

They even had the date set for the execution, and I knew they intended to go through with it. Only a revolution would change that.

I wanted that job; it was my chance to make a name for myself. If they should close the plant now, I’d have a black eye. You can’t go around asking for a job and saying, “But I was making money for them.” They’ll wonder what else was wrong.

I thought I knew why they were so willing to close the plant; it was part of an estate, and the way things were, it took a lot of their time each month for not too big a fee. But if the estate should be liquidated⁠—well, figure it out yourself. This business was all mixed up between an administratorship and a receivership, and the attorney’s fees for liquidation would be a percentage of a hundred-thousand-dollar shop. It could run to a nice sum. They’d sell out, collect their fee, and forget it. A nice clean deal for them. And no more worry.

That is what I was up against, so perhaps it was inevitable that I should find Dr. Hudson⁠—Lawrence Edward Hudson. That was 1983, really about the beginning of the scientific age in industry, and I dug this idea up out of the back of my head where it had been for some time. Dr. Hudson was the result. I did not label him efficiency-expert, for printers have always been notoriously allergic to that title. I called him production-engineer.

He was a small, thin-faced man with a face that seemed to all flow into a point where his nose should have been, and he started talking things over with me before he got his coat off.

“Printing,” he said, “is really the backward industry. There has been no basic advance since the invention of the linecasting machine around 1890, and possibly the development of offset printing.”

“That,” I said, “is why you are here⁠—to bring out something startling.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ve heard the old one about the man who had something to do with each hand, and if you’d give him a broom he could sweep out the shop, too?” He leaned forward, his nose jutting at me, and said impressively, “Mr. Shane, we shall make that come literally true; we’ll have men working in two places at once before we’re through.”

“Okay.”

“In the meantime, there are certain old-fashioned fundamental principles on which we shall start. I shall be here at seven thirty in the morning.”

I should have known. Man, being mass, possesses inertia, mentally as well as physically, and therefore offers a certain amount of resistance to being kicked around. That applies to printers as well as to people. But at that time I was too worried. I gave Dr. Hudson full authority.

He was there at seven thirty the next morning, as he had said. At eight, the printers were standing around the time-clock, waiting for it to click the hour. It clicked, but the man nearest it was smoking a cigarette. He punched his card and then stood there, finishing the cigarette.

Dr. Hudson stepped up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is now four minutes past eight. Starting-time is eight o’clock.” He looked at his watch and compared it with the clock. “Please do your visiting and your smoking on your own time,” he said coldly.

Well, it bothered me a little. I’d never handled them that way⁠—and anyway, who cared about five minutes? The men would set just so much type, or do so much work. If they lost five minutes in one place, they generally made it up somewhere else. But this was Dr. Hudson’s job.

It was nice that there had been no insolence⁠—only a couple of raised eyebrows. Dr. Hudson’s gesture had had its effect. They knew now who was boss.

For the next few days they kept their heads up. Production did not improve much, but I personally had not expected it to do that. I think Dr. Hudson had not expected it, either.

It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came in from the Legal Publishing Company⁠—a three-volume, four-thousand-page record for the U.S. circuit court. They could not handle the typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.

It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it down, but Dr. Hudson’s eyes glittered when he saw it. “Just what we need,” he said.

“That’s almost two thousand galleys of type,” I reminded him, “besides our regular stuff.” I was very dubious.

But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. “We’ll make history,” he promised.

Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.

As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in time.

So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do the job over⁠—but right. The casterman didn’t like it, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially when the job, reset in the correct face⁠—or rather, set in the correct face, because this now was the first time it had been set⁠—was put on the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn’t occur to me then that a man could be too ambitious.

That afternoon the chairman came in, and I was ready for him. “We are not,” I pointed out, “violating our union contract.”

“But you made the casterman set the job twice, and he doesn’t get paid for it.”

“We pay the casterman two dollars an hour for seven hours a day. When he’s here more than seven hours, he’ll get time and a half,” I said triumphantly.

The chairman frowned, but I didn’t relax; I was on top and I knew it. “He set the job wrong in the first place,” I pointed out, “and he got paid for that. Is there any reason why he shouldn’t correct his own mistake, if it doesn’t take any of his time?”

“It does take time,” he insisted.

“No. He’s only reliving that four hours and doing the job right instead of wrong; you can’t find any fault with that.”

And he couldn’t. I felt wonderful. I wanted to jump and shout, but I compromised by taking Dr. Hudson down for a gleeful drink and planning our next tactic.

We also settled a point of strategy. We decided to confuse them with a few minor things before springing our next real item⁠—which would be, to put it mildly, revolutionary.

Things looked pretty good. The only thing that bothered me was that we hadn’t started the big job yet.

The next morning I saw a new face at the keyboard of one of our linecasting machines. I had long ago adopted democracy as a good policy, so now I stopped to introduce myself. “I’m J. J. Shane, the manager.”

