Short Fiction

Conditionally Human

There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands. His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house. He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack and miserable.

“Honeymoon’s over, huh?”

She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.

“You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,” he said. “You knew I’d have charge of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.”

“I didn’t know you killed them,” she said venomously.

“I won’t have to kill many. Besides, they’re only animals.”

“Intelligent animals!”

“Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.”

“A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?”

“You’re taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,” he protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless against sentimentality. “Baby⁠—”

“Don’t call me baby! Call them baby!”

Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment, he spoke again. “Anne honey, look! Think of the good things about the job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think⁠—we get this house rent-free; I’ve got my own district with no bosses around; I make my own hours; you’ll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It’s a fine job, honey!”

She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.

“And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment. They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration. If I don’t want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common labor. That’s the law.”

“I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?” she said sweetly.

Norris withered. His voice went desperate. “They assigned me to it because I liked babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an aptitude for dealing with people. Can’t you understand? Destroying unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business, people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way⁠—I’m just a dogcatcher.”

Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.

He backed closer to the door.

“Well, I’ve got to get on the job.” He put on his hat and picked at a splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. “I⁠—I’ll see you tonight.” He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious that she didn’t want to be kissed.

He grunted a nervous goodbye and stumbled down the hall and out of the house. The honeymoon was over, all right.

He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were someplace where he could be completely alone.

As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris pulled to a halt.

He smiled at it from the window and called, “What’s your name, kitten?”

The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a stuttering high-pitched wail, then: “Kiyi Rorry.”

“Whose child are you, Rorry?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost. It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He repeated the questions.

“Mama kiyi,” said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.

“That’s right, Mama’s kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran away?”

The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, “Mama no run ray! Mama no run ray!”

Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called “neutroids.” When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief; but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.

His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises were class-C⁠—defective heredity.

He found himself in Sherman III Community Center⁠—eight blocks of commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was something he had been expecting for several days.

Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.

You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one nonstandard unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant’s serial number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when one animal is found. Be thorough.

If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey project within seven days.

Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July’s influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector’s “unclaimed” inventory⁠—awaiting destruction.

He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July’s Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week’s deadline for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight squeeze.

He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping for Anne’s voice. A polite professional purr came instead.

“Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven’t met, but I imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?”

Norris hesitated. “Extremely,” he said.

“Well, this won’t take long. One of my patients⁠—a Mrs. Sarah Glubbes⁠—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be getting absentminded, because I forgot she was class-C until I got there.” He hesitated. “The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It’s dying. Eighteenth order virus.”

“So?”

“Well, she’s⁠—uh⁠—rather a peculiar woman, Inspector. Keeps telling me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can’t ever have another one. It’s pathetic. She believes it’s her own. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Norris replied slowly. “But what do you want me to do? Can’t you send the neutroid to a vet?”

“She insists it’s going to a hospital. Worst part is that she’s heard of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment⁠—in humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and take a neutroid, especially since she couldn’t pay for its treatment.”

“I still don’t see⁠—”

“I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It’s a K-48 series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound that’s not claimed?”

Norris thought for a moment. “I think I have one. You’re welcome to it, Doctor, but you can’t fake a serial number. She’ll know it. And even though they look exactly alike, the new one won’t recognize her. It’ll be spooky.”

There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. “I’ll try it anyway. Can I come get the animal now?”

“I’m on the highway⁠—”

“Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind completely if⁠—”

“All right, I’ll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you. Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen⁠—”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let me catch you falsifying a serial number.”

Doctor Georges laughed faintly. “I won’t, Norris. Thanks a million.” He hung up quickly.

Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal. But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later have to be killed.

He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not angry. When he finished talking, she said, “All right, Terry,” and hung up.

By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July’s Bermuda-K-99s had entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.

After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and addresses of individual buyers. By three o’clock, he had the entire list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained was to pick up the thirty-five animals.

And that, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to begin his rounds.

Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.

“Doctor Georges came,” she told him. “He signed for the⁠—” She stopped to stare at him. “Darling, your face! What happened?”

Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. “Just scratched a little,” he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the scratches.

Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating mechanical voice answered, “Locator center. Your party, please.”

“Sheriff Yates,” Norris grunted.

The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.

“I’m getting so I hate that infernal gadget,” Yates grumbled. “I think it’s got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?”

“Cooperation. I’m mailing you three letters charging three Wylo citizens with resisting a Federal official⁠—namely me⁠—and charging one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a pound inspection⁠—”

Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.

“It’s not funny. I’ve got to get those neutroids. It’s in connection with the Delmont case.”

Yates stopped laughing. “Oh. Well, I’ll take care of it.”

“It’s a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick up the animals in the morning?”

“Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can’t be disturbed just any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we don’t have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers.”

“That’ll be all right. And listen, Yates⁠—fix it so the charges will be dropped if they cooperate. Don’t shake those warrants around unless they just won’t listen to reason. But get those neutroids.”

“Okay, boy. Gotcha.”

Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers. As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, “Sit still.” She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.

“Hard day?” she asked.

“Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other twelve. They’re in the truck.”

“That’s good,” she said. “You’ve got only twelve empty cages.”

He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this reason. “Guess I better get them unloaded,” he said, standing up.

“Can I help you?”

He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and looked aside. “Terry, I’m sorry⁠—about this morning. I⁠—I know you’ve got a job that has to be⁠—” Her lip quivered slightly.

Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.

“Honeymoon’s on again, huh?” she whispered against his neck.

“Come on,” he grunted. “Let’s unload some neutroids, before I forget all about work.”

They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms⁠—one for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.

Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.

The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.

Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise, they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid reached its age-set, it remained at the set’s child-development level until death.

“They must be getting to know you pretty well,” Anne said, glancing around at the cages.

Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. “They’ve never gotten this excited before.”

He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.

“Apple cores!” He turned to face his wife. “How did apples get in there?”

She reddened. “I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen cooking apples.”

“That was a mistake.”

She frowned irritably. “We can afford it.”

“That’s not the point. There’s a reason for the mechanical feeders.” He paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on: “They get to love whoever feeds them.”

“I can’t see⁠—”

“How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?”

Anne folded her arms and stared at him. “Planning to dispose of any soon?” she asked acidly.

“Honeymoon’s off again, eh?”

She turned away. “I’m sorry, Terry. I’ll try not to mention it again.”

He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man pets, always frightened of strangers.

“What’s the Delmont case, Terry?” Anne asked while he worked.

“Huh?”

“I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got your face scratched?”

He nodded sourly. “Indirectly, yes. It’s a long story.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, Delmont was a greenhorn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the gene structure with subatomic particles. It’s tricky business. He flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope screen⁠—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It’s like shooting subatomic billiards. He’s got to fire alpha-particles into the gene structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And he’s got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of seven tries.

“Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical. Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum had a couple of flaws⁠—something wrong in the central nervous system’s determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it wouldn’t be caught until after birth.”

“It wasn’t caught at all?” Anne asked.

“Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn’t be. He got to worrying about it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone flow into its compartment.”

“Why that?”

“So it would develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female if they didn’t give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally. That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final inspection. They’d dispose of her without even bothering to examine for the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn’t catch the female. She went on through; they all look female.”

“How did they find out about it now?”

“He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing it once before. No telling how many times he really did it.”

Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. “This little fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a potential murderer. All these kiddos are from the machines in the section where Delmont worked.”

Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the snare. “Kkr-r-reee,” it cooed nervously. “Kkr-r-reee!”

“You tell him you’re no murderer,” Anne purred to it.

Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months old and looked like a child of two years⁠—a year short of its age-set. And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.

“Put it in the cage, Anne,” he said quietly.

She looked up and shook her head.

“It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you, you’re actually robbing its owner. They can’t love many people at once.”

She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.

“Anne⁠—” Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. “Do you⁠—want one⁠—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to keep in the house. It won’t cost us anything.”

Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous. “I’m going to have one of my own,” she said.

He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. “Do you realize what⁠—”

“I know what I’m saying. We’re class-C on account of heart-trouble in both our families. Well, I don’t care, Terry. I’m not going to waste a heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We’re going to have a baby.”

“You know what they’d do to us?”

“If they catch us, yes⁠—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they won’t catch us. I’ll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We’ll hide it.”

“I won’t let you do such a thing.”

She faced him angrily. “Oh, this whole rotten world!” she choked. Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.

Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.

“… we were unable to get shots of the body,” the announcer was saying. “But here is a view of the Georges residence. I’ll switch you to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting.”

Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile unit’s powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and the police ’copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in the street. A new voice came on the audio.

“This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges’ residence just west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out, and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a word about the case. Doctor Georges’ death has shocked the community deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years⁠—some of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a man well known, well loved. But now let’s listen to Chief Miler.”

Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor Georges in the community, but only this morning.⁠ ⁠…

A growling drawl came from the audio. “This’s Chief Miler speaking, folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She’s wanted for questioning.”

“Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I’ll review the facts for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o’clock, less than an hour ago, a woman⁠—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes⁠—burst into Doctor Georges’ dining room while the family was at dinner. She was brandishing a pistol and screaming, ‘You stole my baby! You gave me the wrong baby! Where’s my baby?’

“When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired, shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs. Glubbes, the alleged intruder, has no baby. Just a minute⁠—just a minute⁠—here comes the stretcher now.”

Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she concealed it well.

“What was all that?” she asked.

“Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive.”

“What was it?”

“Neutroid trouble.”

“You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don’t you?”

“Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,” he admitted.

“I know. Well, supper’s been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?”

They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time, listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly out of the north.

He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy chatters greeted the light.

One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the longtime residents; they knew him well, and they came with him willingly⁠—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas. The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.

Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.

He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest just to retch.

When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw Anne’s small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of exhaust gases from the crematory’s chimney.

Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.

After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek lightly. He felt her cool fingertips trace a soft line up his temple.

“It’s all right, Terry,” she whispered.

He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing, until he⁠—and the whole world⁠—completely lost sanity. And then everything would be all right, only it still wouldn’t make sense.

Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he could begin his testing.

Still he felt the night’s guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.

Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he “created,” but he created nothing. He thought that he had created⁠—with his medical science and his end to wars⁠—a longer life for the individual. But he found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.

A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman’s craving to mother something small.

Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a matter of adjustment.

At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already brought in the three from yesterday.

“No more scratches?” Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not speak of the night’s mass-disposal.

Norris smiled mechanically. “I learned my lesson yesterday. If they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing though⁠—I’ve got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn’t like it, but she let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at it and said, ‘Why, that’s not Chichi’s number!’ I looked at the newt’s foot, and sure enough it wasn’t. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but not even from Bermuda.”

“I thought they were all registered,” Anne said.

“They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from O’Reilley’s pet shop⁠—right place, wrong number. I just don’t get it.”

“Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?”

He looked at her peculiarly. “Ever think what might happen if someone started a black market in neutroids?”

They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to gather up the rest of the group. By four o’clock, he had gotten all that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.

If Delmont’s falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were frequently shifted from one territory to another.

On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a sidewalk escalator toward O’Reilley’s address.

It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the sidewalk, announcing:

J. “Doggy” O’Reilley
Pets for sale
Dumb blondes and goldfish
Mutants for the childless
Buy a bundle of joy

Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors. O’Reilley’s was not a shining example of cleanliness.

Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of “A Chimp to Call My Own”, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.

He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the price of a half grown secondhand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog’s death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog’s alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.

The dog was saying, “Don’ sell me, Dada. Don’ sell me.”

Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The nonhuman pets were smarter than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99 never got farther than “mamma,” “pappa,” and “cookie.” Anthropos was afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists proclaim them really human.

He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by the cash register to inspect O’Reilley’s license, which hung in a dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. “James Fallon O’Reilley⁠ ⁠… authorized dealer in mutant animals⁠ ⁠… all non-predatory mammals including chimpanzee-K series⁠ ⁠… license expires June 1, 2235.”

It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but O’Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald head bobbled in a welcoming nod.

“Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a⁠—” He stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris flashed his badge. His smile waned.

“I’m Agent Norris, Mr. O’Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown on K-99 sales.”

O’Reilley looked suddenly nervous. “Oh, yes. Find ’em all?”

Norris shook his head. “No. That’s why I stopped by. There’s some mistake on⁠—” he glanced at his list⁠—“on K-99-LJZ-351. Let’s check it again.”

O’Reilley seemed to cringe. “No mistake. I gave you the buyer’s name.”

“She has a different number.”

“Can I help it if she traded with somebody?”

“She didn’t. She bought it here. I saw the receipt.”

“Then she traded with one of my other customers!” snapped the old man.

“Two of your customers have the same name⁠—Adelia Schultz? Not likely. Let’s see your duplicate receipt book.”

O’Reilley’s wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. “Doubt if it’s still around.”

Norris frowned. “Look, pop, I’ve had a rough day. I could start naming some things around here that need fixing⁠—sanitary violations and such. Not to mention that sign⁠—‘dumb blondes.’ They outlawed that one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides, you’re required to keep sales records until they’ve been microfilmed. There hasn’t been a microfilming since July.”

The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O’Reilley shuffled to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under the register and started toward a wooden stairway.

“Where you going?” Norris called.

“Get my old glasses,” the manager grumbled. “Can’t see through these new things.”

“Leave the book here and I’ll check it,” Norris offered.

But O’Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click. The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him. Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble.

Five minutes passed before the old man came down the stairs. He said nothing as he placed the book on the counter. Norris noticed that his hands were trembling as he shuffled through the pages.

“Let me look,” said the bio-agent.

O’Reilley stepped reluctantly aside. Norris had memorized the owner’s receipt number, and he found the duplicate quickly. He stared at it silently. “Mrs. Adele Schultz⁠ ⁠… chimpanzee-K-99-LJZ-351.” It was the number of the animal he wanted, but it wasn’t the number on Mrs. Schultz’s neutroid nor on her original copy of the receipt.

He held the book up to his eye and aimed across the page at the light. O’Reilley’s breathing became audible. Norris put the book down, folded two thicknesses of handkerchief over the blade of his pocketknife, and ran it down the seam between the pages. He took the sheet he wanted, folded it, and stowed it in his vest pocket. O’Reilley was stuttering angrily.

Norris turned to face him coldly. “Nice erasure job, for a carbon copy.”

The old man prepared himself for exploding. Norris quietly put on his hat.

“See you in court, O’Reilley.”

“Wait!”

Norris turned. “Okay, I’m waiting.”

The old man sagged into a deflated bag of wrinkles. “Let’s sit down first,” he said weakly.

Norris followed him up the stairs and into a dingy parlor. The tiny apartment smelled of boiled cabbage and sweat. An orange-haired neutroid lay asleep on a small rug in a corner. Norris knelt beside it and read the tattooed figures on the sole of its left foot⁠—K-99-LJZ-351. Somehow he was not surprised.

When he stood up, the old man was sagged in an ancient armchair, his head propped on a hand that covered his eyes.

“Lots of good explanations, I guess?” Norris asked quietly.

“Not good ones.”

“Let’s hear them, anyway.”

O’Reilley sighed and straightened. He blinked at the inspector and spoke in a monotone. “My missus died five years back. We were class-B⁠—allowed one child of our own⁠—if we could have one. We couldn’t. But since we were class-B, we couldn’t own a neutroid either. Sorta got around it by running a pet shop. Mary⁠—she always cried when we sold a neut. I sorta felt bad about it myself. But we never did swipe one. Last year this Bermuda shipment come in. I sold most of ’em pretty quick, but Peony here⁠—she was kinda puny. Seemed like nobody wanted her. Kept her around so long, I got attached to her. ’Fraid somebody’d buy her. So I faked the receipt and moved her up here.”

“That all?”

The old man nodded.

“Ever done this before?”

He shook his head.

Norris let a long silence pass while he struggled with himself. At last he said, “Your license could be revoked, you know.”

“I know.”

Norris ground his fist thoughtfully in his palm and stared at the sleeping doll-thing. “I’ll take your books home with me tonight,” he said. “I want to make a complete check for similar changes. Any objections?”

“None. It’s the only trick I’ve pulled, so help me.”

“If that’s true, I won’t report you. We’ll just attach a correction to that page, and you’ll put the newt back in stock.” He hesitated. “Providing it’s not a deviant. I’ll have to take it in for examination.”

A choking sound came from the armchair. Norris stared curiously at the old man. Moisture was creeping in the wrinkles around his eyes.

“Something the matter?”

O’Reilley nodded. “She’s a deviant.”

“How do you know?”

The dealer pulled himself erect and hobbled to the sleeping neutroid. He knelt beside it and stroked a small bare shoulder gently.

“Peony,” he breathed. “Peony, girl⁠—wake up.”

Its fluffy tail twitched for a moment. Then it sat up, rubbing its eyes and yawning. It looked normal, like a two-year-old girl with soft brown eyes. It pouted at O’Reilley for awakening it. It saw Norris and ignored him, apparently too sleepy to be frightened.

“How’s my Peony-girl?” the dealer purred.

It licked its lips. “Wanna g’ass o’ water, Daddy,” it said drowsily.

Norris caught his breath. No K-99 should be able to make a speech that long, even when it reached the developmental limit. He glanced at O’Reilley. The old man nodded slowly, then went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She drank greedily and eyed her foster-parent.

“Daddy crying.”

O’Reilley glowered at her and blew his nose solemnly. “Don’t be silly, child. Now get your coat on and go with Mister Norris. He’s taking you for a ride in his truck. Won’t that be fine?”

“I don’t want to. I wanna stay here.”

“Peeony! On with you!”

She brought her coat and stared at Norris with childish contempt. “Can Daddy go, too?”

“Be on your way!” growled O’Reilley. “I got things to do.”

“We’re coming back?”

“Of course you’re coming back! Git now⁠—or shall I get my spanking switch?”

Peony strolled out the door ahead of Norris.

“Oh, inspector, would you be punching the night latch for me as you leave the shop? I think I’ll be closing for the day.”

Norris paused at the head of the stairs, looking back at the old man. But O’Reilley closed himself inside and the lock clicked. The agent sighed and glanced down at the small being beside him.

“Want me to carry you, Peony?”

She sniffed disdainfully. She hopped upon the banister and slid down ahead of him. Her motor-responses were typically neutroid⁠—something like a monkey, something like a squirrel. But there was no question about it; she was one of Delmont’s deviants. He wondered what they would do with her in central lab. He could remember no instance of an intelligent mutant getting into the market.

Somehow he could not consign her to a cage in the back of the truck. He drove home while she sat beside him on the front seat. She watched the scenery and remained aloof, occasionally looking around to ask, “Can we go back now?”

Norris could not bring himself to answer.

When he got home, he led her into the house and stopped in the hall to call Chief Franklin. The operator said, “His office doesn’t answer, sir. Shall I give you the robot locator?”

Norris hesitated. His wife came into the hall. She stooped to grin at Peony, and Peony said, “Do you live here, too?” Anne gasped and sat on the floor to stare.

Norris said, “Cancel the call. It’ll wait till tomorrow.” He dropped the phone quickly.

“What series is it?” Anne asked excitedly. “I never saw one that could talk.”

“It is a she,” he said. “And she’s a series unto herself. Some of Delmont’s work.”

Peony was looking from one to the other of them with a baffled face. “Can we go back now?”

Norris shook his head. “You’re going to spend the night with us, Peony,” he said softly. “Your daddy wants you to.”

His wife was watching him thoughtfully. Norris looked aside and plucked nervously at a corner of the telephone book. Suddenly she caught Peony’s hand and led her toward the kitchen.

“Come on, baby, let’s go find a cookie or something.”

Norris started out the front door, but in a moment Anne was back. She caught at his collar and tugged. “Not so fast!”

He turned to frown. Her face accused him at a six-inch range.

“Just what do you think you’re going to do with that child?”

He was silent for a long time. “You know what I’m supposed to do.”

Her unchanging stare told him that she wouldn’t accept any evasions. “I heard you trying to get your boss on the phone.”

“I canceled it, didn’t I?”

“Until tomorrow.”

He worked his hands nervously. “I don’t know, honey⁠—I just don’t know.”

“They’d kill her at central lab, wouldn’t they?”

“Well, they’d need her as evidence in Delmont’s trial.”

“They’d kill her, wouldn’t they?”