His hands, with incredibly long fingers, had been just flowing over the keyboard⁠—that is the only way to describe it⁠—with the long fingers moving down an inch or so whenever they were above the right key, and doing it all so smoothly it was hard to realize he was actually composing lines. His hands seemed to flow back and forth like the tide, and yet he was setting twenty ems eight-point and keeping the machine hung. Here, I thought right away, was a valuable man. This fellow could be a pacesetter if we would handle him right.

But when I spoke to him and held out my hand, he looked at me for a second without missing a stroke, then his hands dropped away from the keyboard and he started to unfold himself from the chair.

“You don’t need to get up,” I said hastily. “I don’t want to take up any of your time.”

But he finished unfolding himself and stood up. “I have plenty of time,” he said. He was over seven feet tall, and that meant a foot and a half over me⁠—and very thin. His clothes looked pretty weatherbeaten, as if maybe he’d been caught in a few rainstorms.

“Jones,” said his booming voice from somewhere far above me. “High-Pockets Jones, sometimes known as the Dean of Barnstormers.”

I leaned back to look up at him. His face was as weatherbeaten as his clothes. I recognized the reddish tan that comes from facing a hot wind on the top of a moving boxcar. He was obviously a bum, and probably wouldn’t be with us long, but there was something almost of nobility in his eyes⁠—calmness, gentleness, or perhaps just the knowledge of having been in many, many situations and the experience gained from getting out of them, and the self-assurance that he would always be able to get out of any situation.

I reached up to shake hands. “Yes, I’ve heard of you,” I said. “You’re sort of a throwback to the days when they needed barnstormers to correct bad working-conditions, aren’t you?”

He chose to pass that remark, “I’ve heard of you, too,” he said, that last word sounding like the low string on a bull fiddle.

I laughed quickly but efficiently⁠—shortly, I believe they call it. “Nothing good, I hope.”

High-Pockets Jones paused a moment before he answered: “Not bad, until lately.”

It took me a moment or two to realize what he had said. I bent back to look at his face. He was quite sober about it.

“Okay,” I said hastily. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

I worried a little about High-Pockets. I had heard a lot about him; he was a sort of mystery man in the printing business, going from place to place, wherever printers felt they were having trouble, and trying to straighten things out.

The stories about him indicated that he had some odd ways of doing that, based largely on a sort of legendary influence that he had over machinery. I remembered even the theory that all machinery was negatively charged with some sort of “personal” electricity, and that High-Pockets⁠—having been hit by lightning⁠—had a terrifically high charge of positive electricity of the same sort, which enabled him to do miraculous things on occasion with machinery⁠—especially linecasting machines.

Well, I dismissed that as a bunch of talk, but what I didn’t quite like was the fact that High-Pockets traditionally appeared in places where he was needed to straighten out things for the men.

I went into conference with Dr. Hudson, and he agreed with me that we should go right ahead; but we’d keep an eye on High-Pockets Jones, and at the first sign of interference Mr. Jones would find himself in a great deal of trouble. I would even, I decided, stoop to having him thrown in jail on a phony charge, if that should be necessary.

By this time we had started on the Legal Printing Company job, and we went ahead with our next offensive. Mind-reading came first. Dr. Hudson installed a black box at the water-fountain, and he explained to the men what it was for. He had a private wire to his desk, and a transformer that turned the current from the box back into thoughts. It was quite efficient. Some of the thoughts we got the first day were vituperative, some were quite obscene, and some were pretty feeble, but that didn’t matter. It got the boys to worrying, and it saved us a bottle of spring water a day.

Then there was the installation of the lucite piping. Of course seeing in curves had been possible for years, but never on this scale. We piped lucite to every place where a man worked, and so we could throw a switch in the inner office and check on every man in the shop without their knowing it. That was a very clever device; it really put the men on the spot.

Once in a while, when I needed to relax, I would flip a switch and throw High-Pockets Jones’ machine on the screen. The smooth rhythm of those flowing hands was more soothing than a lullaby, especially because I knew how much type they were getting up.

Then we advanced to the third step in our strategy: having a man in two places at once.

Dr. Hudson finished making his cabinet filled with coils and transformers and condensers and circuits I’d never heard of, and we set it up in the composing-room one night.

It was that night that full realization hit me that we had set only two hundred galleys of type out of the two thousand on the Legal Printing Company job, and that there were only two weeks left to get it out. Somehow or other, I had let it slip by. I thought Dr. Hudson was watching those things; I had been busy trying to make an impression for the receivers.

I was sick when I figured it all out. We had six machines. If we should run those six machines two shifts a day, our capacity was about three hundred and sixty galleys a week. Into eighteen hundred that goes considerably more than two times. We would need five weeks of full production⁠—and we couldn’t possibly give it full production; we had other jobs, too.

The only hope was Dr. Hudson’s new machine.

The next day the electricians hooked it up to a twelve-hundred-volt feed-line, and by noon it was ready to go. At twelve thirty, as soon as the men punched in, I called them together. This was on office time, of course, so there couldn’t be any squawk. Dr. Hudson was there to explain. I never had fully realized how much of him was nose before I watched him that day.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is nothing to be afraid of. This is merely a modern device to assure continuous production in the composing-room by eliminating lost time from sickness and accidents. As you know, if a linotype operator is ill, his machine goes untouched. That day’s production is lost. At a cost per man of around ten dollars an hour, that represents a considerable loss.”

He opened the cabinet and showed them a comfortable leather seat inside.

“There are two compartments in this cabinet,” he said. “All this machine does is to produce, temporarily, an extra man to fill the sick man’s place. One of the men present steps in here; I close the door, see that the machine is charged here on the other side with plenty of linotype metal to provide the material of atomic synthesis, press the button, and lo!⁠—the man in the chair is duplicated on the other side of the cabinet.”

High-Pockets Jones stepped forward with his deep eyes fixed on Dr. Hudson. “What,” High-Pockets asked, “is your theory of this machine?”

Dr. Hudson smiled. “I am glad you asked that, Mr. Jones. Very glad. This process is in no sense a separation or thinning out of the man in the chair. It is, in reality; an unusual extension of the well-known fact that nature tends to follow a pattern. If you want to make a synthetic sapphire, you start with a seed sapphire, and the artificial process builds up on that. Now, this machine, which I call an extender, is merely a far-reaching extension of the synthesis of precious stones.”

“By use of a revolutionary type of three-dimensional scanner, which was invented by myself,” he said modestly, “I am able to focus on a certain object from a certain distance and, if there is material at hand, synthesize an exact duplicate of the original from the scanner. It doesn’t hurt the original in any way. You merely have two where you had but one.”

The men stood around bug-eyed and stared incredulously⁠—all but High-Pockets. “Is the second one alive?” he asked. “I mean, would you say it has a soul?”

“That,” said Dr. Hudson crisply, “is out of my field. I suggest you consult your spiritual adviser.”

The chairman stepped up, “You have tried this thing, have you?”

“Thoroughly tested,” said Dr. Hudson.

I refrained from smiling. The printers were flabbergasted; they didn’t know what to do or think. The chairman was trying to get his poor fogged brain together with arguments. The only person besides myself and Dr. Hudson who seemed to be at ease was the barnstormer, High-Pocket Jones.

“In-other words,” High-Pockets said, “if we are short an operator, I can walk in that cabinet and you can in a few minutes make another High-Pockets Jones, who will set type until you put him back into the cabinet and turn him back into a hundred and sixty pounds of linotype metal?”

“Precisely.” Dr. Hudson smiled and showed his teeth. I could see he was losing his patience.

“Well,” said High-Pockets, “I can see about nine hundred legal questions right off the bat. Who is going to draw the duplicate’s pay? Is the duplicate entitled to a union card? Is he entitled to overtime? Is he a man or an automaton?”

“Sorry,” said Dr. Hudson. “I am not a legal expert.”

High-Pockets walked up to the cabinet and looked inside. I’d swear he looked as if he knew what all those wires were there for. His deep eyes took it all in, and then he announced in his booming voice from far above us. “You’re waiting for a volunteer,” he said. “I’ll be first.”

I practically fell over. I think even Dr. Hudson was dumbfounded; we had not expected unconditional surrender. I was elated.

High-Pockets Jones was seated in the cabinet. Dr. Hudson threw the switch. After five minutes’ humming, a relay clicked. Dr. Hudson opened the door. High-Pockets Jones, with a deep smile on his weatherbeaten face, unfolded his long legs and stepped out, holding his head down to keep from hitting the top of the doorframe.

“How do you feel?” asked Dr. Hudson.

“Excellent,” boomed High-Pockets, straightening up.

The physicist went around to the other side, and though I had been watching these experiments for some time, I give you my word I very nearly choked on my own tongue when I saw High-Pockets Jones walk out of the second compartment.

The second High-Pockets produced a worn billfold and extracted a pink union permit.

“I protest this inhuman manipulation of a man’s individuality,” said the chairman indignantly; “this is outrageous.”

I felt better now. I’d been waiting for that. “Let him go to work,” I said. “We need an operator today, anyway; Bill Smith has the flu. I will guarantee to pay a man’s wages to whomever you say, if this is found to be illegal.”

Under the law, there wasn’t much they could do. And I had already taken the precaution of retaining the best legal counsel in the city.

I was elated when they went to work. I pumped Dr. Hudson’s hand and assured him that we had indeed made spectacular history, and together we could make millions.

The first trouble came an hour later. One of the High-Pocketses⁠—I couldn’t tell which one⁠—came into the office. “The foreman sent me up to get some work,” he said in his booming voice.

I frowned. What was going on back there? I went back, High-Pockets Jones was working on his own machine. High-Pockets Jones was also working on Bill Smith’s machine. I looked up quickly. High-Pockets Jones was also standing beside me.

He smiled. “Catching, isn’t it?”