“When it was over⁠—it’s hard to say. The law says deviants must be destroyed, but⁠—”

“Well?”

He paused miserably. “We’ve got a few days to think about it, honey. I don’t have to make my report for a week.”

He sidled out the door. Looking back, he saw the hard determination in her eyes as she watched him. He knew somehow that he was going to lose either his job or his wife. Maybe both. He shuffled moodily out to the kennels to care for his charges.

A great silence filled the house during the evening. Supper was a gloomy meal. Only Peony spoke; she sat propped on two cushions at the table, using her silver with remarkable skill.

Norris wondered about her intelligence. Her chronological age was ten months; her physical age was about two years; but her mental age seemed to compare favorably with at least a three year old.

Once he reached across the table to touch her forehead. She eyed him curiously for a moment and continued eating. Her temperature was warmer than human, but not too warm for the normally high neutroid metabolism⁠—somewhere around 101°. The rapid rate of maturation made I.Q. determination impossible.

“You’ve got a good appetite, Peony,” Anne remarked.

“I like Daddy’s cooking better,” she said with innocent bluntness. “When can I go home?”

Anne looked at Norris and waited for an answer. He managed a smile at the flame-haired cherub. “Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll call your daddy on the phone and let you say hello. Would you like that?”

She giggled, then nodded. “Uh-huh! When can we do it?”

“Later.”

Anne tapped her fork thoughtfully against the edge of her plate. “I think we better have a nice long talk tonight, Terry,” she said.

“Is there anything to talk about?” He pushed the plate away. “I’m not hungry.”

He left the table and went to sit in darkness by the parlor window, while his wife did the dishes and Peony played with a handful of walnuts on the kitchen floor.

He watched the scattered lights of the suburbs and tried to think of nothing. The lights were peaceful, glimmering through the trees.

Once there had been no lights, only the flickering campfires of hunters shivering in the forest, when the world was young and sparsely planted with the seed of Man. Now the world was infected with his lights, and with the sound of his engines and the roar of his rockets. He had inherited the Earth and had filled it⁠—too full.

There was no escape. His rockets had touched two of the planets, but even the new worlds offered no sanctuary for the unborn. Man could have babies⁠—if allowed⁠—faster than he could build ships to haul them away. He could only choose between a higher death rate and a lower birth rate.

And unborn children were not eligible to vote when Man made his choice.

His choice had robbed his wife of a biological need, and so he made a disposable baby with which to pacify her. He gave it a tail and only half a mind, so that it could not be confused with his own occasional children.

But Peony had only the tail. Still she was not born of the seed of Man. Strange seed, out of the jungle, warped toward the human pole, but still not human.

Norris heard a car approaching in the street. Its headlights swung along the curb, and it slowed to a halt in front of the house. A tall, slender man in a dark suit climbed out and stood for a moment, staring toward the house. He was only a shadow in the faint street light. Norris could not place him. Suddenly the man snapped on a flashlight and played it over the porch. Norris caught his breath and darted toward the kitchen. Anne stared at him questioningly, while Peony peered up from her play.

He stooped beside her. “Listen, child!” he said quickly. “Do you know what a neutroid is?”

She nodded slowly. “They play in cages. They don’t talk.”

“Can you pretend you’re a neutroid?”

“I can play neutroid. I play neutroid with Daddy sometimes, when people come to see him. He gives me candy when I play it. When can I go home?”

“Not now. There’s a man coming to see us. Can you play neutroid for me? We’ll give you lots of candy. Just don’t talk. Pretend you’re asleep.”

“Now?”

“Now.” He heard the door chimes ringing.

“Who is it?” Anne asked.

“I don’t know. He may have the wrong house. Take Peony in the bedroom. I’ll answer it.”

His wife caught the child-thing up in her arms and hurried away. The chimes sounded again. Norris stalked down the hall and switched on the porch-light. The visitor was an elderly man, erect in his black suit and radiating dignity. As he smiled and nodded, Norris noticed his collar. A clergyman. Must have the wrong place, Norris thought.

“Are you Inspector Norris?”

The agent nodded, not daring to talk.

“I’m Father Paulson. I’m calling on behalf of a James O’Reilley. I think you know him. May I come in?”

Grudgingly, Norris swung open the door. “If you can stand the smell of paganism, come on in.”

The priest chuckled politely. Norris led him to the parlor and turned on the light. He waved toward a chair.

“What’s this all about? Does O’Reilley want something?”

Paulson smiled at the inspector’s brusque tone and settled himself in the chair. “O’Reilley is a sick man,” he said.

The inspector frowned. “He didn’t look it to me.”

“Sick of heart, Inspector. He came to me for advice. I couldn’t give him any. He told me the story⁠—about this Peony. I came to have a look at her, if I may.”

Norris said nothing for a moment. O’Reilley had better keep his mouth shut, he thought, especially around clergymen. Most of them took a dim view of the whole mutant business.

“I didn’t think you’d associate with O’Reilley,” he said. “I thought you people excommunicated everybody that owns a neutroid. O’Reilley owns a whole shopful.”

“That’s true. But who knows? He might get rid of his shop. May I see this neutroid?”

“Why?”

“O’Reilley said it could talk. Is that true or is O’Reilley suffering delusions? That’s what I came to find out.”

“Neutroids don’t talk.”

The priest stared at him for a time, then nodded slowly, as if approving something. “You can rest assured,” he said quietly, “that I’ll say nothing of this visit, that I’ll speak to no one about this creature.”

Norris looked up to see his wife watching them from the doorway.

“Get Peony,” he said.

“It’s true then?” Paulson asked.

“I’ll let you see for yourself.”

Anne brought the small child-thing into the room and set her on the floor. Peony saw the visitor, chattered with fright, and bounded upon the back of the sofa to sit and scold. She was playing her game well, Norris thought.

The priest watched her with quiet interest. “Hello, little one.”

Peony babbled gibberish. Paulson kept his eyes on her every movement. Suddenly he said, “I just saw your daddy, Peony. He wanted me to talk to you.”

Her babbling ceased. The spell of the game was ended. Her eyes went sober. Then she looked at Norris and pouted. “I don’t want any candy. I wanna go home.”

Norris let out a deep breath. “I didn’t say she couldn’t talk,” he pointed out sullenly.

“I didn’t say you did,” said Paulson. “You invited me to see for myself.”

Anne confronted the clergyman. “What do you want?” she demanded. “The child’s death? Did you come to assure yourself that she’d be turned over to the lab? I know your kind! You’d do anything to get rid of neutroids!”

“I came only to assure myself that O’Reilley’s sane,” Paulson told her.

“I don’t believe you,” she snapped.

He stared at her in wounded surprise; then he chuckled. “People used to trust the cloth. Ah, well. Listen, my child, you have us wrong. We say it’s evil to create the creatures. We say also that it’s evil to destroy them after they’re made. Not murder, exactly, but⁠—mockery of life, perhaps. It’s the entire institution that’s evil. Do you understand? As for this small creature of O’Reilley’s⁠—well, I hardly know what to make of her, but I certainly wouldn’t wish her⁠—uh⁠—d-e-a-d.”

Peony was listening solemnly to the conversation. Somehow Norris sensed a disinterested friend, if not an ally, in the priest. He looked at his wife. Her eyes were still suspicious.

“Tell me, Father,” Norris asked, “if you were in my position, what would you do?”

Paulson fumbled with a button of his coat and stared at the floor while he pondered. “I wouldn’t be in your position, young man. But if I were, I think I’d withhold her from my superiors. I’d also quit my job and go away.”

It wasn’t what Norris wanted to hear. But his wife’s expression suddenly changed; she looked at the priest with a new interest. “And give Peony back to O’Reilley,” she added.

“I shouldn’t be giving you advice,” he said unhappily. “I’m duty-bound to ask O’Reilley to give up his business and have nothing further to do with neutroids.”

“But Peony’s human,” Anne argued. “She’s different.”

“I fail to agree.”

“What!” Anne confronted him again. “What makes you human?”

“A soul, my child.”

Anne put her hands on her hips and leaned forward to glare down at him like something unwholesome. “Can you put a voltmeter between your ears and measure it?”

The priest looked helplessly at Norris.

“No!” she said. “And you can’t do it to Peony either!”

“Perhaps I had better go,” Paulson said to his host.

Norris sighed. “Maybe you better, Padre. You found out what you wanted to know.”

Anne stalked angrily out of the room, her dark hair swishing like a battle-pennant with each step. When the priest was gone, Norris picked up the child and held her in his lap. She was shivering with fright, as if she understood what had been said. Love them in the parlor, he thought, and kill them in the kennels.

“Can I go home? Doesn’t Daddy want me any more?”

“Sure he does, baby. You just be good and everything’ll be all right.”

Norris felt a bad taste in his mouth as he laid her sleeping body on the sofa half an hour later. Everything was all wrong and it promised to remain that way. He couldn’t give her back to O’Reilley, because she would be caught again when the auditor came to microfilm the records. And he certainly couldn’t keep her himself⁠—not with other Bio-agents wandering in and out every few days. She could not be concealed in a world where there were no longer any sparsely populated regions. There was nothing to do but obey the law and turn her over to Franklin’s lab.

He closed his eyes and shuddered. If he did that, he could do anything⁠—stomach anything⁠—adapt to any vicious demands society made of him. If he sent the child away to die, he would know that he had attained an “objective” outlook. And what more could he want from life than adaptation and objectivity?

Well⁠—his wife, for one thing.

He left the child on the sofa, turned out the light, and wandered into the bedroom. Anne was in bed, reading. She did not look up when she said, “Terry, if you let that baby be destroyed, I’ll.⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t say it,” he cut in. “Any time you feel like leaving, you just leave. But don’t threaten me with it.”

She watched him silently for a moment. Then she handed him the newspaper she had been reading. It was folded around an advertisement.

Biologists wanted
by
Anthropos Incorporated
for
Evolvotron Operators
Incubator Tenders
Nursery Supervisors
Laboratory Personnel
in
New Atlanta Plant
Call or write: Personnel Mgr.
Anthropos Inc.
Atlanta, GA
Note: Secure Work Department
release from present job
before applying.

He looked at Anne curiously. “So?”

She shrugged. “So there’s a job, if you want to quit this one.”

“What’s this got to do with Peony, if anything?”

“We could take her with us.”

“Not a chance,” he said. “Do you suppose a talking neutroid would be any safer there?”

She demanded angrily, “Why should they want to destroy her?”

Norris sat on the edge of the bed and thought about it. “No particular individual wants to, honey. It’s the law.”

“But why?”

“Generally, because deviants are unknown quantities. They can be dangerous.”

“That child⁠—dangerous?”

“Dangerous to a concept, a vague belief that Man is something special, a closed tribe. And in a practical sense, she’s dangerous because she’s not a neuter. The Federation insists that all mutants be neuter and infertile, so it can control the mutant population. If mutants started reproducing, that could be a real threat in a world whose economy is so delicately balanced.”

“Well, you’re not going to let them have her, do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he grumbled.

On the following day, he went down to police headquarters to sign a statement concerning the motive in Doctor Georges’ murder. As a result, Mrs. Glubbes was put away in the psycho-ward.

“It’s funny, Norris,” said Chief Miler, “what people’ll do over a neutroid. Like Mrs. Glubbes thinking that newt was her own. I sure don’t envy you your job. It’s a wonder you don’t get your head blown off. You must have an iron stomach.”

Norris signed the paper and looked up briefly. “Sure, Chief. Just a matter of adaptation.”

“Guess so.” Miler patted his paunch and yawned. “How you coming on this Delmont business? Picked up any deviants yet?”

Norris laid down the pen abruptly. “No! Of course not! What made you think I had?”

Miler stopped in the middle of his yawn and stared at Norris curiously. “Touchy, aren’t you?” he asked thoughtfully. “When I get that kind of answer from a prisoner, I right away start thinking⁠—”

“Save it for your interrogation room,” Norris growled. He stalked quickly out of the office while Chief Miler tapped his pencil absently and stared after him.

He was angry with himself for his indecision. He had to make a choice and make it soon. He was climbing in his car when a voice called after him from the building. He looked back to see Chief Miler trotting down the steps, his pudgy face glistening in the morning sun.

“Hey, Norris! Your missus is on the phone. Says it’s urgent.”

Norris went back grudgingly. A premonition of trouble gripped him.

“Phone’s right there,” the chief said, pointing with a stubby thumb.

The receiver lay on the desk, and he could hear it saying, “Hello⁠—hello⁠—” before he picked it up.

“Anne? What’s the matter?”

Her voice was low and strained, trying to be cheerful. “Nothing’s the matter, darling. We have a visitor. Come right home, will you? Chief Franklin’s here.”

It knocked the breath out of him. He felt himself going white. He glanced at Chief Miler, calmly sitting nearby.

“Can you tell me about it now?” he asked her.

“Not very well. Please hurry home. He wants to talk to you about the K-99s.”

“Have the two of them met?”

“Yes, they have.” She paused, as if listening to him speak, then said, “Oh, that! The game, honey⁠—remember the game?”

“Good,” he grunted. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up and started out.

“Troubles?” the chief called after him.

“Just a sick newt,” he said, “if it’s any of your business.”

Chief Franklin’s helicopter was parked in the empty lot next door when Norris drove up in front of the house. The official heard the truck and came out on the porch to watch his agent walk up the path. His lanky, emaciated body was loosely draped in gray tweeds, and his thin hawk face was a dark and solemn mask. He was a middle-aged man, his skin seamed with wrinkles, but his hair was still abnormally black. He greeted Norris with a slow, almost sarcastic nod.

“I see you don’t read your mail. If you’d looked at it, you’d have known I was coming. I wrote you yesterday.”

“Sorry, Chief, I didn’t have a chance to stop by the message office this morning.”

Franklin grunted. “Then you don’t know why I’m here?”

“No, sir.”

“Let’s sit out on the porch,” Franklin said, and perched his bony frame on the railing. “We’ve got to get busy on these Bermuda-K-99s, Norris. How many have you got?”

“Thirty-four, I think.”

“I counted thirty-five.”

“Maybe you’re right. I⁠—I’m not sure.”

“Found any deviants yet?”

“Uh⁠—I haven’t run any tests yet, sir.”

Franklin’s voice went sharp. “Do you need a test to know when a neutroid is talking a blue streak?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just this. We’ve found at least a dozen of Delmont’s units that have mental ages that correspond to their physical age. What’s more, they’re functioning females, and they have normal pituitaries. Know what that means?”

“They won’t take an age-set then,” Norris said. “They’ll grow to adulthood.”

“And have children.”

Norris frowned. “How can they have children? There aren’t any males.”

“No? Guess what we found in one of Delmont’s incubators.”

“Not a⁠—”

“Yeah. And it’s probably not the first. This business about padding his quota is baloney! Hell, man, he was going to start his own black market! He finally admitted it, after twenty-hours’ questioning without a letup. He was going to raise them, Norris. He was stealing them right out of the incubators before an inspector ever saw them. The K-99s⁠—the numbered ones⁠—are just the ones he couldn’t get back. Lord knows how many males he’s got hidden away someplace!”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Do! What do you think we’ll do? Smash the whole scheme, that’s what! Find the deviants and kill them. We’ve got enough now for lab work.”

Norris felt sick. He looked away. “I suppose you’ll want me to handle the destruction, then.”

Franklin gave him a suspicious glance. “Yes, but why do you ask? You have found one, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” he admitted.

A moan came from the doorway. Norris looked up to see his wife’s white face staring at him in horror, just before she turned and fled into the house. Franklin’s bony head lifted.

“I see,” he said. “We have a fixation on our deviant. Very well, Norris, I’ll take care of it myself. Where is it?”

“In the house, sir. My wife’s bedroom.”

“Get it.”

Norris went glumly in the house. The bedroom door was locked.

“Honey,” he called softly. There was no answer. He knocked gently.

A key turned in the lock, and his wife stood facing him. Her eyes were weeping ice.

“Stay back!” she said. He could see Peony behind her, sitting in the center of the floor and looking mystified.

Then he saw his own service revolver in her trembling hand.

“Look, honey⁠—it’s me.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not you. It’s a man that wants to kill a little girl. Stay back.”

“You’d shoot, wouldn’t you?” he asked softly.

“Try to come in and find out,” she invited.

“Let me have Peony.”

She laughed, her eyes bright with hate. “I wonder where Terry went. I guess he died. Or adapted. I guess I’m a widow now. Stay back, Mister, or I’ll kill you.”

Norris smiled. “Okay, I’ll stay back. But the gun isn’t loaded.”

She tried to slam the door; he caught it with his foot. She struck at him with the pistol, but he dragged it out of her hand. He pushed her aside and held her against the wall while she clawed at his arm.

“Stop it!” he said. “Nothing will happen to Peony, I promise you!” He glanced back at the child-thing, who had begun to cry.

Anne subsided a little, staring at him angrily.

“There’s no other way out, honey. Just trust me. She’ll be all right.”

Breathing quickly, Anne stood aside and watched him. “Okay, Terry. But if you’re lying⁠—tell me, is it murder to kill a man to protect a child?”

Norris lifted Peony in his arms. Her wailing ceased, but her tail switched nervously.

“In whose law book?” he asked his wife. “I was wondering the same thing.” Norris started toward the door. “By the way⁠—find my instruments while I’m outside, will you?”

“The dissecting instruments?” she gasped. “If you intend⁠—”

“Let’s call them surgical instruments, shall we? And get them sterilized.”

He went on outside, carrying the child. Franklin was waiting for him in the kennel doorway.

“Was that Mrs. Norris I heard screaming?”

Norris nodded. “Let’s get this over with. I don’t stomach it so well.” He let his eyes rest unhappily on the top of Peony’s head.

Franklin grinned at her and took a bit of candy out of his pocket. She refused it and snuggled closer to Norris.

“When can I go home?” she piped. “I want Daddy.”

Franklin straightened, watching her with amusement. “You’re going home in a few minutes, little newt. Just a few minutes.”

They went into the kennels together, and Franklin headed straight for the third room. He seemed to be enjoying the situation. Norris hating him silently, stopped at a workbench and pulled on a pair of gloves. Then he called after Franklin.

“Chief, since you’re in there, check the outlet pressure while I turn on the main line, will you?”

Franklin nodded assent. He stood outside the gas-chamber, watching the dials on the door. Norris could see his back while he twisted the mainline valve.

“Pressure’s up!” Franklin called.

“Okay. Leave the hatch ajar so it won’t lock, and crack the intake valves. Read it again.”

“Got a mask for me?”

Norris laughed. “If you’re scared, there’s one on the shelf. But just open the hatch, take a reading, and close it. There’s no danger.”

Franklin frowned at him and cracked the intakes. Norris quietly closed the main valve again.

“Drops to zero!” Franklin called.

“Leave it open, then. Smell anything?”

“No. I’m turning it off, Norris.” He twisted the intakes.

Simultaneously, Norris opened the main line.

“Pressure’s up again!”

Norris dropped his wrench and walked back to the chamber, leaving Peony perched on the workbench.

“Trouble with the intakes,” he said gruffly. “It’s happened before. Mind getting your hands dirty with me, Chief?”

Franklin frowned irritably. “Let’s hurry this up, Norris. I’ve got five territories to visit.”

“Okay, but we’d better put on our masks.” He climbed a metal ladder to the top of the chamber, leaned over to inspect the intakes. On his way down, he shouldered a light-bulb over the door, shattering it. Franklin cursed and stepped back, brushing glass fragments from his head and shoulders.

“Good thing the light was off,” he snapped.

Norris handed him the gas-mask and put on his own. “The main switch is off,” he said. He opened the intakes again. This time the dials fell to normal open-line pressure. “Well, look⁠—it’s okay,” he called through the mask. “You sure it was zero before?”

“Of course I’m sure!” came the muffled reply.

“Leave it on for a minute. We’ll see. I’ll go get the newt. Don’t let the door close, sir. It’ll start the automatics and we can’t get it open for half an hour.”

“I know, Norris. Hurry up.”

Norris left him standing just outside the chamber, propping the door open with his foot. A faint wind was coming through the opening. It should reach an explosive mixture quickly with the hatch ajar.