I swallowed, but I knew they were playing tricks. High-Pockets Jones had walked into the cabinet a second time, and his double had worked the controls and produced a third. Well, this could get confusing, but I stayed calm. “You’re a floor-man, too, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. You go back to the Monotype room and get a bunch of slugs and leads and saw them up to fill the cases. They’re getting pretty low.”

“Yes, sir.” He turned and went away.

When I got back to the office I thought I’d just turn on the lucite and see what they might be up to next. I had an uneasy feeling.

Sure enough, a High-Pockets Jones was stepping out of the second compartment of the cabinet. I gulped and quickly checked the others. This was the fourth one.

I went back to raise hell, but High-Pockets⁠—well, one of them⁠—was quite calm about it. “Two men can do it faster than one,” he said.

I licked my lips and beat my brains, but I didn’t know the answer. I went back to think it over. I had just decided to laugh it off when three High-Pockets Joneses came into the office.

“We need something to do,” they said, all in that great booming voice that seemed to come from the ceiling.

“See the foreman. Tell him to give you all the standing type that needs to be distributed.”

They left. I breathed a sigh of relief and sent out for a padlock to put on the cabinet.

An hour later, with a nice, shiny new padlock, I went back to the composing-room. But I very nearly fainted when I saw the activity going on back there. The composing-room was filled with High-Pockets Joneses.

Two still were at the linecasting machines, and a whole crew of others were running around the floor.

“Where’s the foreman?” I barked.

High-Pockets Jones⁠—one of them⁠—came to attention. “He went home. He was quite discouraged; he told us to throw in all the standing type we could find.”

It didn’t look good. I had the feeling that High-Pockets was laughing at me⁠—this High-Pockets, anyway.

That reminded me. I gathered up all the High-Pocketses in the composing-room and lined them up. There were nine⁠—exactly nine⁠—every one of them over seven feet tall and thin as a sidestick, every one of them with a gentle, booming voice.

I wanted to tell the original High-Pockets to gather them all up and put them back together, but I didn’t know how to find the original.

Well, they couldn’t get me down. I fooled them. I told them all to take the rest of the day off⁠—at full pay.

All nine of them washed up together and left together. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw offstage. Nine identical High-Pocketses⁠—all so tall they had to weave around the neon lights instead of ducking under them. It was enough to give a man nightmares, to watch that line of High-Pockets Joneses advancing across an open composing-room.

This kind of thing went on the next day, and the next. Every day there were nine High-Pockets Joneses in the composing-room. Everybody was falling over everybody else, when they weren’t standing around laughing up their sleeves.

There was nothing I could do. I had been forced to turn over all of my house to eight of the High-Pocketses, because they had to have a place to stay, and after all, I was responsible for them.

Our production went up a little, but the Legal Printing Company job was hardly touched. There was too much of that sort of festive spirit in the air; everybody was watching the High-Pocketses and waiting to see what would happen next⁠—and hoping for something extravagant. In other words, they refused to take it seriously; to them, it was a circus.

I didn’t have the nerve to ask anybody else to split. After all, High-Pockets was in nine places at once; that should have been enough. It was apparent by that time that the extender would never be anything in a printing office but a psychological monstrosity.

I had to admit I was stymied, and I got so I didn’t give a whoop. I was sunk anyway. That is the way it went that week. On Saturday night Dr. Hudson and I got beautifully soused.

On Monday morning I didn’t care. The Legal Printing Company called up and said they could give us a few more days; if they could have it by Friday, they could still make the filing date. I said we’d do everything possible, and then I hung up and laughed bitterly and aloud. We couldn’t get it out if we had another month. The only thing was, as soon as our plant closed up, they could ask the court for an extension because of unforeseen circumstances, and probably get it. So I laughed aloud.

I saw Dr. Hudson cleaning out his desk, and I nodded. “Sorry, Doc, we got all fouled up. Maybe some other time⁠—”

He nodded. “Progress always encounters opposition,” he said. “It just happens that we are the sacrifices in this deal.”

“Yeah.” I went out and had a drink.

I was pretty dazed that week. It didn’t make any difference. I had already tried everything possible, and they had me hog-tied. And those nine High-Pocketses had made me a laughingstock.

On Friday morning, I looked at the calendar and it suddenly occurred to me that this was the thirty-first and the receivers would be around this afternoon to decide whether or not to close the place.

There wasn’t any doubt as to what they would do. I began to clean out my own desk. I felt terrible.

Then one of the High-Pocketses came in with a piece of copy in his hand. He looked at me queerly and then said softly, “You leaving?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly, “I’m going. You got me licked; I’m through.”

“I was just trying to point out to you the absurdity of some of your new devices,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, “you win. Guys like you make a business of going around the country breaking print-shops and printing-office managers.”

High-Pockets’ booming voice came from the ceiling. “You are mistaken. I did not try to break you.”

“Well, you broke me, anyway.” I blurted out the whole thing to him, how the receivers were about to close us up, how the Legal Printing Company job was weeks behind and was supposed to be delivered today. Then I apologized. “It isn’t your fault,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just⁠—well, I wanted to make good on this job.”