He stepped into the next room, waited a moment, and jerked the switch. The roar was deafening as the exposed tungsten filament flared and detonated the escaping anesthetic vapor. Norris went to cut off the main line. Peony was crying plaintively. He moved to the door and glanced at the smouldering remains of Franklin.

Feeling no emotion whatever, Norris left the kennels, carrying the sobbing child under one arm. His wife stared at him without understanding.

“Here, hold Peony while I call the police,” he said.

“Police? What’s happened?”

He dialed quickly. “Chief Miler? This is Norris. Get over here quick. My gas chamber exploded⁠—killed Chief Agent Franklin. Man, it’s awful! Hurry.”

He hung up and went back to the kennels. He selected a normal Bermuda-K-99 and coldly killed it with a wrench. “You’ll serve for a deviant,” he said, and left it lying in the middle of the floor.

Then he went back to the house, mixed a sleeping capsule in a glass of water, and forced Peony to drink it.

“So she’ll be out when the cops come,” he explained to Anne.

She stamped her foot. “Will you tell me what’s happened?”

“You heard me on the phone. Franklin accidentally died. That’s all you have to know.”

He carried Peony out and locked her in a cage. She was too sleepy to protest, and she was dozing when the police came.

Chief Miler strode about the three rooms like a man looking for a burglar at midnight. He nudged the body of the neutroid with his foot. “What’s this, Norris?”

“The deviant we were about to destroy. I finished her with a wrench.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any deviants.”

“As far as the public’s concerned, there aren’t. I couldn’t see that it was any of your business. It still isn’t.”

“I see. It may become my business, though. How’d the blast happen?”

Norris told him the story up to the point of the detonation. “The light over the door was loose. Kept flickering on and off. Franklin reached up to tighten it. Must have been a little gas in the socket. Soon as he touched it⁠—wham!”

“Why was the door open with the gas on?”

“I told you⁠—we were checking the intakes. If you close the door, it starts the automatics. Then you can’t get it open till the cycle’s finished.”

“Where were you?”

“I’d gone to cut off the gas again.”

“Okay, stay in the house until we’re finished out here.”

When Norris went back in the house, his wife’s white face turned slowly toward him.

She sat stiffly by the living room window, looking sick. Her voice was quietly frightened.

“Terry, I’m sorry about everything.”

“Skip it.”

“What did you do?”

He grinned sourly. “I adapted to an era. Did you find the instruments?”

She nodded. “What are they for?”

“To cut off a tail and skin a tattooed foot. Go to the store and buy some brown hair-dye and a pair of boy’s trousers, age two. Peony’s going to get a crew-cut. From now on, she’s Mike.”

“We’re class-C, Terry! We can’t pass her off as our own.”

“We’re class-A, honey. I’m going to forge a heredity certificate.”

Anne put her face in her hands and rocked slowly to and fro.

“Don’t feel bad, baby. It was Franklin or a little girl. And from now on, it’s society or the Norrises.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Go to Atlanta and work for Anthropos. I’ll take up where Delmont left off.”

“Terry!”

“Peony will need a husband. They may find all of Delmont’s males. I’ll make her one. Then we’ll see if a pair of chimp-Ks can do better than their makers.”

Wearily, he stretched out on the sofa.

“What about that priest? Suppose he tells about Peony. Suppose he guesses about Franklin and tells the police?”

“The police,” he said, “would then smell a motive. They’d figure it out and I’d be finished. We’ll wait and see. Let’s don’t talk; I’m tired. We’ll just wait for Miler to come in.”

She began rubbing his temples gently, and he smiled.

“So we wait,” she said. “Shall I read to you, Terry?”

“That would be pleasant,” he murmured, closing his eyes.

She slipped away, but returned quickly. He heard the rustle of dry pages and smelled musty leather. Then her voice came, speaking old words softly. And he thought of the small child-thing lying peacefully in her cage while angry men stalked about her. A small life with a mind; she came into the world as quietly as a thief, a burglar in the crowded house of Man.

“I will send my fear before thee, and I will destroy the peoples before whom thou shalt come, sending hornets to drive out the Hevite and the Canaanite and the Hethite before thou enterest the land. Little by little I will drive them out before thee, till thou be increased, and dost possess the land. Then shalt thou be to me a new people, and I to thee a God.⁠ ⁠…”

And on the quiet afternoon in May, while he waited for the police to finish puzzling in the kennels, it seemed to Terrell Norris that an end to scheming and pushing and arrogance was not too far ahead. It should be a pretty good world then.

He hoped Man could fit into it somehow.

A thief, he was about to die like a thief.

He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.

He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed and hungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face, though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup.

When he opened his eyes he could see the low hills of Mars, sun-washed and gray-green with trees, trees brought down from the heavens by the Ancient Fathers. But he could also see the executioner in the foreground, sitting spraddle-legged and calm while he chewed a blade of grass and waited. A squat man with a thick face, he occasionally peered at the thief with empty blue eyes⁠—while he casually played mumblety-peg with the bleeding-blade. His stare was blank.

“Ready for me yet, Asir?” he grumbled, not unpleasantly.

The knifeman sat beyond spitting range, but Asir spat, and tried to wipe his chin on the post. “Your dirty mother!” he mumbled.

The executioner chuckled and played mumblety-peg.

After three hours of dangling from the spikes that pierced his arms, Asir was weakening, and the blood throbbed hard in his temples, with each jolt of his heart a separate pulse of pain. The red stickiness had stopped oozing down his arms; they knew how to drive the spike just right. But the heartbeats labored in his head like a hammer beating at red-hot iron.

How many heartbeats in a lifetime⁠—and how many left to him now?

He whimpered and writhed, beginning to lose all hope. Mara had gone to see the Chief Commoner, to plead with him for the pilferer’s life⁠—but Mara was about as trustworthy as a wild hüffen, and he had visions of them chuckling together in Tokra’s villa over a glass of amber wine, while life drained slowly from a young thief.

Asir regretted nothing. His father had been a renegade before him, had squandered his last ritual formula to buy a wife, then impoverished, had taken her away to the hills. Asir was born in the hills, but he came back to the village of his ancestors to work as a servant and steal the rituals of his masters. No thief could last for long. A ritual-thief caused havoc in the community. The owner of a holy phrase, not knowing that it had been stolen, tried to spend it⁠—and eventually counterclaims would come to light, and a general accounting had to be called. The thief was always found out.

Asir had stolen more than wealth, he had stolen the strength of their souls. For this they hung him by his wrists and waited for him to beg for the bleeding-blade.

Woman thirsts for husband,
Man thirsts for wife,
Baby thirsts for breast-milk
Thief thirsts for knife.⁠ ⁠…

A rhyme from his childhood, a childish chant, an eenie-meenie-miney for determining who should drink first from a nectar-cactus. He groaned and tried to shift his weight more comfortably. Where was Mara?

“Ready for me yet, Asir?” the squat man asked.

Asir hated him with narrowed eyes. The executioner was bound by law to wait until his victim requested his fate. But Asir remained ignorant of what the fate would be. The Council of Senior Kinsmen judged him in secret, and passed sentence as to what the executioner would do with the knife. But Asir was not informed of their judgment. He knew only that when he asked for it, the executioner would advance with the bleeding-blade and exact the punishment⁠—his life, or an amputation, depending on the judgment. He might lose only an eye or an ear or a finger. But on the other hand, he might lose his life, both arms, or his masculinity.

There was no way to find out until he asked for the punishment. If he refused to ask, they would leave him hanging there. In theory, a thief could escape by hanging four days, after which the executioner would pull out the nails. Sometimes a culprit managed it, but when the nails were pulled, the thing that toppled was already a corpse.

The sun was sinking in the west, and it blinded him. Asir knew about the sun⁠—knew things the stupid council failed to know. A thief, if successful, frequently became endowed with wisdom, for he memorized more wealth than a score of honest men. Quotations from the ancient gods⁠—Fermi, Einstein, Elgermann, Hanser and the rest⁠—most men owned scattered phrases, and scattered phrases remained meaningless. But a thief memorized all transactions that he overheard, and the countless phrases could be fitted together into meaningful ideas.

He knew now that Mars, once dead, was dying again, its air leaking away once more into space. And Man would die with it, unless something were done, and done quickly. The Blaze of the Great Wind needed to be rekindled under the earth, but it would not be done. The tribes had fallen into ignorance, even as the holy books had warned:

It is realized that the colonists will be unable to maintain a technology without basic tools, and that a rebuilding will require several generations of intelligently directed effort. Given the knowledge, the colonists may be able to restore a machine culture if the knowledge continues to be bolstered by desire. But if the third, fourth, and nth generations fail to further the gradual retooling process, the knowledge will become worthless.

The quotation was from the god Roggins, Progress of the Mars-Culture, and he had stolen bits of it from various sources. The books themselves were no longer in existence, remembered only in memorized ritual chants, the possession of which meant wealth.

Asir was sick. Pain and slow loss of blood made him weak, and his vision blurred. He failed to see her coming until he heard her feet rustling in the dry grass.

“Mara⁠—”

She smirked and spat contemptuously at the foot of the post. The daughter of a Senior Kinsman, she was a tall, slender girl with an arrogant strut and mocking eyes. She stood for a moment with folded arms, eyeing him with amusement. Then, slowly, one eye closed in a solemn wink. She turned her back on him and spoke to the executioner.

“May I taunt the prisoner, Slubil?” she asked.

“It is forbidden to speak to the thief,” growled the knifeman.

“Is he ready to beg for justice, Slubil?”

The knifeman grinned and looked at Asir. “Are you ready for me yet, thief?”

Asir hissed an insult. The girl had betrayed him.

“Evidently a coward,” she said. “Perhaps he means to hang four days.”

“Let him then.”

“No⁠—I think that I should like to see him beg.”

She gave Asir a long searching glance, then turned to walk away. The thief cursed her quietly and followed her with his eyes. A dozen steps away she stopped again, looked back over her shoulder, and repeated the slow wink. Then she marched on toward her father’s house. The wink made his scalp crawl for a moment, but then.⁠ ⁠…

Suppose she hasn’t betrayed me? Suppose she had wheedled the sentence out of Tokra, and knew what his punishment would be. I think that I should like to see him beg.

But on the other hand, the fickle she-devil might be tricking him into asking for a sentence that she knew would be death or dismemberment⁠—just to amuse herself.

He cursed inwardly and trembled as he peered at the bored executioner. He licked his lips and fought against dizzyness as he groped for words. Slubil heard him muttering and looked up.

“Are you ready for me yet?”

Asir closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Give it to me!” he yelped suddenly, and braced himself against the post.

Why not? The short time gained couldn’t be classed as living. Have it done with. Eternity would be sweet in comparison to this ignomy. A knife could be a blessing.

He heard the executioner chuckle and stand up. He heard the man’s footsteps approaching slowly, and the singing hiss of the knife as Slubil swung it in quick arcs. The executioner moved about him slowly, teasing him with the whistle of steel fanning the air about him. He was expected to beg. Slubil occasionally laid the knife against his skin and took it away again. Then Asir heard the rustle of the executioner’s cloak as his arm went back. Asir opened his eyes.

The executioner grinned as he held the blade high⁠—aimed at Asir’s head! The girl had tricked him. He groaned and closed his eyes again, muttering a half-forgotten prayer.

The stroke fell⁠—and the blade chopped into the post above his head. Asir fainted.

When he awoke he lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. The executioner rolled him over with his foot.

“In view of your extreme youth, thief,” the knifeman growled, “the council has ordered you perpetually banished. The sun is setting. Let dawn find you in the hills. If you return to the plains, you will be chained to a wild hüffen and dragged to death.”

Panting weakly, Asir groped at his forehead, and found a fresh wound, raw and rubbed with rust to make a scar. Slubil had marked him as an outcast. But except for the nail-holes through his forearms, he was still in one piece. His hands were numb, and he could scarcely move his fingers. Slubil had bound the spike-wounds, but the bandages were bloody and leaking.

When the knifeman had gone, Asir climbed weakly to his feet. Several of the townspeople stood nearby, snickering at him. He ignored their catcalls and staggered toward the outskirts of the village, ten minutes away. He had to speak to Mara, and to her father if the crusty oldster would listen. His thief’s knowledge weighed upon him and brought desperate fear.

Darkness had fallen by the time he came to Welkir’s house. The people spat at him in the streets, and some of them flung handfuls of loose dirt after him as he passed. A light flickered feebly through Welkir’s door. Asir rattled it and waited.

Welkir came with a lamp. He set the lamp on the floor and stood with feet spread apart, arms folded, glaring haughtily at the thief. His face was stiff as weathered stone. He said nothing, but only stared contemptuously.

Asir bowed his head. “I have come to plead with you, Senior Kinsman.”

Welkir snorted disgust. “Against the mercy we have shown you?”

He looked up quickly, shaking his head. “No! For that I am grateful.”

“What then?”

“As a thief, I acquired much wisdom. I know that the world is dying, and the air is boiling out of it into the sky. I wish to be heard by the council. We must study the words of the ancients and perform their magic, lest our children’s children be born to strangle in a dead world.”

Welkir snorted again. He picked up the lamp. “He who listens to a thief’s wisdom is cursed. He who acts upon it is doubly cursed and a party to the crime.”

“The vaults,” Asir insisted. “The key to the Blaze of the Winds is in the vaults. The god Roggins tells us in the words⁠—”

“Stop! I will not hear!”

“Very well, but the blaze can be rekindled, and the air renewed. The vaults⁠—” He stammered and shook his head. “The council must hear me.”

“The council will hear nothing, and you shall be gone before dawn. And the vaults are guarded by the sleeper called Big Joe. To enter is to die. Now go away.”

Welkir stepped back and slammed the door. Asir sagged in defeat. He sank down on the doorstep to rest a moment. The night was black, except for lamp-flickers from an occasional window.

“Ssssst!”

A sound from the shadows. He looked around quickly, searching for the source.

“Ssssst! Asir!”

It was the girl Mara, Welkir’s daughter. She had slipped out the back of the house and was peering at him around the corner. He arose quietly and went to her.

“What did Slubil do to you?” she whispered.

Asir gasped and caught her shoulders angrily. “Don’t you know?”

“No! Stop! You’re hurting me. Tokra wouldn’t tell me. I made love to him, but he wouldn’t tell.”

He released her with an angry curse.

“You had to take it sometime,” she hissed. “I knew if you waited you would be too weak from hanging to even run away.”

He called her a foul name.

“Ingrate!” she snapped. “And I bought you a hüffen!”

“You what?”

“Tokra gave me a ritual phrase and I bought you a hüffen with it. You can’t walk to the hills, you know.”

Asir burned with dull rage. “You slept with Tokra!” he snapped.

“You’re jealous!” she tittered.

“How can I be jealous! I hate the sight of you!”

“Very well then, I’ll keep the hüffen.”

“Do!” he growled. “I won’t need it, since I’m not going to the hills!”

She gasped. “You’ve got to go, you fool! They’ll kill you!”

He turned away, feeling sick. She caught at his arm and tried to pull him back. “Asir! Take the hüffen and go!”

“I’ll go,” he growled. “But not to the hills. I’m going out to the vault.”

He stalked away, but she trotted along beside him, trying to tug him back. “Fool! The vaults are sacred! The priests guard the entrance, and the Sleeper guards the inner door. They’ll kill you if you try it, and if you linger, the council will kill you tomorrow.”

“Let them!” he snarled. “I am no sniveling townsman! I am of the hills, and my father was a renegade. Your council had no right to judge me. Now I shall judge them.”

The words were spoken hotly, and he realized their folly. He expected a scornful rebuke from Mara, but she hung onto his arm and pleaded with him. He had dragged her a dozen doorways from the house of her father. Her voice had lost its arrogance and became pleading.

“Please, Asir! Go away. Listen! I will even go with you⁠—if you want me.”

He laughed harshly. “Tokra’s leavings.”

She slapped him hard across the mouth. “Tokra is an impotent old dodderer. He can scarcely move for arthritis. You’re an idiot! I sat on his lap and kissed his bald pate for you.”

“Then why did he give you a ritual phrase?” he asked stiffly.

“Because he likes me.”

“You lie.” He stalked angrily on.

“Very well! Go to the vaults. I’ll tell my father, and they’ll hunt you down before you get there.”

She released his arm and stopped. Asir hesitated. She meant it. He came back to her slowly, then slipped his swollen hands to her throat. She did not back away.

“Why don’t I just choke you and leave you lying here?” he hissed.

Her face was only a shadow in darkness, but he could see her cool smirk.

“Because you love me, Asir of Franic.”

He dropped his hands and grunted a low curse. She laughed low and took his arm.

“Come on. We’ll go get the hüffen,” she said.

Why not? he thought. Take her hüffen, and take her too. He could dump her a few miles from the village, then circle back to the vaults. She leaned against him as they moved back toward her father’s house, then skirted it and stole back to the field behind the row of dwellings. Phobos hung low in the west, its tiny disk lending only a faint glow to the darkness.

He heard the hüffen’s breathing as they approached a hulking shadow in the gloom. Its great wings snaked out slowly as it sensed their approach, and it made a low piping sound. A native Martian species, it bore no resemblance to the beasts that the ancients had brought with them from the sky. Its back was covered with a thin shell like a beetle’s, but its belly was porous and soft. It digested food by sitting on it, and absorbing it. The wings were bony⁠—parchment stretched across a fragile frame. It was headless, and lacked a centralized brain, the nervous functions being distributed.

The great creature made no protest as they climbed up the broad flat back and strapped themselves down with the belts that had been threaded through holes cut in the hüffen’s thin, tough shell. Its lungs slowly gathered a tremendous breath of air, causing the riders to rise up as the huge air-sacs became distended. The girth of an inflated hüffen was nearly four times as great as when deflated. When the air was gathered, the creature began to shrink again as its muscles tightened, compressing the breath until a faint leakage-hiss came from behind. It waited, wings taut.

The girl tugged at a ring set through the flesh of its flank. There was a blast of sound and a jerk. Nature’s experiment in jet propulsion soared ahead and turned into the wind. Its first breath exhausted, it gathered another and blew itself ahead again. The ride was jerky. Each tailward belch was a rough lurch. They let the hüffen choose its own heading as it gained altitude. Then Mara tugged at the wing-straps, and the creature wheeled to soar toward the dark hills in the distance.

Asir sat behind her, a sardonic smirk on his face, as the wind whipped about them. He waited until they had flown beyond screaming distance of the village. Then he took her shoulders lightly in his hands. Mistaking it for affection, she leaned back against him easily and rested her dark head on his shoulder. He kissed her⁠—while his hand felt gingerly for the knife at her belt. His fingers were numb, but he managed to clutch it, and press the blade lightly against her throat. She gasped. With his other hand, he caught her hair.

“Now guide the hüffen down!” he ordered.

“Asir!”

“Quickly!” he barked.

“What are you going to do?”

“Leave you here and circle back to the vaults.”

“No! Not out here at night!”

He hesitated. There were slinking prowlers on the Cimmerian plain, beasts who would regard the marooned daughter of Welkir a delicious bit of good fortune, a gustatory delight of a sort they seldom were able to enjoy. Even above the moan of the wind, he could hear an occasional howl-cry from the fanged welcoming committee that waited for its dinner beneath them.

“Very well,” he growled reluctantly. “Turn toward the vaults. But one scream and I’ll slice you.” He took the blade from her throat but kept the point touching her back.

“Please, Asir, no!” she pleaded. “Let me go on to the hills. Why do you want to go to the vaults? Because of Tokra?”

He gouged her with the point until she yelped. “Tokra be damned, and you with him!” he snarled. “Turn back.”

“Why?”

“I’m going down to kindle the Blaze of the Winds.”

“You’re mad! The spirits of the ancients live in the vaults.”

“I am going to kindle the Blaze of the Winds,” he insisted stubbornly. “Now either turn back, or go down and I’ll turn back alone.”

After a hesitant moment, she tugged at a wing-rein and the hüffen banked majestically. They flew a mile to the south of the village, then beyond it toward the cloister where the priests of Big Joe guarded the entrance to the vaults. The cloister was marked by a patch of faint light on the ground ahead.

“Circle around it once,” he ordered.

“You can’t get in. They’ll kill you.”

He doubted it. No one ever tried to enter, except the priests who carried small animals down as sacrifices to the great Sleeper. Since no outsider ever dared go near the shaft, the guards expected no one. He doubted that they would be alert.

The cloister was a hollow square with a small stone tower rising in the center of the courtyard. The tower contained the entrance to the shaft. In the dim light of Phobos, assisted by yellow flickers from the cloister windows, he peered at the courtyard as they circled closer. It seemed to be empty.

“Land beside the tower!” he ordered.

“Asir⁠—please⁠—”

“Do it!”

The hüffen plunged rapidly, soared across the outer walls, and burst into the courtyard. It landed with a rough jolt and began squeaking plaintively.

“Hurry!” he hissed. “Get your straps off and let’s go.”

“I’m not going.”

A prick of the knife point changed her mind. They slid quickly to the ground, and Asir kicked the hüffen in the flanks. The beast sucked in air and burst aloft.

Startled faces were trying to peer through the lighted cloister windows into the courtyard. Someone cried a challenge. Asir darted to the door of the tower and dragged it open. Now forced to share the danger, the girl came with him without urging. They stepped into a stair-landing. A candle flickered from a wall bracket. A guard, sitting on the floor beneath the candle, glanced up in complete surprise. Then he reached for a short barbed pike. Asir kicked him hard in the temple, then rolled his limp form outside. Men with torches were running across the courtyard. He slammed the heavy metal door and bolted it.

Fists began beating on the door. They paused for a moment to rest, and Mara stared at him in fright. He expected her to burst into angry speech, but she only leaned against the wall and panted. The dark mouth of the stairway yawned at them⁠—a stone throat that led into the bowels of Mars and the realm of the monster, Big Joe. He glanced at Mara thoughtfully, and felt sorry for her.

“I can leave you here,” he offered, “but I’ll have to tie you.”

She moistened her lips, glanced first at the stairs, then at the door where the guards were raising a frantic howl. She shook her head.

“I’ll go with you.”

“The priests won’t bother you, if they see that you were a prisoner.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He was pleased, but angry with himself for the pleasure. An arrogant, spiteful, conniving wench, he told himself. She’d lied about Tokra. He grunted gruffly, seized the candle, and started down the stairs. When she started after him, he stiffened and glanced back, remembering the barbed pike.

As he had suspected, she had picked it up. The point was a foot from the small of his back. They stared at each other, and she wore her self-assured smirk.

“Here,” she said, and handed it casually. “You might need this.”

They stared at each other again, but it was different this time. Bewildered, he shook his head and resumed the descent toward the vaults. The guards were battering at the door behind them.

The stairwell was damp and cold. Blackness folded about them like a shroud. They moved in silence, and after five thousand steps, Asir stopped counting.

Somewhere in the depths, Big Joe slept his restless sleep. Asir wondered grimly how long it would take the guards to tear down the metal door. Somehow they had to get past Big Joe before the guards came thundering after them. There was a way to get around the monster: of that he was certain. A series of twenty-four numbers was involved, and he had memorized them with a stolen bit of ritual. How to use them was a different matter. He imagined vaguely that one must call them out in a loud voice before the inner entrance.

The girl walked beside him now, and he could feel her shivering. His eyes were quick and nervous as he scanned each pool of darkness, each nook and cranny along the stairway wall. The well was silent except for the mutter of their footsteps, and the gloom was full of musty odors. The candle afforded little light.

“I told you the truth about Tokra,” she blurted suddenly.

Asir glowered straight ahead and said nothing, embarrassed by his previous jealousy. They moved on in silence.

Suddenly she stopped. “Look,” she hissed, pointing down ahead.

He shielded the candle with his hand and peered downward toward a small square of dim light. “The bottom of the stairs,” he muttered.

The light seemed faint and diffuse, with a slight greenish cast. Asir blew out the candle, and the girl quickly protested.

“How will we see to climb again?”

He laughed humorlessly. “What makes you think we will?”

She moaned and clutched at his arm, but came with him as he descended slowly toward the light. The stairway opened into a long corridor whose ceiling was faintly luminous. White-faced and frightened, they paused on the bottom step and looked down the corridor. Mara gasped and covered her eyes.

“Big Joe!” she whispered in awe.

He stared through the stairwell door and down the corridor through another door into a large room. Big Joe sat in the center of the room, sleeping his sleep of ages amid a heap of broken and whitening bones. A creature of metal, twice the height of Asir, he had obviously been designed to kill. Tri-fingered hands with gleaming talons, and a monstrous head shaped like a Marswolf, with long silver fangs. Why should a metal-creature have fangs, unless he had been built to kill?

The behemoth slept in a crouch, waiting for the intruders.

He tugged the girl through the stairwell door. A voice droned out of nowhere: “If you have come to plunder, go back!”

He stiffened, looking around. The girl whimpered.

“Stay here by the stairs,” he told her, and pushed her firmly back through the door.

Asir started slowly toward the room where Big Joe waited. Beyond the room he could see another door, and the monster’s job was apparently to keep intruders back from the inner vaults where, according to the ritual chants, the Blaze of the Winds could be kindled.

Halfway along the corridor, the voice called out again, beginning a kind of singsong chant: “Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you⁠—”

He turned slowly, searching for the speaker. But the voice seemed to come from a black disk on the wall. The talking-machines perhaps, as mentioned somewhere in the ritual.

A few paces from the entrance to the room, the voice fell silent. He stopped at the door, staring in at the monster. Then he took a deep breath and began chanting the twenty-four numbers in a loud but quavering voice. Big Joe remained in his motionless crouch. Nothing happened. He stepped through the doorway.

Big Joe emitted a deafening roar, straightened with a metallic groan, and lumbered toward him, taloned hands extended and eyes blazing furiously. Asir shrieked and ran for his life.

Then he saw Mara lying sprawled in the stairway entrance. She had fainted. Blocking an impulse to leap over her and flee alone, he stopped to lift her.

But suddenly he realized that there was no pursuit. He looked back. Big Joe had returned to his former position, and he appeared to be asleep again. Puzzled, Asir stepped back into the corridor.

“If you have come to plunder, go back!”

He moved gingerly ahead again.

“Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill⁠—”

He recovered the barbed pike from the floor and stole into the zone of silence. This time he stopped to look around. Slowly he reached the pikestaff through the doorway. Nothing happened. He stepped closer and waved it around inside. Big Joe remained motionless.

Then he dropped the point of the pike to the floor. The monster bellowed and started to rise. Asir leaped back, scalp crawling. But Big Joe settled back in his crouch.

Fighting a desire to flee, Asir reached the pike through the door and rapped it on the floor again. This time nothing happened. He glanced down. The pike’s point rested in the center of a gray floor-tile, just to the left of the entrance. The floor was a checkerboard pattern of gray and white. He tapped another gray square, and this time the monster started out of his drowse again.

After a moment’s thought, he began touching each tile within reach of the door. Most of them brought a response from Big Joe. He found four that did not. He knelt down before the door to peer at them closely. The first was unmarked. The second bore a dot in the center. The third bore two, and the fourth three⁠—in order of their distance from the door.

He stood up and stepped inside again, standing on the first tile. Big Joe remained motionless. He stepped diagonally left to the second⁠—straight ahead to the third⁠—then diagonally right to the fourth. He stood there for a moment, trembling and staring at the Sleeper. He was four feet past the door!

Having assured himself that the monster was still asleep, he crouched to peer at the next tiles. He stared for a long time, but found no similar markings. Were the dots coincidence?

He reached out with the pike, then drew it back. He was too close to the Sleeper to risk a mistake. He stood up and looked around carefully, noting each detail of the room⁠—and of the floor in particular. He counted the rows and columns of tiles⁠—twenty-four each way.

Twenty-four⁠—and there were twenty-four numbers in the series that was somehow connected with safe passage through the room. He frowned and muttered through the series to himself⁠—0, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1.⁠ ⁠…

The first four numbers⁠—0, 1, 2, 3. And the tiles⁠—the first with no dots, the second with one, the third with two, the fourth with three. But the four tiles were not in a straight line, and there were no marked ones beyond the fourth. He backed out of the room and studied them from the end of the corridor again.

Mara had come dizzily awake and was calling for him weakly. He replied reassuringly and turned to his task again. “First tile, then diagonally left, then straight, then diagonally right⁠—”

0, 1, 2, 3, 3.

A hunch came. He advanced as far as the second tile, then reached as far ahead as he could and touched the square diagonally right from the fourth one. Big Joe remained motionless but began to speak. His scalp bristled at the growling voice.

“If the intruder makes an error, Big Joe will kill.”

Standing tense, ready to leap back to the corridor, he touched the square again. The motionless behemoth repeated the grim warning.

Asir tried to reach the square diagonally right from the fifth, but could not without stepping up to the third. Taking a deep breath, he stepped up and extended the pike cautiously, keeping his eyes on Big Joe. The pike rapped the floor.

“If the intruder makes an error, Big Joe will kill.”

But the huge figure remained in his place.

Starting from the first square, the path went left, straight, right, right, right. And after zero, the numbers went 1, 2, 3, 3, 3. Apparently he had found the key. One meant a square to the southeast; two meant south; and three southwest. Shivering, he moved up to the fifth square upon which the monster growled his first warning. He looked back at the door, then at Big Joe. The taloned hands could grab him before he could dive back into the corridor.

He hesitated. He could either turn back now, or gamble his life on the accuracy of the tentative belief. The girl was calling to him again.

“Come to the end of the corridor!” he replied.

She came hurriedly, to his surprise.

“No!” he bellowed. “Stay back of the entrance! Not on the tile! No!”

Slowly she withdrew the foot that hung poised over a trigger-tile.

“You can’t come in unless you know how,” he gasped.

She blinked at him and glanced nervously back over her shoulder. “But I hear them. They’re coming down the stairs.”

Asir cursed softly. Now he had to go ahead.

“Wait just a minute,” he said. “Then I’ll show you how to come through.”

He advanced to the last tile that he had tested and stopped. The next two numbers were two⁠—for straight ahead. And they would take him within easy reach of the long taloned arms of the murderous sentinel. He glanced around in fright at the crushed bones scattered across the floor. Some were human. Others were animal-sacrifices tossed in by the priests.

He had tested only one two⁠—back near the door. If he made a mistake, he would never escape; no need bothering with the pike.

He stepped to the next tile and closed his eyes.

“If the intruder makes an error, Big Joe will kill.”

He opened his eyes again and heaved a breath of relief.

“Asir! They’re getting closer! I can hear them!”

He listened for a moment. A faint murmur of angry voices in the distance. “All right,” he said calmly. “Step only on the tiles I tell you. See the gray one at the left of the door?”

She pointed. “This one?”

“Yes, step on it.”

The girl moved up and stared fearfully at the monstrous sentinel. He guided her up toward him. “Diagonally left⁠—one ahead⁠—diagonally right. Now don’t be frightened when he speaks⁠—”

The girl came on until she stood one square behind him. Her quick frightened breathing blended with the growing sounds of shouting from the stairway. He glanced up at Big Joe, noticing for the first time that the steel jaws were stained with a red-brown crust. He shuddered.

The grim chess-game continued a cautious step at a time, with the girl following one square behind him. What if she fainted again? And fell across a triggered tile? They passed within a foot of Big Joe’s arm.

Looking up, he saw the monster’s eyes move⁠—following them, scrutinizing them as they passed. He froze.

“We want no plunder,” he said to the machine.

The gaze was steady and unwinking.

“The air is leaking away from the world.”

The monster remained silent.

“Hurry!” whimpered the girl. Their pursuers were gaining rapidly and they had crossed only half the distance to the opposing doorway. Progress was slower now, for Asir needed occasionally to repeat through the whole series of numbers, looking back to count squares and make certain that the next step was not a fatal one.

“They won’t dare to come in after us,” he said hopefully.

“And if they do?”

“If the intruder makes an error, Big Joe will kill,” announced the machine as Asir took another step.

“Eight squares to go!” he muttered, and stopped to count again.

“Asir! They’re in the corridor!”

Hearing the rumble of voices, he looked back to see blue-robed men spilling out of the stairway and milling down the corridor toward the room. But halfway down the hall, the priests paused⁠—seeing the unbelievable: two intruders walking safely past their devil-god. They growled excitedly among themselves. Asir took another step. Again the machine voiced the monotonous warning.

“If the intruder makes an error.⁠ ⁠…”

Hearing their deity speak, the priests of Big Joe babbled wildly and withdrew a little. But one, more impulsive than the rest, began shrieking.

“Kill the intruders! Cut them down with your spears!”

Asir glanced back to see two of them racing toward the room, lances cocked for the throw. If a spear struck a trigger-tile⁠—

“Stop!” he bellowed, facing around.

The two priests paused. Wondering if it would result in his sudden death, he rested a hand lightly against the huge steel arm of the robot, then leaned against it. The huge eyes were staring down at him, but Big Joe did not move.

The spearmen stood frozen, gaping at the thief’s familiarity with the horrendous hulk. Then, slowly they backed away.

Continuing his bluff, he looked up at Big Joe and spoke in a loud voice. “If they throw their spears or try to enter, kill them.”

He turned his back on the throng in the hall and continued the cautious advance. Five to go, four, three, two⁠—

He paused to stare into the room beyond. Gleaming machinery⁠—all silent⁠—and great panels, covered with a multitude of white circles and dials. His heart sank. If here lay the magic that controlled the Blaze of the Great Wind, he could never hope to rekindle it.

He stepped through the doorway, and the girl followed. Immediately the robot spoke like low thunder.

“The identity of the two technologists is recognized. Hereafter they may pass with impunity. Big Joe is charged to ask the following: why do the technologists come, when it is not yet time?”

Staring back, Asir saw that the robot’s head had turned so that he was looking directly back at the thief and the girl. Asir also saw that someone had approached the door again. Not priests, but townspeople.

He stared, recognizing the Chief Commoner, and the girl’s father Welkir, three other Senior Kinsmen, and⁠—Slubil, the executioner who had nailed him to the post.

“Father! Stay back.”

Welkir remained silent, glaring at them. He turned and whispered to the Chief Commoner. The Chief Commoner whispered to Slubil. The executioner nodded grimly and took a short-axe from his belt thong. He stepped through the entrance, his left foot striking the zero-tile. He peered at Big Joe and saw that the monster remained motionless. He grinned at the ones behind him, then snarled in Asir’s direction.

“Your sentence has been changed, thief.”

“Don’t try to cross, Slubil!” Asir barked.

Slubil spat, brandished the axe, and stalked forward. Big Joe came up like a resurrection of fury, and his bellow was explosive in the vaults. Slubil froze, then stupidly drew back his axe.

Asir gasped as the talons closed. He turned away quickly. Slubil’s scream was cut off abruptly by a ripping sound, then a series of dull cracks and snaps. The girl shrieked and closed her eyes. There were two distinct thuds as Big Joe tossed Slubil aside.

The priests and the townspeople⁠—all except Welkir⁠—had fled from the corridor and up the stairway. Welkir was on his knees, his hands covering his face.

“Mara!” he moaned. “My daughter.”

“Go back, Father,” she called.

Dazed, the old man picked himself up weakly and staggered down the corridor toward the stairway. When he passed the place of the first warning voice, the robot moved again⁠—arose slowly and turned toward Asir and Mara who backed quickly away, deeper into the room of strange machines. Big Joe came lumbering slowly after them.

Asir looked around for a place to flee, but the monster stopped in the doorway. He spoke again, a mechanical drone like memorised ritual.

“Big Joe is charged with announcing his function for the intelligence of the technologists. His primary function is to prevent the entrance of possibly destructive organisms into the vaults containing the control equipment for the fusion reaction which must periodically renew atmospheric oxygen. His secondary function is to direct the technologists to records containing such information as they may need. His tertiary function is to carry out simple directions given by the technologists if such directions are possible to his limited design.”

Asir stared at the lumbering creature and realized for the first time that it was not alive, but only a machine built by the ancients to perform specific tasks. Despite the fresh redness about his hands and jaws, Big Joe was no more guilty of Slubil’s death than a grinding mill would be if the squat sadist had climbed into it while the Marsoxen were yoked to the crushing roller.

Perhaps the ancients had been unnecessarily brutal in building such a guard⁠—but at least they had built him to look like a destroyer, and to give ample warning to the intruder. Glancing around at the machinery, he vaguely understood the reason for Big Joe. Such metals as these would mean riches for swordmakers and smiths and plunderers of all kinds.

Asir straightened his shoulders and addressed the machine.

“Teach us how to kindle the Blaze of the Great Wind.”

“Teaching is not within the designed functions of Big Joe. I am charged to say: the renewal reaction should not be begun before the Marsyear 6,000, as the builders reckoned time.”

Asir frowned. The years were no longer numbered, but only named in honor of the Chief Commoners who ruled the villages. “How long until the year 6,000?” he asked.

Big Joe clucked like an adding machine. “Twelve Marsyears, technologist.”

Asir stared at the complicated machinery. Could they learn to operate it in twelve years? It seemed impossible.

“How can we begin to learn?” he asked the robot.

“This is an instruction room, where you may examine records. The control mechanisms are installed in the deepest vault.”

Asir frowned and walked to the far end of the hall where another door opened into⁠—another anteroom, with another Big Joe! As he approached the second robot spoke:

“If the intruder has not acquired the proper knowledge, Big Oswald will kill.”

Thunderstruck, he leaped back from the entrance and swayed heavily against an instrument panel. The panel lit up and a polite recorded voice began reading something about “President Snell’s role in the Eighth World War.” He lurched away from the panel and stumbled back toward Mara who sat glumly on the foundation slab of a weighty machine.

“What are you laughing about?” she muttered.

“We’re still in the first grade!” he groaned, envisioning a sequence of rooms. “We’ll have to learn the magic of the ancients before we pass to the next.”

“The ancients weren’t so great,” she grumbled. “Look at the mural on the wall.”

Asir looked, and saw only a strange design of circles about a bright splash of yellow that might have been the sun. “What about it?” he asked.

“My father taught me about the planets,” she said. “That is supposed to be the way they go around the sun.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“One planet too many,” she said. “Everyone knows that there is only an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. The picture shows a planet there.”

Asir shrugged indifferently, being interested only in the machinery. “Can’t you allow them one small mistake?”

“I suppose.” She paused, gazing miserably in the direction in which her father had gone. “What do we do now?”

Asir considered it for a long time. Then he spoke to Big Joe. “You will come with us to the village.”

The machine was silent for a moment, then: “There is an apparent contradiction between primary and tertiary functions. Request priority decision by technologist.”

Asir failed to understand. He repeated his request. The robot turned slowly and stepped through the doorway. He waited.

Asir grinned. “Let’s go back up,” he said to the girl.

She arose eagerly. They crossed the anteroom to the corridor and began the long climb toward the surface, with Big Joe lumbering along behind.

“What about your banishment, Asir?” she asked gravely.

“Wait and see.” He envisioned the pandemonium that would reign when girl, man, and robot marched through the village to the council house, and he chuckled. “I think that I shall be the next Chief Commoner,” he said. “And my councilmen will all be thieves.”

“Thieves!” she gasped. “Why?”

“Thieves who are not afraid to steal the knowledge of the gods⁠—and become technologists, to kindle the Blaze of the Winds.”

“What is a ‘technologist,’ Asir?” she asked worshipfully.

Asir glowered at himself for blundering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm. “I think,” he said, “that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do.”

“Kiss me, Technologist,” she told him in a small voice.

Big Joe clanked to a stop to wait for them to move on. He waited a long time.

Check and Checkmate

John Smith XVI, new President of the Western Federation of Autonomous States, had made a number of campaign promises that nobody really expected him to fulfill, for after all, the campaign and the election were only ceremonies, and the President⁠—who had no real name of his own⁠—had been trained for the executive post since birth. He had been elected by a popular vote of 603,217,954 to 130, the dissenters casting their negative by announcing that, for the sake of national unity, they refused to participate in any civilized activities during the President’s term, whereupon they were admitted (voluntarily) to the camp for conscientious objectors.