High-Pockets was very thoughtful. “I feel kind of sorry for you,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t need to. I earned it; I’ve got it coming. I was just a little too ambitious, that’s all. I didn’t know a man could be too ambitious.”

High-Pockets looked at me. His deep eyes were thoughtful. I could almost see the neurons buzzing around in his head.

“If I could get this job out for you on time, would that save the day?”

“Probably.” I laughed⁠—or tried to. “But it is now a physical impossibility. There isn’t enough time.”

High-Pockets said sharply, “Call a truck,” and wheeled out of the office.

I called the delivery truck before I realized what I had done. Well, it didn’t make any difference. They could start hauling out the machinery.

I finished cleaning out my desk and took a wastebasket full of papers to the back shop.

And there, I give you my word, three High-Pocketses were busy carrying galleys from the type-dump to the proof-press. And as fast as they could carry a galley of type from the dump, another galley would just materialize there. I stood and stared. Galleys of type were coming out of thin air at the rate of about four galleys a minute.

I went over to where High-Pockets⁠—the original High-Pockets, I suppose⁠—was sitting at his machine. “Would you please tell me what is going on?” I asked.

“Well,” said High-Pockets, “it isn’t so complicated. I just sent the other five back in time to set this job, that’s all. They’ve gone back about twelve weeks; and of course there isn’t much time, so I had to make them double up. I’ve got them split up into shifts, along with a double of the chairman there, to cover the six machines. It’s a little hard to explain, whether they are split up in time, or the time-split ones are split up in place, or just what.”

“It’s insane,” I said weakly.

“Well, at any rate, you see you have the equivalent of twelve night shifts running at once, plus twelve graveyard shifts. That’s twenty-four times six⁠—you have six machines⁠—times twelve⁠—that’s the number of galleys a day for each machine. I think it comes out to seventeen hundred for a day’s work.”

I grabbed hold of the vise-locking screw to keep my knees from doubling under me. It was incredible⁠—and yet it was true.

High-Pockets also had organized the proofreaders and copyholders, and they were reading in the past also, and sending us proofs in the present. If anybody ever tells you they can’t get seventeen hundred galleys of type a day out of six linecasting machines⁠—well, they just don’t know High-Pockets Jones.

“Of course,” he said apologetically, “they’ll want to be paid.”

I was practically hysterical by that time. “I’ll see that they get overtime for every hour they put in.”

High-Pockets looked at me with his deep eyes. “Me, too,” he said. I laughed when I thought how there were nine of him working in twelve places at once⁠—or was it twenty-four⁠—or maybe forty-eight. I was too dizzy by that time to figure out anything. I only knew the job was going to be delivered. The truckers were going in a steady stream through the back door.

Maybe the receivers would close up the place; maybe they wouldn’t. At least the job was being delivered.

About four thirty, the galleys suddenly quit coming; the job was finished. Half an hour later it was out of the shop, and I had entered it on the books.

I had hardly laid down the pen when the three receivers came in. They smoked a little and talked and I held my breath while they looked at the books. I couldn’t figure out what they were going to do.

One of them whistled when he saw the Legal Printing Company figures. “Well,” he said, “business has been good.”

“Fair,” I said modestly.

The door to the shop opened and High-Pockets Jones walked in. I gulped; eight High-Pockets Joneses walked in behind him.

The three receivers stared. Their eyes stuck out until it was ludicrous. But it wasn’t funny; I knew something was going to happen now.

By the time the last High-Pockets got in, the first receiver had seen what was going on and was trying to get out, but nine High-Pocketses in one room are a lot. For a minute it looked like a basketball game.

The elder lawyer looked at me suspiciously. “Please explain this.”

I was too weak. “See for yourself,” I said.

One High-Pockets spoke to me. “Sorry, Mr. Shane. Just came in to say goodbye. Never realized⁠—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You’ve done your part; I can’t squawk.”

The attorney spoke up. “Mr. Shane,” he said, “I think the affairs of the Imperial Printing Company are in perilous circumstances. I do not know what is the meaning of this, but certainly there is something here without precedent.” And if you know lawyers, you know that anything without precedent is very unholy.

I told what we had done, but he was interested in only one thing. “Think what a combined suit by these nine-er-twins here would do.”

“Nontuplets,” suggested one High-Pockets.

“Why”⁠—the lawyer seemed to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the damages he was visualizing⁠—“that could amount to millions.”

I was desperate for an idea, but it wasn’t any use. They were taking it out of my hands. I saw the righteous light in the eyes of those men, and I knew it was all over.

But High-Pockets⁠—or one of him⁠—spoke up. “Is it your intention,” he asked me, “to keep the time-machine and the extender?”

“No,” I said. “I rather thought I’d get rid of the whole business; it’s much too complicated. Anyway, you boys out there came through with superhuman efforts this afternoon. I don’t think I’d ask you to be in two places at once again.”