But now, two weeks after his inauguration, he seemed ready to make good the first and perhaps most difficult promise of the lot: to confer by televiewphone with Ivan Ivanovitch the Ninth, the Peoplesfriend and Vicar of the Asian Proletarian League. The President apparently meant to keep to himself the secret of his success in the difficult task of arranging the interview in spite of the lack of any diplomatic contact between the nations, in spite of the Hell Wall, and the interference stations which made even radio communication impossible between the two halves of the globe. Someone had suggested that John Smith XVI had floated a note to Ivan IX in a bottle, and the suggestion, though ludicrous, seemed not at all unlikely.

John XVI seemed quite pleased with himself as he sat with his staff of Primary Stand-ins in the study of his presidential palace. His face, of course, was invisible behind the golden mask of the official helmet, the mask of tragedy with its expression of pathos symbolizing the self-immolation of public service⁠—as well as protecting the President’s own personal visage from public view, and hence from assassination in unmasked private life, for not only was he publicly nameless, but also publicly faceless and publicly unknown as an individual. But despite the invisibility of his expression, his contentment became apparent by a certain briskness of gesticulation and a certain smugness in his voice as he spoke to the nine Stand-ins who were also bodyguards, council-members, and advisors to the chief executive.

“Think of it, men,” he sighed happily in his smooth tenor, slightly muffled by the mask. “Communication with the East⁠—after forty years of the Big Silence. A great moment in history, perhaps the greatest since the last peace-effort.”

The nine men nodded dutifully. The President looked around at them and chuckled.

“ ‘Peace-effort,’ ” he echoed, spitting the words out distinctly as if they were a pair of phonetic specimens. “Do you remember what it used to be called⁠—in the middle of the last century?”

A brief silence, then a Stand-in frowned thoughtfully. “Called it ‘war,’ didn’t they, John?”

“Precisely.” The golden helmet nodded crisply. “ ‘War’⁠—and now ‘peace-effort.’ Our semantics has progressed. Our present ‘security-probe’ was once called ‘lynch.’ ‘Social-security’ once meant a limited insurance plan, not connoting euthanasia and sterilization for the ellie-moes. And that word ‘ellie-moe’⁠—once eleemosynary⁠—was once applied to institutions that took care of the handicapped.”

He waited for the burst of laughter to subside. A Stand-in, still chuckling, spoke up.

“It’s our institutions that have evolved, John.”

“True enough,” the President agreed. “But as they changed, most of them kept their own names. Like ‘the Presidency.’ It used to be rabble-chosen, as our ceremonies imply. Then the Qualifications Amendment that limited it to the psychologically fit. And then the Education Amendment prescribed other qualifying rules. And the Genetic Amendment, and the Selection Amendment, and finally the seclusion and depersonalization. Until it gradually got out of the rabble’s hands, except symbolically.” He paused. “Still, it’s good to keep the old names. As long as the names don’t change, the rabble is happy, and say, ‘We have preserved the Pan-American way of life.’ ”

“While the rabble is really impotent,” added a Stand-in.

“Don’t say that!” John Smith XVI snapped irritably, sitting quickly erect on the self-conforming couch. “And if you believe it, you’re a fool.” His voice went sardonic. “Why don’t you try abolishing me and find out?”

“Sorry, John. I didn’t mean⁠—”

The President stood up and paced slowly toward the window where he stood gazing between the breeze-stirred drapes at the sun-swept city of Acapulco and at the breakers rolling toward the distant beach.

“No, my power is of the rabble,” he confessed, “and I am their friend.” He turned to look at them and laugh. “Should I build my power on men like you? Or the Secondary Stand-ins? Baa! For all your securities, you are still stooges. Of the rabble. Do you obey me because I control military force? Or because I control rabble? The latter I think. For despite precautions, military forces can be corrupted. Rabble cannot. They rule you through me, and I rule you through them. And I am their servant because I have to be. No tyrant can survive by oppression.”

A gloomy hush followed his words. It was still fourteen minutes before time for the televiewphone contact with Ivan Ivanovitch IX. The President turned back to the “window.” He stared “outside” until he grew tired of the view. He pressed a button on the wall. The window went black. He pressed another button, which brought another view: Pike’s Peak at sunset. As the sky gathered gray twilight, he twisted a dial and ran the sun back up again.

The palace was built two hundred feet underground, and the study was a safe with walls of eight-inch steel. It lent a certain air of security.

The historic moment was approaching. The Stand-ins seemed nervous. What changes had occurred behind the Hell Wall, what new developments in science, what political mutations? Only rumors came from beyond the Wall, since the last big peace-effort which had ended in stalemate and total isolation. The intelligence service did the best that it could, but the picture was fuzzy and incomplete. There was still “communism,” but the word’s meaning had apparently changed. It was said that the third Ivan had been a crafty opportunist but also a wise man who, although he did nothing to abolish absolutism, effected a bloody reformation in which the hairsplitting Marxist dogmatics had been purged. He appointed the most pragmatic men he could find to succeed them, and set the whole continental regime on the road to a harsh but practical utilitarian civilization.

A slogan had leaked across the Wall recently: “There is no God but a Practical Man; there is no Law but a Best Solution,” and it seemed to affirm that the third Ivan’s influence had continued after his passing⁠—although the slogan itself was a dogma. And it might mean something quite non-literal to the people who spoke it. The rabble of the West were still stirred to deep emotion by a thing that began, “When in the course of human events⁠—” and they saw nothing incongruous about Tertiary Stand-ins who quoted it in the name of the Federation’s rule.

But the unknown factor that disturbed the President most was not the present Asian political or economic situation, but rather, the state of scientific development, particularly as it applied to military matters. The forty years of non-communication had not been spent in military stasis, at least not for the West. Sixty percent of the federal budget was still being spent for defense. Powerful new weapons were still being developed, and old ones pronounced obsolete. The seventh John Smith had even conspired to have a conspiracy against himself in Argentina, with resulting civil war, so that the weapons could be tested under actual battle conditions⁠—for the region had been overpopulated anyway. The results had been comforting⁠—but John the Sixteenth wanted to know more about what the enemy was doing.

The Hell Wall⁠—which was really only a globe-encircling belt of booby-trapped land and ocean, guarded from both sides⁠—had its political advantages, of course. The mysterious doings of the enemy, real and imagined, were a constant and suspenseful threat that made it easy for the Smiths to keep the rabble in hand. But for all the present Smith knew, the threat might very well be real. He had to find out. It would also be a popular triumph he could toss to the rabble, bolstering his position with them, and thereby securing his hold on the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Stand-ins, who were becoming a little too presumptuous of late.

He had a plan in mind, vague, tentative, and subject to constant revision to suit events as they might begin to occur. He kept the plan’s goal to himself, knowing that the Stand-ins would call it insane, dangerous, impossible.

“John! We’re picking up their station!” a Stand-in called. “It’s a minute before time!”

He left the window and walked calmly to the couch before the televiewphone, whose screen had come alive with the kaleidoscope patterns of the interference-station which sprang to life as soon as an enemy station tried to broadcast.

“Have the fools cut that scatter-station!” he barked angrily.

A Stand-in grabbed at a microphone, but before he made the call the interference stopped⁠—a few seconds before the appointed time. The screen revealed an empty desk and a wall behind, with a flag of the Asian League. No one was in the picture, which was slightly blurred by several relay stations, which had been set up on short notice for this one broadcast.

A wall-clock peeped the hour in a childish voice: “Sixteen o’clock, Thirdday, Smithweek, also Accident-Prevention Week and Probe-Subversives Week; Happy 2073! Peep!”

A man walked into the picture and sat down, facing John Smith XVI. A heavyset man, clad in coveralls, and wearing a red rubber or plastic helmet-mask. The mask was the face of the first Soviet dictator, dead over a century ago. John’s scalp bristled slightly beneath his own golden headdress. He tried to relax. The room was hushed. The opposing leaders stared at each other without speaking. Historic moment!

Ivan Ivanovitch slowly lifted his hand and waved it in greeting. John Smith returned the gesture, then summoned courage to speak first.

“You have translators at hand?”

“I need none,” the red mask growled in the Western tongue. “You are unable to speak my tongue. We shall speak yours.”

The President started. How could the Red know that he did not speak the Russo-Asian dialect?

“Very well.” The President reached for a prepared text and began to read. “I requested this conference in the hope of establishing some form of contact between our peoples, through their duly constituted executive authorities. I hope that we can agree on a series of conferences, aimed eventually at a lessening of the tension between us. I do not propose that we alter our respective positions, nor to change our physical isolation from one another, except in the field of high-level diplomacy and.⁠ ⁠…”

“Why?” grunted the Asian chieftain.

John Smith XVI hesitated. The gutteral monosyllable had been toneless and disinterested. The Red was going to draw him out, apparently. Very well, he would be frank⁠—for a time.

“The answer should be evident, Peoplesfriend. I presume that your government spends a respectable sum for armaments. My government does likewise. The eventual aim should be economy.⁠ ⁠…”

“Is this a disarmament proposal?”

The fellow was blunt. Smith cleared his throat. “Not at the present time, Peoplesfriend. I hoped that eventually we might be able to establish a mutual trust so that to some extent we could lessen the burden.⁠ ⁠…”

“Stop talking Achesonian, President. What do you want?”

The President went rigid. “Very well,” he said sarcastically, “I propose that we reduce military expenses by blowing the planet in half. The halves can circle each other as satellite twins, and we’ll have achieved perfect isolation. It would seem more economical than the present course.”

He apparently had sized-up the Peoplesfriend correctly. The man threw back his masked head and laughed uproariously.

“The Solomon solution!⁠ ⁠… ha ha!⁠ ⁠… Slice the baby in half!” the Stalin-mask chuckled. Then he paused to grow sober. “Too bad we can’t do it, isn’t it?”

John Smith sat stiffly waiting. Diplomacy was dead, and he had made a mistake in trying to be polite. Diplomats were dead, and the art forgotten. Poker-game protocol had to apply here, and it was really the only sensible way: for two opponents to try to cheat each other honestly and jovially. He was glad the Soviet Worker’s Vicar had not responded to his first politeness.

“Anything else, Smith?”

“We can discuss agenda later. What about the continued conferences?”

“Suits me. I have nothing to lose. I am in a position to destroy you anyway, a position I have occupied for several years. I have not cared to do so, since you made no overt moves against us.”

A brief silence. Bluff? Smith wondered. Certainly bluff. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how far Ivan would brag.

“I gather your atomic research has made rapid strides, for you to make such a boast,” Smith ventured.

“Not at all. In fact, my predecessor had it curtailed and limited to industrial applications. Our weapons program has become unidirectional, and extremely inexpensive. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Smith’s flesh crawled. Something was wrong here. The Asian leader was too much at his ease. His words meant nothing, of course. It had to be lying noise; it could be nothing else. A meeting such as this was not meant to communicate truth, but to discern an opponent’s attitude and to try to hide one’s own.

“Let it suffice to say,” the Red leader went on, “that we know more about you than you know about us. Our system has changed. A century ago, our continent suffered a blight of dogmatism and senseless butchery such as the world had never seen. Obviously, such conditions cannot endure. They did not. There was strong reaction and revolution within the framework of the old system. We have achieved a workable technological aristocratism, based on an empirical approach to problems. We realize that the final power is in the hands of the people⁠—and I use that archaic word in preference to your ‘rabble’⁠—”

“Are you trying to convert me to something?” John Smith growled acidly.

“Not at all. I’m telling you our position.” He paused for a moment, then inserted his fingertips under the edge of the mask. “Here is probably the best way to tell you.”

The Red leader ripped off the mask, revealing an impassive Oriental face with deepset black eyes and a glowering frown. The President sucked in his breath. It was unthinkable, that a man should expose himself to⁠ ⁠… but then, that was what he was trying to prove wasn’t it?

He kicked a foot-switch to kill the microphone circuit, and spoke quickly to the Stand-ins, knowing that the Asian could not see his lips move behind the golden mask.

“Is Security Section guarding against spy circuits?”

“Yes, John.”

“Then quick, get out of the room, all of you! Join the Secondaries.”

“But John, it’ll leave you fingered! If nine of us leave, they’ll know that the remaining one is⁠—”

“Get on your masks and get out! I’m going to take mine off.”

“But John⁠—!”

“Move, Subversive!”

“You don’t need to curse,” the Stand-in muttered. The nine men, out of the camera’s field, donned golden helmets identical to Smith’s, whistled six notes to the audio-combination, then slipped out the thick steel door as it clicked and came open.

The Red was jeering at him quietly. “Afraid to take off your mask, President? The rabble? Or your self-appointed Stand-ins? Which frightens you, President⁠—”

John Smith plucked at a latch under his chin, and the golden headdress came apart down the sides. He lifted it off and laid it casually aside, revealing a hard, blocky face, slightly in need of a shave, with cool blue eyes and blond brows. His hair was graying slightly at the temples, with a fortyish hairline.

The Red nodded. “Greetings, human. I doubted that you would.”

“Why not?” growled Smith.

“Because you fear your Stand-ins, as appointees, not subject to your ‘rabble.’ Our ruling clique selects its own members, but they are subject to popular approval or recall by referendum. I fear nothing from them.”

“Let’s not compare our domestic forms, Peoplesfriend.”

“I wanted to point out,” the Asian continued calmly, “that your system slipped into what it is without realizing it. A bad was allowed to grow worse. We, however were reacting against unreasonableness and stupidity within our own system. In the year 2001⁠—”

“I am aware of your history before the Big Silence. May we discuss pertinent matters⁠—?”

The Asian stared at him sharply. The frown grew deeper. The black eyes looked haughty. “If you really want to discuss something, John Smith, suppose we arrange a personal meeting in a non-walled, neutral region? Say, Antarctica?”

John Smith XVI, unaccustomed to dealing without a mask, let surprise fill his face before he caught himself. The Asian chuckled but said nothing. The President studied the border of the teleview screen for a moment.

“I shall have to consider your proposal,” he said dully.

The Peoplesfriend nodded curtly, then suggested a time for the next interview. Smith revised it ahead to gain more time, and agreement was reached. The screen went blank; the interview was at an end. The Sixteenth Smith took a slow, worried breath, then slowly donned the mask of office again. He summoned the nine Primaries immediately.

“That was dangerous, John,” one of them warned him as they entered. “You may regret it. They knew you were in here alone. We’re not all identical from the neck-down you know. When we come out, they might compare⁠—”

He cut the man off with a curt gesture. “No time. We’re in a bad situation. Maybe worse than I guess.” He began pacing the floor and staring down at the metallifiber rug as he spoke. “He knows more about us than he should. It took me awhile to realize that he’s speaking our latest language variations. A language changes idiom in forty years, and slang. He’s got the latest phrases. ‘Greetings, human’ is one, like a rabbleman says when somebody softens up.”

“Spies?”

“Maybe a whole network. I don’t see how they could get them through the Wall, but⁠—maybe it’s not so hard. Antarctic’s open, as he pointed out.”

“What can we do about it, John?”

Smith stopped pacing, popped his knuckles hard, stared at them. “Assemble Congress. Security-probe. It’s the only answer. Let the ‘Rabble’s Parliament’ run their own inquisition. They were always good at purging themselves. Start a big spy-scare, and keep it in the channels. I’ll lead with a message to the rabble.” He paused, the tragedy mask gaping at them. “You won’t like this, but I’m having the Stand-ins probed too. The Presidency is not immune.”

A muttering of indignation. Some of them went white. No one protested however.

“No witch-hunt in this group, however,” he assured them. “I’ll veto anything that looks unfair for the Primaries, but⁠—” He paused and rang the word again. “⁠—but⁠—there will be no leniency tolerated from here on down. If Congress thinks it’s found a spy, it can execute him on the spot⁠—and I won’t lift a finger. This has got to be rooted out and burned.”

He began to pace again. He began barking crisp orders for specific details of the probe, or rather, for the campaign that would start the probe. The rabble were better at witch-hunts than a government was. Congress had not been assembled for fifteen years, since there had been nothing suspicious to investigate, but once it was called to duty, heads would roll⁠—some of them literally. If some innocent people were hurt, the rabble could only blame themselves, for their own enthusiasm in ruthlessly searching out the underground enemy. Smith couldn’t worry about that. If an Asian spy-system were operating in the continent, it had to be crushed quickly.

When he had outlined the propaganda and string-pulling plans for them, he turned to the other matter⁠—the Red leader’s boast of ability to conquer the West.

“It’s probably foolish talk, but we don’t know their present psychology. Double production on our most impressive weapons. Give the artificial-satellite program all the money it wants, and get them moving on it. I want a missile-launching site in space before the end of the year. Pay particular attention to depopulation weapons for use against industrial areas. We may have to strike in a hurry. We’ve been fools⁠—coasting this way, feeling secure behind the Wall.”

“You’re not contemplating another peace-effort, John?” gasped an elderly Stand-in.

“I’m contemplating survival!” the leader snapped. “I don’t know that we’re in serious danger, but if it takes a peace-effort to make sure, then we’ll start one. So fast it’ll knock out their industry before they know we’ve hit them.” He stood frozen for a moment, the mask lifted proudly erect. “By Ike, I love the West! And it’s not going to suffer any creeping eruption while I’m at its head!”

When the President had finished and was ready to leave, the others started donning their masks again.

“Just a minute,” he grunted. “Number Six.”

One of the men, about the President’s size and build, looked up quickly. “Yes, John?”

“Your cloak is stained at the left shoulder. Grease?”

Six inspected it curiously, then nodded. “I was inspecting a machine shop, and⁠—”

“Never mind. Trade cloaks with me.”

“Why, if⁠—” Six stopped. His face lost color. “But the others⁠—might have⁠—”

“Precisely.”

Six unclasped it slowly and handed it to the Sixteenth Smith, accepting the President’s in return. His face was set in rigid lines, but he made no further protest.

Masked and prepared, a Stand-in whistled a tune to the door, which had changed its combination since the last time. The tumblers clicked, and they walked out into a large auditorium containing two hundred Secondary Stand-ins, all wearing the official mask.

If a Secondary ever wanted to assassinate the President, one shot would give him a single chance in ten as they filed through the door.

“Mill about!” bellowed a Sergeant-at-Arms, and the two hundred began wandering among themselves in the big room, a queer porridge, stirred clumsily but violently. The Primaries and the President lost themselves in the throng. For ten minutes the room milled and circulated.

“Unmask!” bellowed the crier.

The two hundred and ten promptly removed their helmets and placed them on the floor. The President was unmasked and unknown⁠—unmarked except by a certain physical peculiarity that could be checked only by a physician, in case the authenticity of the presidential person was challenged, as it frequently was.

Then the Secondaries went out to lose themselves in a larger throng of Tertiaries, and the group split randomly to take the various underground highways to their homes.

The President entered his house in the suburbs of Dia City, hugged the children, and kissed his wife.

John Smith was profoundly disturbed. During the years of the Big Silence, a feeling of uneasy security had evolved. The Federation had been in isolation too long, and the East had become a mysterious unknown. The Presidency had oscillated between suspicious unease and smug confidence, depending perhaps upon the personality of the particular president more than anything else. The mysteriousness of the foe had been used politically to good advantage by every president selected to office, and the Sixteenth Smith had intended to so use it. But now he vaguely regretted it.

The tenure of office was still four years, and he could not help feeling that if he had maintained the intercontinental silence, he would not have had to worry about the spy-matter. If the hemisphere had been infiltrated, the subversive work had not begun yesterday. It had probably been going on for years, during several administrations, and the plans of the East, if any, would perhaps not come to a climax for several more years. He felt himself in the position of a man who suffered no pain as yet, but learned that he had an incurable disease. Why did he have to find out?

But now that the danger was apparent, he had to go ahead and fight it instead of allowing it to pass on to the next John Smith.

He made a stirring speech to Congress when it convened. The cowled figures of the people’s representatives sat like gloomy gray shadows in the tiers of seats around the great amphitheatre under the night sky; the symbolic torches threw fluttering black shadows among their ranks. The sight always made him shiver. Their cowls and robes had been affected during the last great peace-effort, at which time they had been impregnated with lead to protect against bomb-radiation, but the garb of office had endured for ceremonial reasons.

There was still a Senate and a House, the former acting chiefly as an investigating body, the latter serving a legislative function in accordance with the rabble-code, which no longer applied to the Executive, being chiefly concerned with matters of rabble morals and police-functions. Its duties could mostly be handled by mail and televiewphone voting, so that it seldom convened in the physical sense.