High-Pockets turned to the lawyer. “If the receivers agree to let the plant operate as long as it shows a profit,” he said, “we’ll all go back together and then you can break up the extender and there won’t be any more trouble. If you don’t agree to that”⁠—he paused⁠—“we’ll stay in nine bodies and sue you every time we get a chance.”

The lawyer winced. The receivers went into conference. Finally they said, a little anxiously, “If the Messiers High-Pockets will be good enough to go back together, and if Mr. Shane will destroy the machine, we are agreeable to the plant’s continuance as a printing office.”

“Hooray!” I said, and nine High-Pocketses yelled hooray.

I was exultant. I shook hands with each one of the High-Pocketses as they filed into the extender. When there was only one left; he shook hands with me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing at all,” said High-Pockets Jones. “Just got a call this morning from a print-shop where they’re trying to make the men wear roller-skates so they can move faster. Guess they need me down there. So long, boss.”

“So long,” I said. I was sorry to see him go. I locked up the shop⁠—but first I cut off all the power and got a pig and smashed up Dr. Hudson’s coils and transformers. I wanted to come down in the morning without seeing double.

Day’s Work

Two of the gods had been arguing all morning. A galactic morning, that is⁠—one sixth of the time it took Betelgeuse to complete its orbit around the circumference of a cross-section of the spiral whorl of the sprawling IX Galaxy⁠—some four hundred and twenty thousand years.

And the fury of the last nova explosion indicated that Mogar, ranking member of the IX Galactic Council, was becoming annoyed over his failure to browbeat Dalen, who had come up from the LIII Constellation Committee only a few eons before.

But finally, just before noon, Mogar’s tremendous thought-force thundered at the younger god out of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and rolled across ninety thought light-years of space to the constellation Bootes, where Dalen was trying to settle a territorial dispute between two solar system deputies who had been involved for eighteen centuries over the jurisdiction of a newly formed binary system.

Mogar’s thought-force said: “Your theories are preposterous and repellent. No entity in physical shape can ever learn to live a useful life. For one thing, they seldom evolve the quality of infinite age. And records will show that in all the II Supergalaxy no species of biped with an opposed thumb has ever been able to live peacefully with itself. All such species are self-destructive.”

A great rumbling came from the Cloud, accompanied by trillion mile streams of sullen fire, and then Mogar’s thought-force, muttered but still understandable at that distance, came again: “When you have been in the Council long enough to become oriented, you will see that these ideas of yours are nothing but sentiment, and have no place in a council of the gods.”

The energy-nucleus that was Dalen absorbed these thoughts, and at length sent his answer back to the Cloud:

“Sire, your venerable age and your seniority on the Galactic Council cause me to answer you with deep respect, but I find it impossible to agree.”

Mogar’s thought returned like cosmic lightning: “Then you will, I suppose, appeal to the Supergalactic Conference.”

Dalen evaded this trap. His answer swept back across the light-years of the galaxy’s length quietly but strongly:

“Sire, I do not think that is necessary.”

And of course it was not necessary. While all the nine gods in the Galactic Council had authority in any part of the galaxy, and even certain rights anywhere in the Milky Way Supergalaxy, in practice each member of the council ruled a particular sphere of the galaxy, and by unwritten law might do anything he wished in that region as long as he did not upset the dynamic balance of neighbor regions.

That was where Mogar came in, and why it was necessary to secure his approval before actually beginning the experiment. For Mogar’s ancient seniority on the council and his resultant familiarity with all conditions in the Galaxy of Orion (the IX) had made him a sort of deputy of the Supergalactic Conference, and they had actually given him a temporary appointment as Director of Creation in the IX Galaxy. Temporary, though he had already held it for several ages. The higher gods were very conservative.

So it was most desirable to secure Mogar’s approval on any project involving creation, for creation involved the welfare of neighboring regions. But Mogar, long embittered by his own failure to advance beyond the Galactic Council, valued the small eminence his appointment gave him, and had adopted a policy of conservatism as his best means of preserving it. Therefore he could be expected to oppose on principle any experiment the failure or success of which might upset the dynamic balance of the galaxy and throw a shadow on his judgment, and the successes of which could only react favorably to the god who should bring it about.

Dalen considered Mogar’s opposition for the century-long space of a galactic heartbeat. This wasn’t a good start for Dalen to make in the council.

It was well known throughout the entire IV Universe that Mogar was old and crotchety, perhaps even vindictive. Those very weaknesses had long ago cost Mogar a seat in the Supergalactic Conference, but that wasn’t the worst of it. If Mogar had progressed in the usual fashion from the last Beginning, he would by now have had a seat in the mighty Cosmic Chamber.

So the situation exhibited still more serious aspects. Mogar, having seen many younger gods pass him in the long climb upward through the several eternities from the last Beginning, consistently delighted in showing younger gods their place, and under the Laws of Hierarchy, a younger god who lost face would be relegated to some quiet Constellation Committee until the next End and reorganization of the Cosmos. Mogar was known to throw obstacles in the way of every young and ambitious god, and then watch them sharply for a chance to catch them off-guard.