President John quoted freely from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the MacArthur Speech to Congress, and the immortal words of the first John Smith in his “Shall We Submit?” which began: “If thy brother the son of thy mother, or thy son, or daughters, or thy wife, or thy friend whom thou lovest, would persuade thee secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve strange gods,’ neither let thy eyes spare him nor conceal him, but thou shalt presently put him to death!”

The speech was televised to the rabble, and for that matter, one of the Stand-ins delivered the actual address to protect the President who was present on the platform among the ranks of Primaries and Secondaries, although not even these officials were aware of it. The address was honestly an emotional one, not bothering with any attempt at logical analysis. None was needed. Congress was always eager to investigate subversion. It was good political publicity, and about the only congressional activity that could command public attention and interest. The cheers were rousing and prolonged. When it was over, the Speaker and the President of the Senate both made brief addresses to set the machinery in motion.

John Smith watched the proceedings with deep satisfaction. But as time wore on, he began to wonder how many spies were truly being apprehended. Among the many thousands who were brought to justice, only sixty-nine actually confessed to espionage, and over half of them, upon being subjected to psychiatric examination, proved to be neurotic publicity-seekers who would have confessed to anything sufficiently dramatic. Twenty-seven of them were psychiatrically cleared, but even so, their stories broke down when questioned under hypnosis or hypnotic drugs, except for seven who, although constantly maintaining their guilt, could not substantiate one another’s claims, nor furnish any evidence which might lead to the discovery of a well-organized espionage network. John Smith was baffled.

He was particularly baffled by the disappearance of seventeen men in key positions, who, upon being mentioned as possible candidates for the probe, immediately vanished into thin air, leaving no trace. It seemed to Smith, upon reading the individual reports, that many of them would have been absolved before their cases got beyond the deputy level, so flimsy were the accusations made against them. But they had not waited to find out. Two were obviously guilty of something. One had murdered a deputy who came to question him, then fled in a private plane, last seen heading out to sea. He had apparently run out of fuel over the ocean and crashed. The second man, an ordnance officer at the proving ground, had spectacularly committed suicide by exploding an atomic artillery shell, vaporizing himself and certain key comrades including his superior officer.

Here, the President felt, was something really ominous. The disappearances and the suicides spelled careful discipline and planning. Their records had been impeccable. The accusations seemed absurd. If they were agents, they had done nothing but sit in their positions and wait for an appointed time. The possibilities were frightening, but evidence was inconclusive and led nowhere. Nevertheless, the housecleaning continued.

On Fourthday of Traffic Safety Week, which was also Eat More Corn-Popsies Week, John Smith XVI conferred with Ivan Ivanovitch IX again at the appointed time. Contrary to all traditions, he again ordered the Stand-ins⁠—temporarily eight in number, since Number Six had died mysteriously in the bathtub⁠—to leave the study so that he might unmask. Promptly at sixteen o’clock the Asian’s face⁠—or rather his ceremonial mask⁠—came on the screen. But seeing the Westerner’s square-cut visage smiling at him sourly, he promptly removed the covering to reveal his Oriental face. The exchange of greetings was curt.

“I see by recent events,” said Ivan, “that you are nervous on your throne. For the sake of your own people, let me warn you that we have no designs on your autonomy unless you become aggressive toward us. The real difficulty, as revealed by your purge, is that you feel insecure, and insecurity makes you unpredictable. I do not, of course, expect you to be trustworthy. But insecurity sometimes breeds impulsiveness. If you are to strike out blindly, perhaps the talks had best be broken off.”

Smith XVI reddened angrily but held his temper. The man’s presumption was intolerable. Further, he knew about the probe, knowledge which could only come from espionage.

“I have become aware,” the President said firmly, “that you have managed to establish a spy-system on this continent. If you wish better relations, you will have the activity stop at once.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Peoplesfriend with a bland smile. “I might point out however that at least forty of your spies are either killed while trying to cross the Wall, or are apprehended after they manage to enter my regime.”

“The accusation is too ridiculous to deny,” Smith lied. “We have no desire to pry into your activities. We wish only to maintain the status quo.”

The exchange continued, charges and countercharges and denials. Neither side expected truth or honesty, and the game was as old as civilization. Neither expected to be believed, although the press of both nations would heatedly condemn the other’s lack of good faith. The ethical side of the affair was for the rabble to consider, for only the rabble cared about such things. The real task was to ferret out the enemy’s attitudes and intentions without revealing one’s own.

Smith felt that he had won a little, and lost a little too. He had found many hints of subversive activity, but had betrayed his own lack of certainty by reacting so swiftly to it. Ivan IX, on the other hand, seemed too much at ease, too secure, and even impertinent.

“At our last meeting,” said the Asian, “I suggested a meeting between ourselves. Have you given thought to the matter?”

“I have given it thought,” said the President, “and will agree to the proposal provided you come to this country. The meeting will be held at my capitol.”

“Which you change at random intervals, I notice,” purred Ivan with a bland smile. “For security reasons?”

“You could only know that by espionage!” Smith snapped.

“Your proposal of course is outrageous. The only sensible place for the meeting is in Singapore.”

“That is out of the question. I must insist on the capitol of my government as the only acceptable meeting-place. My government in contacting yours put itself in the position of extending an invitation, a position from which we could not depart without loss of dignity.”

“I suggest we delay the matter then,” grunted the Peoplesfriend. “And talk about the agenda for such a meeting. What did you have in mind?”

“I have already stated our general aims as being a reduction of armament expenses, beneficial to both sides. I think you agree?”

“Not necessarily, since our budget is already rather low. However, make your specific proposals, and I shall consider them. Further economy, where not injurious to security, is always desirable.”

“I propose, then, that we discuss a method whereby agreement might be reached on a plan to divulge the nature of our respective armaments, including number, nature, and purpose of each weapon-class, as a foundation for discussions relating to reductions.”

Smith waited for a flat “no” to the suggestion. The Asian leader apparently knew a great deal more about the West’s armaments than Smith knew about the East. The Peoplesfriend had nothing to gain by revealing the military strength of his own hemisphere. But he paused, watching Smith with an expressionless stare.

“I accept that for further consideration, at least,” Ivan said at last.

John XVI hovered between elation and suspicion. Suspicion won. “Of course there must be some method to assure that accurate figures are divulged.”

“That could probably be settled.”

Again the President was shocked. It was all too easy. Something was rotten about the whole thing. The Peoplesfriend agreed too readily to things that seemed to be to his disadvantage. The discussion continued for several hours, during which both men presented viewpoints and postponed agreement until a later meeting.

“Stockpiles of fissionable material,” said the President, “which could quickly be converted to weapons use should also be discussed.”

Ivan frowned. “I mentioned before that we have no need of atomic armaments, nor any plans for building them. Our defense is secured by something entirely different, a weapon which serves an industrial function in time of peace, and a weapon which I might add was largely responsible for our abandoning Marxism. A single discovery, Andrei Sorkin’s, made communist doctrine not only a wrong solution, but a wrong solution to a problem that had ceased to exist.”

“What problem are you referring to?”

“The use of human beings as automatic devices in a corporate machine⁠—the social-structure of industry, in which the worker was caught and bolted down and expected to perform a single, highly specialized task. That of course, is almost a definition of the word ‘proletarian.’ We no longer have a true proletariat. For that reason, we are no longer Marxist⁠—although the name ‘communist’ has survived with its meaning changed.”

The conference ended after setting the time for another meeting. John Smith XVI felt that he had been groping in the dark, because of the information-vacuum that kept him from even making a reasonable guess as to Ivan’s real aims. He kept feeling vaguely that Ivan was just playing along, reacting according to the opportunity of the moment, not particularly caring what Smith did next. But leaders of states just did not proceed so carelessly⁠—not unless they were fools, or unless they were supremely confident in the ultimate outcome.

The intelligence service analysis of his latest conversation with Ivan gave him something to think about later however. Andrei Sorkin had been a physicist who had done considerable work in crystal-structure before the Big Silence had cut off knowledge of his activities from the West. Further, the Peoplesfriend’s references to industrial usage, coupled with his remarks about specialized labor, seemed to suggest that the East had made great strides in servomechanisms and auto-control devices. But control devices were not weapons in themselves. Electronic rocket-pilots were not weapons unless there were rockets for them to fly. Automatic target-trackers were not weapons unless they guided a weapon to shoot at the target. It made little sense; he concluded that Ivan had not meant it to make much sense. Smith could only interpret it as meaning: “Our weapons are marvelously controlled; therefore we need fewer of them.”

On the probe front, events were about as usual. The lists of suspects and convictions grew bulky enough to keep a large office staff busy with details. More sinister, in the President’s judgment, was the small list of suspects who vanished or committed suicide at the slightest hint of suspicion. The list grew at a slow but steady pace. John assumed that these were certainly guilty. And thorough, searching inquiries into their past activities were made. These post mortem probes revealed nothing. Their records were clean. Their families, friends, relatives, and even their ancestors were above suspicion. If they had sold out to the enemy, they had given him nothing in return for his wages except perhaps a promise to be fulfilled on a Deadline Day.

He called the Secretary of Defense and demanded a screening procedure be adopted for future personnel, a procedure which would be aimed at selecting men with fanatic loyalty, rather than merely guarding against treason.

“We seem to already have something,” murmured the Secretary, a slender, graying gentleman with aristocratic features. “The incidents at the satellite-project seem to indicate that there’s something they don’t like about our ordinary testing methods.”

“Eh? How do you mean?”

“Three men⁠—volunteers for the project⁠—vanished as soon as they found out that they had to submit to all the physicals, mental tests, and so forth. I don’t know what they were afraid of. They were already on the reservation. Found out they’d have to be tested again, and vanished. One a known suicide, but the body’s still in the river.”

“ ‘Tested again’?” the President echoed.

“That’s right, John. They’d gone through it before. This was just a recheck for this particular project. Of course, I don’t know that they were agents.”

“Mmm! So they can’t stand a recheck. All right, recheck everybody.”

“John! A third of the population works for the government!”

“I mean everybody connected with new projects, the most important installations. This might be a weapon for us.”

When he received the Secretary’s report a week later, John grinned happily. The rechecks had begun, and the disappearances were mounting. But the grin faded when he read the rest of it. Two of the men had been caught attempting to escape. They had been lodged in a local jail to await transfer to the capitol. During the night, the jailer became aware of a blinding light from the cellblocks and the stench of burnt organic matter. By the time he reached their cells, the men were gone, and there were only sickening fumes, charred ashes, and a pair of red-hot patches on the floor. Somehow they had gotten incendiary materials into their cells, and the cremation was complete⁠—too complete to be credible.

Then the disappearances began to taper off⁠—until finally, after a few weeks, they ceased completely. He wondered: were the culprits all ferreted out, or had some of them managed to get around the rechecks?

He had spoken to the Asian leader several times, and Ivan was growing curt, even bitingly nasty at times. The President hopefully interpreted it as a sign that his probe was successful enough to worry the Red. He tried to strengthen his position with respect to the proposed conferences, and made only minor concessions such as agreeing to a coastal city in Mexico as the site, rather than the shifting capitol. Ivan sneeringly made equally minute adjustments eastward from Singapore. There was apparently going to be a deadlock, and John was somehow not sorry.

Then the cold-eyed face on the screen did an abrupt about-face, and announced, “I propose that the delegates, including the leaders of both states, meet at a site of your selection in either of the neutral polar regions, not later than Seventhday of Veto Week⁠—which, I think is your Fried Pie Week?⁠—and come prepared to discuss and exchange information relating to size of armament-inventories and future plans. This is my last proposal.”

They stared at each other coldly. John started to utter a refusal, then paused. Seventhday of⁠ ⁠… it was one day before the satellite program began moving into space. If he could keep the Eastern Leader tied up for a few weeks afterwards⁠—

“I’ll consider your proposal and give you a reply tomorrow,” he said bluntly.

The Peoplesfriend gave him a curt nod and clicked off the screen. John chuckled. The enemy’s espionage program was evidently getting badly hurt. About one percent of the West’s population had been executed, imprisoned, or shifted to other jobs as a result of the congressional probe. The one percent probably included quite a few guilty citizens.

“Rodner, I want a Strike-Day set, a full-scale blitz-operation readied as soon as possible,” he told the defense-chief. “I know that a lot of your target information is forty years old, but work out the best plan you can. A depopulation strike, perhaps; there are only two opinions in the world, so ‘world-opinion’ is not one of the things we need to consider.”

The Defense Secretary caught his breath and sat stiffly erect. “War?” he gasped.

“Don’t use that word.”

“Sorry, peace-effort.”

“No. At least I hope not. I want a gun aimed at them as a bargaining point. But I want it to be a damned big gun, and one that’s capable of shattering every major city in the East on a few hours’ notice. How effective could you make it⁠—if you had to?”

The Secretary frowned doubtfully and tugged at his ear. “Well, John, our strategic command has kept a running plan in effect, revising it to allow for every tidbit of information we can get. Planning continental blitzes is a favorite past-time around high-level strategic commands; it keeps the boys in trim. A plan could probably be agreed upon in a very short time, but its nature would depend on your earliest deadline date.”

“Two dates,” grunted the tragedy-mask. “The first is Seventhday, Fried Pie Week. I want a maximum possible effort readied by then, with a plan that allows for a possible standby at that date, and a continued buildup to a greater maximum⁠—to be reached when the satellite station is in space and ready for battle. Include the station in the extended plan.”

“This is a very dangerous business, John.”

The mask whirled. “Do you presume to⁠—?”

“No, Sir. The strike-effort will be prepared as soon as possible.” He bowed slightly, then left the presidential study-vault.

Smith turned to gaze at his Stand-ins. “You will go,” he said, “all of you, to the examining authorities for the standard loyalty tests and psych-phys rechecks.”

The nine masked figures glanced at one another in surprise, then nodded. There were no protests. The following day he had only seven Stand-ins; Four and Eight had been trapped in a burning building on the outskirts of the rabble city, and their remains had not been found.

Smith kept a tight cork on his rage, but it seethed inside him and threatened to burn through as the time approached to speak again with Ivan Ivanovitch IX. The enemy’s infiltration into the very ranks of the Presidency robbed him even of dignity. Furthermore, now that the two scoundrels were uncovered, and dead, he remembered a very unpleasant but significant fact: he had, even before his “election” by the rabble, discussed the televiewphone conferences with the Primaries. The idea of contacting Ivan had started, as most ideas start, from some small seed or other that could scarcely be remembered, some offhand reference to the costly aspects of the Big Silence perhaps, and it had grown into the plan for contact. But how had the idea first come to him? Had one of the guilty Stand-ins perhaps planted the seed in his mind? After he proposed it, they had seemed demurring at first, but not too long.

Grimly, he realized that the idea might have originated on the far side of the Pacific.

“Who, pray, is the potter, and who the pot?” he grunted, glowering at the nearest Stand-in.

“I beg your pardon?” answered the man, who could not see the glower for the mask.

“Khayyam, you fool!”

“Oh⁠—”

“Sixteen o’clock!” cheeped the timepiece on the wall. “Fifthday, Anti-Rabies Week, Practice-Eugenics Week; Happy 2073; Peep!”

Ivan came on the screen, but John did not bother to remove his mask. He sat down quickly and began speaking before any greeting could be exchanged.

“I have decided to accept your last proposal. I specify the meeting place as the deserted weather station at the old settlement of Tharviana in the Byrd-Ellsworth Sector of Antarctica. Date to be Seventhday of Fried Pie Week. Advance cadres of personnel from both sides should meet at the site two weeks earlier to make repairs and preparations. Do you agree?”

Ivan nodded impatiently, his dark eyes watching the President closely. Smith went on to suggest limits for the size of both cadres, their equipment, and the kind of transportation. Ivan made only one suggestion: that the details, such as permissible arms and standards of conduct, be left to the cadre commanders to settle between themselves before the leaders’ parties arrived.

“Your continual espionage activities,” Smith said coldly, “do not recommend your government as one to be trusted in the matter of agreements without guarantees. My cadre commander will be instructed as to details.”

The Asian grunted. “You speak of trust, yet violate it in advance by preparing an assault against us.”

They glared at each other. After a few more words, the conversation ended abruptly, and the matter was tentatively settled.

It was Antarctic Summer. The sun lay low in the north, but clouds threatened to obscure it, and a forbidding coastline hulked under the ugly sky. A small group of ships sulked to the east, and watched another group that sulked to the west. Two rows of buoys marked an ice-free strip across the choppy face of the sea.

A speck appeared in the north, grew larger, became a giant seaplane. It circled once, then swooped majestically down between the rows of buoys, its atomic-fired jets breathing heat over the water. It slid between streamers of spray until slowly it came to a coasting halt and rode on the rise and the fall of the sea. A section of its back rolled open. It pushed a helicopter up into view. The helicopter unfolded its rotors, spun them, then climbed lazily aloft like a beetle that had ridden the eagle. It soared, and travelled inland. The seaplane taxied west to join one group of ships.

The helicopter landed near a long, windowless concrete building which lay in the shadow of an old control-tower’s skeleton. The tower was twisted awry, and the concrete was pockmarked by shrapnel or bullets dating back to one of the peace-efforts. The President, two Stand-ins, and the pilot climbed from the helicopter. A small detachment of troops presented arms. The cadre commander, a major general, approached the delegation formally, gave it a salute, and took the President’s hand.

“The Peoplesfriend is already in the conference hall, Sir, with several of his aides. Do you wish to enter now, or⁠—”

“Where are their troops?”

“Over there, Sir. As you know, we could not agree to completely disarm the site. Only inside the building itself.”

“Any unpleasantness?”

“No, sir. Their men are well-disciplined.”

“Then let’s go and get started. I assume that you’re in constant contact with the capitol?”

“Yes, Sir. Televiewphone relay chain all the way up.”

John looked around. The Peoplesfriend’s helicopter was parked not far away, and beyond it stood a platoon of the Peoplesfriend’s troops, lightly armed as his own.

An Asian and a Western guard flanked the entrance to the building, but their only weapons were police-clubs. The party entered slowly and stood for a moment just inside the heavy door that swung closed behind them. John Smith removed his mask.

“Greetings, human.”

The dull voice called it from the far end of the gloomy hall where Ivan Ivanovitch IX sat facing him, flanked by a pair of aides, at a long, plain table. John Smith XVI advanced with dignity toward him. Curt bows were exchanged, but no handshakes. The Western delegation took their seats.

John nudged the Stand-in on his right, who immediately opened a portfolio to extract a sheaf of papers.

“Would you care to exchange prepared statements to begin with?” Smith asked coolly.

“We have no⁠—” The Peoplesfriend stopped, smirked coldly at his deputies but continued to frown. He peered thoughtfully at his huge knuckles for a moment, then nodded slowly. “A statement⁠—yes.”

John slid a section of the sheaf of papers to the Peoplesfriend. The Red leader ignored them, spoke to a deputy curtly.

“Give me a sheet of paper.”

The deputy fumbled in a thin briefcase, shook his head and muttered. Finally he found a dog-eared sheet with only a few lines typed across the top. He glanced questioningly at his leader. Ivan snatched it with a low grunt, tore off the good half, produced a stubby, gnawed pencil, and wrote slowly as if his hands were cramped with arthritis. John could see the big block-letters but not the words.

“My prepared statement,” said the Peoplesfriend.

With that he pushed the scrap of paper across the table. John stared, and felt the blood leaving his face. The prepared statement said:

I veto you.

“Is this a joke?” he growled, keeping his voice calm. “You cannot mean that you reject proposals before they are made? I fail to see the humor in⁠—”

“There is no humor.”

John pushed back his chair, glanced at his men. “Gentlemen, it would appear that we have come to the bottom of the world for nothing. I think we had better retire to discuss⁠—”

“Sit down,” the Asian growled.

“Why⁠—” The President stopped. One of the Red deputies had produced a gun. He sat, and stared coldly at the eastern leader. “Have your man dispose of that weapon. This is a conference table.”

The Peoplesfriend grunted an order to the other deputy instead. “Search them.”

“Stay back,” Smith droned. “I can kill you all quite easily.”

The deputy hesitated. The leader started laughing, then checked it. “May I ask how?”

John smiled. “Stay back, or you will find out too quickly.” He unzipped his heavy Arctic clothing, removed a heavy container, shaped to conform to his chest, and laid it on the table. A cord ran from the container into his sleeve.

The Peoplesfriend laughed. “High explosives? You would not set them off. However⁠—Jacob, let them keep their weapons. This will be over shortly.”

They glared at each other for a moment.

“There is no conference?”

“There is no conference.”

“Then why this farce?”

The eastern leader wore a tight smile. He glanced at his watch, began counting backwards: “Seven, six, five, four⁠—”

When he reached zero, there was a long pause; then a sharp whistle from outside.

“Your men are now disarmed,” said the Asian. “Your cadre commander is ours.”

“Impossible! The recheck⁠—”

“He joined us since the recheck. Further, three of your televiewphone stations in the relay chain are ours, and are relaying recorded broadcasts prepared especially for the purpose.”

“I don’t believe it!”

The Asian shrugged. “In addition, your entire defense system will be in our hands within six days⁠—while your nation imagines that we are here conferring on disarmament.”

“Ridiculous!” the President sputtered. “No system of infiltration or subversion could⁠—”

“Your people were not subverted, Smith. They were merely replaced by ours. Your two Stand-ins, for instance, the ones that died in the fire. They were not the original men.”

“You could not possibly find exact doubles⁠—” Something about the Asian’s smile made his voice taper off.

He picked up the container of explosives and prepared to rise. “I am going to walk out. And you are going with me. We will return in a helicopter to my plane. Let me explain this mechanism. I have no control over the detonator, for it is not a suicide device. The detonator can be triggered only by either of two events.”

“Which are?” The Peoplesfriend was smiling.

“The relay would be closed by a sudden drop in my arterial pressure. Or by an attempt to remove it without knowing how. I am going out, and you are going with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I am about to reach in my pocket and produce a gun. Your deputy cannot shoot without blasting a fifty-foot crater where this building now rests.” Gingerly, while he watched the wavering deputy, he made good the promise. He kept the snub-nosed automatic aimed at the easterner’s belly.

But the Peoplesfriend continued to smile. “May I say something before we go?”

There was a sour mockery about it that made Smith pause. He nodded slowly.

“I hoped to keep you here alive, so that we would not have to destroy the whole mission, including the ships. Of course, when the building is blown up, your little fleet will see and hear and try to respond, and we shall have to destroy it before word can be gotten to your capital. Our plans included that possibility, but it is unfortunate.”

“Our aircraft will⁠—”

“You do not seem to realize the nature of our weapons yet. And there is no harm in telling you now, I suppose.”

“Well?”

“We have a microscopic crystalline relay, so small that millions of them can be packed into a few cubic inches. The crystals are minute tetrahedrons, with each pointed corner an electrical contact. And there is a method for arranging them in circuits without individual attention to each connection. It involves certain techniques in electroplating and the growing of crystals.”

Smith glanced questioningly at one of his Stand-ins, a weapons expert. The man shook his head.

“I can see,” he muttered, “how it might replace a lot of bulky circuit elements in some electronics work⁠—particularly computers and servomechanisms⁠—but⁠—”

“Indeed,” said Ivan, “We have built many so-called ‘thinking-machines’ no larger than a human brain.”

“For self-piloting weapons, I suppose?” asked the Stand-in.

“For self-piloting weapons.”

“I fail to see how this could do what you seem to think.”

The Peoplesfriend snorted. “Jacob⁠—?” He nodded to the deputy, who immediately fumbled in his pocket, found a penknife, opened it, and handed it to Ivan.

He laid his finger on the table. He cut it off at the second joint with the penknife. There was no blood. Flesh of soft plastic. Tendons of nylon. Bones of bakelite.

“Our leader,” the robot said, “is still in Singapore.”

The President looked at the robot and a great, weariness swept over him. Suddenly it all seemed futile⁠—a senseless game, played by madmen, dancing over countless graves⁠—playing tag among the tombstones.

Check and checkmate. But always there was a way out. Never a final move. Life eternal and with life, the eternal plotting and scheming. And never a final victor.

Almost regretfully, the President turned his mind back to the affair at hand.

Death of a Spaceman

Old Donegal was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they watched it come⁠—his haggard wife, his daughter, and now his grandson, home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics academy. Old Donegal knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of the time, he pretended to let them keep the secret they shared with the doctors⁠—that the operations had all been failures, and that the cancer that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis engulfed vital organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would be cruel to let them know that he knew. Once, weeks ago, he had joked about the approaching shadows.

“Buy the plot back where people won’t walk over it, Martha,” he said. “Get it way back under the cedars⁠—next to the fence. There aren’t many graves back there yet. I want to be alone.”

“Don’t talk that way, Donny!” his wife had choked. “You’re not dying.”

His eyes twinkled maliciously. “Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don’t let them lay me out like a lily.”

“Donny, please!”

“They oughta face a man the way he’s headed,” Donegal grunted. “I been up⁠—way up. Now I’m going straight down.”

Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn’t mind joking with him about it.

Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But she couldn’t bear thinking that he might take it calmly. If he accepted death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving her, and Old Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to her in such a troublesome moment.

“When’ll they let me out of this bed again?” he complained.

“Be patient, Donny,” she sighed. “It won’t be long. You’ll be up and around before you know it.”

“Back on the moon-run, maybe?” he offered. “Listen, Martha, I been planet-bound too long. I’m not too old for the moon-run, am I? Sixty-three’s not so old.”

That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again. The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.

But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and his thoughts unclear. He could move his arms a little, clumsily, but feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was lost to him. Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation was mostly an illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the “ghost-arm” that an amputee continues to feel. The wires were down, and he was cut off from himself.

He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented flat. Gaunt and unshaven, gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze from the open window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and the loud ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair scraping on the stone terrace next door, and the low mutter of voices, sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the terrace for late afternoon guests.

With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat beside the bed, pinch-faced and weary.

“You ought to get some sleep,” he said.

“I slept yesterday. Don’t talk, Donny. It tires you.”

“You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid I’ll get up and run away if you go to sleep for a while?”

She managed a brittle smile. “There’ll be plenty of time for sleep when⁠ ⁠… when you’re well again.” The brittle smile fled and she swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.

There wasn’t much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly tight-stretched hide spotted with brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow cigarette stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze Martha’s thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little, but it was like operating a remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand, you’re leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I’ll see you again in hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.

“Requiescat,” he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.

Perhaps she heard him. “Donny,” she whispered, leaning closer, “won’t you let me call the priest now? Please.”

He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. “Are the Keiths having a party today?” he asked. “Sounds like they’re moving chairs out on the terrace.”

“Please, Donny, the priest?”

He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed shook slightly as she quickly caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.

“If I’m not dying, I don’t need a priest,” he said sleepily.

“That’s not right,” she scolded softly. “You know that’s not right, Donny. You know better.”

Maybe I’m being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn’t minded getting baptized her way, and married her way, and occasionally priest-handled the way she wanted him to when he was home from a space-run, but when it came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.

He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the stone terrace. “Martha, what kind of a party are the Keiths having today?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said stiffly. “You’d think they’d have a little more respect. You’d think they’d put it off a few days.”

“Until⁠—?”

“Until you feel better.”

“I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I’m glad they’re having one. Pour me a drink, will you? I can’t reach the bottle anymore.”

“It’s empty.”

“No, it isn’t, Martha, it’s still a quarter full. I know. I’ve been watching it.”

“You shouldn’t have it, Donny. Please don’t.”

“But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have whatever I want. Whatever I want, you hear? That means I’m getting well, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well.”

“The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to feel like it’s a party.”

Her throat was rigid as she poured it. She helped him get the tumbler to his mouth. The liquor seared his throat, and he gagged a little as the fumes clogged his nose. Good whiskey, the best⁠—but he couldn’t take it any more. He eyed the green stamp on the neck of the bottle on the bed-table and grinned. He hadn’t had whiskey like that since his space-days. Couldn’t afford it now, not on a blastman’s pension.

He remembered how he and Caid used to smuggle a couple of fifths aboard for the moon-run. If they caught you, it meant suspension, but there was no harm in it, not for the blastroom men who had nothing much to do from the time the ship acquired enough velocity for the long, long coaster ride until they started the rockets again for Lunar landing. You could drink a fifth, jettison the bottle through the trash lock, and sober up before you were needed again. It was the only way to pass the time in the cramped cubicle, unless you ruined your eyes trying to read by the glow-lamps. Old Donegal chuckled. If he and Caid had stayed on the run, Earth would have a ring by now, like Saturn⁠—a ring of Old Granddad bottles.

“You said it, Donny-boy,” said the misty man by the billowing curtains. “Who else knows the gegenschein is broken glass?”

Donegal laughed. Then he wondered what the man was doing there. The man was lounging against the window, and his unzipped space rig draped about him in an old familiar way. Loose plug-in connections and hose-ends dangled about his lean body. He was freckled and grinning.

“Caid,” Old Donegal breathed softly.

“What did you say, Donny?” Martha answered.

Old Donegal blinked hard and shook his head. Something let go with a soggy snap, and the misty man was gone. I’d better take it easy on the whiskey, he thought. You got to wait, Donegal, old lush, until Nora and Ken get here. You can’t get drunk until they’re gone, or you might get them mixed up with memories like Caid’s.

Car doors slammed in the street below. Martha glanced toward the window.

“Think it’s them? I wish they’d get here. I wish they’d hurry.”

Martha arose and tiptoed to the window. She peered down toward the sidewalk, put on a sharp frown. He heard a distant mutter of voices and occasional laughter, with group-footsteps milling about on the sidewalk. Martha murmured her disapproval and closed the window.

“Leave it open,” he said.

“But the Keiths’ guests are starting to come. There’ll be such a racket.” She looked at him hopefully, the way she did when she prompted his manners before company came.

Maybe it wasn’t decent to listen in on a party when you were dying, he thought. But that wasn’t the reason. Donegal, your chamber-pressure’s dropping off. Your brains are in your butt-end, where a spacer’s brains belong, but your butt-end died last month. She wants the window closed for her own sake, not yours.

“Leave it closed,” he grunted. “But open it again before the moon-run blasts off. I want to listen.”

She smiled and nodded, glancing at the clock. “It’ll be an hour and a half yet. I’ll watch the time.”

“I hate that clock. I wish you’d throw it out. It’s loud.”

“It’s your medicine-clock, Donny.” She came back to sit down at his bedside again. She sat in silence. The clock filled the room with its clicking pulse.

“What time are they coming?” he asked.

“Nora and Ken? They’ll be here soon. Don’t fret.”

“Why should I fret?” He chuckled. “That boy⁠—he’ll be a good spacer, won’t he, Martha?”

Martha said nothing, fanned at a fly that crawled across his pillow. The fly buzzed up in an angry spiral and alighted on the ceiling. Donegal watched it for a time. The fly had natural-born space-legs. I know your tricks, he told it with a smile, and I learned to walk on the bottomside of things before you were a maggot. You stand there with your magnasoles hanging to the hull, and the rest of you’s in free fall. You jerk a sole loose, and your knee flies up to your belly, and reaction spins you half-around and near throws your other hip out of joint if you don’t jam the foot down fast and jerk up the other. It’s worse’n trying to run through knee-deep mud with snowshoes, and a man’ll go nuts trying to keep his arms and legs from taking off in odd directions. I know your tricks, fly. But the fly was born with his magnasoles, and he trotted across the ceiling like Donegal never could.

“That boy Ken⁠—he ought to make a damn good space-engineer,” wheezed the old man.

Her silence was long, and he rolled his head toward her again. Her lips tight, she stared down at the palm of his hand, unfolded his bony fingers, felt the cracked calluses that still welted the shrunken skin, calluses worn there by the linings of space gauntlets and the handles of fuel valves, and the rungs of get-about ladders during free fall.

“I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.

“Tell me what, Martha?”

She looked up slowly, scrutinizing his face. “Ken’s changed his mind, Nora says. Ken doesn’t like the academy. She says he wants to go to medical school.”

Old Donegal thought it over, nodded absently. “That’s fine. Space-medics get good pay.” He watched her carefully.

She lowered her eyes, rubbed at his calluses again. She shook her head slowly. “He doesn’t want to go to space.”

The clock clicked loudly in the closed room.

“I thought I ought to tell you, so you won’t say anything to him about it,” she added.

Old Donegal looked grayer than before. After a long silence, he rolled his head away and looked toward the limp curtains.

“Open the window, Martha,” he said.

Her tongue clucked faintly as she started to protest, but she said nothing. After frozen seconds, she sighed and went to open it. The curtains billowed, and a babble of conversation blew in from the terrace of the Keith mansion. With the sound came the occasional brassy discord of a musician tuning his instrument. She clutched the window-sash as if she wished to slam it closed again.

“Well! Music!” grunted Old Donegal. “That’s good. This is some shebang. Good whiskey and good music and you.” He chuckled, but it choked off into a fit of coughing.

“Donny, about Ken⁠—”

“No matter, Martha,” he said hastily. “Space-medic’s pay is good.”

“But, Donny⁠—” She turned from the window, stared at him briefly, then said, “Sure, Donny, sure,” and came back to sit down by his bed.

He smiled at her affectionately. She was a man’s woman, was Martha⁠—always had been, still was. He had married her the year he had gone to space⁠—a lissome, wistful, old-fashioned lass, with big violet eyes and gentle hands and gentle thoughts⁠—and she had never complained about the long and lonely weeks between blastoff and glide-down, when most spacers’ wives listened to the psychiatrists and soap-operas and soon developed the symptoms that were expected of them, either because the symptoms were chic, or because they felt they should do something to earn the pity that was extended to them. “It’s not so bad,” Martha had assured him. “The house keeps me busy till Nora’s home from school, and then there’s a flock of kids around till dinner. Nights are a little empty, but if there’s a moon, I can always go out on the porch and look at it and know where you are. And Nora gets out the telescope you built her, and we make a game of it. ‘Seeing if Daddy’s still at the office,’ she calls it.”

“Those were the days,” he muttered.

“What, Donny?”

“Do you remember that Steve Farran song?”

She paused, frowning thoughtfully. There were a lot of Steve Farran songs, but after a moment she picked the right one, and sang it softly⁠ ⁠…

“O moon whereo’er the clouds fly,
Beyond the willow tree,
There is a ramblin’ space guy
I wish you’d save for me.

“Mare Tranquillitatis,
O dark and tranquil sea,
Until he drops from heaven,
Rest him there with thee⁠ ⁠…”

Her voice cracked, and she laughed. Old Donegal chuckled weakly.

“Fried mush,” he said. “That one made the cats wilt their ears and wail at the moon.

“I feel real crazy,” he added. “Hand me the king kong, fluff-muff.”

“Keep cool, Daddy-O, you’ve had enough.” Martha reddened and patted his arm, looking pleased. Neither of them had talked that way, even in the old days, but the outdated slang brought back memories⁠—school parties, dances at the Rocketport Club, the early years of the war when Donegal had jockeyed an R-43 fighter in the close-space assaults against the Soviet satellite project. The memories were good.

A brassy blare of modern “slide” arose suddenly from the Keith terrace as the small orchestra launched into its first number. Martha caught an angry breath and started toward the window.

“Leave it,” he said. “It’s a party. Whiskey, Martha. Please⁠—just a small one.”

She gave him a hurtful glance.

“Whiskey. Then you can call the priest.”

“Donny, it’s not right. You know it’s not right⁠—to bargain for such as that.”

“All right. Whiskey. Forget the priest.”

She poured it for him, and helped him get it down, and then went out to make the phone-call. Old Donegal lay shuddering over the whiskey taste and savoring the burn in his throat. Jesus, but it was good.

You old bastard, he thought, you got no right to enjoy life when nine-tenths of you is dead already, and the rest is foggy as a thermal dust-rise on the lunar maria at hell-dawn. But it wasn’t a bad way to die. It ate your consciousness away from the feet up; it gnawed away the Present, but it let you keep the Past, until everything faded and blended. Maybe that’s what Eternity was, he thought⁠—one man’s subjective Past, all wrapped up and packaged for shipment, a single space-time entity, a one-man microcosm of memories, when nothing else remains.

“If I’ve got a soul, I made it myself,” he told the gray nun at the foot of his bed.

The nun held out a pie pan, rattled a few coins in it. “Contribute to the Radiation Victims’ Relief?” the nun purred softly.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re my conscience. You hang around the officers’ mess, and when we get back from a sortie, you make us pay for the damage we did. But that was forty years ago.”

The nun smiled, and her luminous eyes were on him softly. “Mother of God!” he breathed, and reached for the whiskey. His arm obeyed. The last drink had done him good. He had to watch his hand to see where it was going, and squeezed the neck until his fingers whitened so that he knew that he had it, but he got it off the table and onto his chest, and he got the cork out with his teeth. He had a long pull at the bottle, and it made his eyes water and his hands grow weak. But he got it back to the table without spilling a bit, and he was proud of himself.

The room was spinning like the cabin of a gyro-gravved ship. By the time he wrestled it to a standstill, the nun was gone. The blare of music from the Keith terrace was louder, and laughing voices blended with it. Chairs scraping and glasses rattling. A fine party, Keith, I’m glad you picked today. This shebang would be the younger Keith’s affair. Ronald Tonwyler Keith, III, scion of Orbital Engineering and Construction Company⁠—builders of the moon-shuttle ships that made the run from the satellite station to Luna and back.

It’s good to have such important neighbors, he thought. He wished he had been able to meet them while he was still up and about. But the Keiths’ place was walled-in, and when a Keith came out, he charged out in a limousine with a chauffeur at the wheel, and the iron gate closed again. The Keiths built the wall when the surrounding neighborhood began to grow shabby with age. It had once been the best of neighborhoods, but that was before Old Donegal lived in it. Now it consisted of sooty old houses and rented flats, and the Keith place was really not a part of it anymore. Nevertheless, it was really something when a pensioned blastman could say, “I live out close to the Keiths⁠—you know, the Ronald Keiths.” At least, that’s what Martha always told him.

The music was so loud that he never heard the doorbell ring, but when a lull came, he heard Nora’s voice downstairs, and listened hopefully for Ken’s. But when they came up, the boy was not with them.

“Hello, skinny-britches,” he greeted his daughter.

Nora grinned and came over to kiss him. Her hair dangled about his face, and he noticed that it was blacker than usual, with the gray streaks gone from it again.

“You smell good,” he said.

“You don’t, Pops. You smell like a sot. Naughty!”

“Where’s Ken?”

She moistened her lips nervously and looked away. “He couldn’t come. He had to take a driver’s lesson. He really couldn’t help it. If he didn’t go, he’d lose his turn, and then he wouldn’t finish before he goes back to the academy.” She looked at him apologetically.

“It’s all right, Nora.”

“If he missed it, he wouldn’t get his copter license until summer.”

“It’s okay. Copters! Hell, the boy should be in jets by now!”

Several breaths passed in silence. She gazed absently toward the window and shook her head. “No jets, Pop. Not for Ken.”

He glowered at her. “Listen! How’ll he get into space? He’s got to get his jet licenses first. Can’t get in rockets without ’em.”

Nora shot a quick glance at her mother. Martha rolled her eyes as if sighing patiently. Nora went to the window to stare down toward the Keith terrace. She tucked a cigarette between scarlet lips, lit it, blew nervous smoke against the pane.

“Mom, can’t you call them and have that racket stopped?”

“Donny says he likes it.”

Nora’s eyes flitted over the scene below. “Female butterflies and puppy-dogs in sport jackets. And the cadets.” She snorted. “Cadets! Imagine Ron Keith the Third ever going to space. The old man buys his way into the academy, and they throw a brawl as if Ronny passed the Compets.”

“Maybe he did,” growled Old Donegal.

“Hah!”

“They live in a different world, I guess,” Martha sighed.

“If it weren’t for men like Pops, they’d never’ve made their fortune.”

“I like the music, I tell you,” grumbled the old man.

“I’m half-a-mind to go over there and tell them off,” Nora murmured.