Dalen knew these things. He had been warned by his friend, the middle-aged god Lennat, who had been one of Mogar’s early victims. Lennat had lost a test of strength with Mogar and had been assigned to the obscure constellation, Tracho, where there had not been even a nova explosion for more eons than Dalen could remember.

Dalen considered these things, and he knew what billions of years of inactivity could do to a god’s mind. Even now he felt the lightly restraining touch of Lennat’s thought-force, a little dulled by long disuse. He felt grateful for Lennat’s interest, and yet he had an idea that was more than just that⁠—it was an ideal.

Dalen wanted to see a species evolve that could temper intelligence with sentiment.

Dalen’s belief was that intelligence alone, even the unusually high forms developed by certain Arachnids and some Centipods, was not the most pleasing form of life. He believed that sentiment⁠—even though unsupported in logic⁠—had a definite place in the cosmic aim of finally conjunctive symbiosis, because it provided the most comfortable form of relationship, and there no longer was any argument even among the gods that comfort was the Ultimate Aim.

So Dalen wished to give such an entity an opportunity to evolve. He knew there would be definite limitations. For one thing, there could be only two forms: avian or mammalian.

The birds and the mammals were the only two forms that developed a great deal of conjunctive feeling, and so his choice was necessarily limited to them. He preferred avian for its ability to leave a solid surface, but he liked mammalian for its inevitable eagerness to develop an opposed thumb. And the opposed thumb, Dalen believed, was the quickest answer to any sort of technical progress.

Some of the gods held that technical progress was undesirable, that any form of life would more quickly evolve into the abstract forms such as pure energy, thought-force, and so on, if they should lack technical ability. But Dalen saw desirable things in technics, as he saw desirable things in sentiment, and he had been determined for several ages that he would some day put his theory into effect.

Just now Dalen hesitated, not because he was afraid, but from caution stirred by his knowledge of Mogar’s ancient shrewdness. Mogar mistook his hesitation for weakness, and his next thought rolled powerfully and triumphantly from the Magellanic Galaxy, across the intervening vacuum, back to the IX and through its length to Bootes again:

“Then, perhaps, you will challenge me.”

Dalen perceived the note of condescension. He knew that Mogar had challenged many ambitious young gods, and had never lost a test, but still Dalen did not rise to the taunt.

“No, sire, I am not at this time going to challenge you,” Dalen answered evenly.

Mogar’s guffaw thundered across the intergalactic void.

But Dalen had not been elected to the council from the committeeship of the Constellation Hercules for his caution. At once he reached out to the other galaxy with his sensitive perceptory faculties and probed lightly at Mogar’s mind.

Dalen recently had begun to suspect that the elder god had retained some of the lower mind-centers that were distinctly ungodlike. Now was a chance to find out. But almost as soon as Dalen tried, he was chagrined. He touched one of the intricately convoluted hyper-centers, but it was shielded.

That was embarrassing. Mogar would know that he had tried, and by evening every god on the council would know that the newcomer from the LIII Constellation Committee had tried to probe old Mogar’s mind and had failed. But Dalen was not a god to back away from his chosen course.

He felt that his power was somewhat diminished by the unusual distance, for Mogar was visiting outside his own galaxy today. Dalen channeled his energy through the fifth-dimension space-warp, which offered zero resistance, and in traversing the long parsecs of the galaxy, he gained six years in time before he reached the point in the galaxy nearest Mogar in the Cloud. There he halted and struck suddenly and with all the normal power of his faculties at the depths of Mogar’s mind.

He hit first the reflexive center, but there he met a solid wall of force, and then, because he could shift his probing lance faster than Mogar could erect shields, he stabbed at what would have been Mogar’s instinctive level. He was astounded to find that, too, protected.

Dalen had expected to find the lower centers unguarded, because it required untold trillions of macro-ergs of energy to erect a single shield, and Mogar would spend centuries replenishing that energy from atomic dissolution. But also because attempting to probe an elder god’s mind was an audacious thing, and Dalen had not expected Mogar would anticipate it.

But Mogar had, and was taking no chance. Dalen did not hesitate. He had committed himself, so he stabbed again, and this time with tremendous power. He funneled his probing force through the spiral timewarp of the sixth dimension, to give it infinitely compounded power, and with all this inconceivable kinetic momentum he stabbed repeatedly at successively lower layers of the elder’s mind, far past the instinctive and even into the inanimate⁠—but without success.

By now he was ashamed. The newcomer was now only a smart aleck. But Dalen had not finished. How the elder god at his age could endure the awful energy-drain of completely shielding himself was more than Dalen could understand. What Dalen did understand by now was that Mogar definitely would not allow anyone to penetrate his mind.

That was a shock as Dalen realized the implications. Why should a god shield his mind-centers at such a frightful cost of energy? There could be but one answer, and it frightened Dalen a little. It meant that Mogar did have disjunctive thoughts and perhaps even feelings. It meant that even if Mogar should withdraw his opposition nominally, he would be glad to see the experiment fail, and he might even help it to fail.

That would be a vicious handicap for Dalen. The evolution of a race was subject to many perils; evolving a particular species was a hothouse sort of process that would take several billion years and much careful nurturing. If another god should be opposed, he could destroy the entire experiment, for instance, by dropping a spore of some malignant virus into the midst of the species⁠—a virus for which the race would be unprepared and against which it would have no resistance. That was only one of infinite ways to eliminate an undesirable species.

So now it was obvious to Dalen that his only recourse was to break down the barriers to Mogar’s mind. He had not intended this, but Mogar was forcing it. If he did break through the shields, then Mogar himself would be relegated, for the entire supergalaxy would know it instantly.

So now Dalen, having unintentionally worked himself into a spot where it was relegation for one or the other, gathered his energy. There was one way in which he felt positive that he could break through Mogar’s protection, even at this great distance. This was by way of the ninth-dimension elliptical spiral. Dalen had never used it, for it was prohibited to any god below the council, but if he could manipulate it into operation he could combine it with the sixth and his infinitely compounded power would be also infinitely squared.

There was one drawback. According to Dalen’s calculations, a combination of the sixth and the ninth would require an output on Dalen’s part of power to the extent of something like 8.4 times ten to the twentieth power macro-ergs-and that would be Dalen’s last effort. He would have to rest for a while after that. If it didn’t succeed, he reflected, there would be eternities to rest.

He concentrated his energy facilities and spiraled them to full power, sucking the last quantum of pure energy from every available atom, even stripping binding energy, and poured it all into his utilization of the two dimensions. Dalen was a young god and a strong god, and it was utterly inconceivable that any god could stand up against that enormous combination of power.

By now the entire IV Universe knew that he and Mogar were fighting it out. Tightness pervaded Dalen’s thought-force which was flung out along the edge of the galaxy. The mighty power of the two dimensions swirled together and lashed out across the interstellar void, gathering momentum as it traveled in ever-increasing spurts.

Perhaps the very first tongue of this energy touched Mogar, when unexpectedly his chuckle⁠—a little forced, it seemed to Dalen⁠—rolled back across the void. He said, as if amused:

“Where do you propose to hold this experiment?”

Dalen relaxed gratefully and allowed the controls to ease from his mind-centers. So Mogar had enough. Mogar had backed down. Only an old god of long seniority could do that without losing face, and also, Dalen understood, that was Mogar’s only way out. Dalen knew now that he would have broken through, and in a way he wished he had. It would have eliminated Mogar’s future unofficial opposition. But Mogar had chosen to break the deadlock, and that was Mogar’s right, so Dalen accepted the gesture.

“I intend to develop a new solar system, to be known as the XXXVI, out on the fringe of the galaxy, and attached for administrative purposes to my home Constellation Hercules. I will choose one of those planets, sire, to be populated.”

Mogar snorted so loudly it could be heard in the VIII Galaxy. “It will take you two billion years to get a biped. I say give the planet a shower of germanium isotope rays and everything but insects will kill themselves off quickly. Then in a few million years you will have an insect civilization to be proud of.”

But Dalen was firm in his answer. “No, sire. I believe the opposed-thumb biped may prove to be a very desirable life-form. This planet will be only one of ten quadrillion in the Milky Way Supergalaxy. I think it is not too extravagant to use it as an experiment. It is under the jurisdiction of my home constellation, sire,” he said pointedly.

Now Mogar grumbled, and a billion cubic parsecs of cosmic dust exploded before his ire and streamed into the vacuum of intergalactial space. “Very well, then. I withdraw my opposition. But you will see that I am right, and at next week’s meeting I shall expect a report from you on the outcome.”

“Yes, sire,” Dalen said respectfully. He turned in the space between two stars, and began traveling back toward Hercules. He felt now the astonishment in the minds of Lennat and the seven members of the council. Yes, Dalen was audacious. He was young and perhaps impetuous, to brave the wrath of a god like Mogar. Dalen knew now that the other members of the council felt as he did, that Mogar would go to any length to prevent Dalen’s success with the experiment.

Dalen resolved more firmly that it should succeed, but it was a heavy load that he bore as he made arrangements for two stars to meet in the outer void of the IX Galaxy. His realization of the difficulties ahead was lightened by only one thought: If he could create the race he wanted, he would be very proud. Even without Mogar’s opposition, the odds were heavy against him. The gods did not like to see their precedents broken.

But the one thought lightened Dalen’s mind: if he should succeed, he would be very proud. No doubt it would mean his elevation to the Supergalactic Conference and perhaps even to the Dioclave. So Dalen’s mind-force was busy with ideas and plans. In fact, he realized a little wryly, he was almost exuberant. He had even selected a name for his experimental species. He would call it “Man,” and by this time next week the entire Supergalaxy would know whether an opposed-thumb biped could be a desirable entity.

This was a good day’s work.