“Let them alone. Just so they’ll stop the racket for blast-away.”

“Look at them!⁠—polite little pattern-cuts, all alike. They take pre-space, because it’s the thing to do. Then they quit before the payoff comes.”

“How do you know they’ll quit?”

“That party⁠—I bet it cost six months’ pay, spacer’s pay,” she went on, ignoring him. “And what do real spacers get? Oley gets killed, and Pop’s pension wouldn’t feed the Keiths’ cat.”

“You don’t understand, girl.”

“I lost Oley. I understand enough.”

He watched her silently for a moment, then closed his eyes. It was no good trying to explain, no good trying to tell her the dough didn’t mean a damn thing. She’d been a spacer’s wife, and that was bad enough, but now she was a spacer’s widow. And Oley? Oley’s tomb revolved around the sun in an eccentric orbit that spun-in close to Mercury, then reached out into the asteroid belt, once every 725 days. When it came within rocket radius of Earth, it whizzed past at close to fifteen miles a second.

You don’t rescue a ship like that, skinny-britches, my darling daughter. Nor do you salvage it after the crew stops screaming for help. If you use enough fuel to catch it, you won’t get back. You just leave such a ship there forever, like an asteroid, and it’s a damn shame about the men trapped aboard. Heroes all, no doubt⁠—but the smallness of the widow’s monthly check failed to confirm the heroism, and Nora was bitter about the price of Oley’s memory, perhaps.

Ouch! Old Donegal, you know she’s not like that. It’s just that she can’t understand about space. You ought to make her understand.

But did he really understand himself? You ride hot in a roaring blastroom, hands tense on the mixer controls and the pumps, eyes glued to instruments, body sucked down in a four-gravity thrust, and wait for the command to choke it off. Then you float free and weightless in a long nightmare as the beast coasts moonward, a flung javelin.

The “romance” of space⁠—drivel written in the old days. When you’re not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get the food down. Liquid is worse, but you gag your whiskey down because you have to.

Stars?⁠—you see stars by squinting through a viewing lens, and it’s like a photo-transparency, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get an eyeful of Old Blinder and back off with a punch-drunk retina.

Adventure?⁠—unless the skipper calls for course-correction, you float around in the blast-cubicle with damn little to do between blast-away and moon-down, except sweat out the omniscient accident statistics. If the beast blows up or gets gutted in space, a statistic had your name on it, that’s all, and there’s no fighting back. You stay outwardly sane because you’re a hog for punishment; if you weren’t, you’d never get past the psychologists.

“Did you like horror movies when you were a kid?” asked the psych. And you’d damn well better answer “yes,” if you want to go to space.

Tell her, old man, you’re her pop. Tell her why it’s worth it, if you know. You jail yourself in a coffin-size cubicle, and a crazy beast thunders berserk for uncontrollable seconds, and then you soar in ominous silence for the long, long hours. Grow sweaty, filthy, sick, miserable, idle⁠—somewhere out in Big Empty, where Man’s got no business except the trouble he always makes for himself wherever he goes. Tell her why it’s worth it, for pay less than a good bricklayer’s. Tell her why Oley would do it again.

“It’s a sucker’s run, Nora,” he said. “You go looking for kicks, but the only kicks you get to keep is what Oley got. God knows why⁠—but it’s worth it.”

Nora said nothing. He opened his eyes slowly. Nora was gone. Had she been there at all?

He blinked around at the fuzzy room, and dissolved the shifting shadows that sometimes emerged as old friendly faces, grinning at him. He found Martha.

“You went to sleep,” said Martha. “She had to go. Kennie called. He’ll be over later, if you’re not too tired.”

“I’m not tired. I’m all head. There’s nothing much to get tired.”

“I love you, Old Donegal.”

“Hold my hand again.”

“I’m holding it, old man.”

“Then hold me where I can feel it.”

She slid a thin arm under his neck, and bent over his face to kiss him. She was crying a little, and he was glad she could do it now without fleeing the room.

“Can I talk about dying now?” he wondered aloud.

She pinched her lips together and shook her head.

“I lie to myself, Martha. You know how much I lie to myself?”

She nodded slowly and stroked his gray temples.

“I lie to myself about Ken, and about dying. If Ken turned spacer, I wouldn’t die⁠—that’s what I told myself. You know?”

She shook her head. “Don’t talk, Donny, please.”

“A man makes his own soul, Martha.”

“That’s not true. You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“A man makes his own soul, but it dies with him, unless he can pour it into his kids and his grandchildren before he goes. I lied to myself. Ken’s a yellow-belly. Nora made him one, and the boots won’t fit.”

“Don’t, Donny. You’ll excite yourself again.”

“I was going to give him the boots⁠—the over-boots with magnasoles. But they won’t fit him. They won’t ever fit him. He’s a lily-livered lapdog, and he whines. Bring me my boots, woman.”

“Donny!”

“The boots, they’re in my locker in the attic. I want them.”

“What on earth!”

“Bring me my goddam space boots and put them on my feet. I’m going to wear them.”

“You can’t; the priest’s coming.”

“Well, get them anyway. What time is it? You didn’t let me sleep through the moon-run blast, did you?”

She shook her head. “It’s half an hour yet⁠ ⁠… I’ll get the boots if you promise not to make me put them on you.”

“I want them on.”

“You can’t, until Father Paul’s finished.”

“Do I have to get my feet buttered?”

She sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. I wish you wouldn’t, Donny. It’s sacrilege, you know it is.”

“All right⁠—‘anointed,’ ” he corrected wearily.

“Yes, you do.”

“The boots, woman, the boots.”

She went to get them. While she was gone, the doorbell rang, and he heard her quick footsteps on the stairs, and then Father Paul’s voice asking about the patient. Old Donegal groaned inwardly. After the priest, the doctor would come, at the usual time, to see if he were dead yet. The doctor had let him come home from the hospital to die, and the doctor was getting impatient. Why don’t they let me alone? he growled. Why don’t they let me handle it in my own way, and stop making a fuss over it? I can die and do a good job of it without a lot of outside interference, and I wish they’d quit picking at me with syringes and sacraments and enemas. All he wanted was a chance to listen to the orchestra on the Keith terrace, to drink the rest of his whiskey, and to hear the beast blast-away for the satellite on the first lap of the run to Luna.

It’s going to be my last day, he thought. My eyes are going fuzzy, and I can’t breathe right, and the throbbing’s hurting my head. Whether he lived through the night wouldn’t matter, because delirium was coming over him, and then there would be the coma, and the symbolic fight to keep him pumping and panting. I’d rather die tonight and get it over with, he thought, but they probably won’t let me go.

He heard their voices coming up the stairs⁠ ⁠…

“Nora tried to get them to stop it, Father, but she couldn’t get in to see anybody but the butler. He told her he’d tell Mrs. Keith, but nothing happened. It’s just as loud as before.”

“Well, as long as Donny doesn’t mind⁠—”

“He just says that. You know how he is.”

“What’re they celebrating, Martha?”

“Young Ronald’s leaving⁠—for pre-space training. It’s a going-away affair.” They paused in the doorway. The small priest smiled in at Donegal and nodded. He set his black bag on the floor inside, winked solemnly at the patient.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Martha. She closed the door and her footsteps wandered off down the hall.

Donegal and the young priest eyed each other warily.

“You look like hell, Donegal,” the padre offered jovially. “Feeling nasty?”

“Skip the small talk. Let’s get this routine over with.”

The priest humphed thoughtfully, sauntered across to the bed, gazed down at the old man disinterestedly. “What’s the matter? Don’t want the ‘routine’? Rather play it tough?”

“What’s the difference?” he growled. “Hurry up and get out. I want to hear the beast blast off.”

“You won’t be able to,” said the priest, glancing at the window, now closed again. “That’s quite a racket next door.”

“They’d better stop for it. They’d better quiet down for it. They’ll have to turn it off for five minutes or so.”

“Maybe they won’t.”

It was a new idea, and it frightened him. He liked the music, and the party’s gaiety, the nearness of youth and good times⁠—but it hadn’t occurred to him that it wouldn’t stop so he could hear the beast.

“Don’t get upset, Donegal. You know what a blastoff sounds like.”

“But it’s the last one. The last time. I want to hear.”

“How do you know it’s the last time?”

“Hell, don’t I know when I’m kicking off?”

“Maybe, maybe not. It’s hardly your decision.”

“It’s not, eh?” Old Donegal fumed. “Well, bigawd you’d think it wasn’t. You’d think it was Martha’s and yours and that damfool medic’s. You’d think I got no say-so. Who’s doing it anyway?”

“I would guess,” Father Paul grunted sourly, “that Providence might appreciate His fair share of the credit.”

Old Donegal made a surly noise and hunched his head back into the pillow to glower.

“You want me?” the priest asked. “Or is this just a case of wifely conscience?”

“What’s the difference? Give me the business and scram.”

“No soap. Do you want the sacrament, or are you just being kind to your wife? If it’s for Martha, I’ll go now.”

Old Donegal glared at him for a time, then wilted. The priest brought his bag to the bedside.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”

“Bless you, son.”

“I accuse myself⁠ ⁠…”

Tension, anger, helplessness⁠—they had piled up on him, and now he was feeling the aftereffects. Vertigo, nausea, and the black confetti⁠—a bad spell. The whiskey⁠—if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is whatever you’re sorry for, maybe. But Old Donegal, you’re sorry for the wrong things, and this young Jesuitical gadget wouldn’t like listening to it. I’m sorry I didn’t get it instead of Oley, and I’m sorry I fought in the war, and I’m sorry I can’t get out of this bed and take a belt to my daughter’s backside for making a puny whelp out of Ken, and I’m sorry I gave Martha such a rough time all these years⁠—and wound up dying in a cheap flat, instead of giving her things like the Keiths had. I wish I had been a sharpster, contractor, or thief⁠ ⁠… instead of a common laboring spacer, whose species lost its glamor after the war.

Listen, old man, you made your soul yourself, and it’s yours. This young dispenser of oils, substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he says, so why not let him try? Tell him the rotten messes.

“Are you finished, my son?”

Old Donegal nodded wearily, and said what he was asked to say, and heard the soft mutter of Latin that washed him inside and behind his ghostly ears⁠ ⁠… ego te absolvo in Nomine Patris⁠ ⁠… and he accepted the rest of it lying quietly in the candlelight and the red glow of the sunset through the window, while the priest anointed him and gave him bread, and read the words of the soul in greeting its spouse: “I was asleep, but my heart waked; it is the voice of my beloved calling: come to me my love, my dove, my undefiled⁠ ⁠…” and from beyond the closed window came the sarcastic wail of a clarinet painting hot slides against a rhythmic background.

It wasn’t so bad, Old Donegal thought when the priest was done. He felt like a schoolboy in a starched shirt on Sunday morning, and it wasn’t a bad feeling, though it left him weak.

The priest opened the window for him again, and repacked his bag. “Ten minutes till blastoff,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about the racket next door.”

When he was gone, Martha came back in, and he looked at her face and was glad. She was smiling when she kissed him, and she looked less tired.

“Is it all right for me to die now?” he grunted.

“Donny, don’t start that again.”

“Where’s the boots? You promised to bring them?”

“They’re in the hall. Donny, you don’t want them.”

“I want them, and I want a drink of whiskey, and I want to hear them fire the beast.” He said it slow and hard, and he left no room for argument.

When she had got the huge boots over his shrunken feet, the magnasoles clanged against the iron bedframe and clung there, and she rolled him up so that he could look at them, and Old Donegal chuckled inside. He felt warm and clean and pleasantly dizzy.

“The whiskey, Martha, and for God’s sake, make them stop the noise till after the firing. Please!”

She went to the window and looked out for a long time. Then she came back and poured him an insignificant drink.

“Well?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw Father Paul on the terrace, talking to somebody.”

“Is it time?”

She glanced at the clock, looked at him doubtfully, and nodded. “Nearly time.”

The orchestra finished a number, but the babble of laughing voices continued. Old Donegal sagged. “They won’t do it. They’re the Keiths, Martha. Why should I ruin their party?”

She turned to stare at him, slowly shook her head. He heard someone shouting, but then a trumpet started softly, introducing a new number. Martha sucked in a hurt breath, pressed her hands together, and hurried from the room.

“It’s too late,” he said after her.

Her footsteps stopped on the stairs. The trumpet was alone. Donegal listened; and there was no babble of voices, and the rest of the orchestra was silent. Only the trumpet sang⁠—and it puzzled him, hearing the same slow bugle-notes of the call played at the lowering of the colors.

The trumpet stopped suddenly. Then he knew it had been for him.

A brief hush⁠—then thunder came from the blast-station two miles to the west. First the low reverberation, rattling the windows, then the rising growl as the sleek beast knifed skyward on a column of blue-white hell. It grew and grew until it drowned the distant traffic sounds and dominated the silence outside.

Quit crying, you old fool, you maudlin ass⁠ ⁠…

“My boots,” he whispered, “my boots⁠ ⁠… please⁠ ⁠…”

“You’ve got them on, Donny.”

He sank quietly then. He closed his eyes and let his heart go up with the beast, and he sank into the gravity padding of the blastroom, and Caid was with him, and Oley. And when Ronald Keith, III, instructed the orchestra to play Blastroom Man, after the beast’s rumble had waned, Old Donegal was on his last moon-run, and he was grinning. He’d had a good day.

Martha went to the window to stare out at the thin black trail that curled starward above the blast-station through the twilight sky. Guests on the terrace were watching it too.

The doorbell rang. That would be Ken, too late. She closed the window against the chill breeze, and went back to the bed. The boots, the heavy, clumsy boots⁠—they clung to the bedframe, with his feet half out of them. She took them off gently and set them out of company’s sight. Then she went to answer the door.

Way of a Rebel

Lieutenant Laskell surfaced his one-man submarine fifty miles off the Florida coast where he had been patrolling in search of enemy subs. Darkness had fallen. He tuned his shortwave set to the Miami station just in time to hear the eight o’clock news. The grim announcement that he had expected was quick to come:

“In accordance with the provisions of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Congress today approved the Manlin Bill, declaring a state of total emergency for the nation. President Williston signed it immediately and tendered his resignation to the Congress and the people. The executive, legislative, and judiciary are now in the hands of the Department of Defense. Secretary Garson has issued two decrees, one reminding all citizens that they are no longer free to shirk their duties to the nation, the other calling upon the leaders of the Eurasian Soviet to cease air attacks on the American continent or suffer the consequences.

“In Secretary Garson’s ultimatum to the enemy, he stated: ‘Heretofore we have refrained from employing certain weapons of warfare in the vain hope that you would recognize the futility of further aggression and desist from it. You have not done so. You have persisted in your bloodthirsty folly, despite this nation’s efforts to reach an agreement for armistice. Therefore I am forced to command you, in the Name of Almighty God, to surrender immediately or be destroyed. I shall allow you one day in which to give evidence of submission. If such evidence is not forthcoming, I shall implement this directive by a total attack.⁠ ⁠…’ ”

Mitch Laskell switched off the shortwave set and muttered an oath. He squeezed his way up through the narrow conning tower and sat on the small deck, leaning back against the rocket-launcher and dangling his feet in the calm ocean. The night was windless and warm, with the summer stars eyeing the earth benignly. But despite the warmth, he felt clammy; his hands were shaking a little as he lit a cigarette.

The newscast⁠—it came as no surprise. The world had known for weeks that the Manlin Bill would be passed, and that Garson would be given absolute powers to lead the nation through the war. And his ultimatum to the enemy was no surprise. Garson had long favored an all-out radiological attack, employing every nuclear weapon the country could muster. Heretofore both sides had limited themselves to non-rigged atomic explosives, and had refrained from using bacterial weapons. Garson wanted to take off the boxing-gloves in favor of steel gauntlets. And now it would happen⁠—the all-out attack, the masterpiece of homicidal engineering, the final word in destruction.

Mitch, reclining in loneliness against the rocket-launcher, blew a thoughtful cloud of cigarette smoke toward the bright yellow eye of Arcturus, almost directly overhead, and wondered why the Constellation Boötes suddenly looked like a big club ready to fall on the earth, when it had always reminded him of a flyswatter about to slap the Corona Borealis. He searched himself for horror, but found only a gloomy uneasiness. It was funny, he thought; five years ago men would have been outraged at the notion of an American absolutism, with one man ruling by decree. But now that it had happened, it was not too hard to accept. He wondered at it.

And he soon decided that almost any fact could be accepted calmly after it had already happened. Men would be just as calm after their cities had been reduced to rubble. The human capacity for calmness was almost unlimited, ex post facto, because the routine of daily living had to go on, despite the big business of governments whose leaders invoked the Deity in the cause of slaughter.

A voice, echoing up out of the conning tower, made him jump. The command set was barking his call letters.

“Unit Sugar William Niner Zero, Mother wants you. I say again: Mother wants you. Acknowledge please. Over.”

The message meant: return to base immediately. And it implied an urgency in the use of the code-word Mother. He frowned and started up, then fell back with a low grunt.

All of his resentment against the world’s political jackasses suddenly boiled up inside him as a personal resentment. There was something about the metallic rasp of the radio’s voice that sparked him to sudden rebelliousness.

“Unit Sugar William Niner Zero, Mother wants you, Mother wants you. Acknowledge immediately. Over.”

He had a good idea what it was all about. All subs were probably being called in for rearmament with cobalt-rigged atomic warheads for their guided missiles. The submarine force would probably be used to implement Garson’s ultimatum. They would deliver radiological death to Eurasian coastal cities, and cause the Soviets to retaliate.

Why must I participate in the wrecking of mechanical civilization? he thought grimly.

But a counter-thought came to trouble him: I have a duty to obey; The country gave me birth and brought me up, and now it’s got a war to fight.

He arose and let himself down through the conning tower. He reached for the microphone, but the receiver croaked again.

“Sugar William Niner Zero, you are ordered to answer immediately. Mother’s fixing shortening bread. Mother wants you. Over.”

Shortening bread⁠—big plans, something special, a radiological death-dish for the world. He hated the voice quietly. His hand touched the microphone but did not lift it.

He stood poised there in the light of a single glow-lamp, feeling his small sub rocking gently in the calm sea, listening to the quiet purr of the atomics beneath him. He had come to love the little sub, despite the loneliness of long weeks at sea. His only companion was the sub’s small computer which was used for navigation and for calculations pertaining to the firing of the rocket-missiles. It also handled the probability mathematics of random search, and automatically radioed periodic position reports to the home-base computer.

He glanced suddenly at his watch, it was nearly time for a report. Abruptly he reached out and jerked open the knife-switch in the computer’s antenna circuit. Immediately the machine began clicking and clattering and chomping. A bit of paper tape suddenly licked out of its answer-slot. He tore it off and read the neatly printed words: malfunction, open circuit, communications output; insert data.

Mitch “inserted data” by punching a button labelled no repair and another labelled radio out. One bank of tubes immediately lost its filament-glow, and the computer shot out another bit of tape inscribed data rogered. He patted it affectionately and grinned. The computer was just a machine, but he found it easy to personalize the thing.⁠ ⁠…

The command-set was crackling again. “Sugar William Niner Zero, this is Commsubron Killer. Two messages. Mother wants you. Daddy has a razor strap. Get on the ball out there, boy! Acknowledge. Over.”

Mitch whitened and picked up the microphone. He keyed the transmitter’s carrier and spoke in a quiet hiss. “Commsubron Killer from Sugar William Niner Zero. Message for Daddy. Sonnyboy just resigned from the Navy. Go to hell, all of you! Over and out!”

He shut off the receiver just as it started to stutter a shocked reply. He dropped the mike and let it dangle. He stood touching his fingertips to his temples and breathing in shallow gasps. Had he gone completely insane?

He sat down on the floor of the tiny compartment and tried to think. But he could only feel a bitter resentment welling up out of nowhere. Why? He had always gotten along in the Navy. He was the undersea equivalent of a fighter pilot, and he had always liked his job. They had even said that “he had the killer instinct”⁠—or whatever it was that made him grin maliciously when he spotted an enemy sub and streaked in for the kill.

Now suddenly he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to quit the whole damn war and run away. Because of Garson maybe? But no, hadn’t he anticipated that before it happened? Why should he kick now, when he hadn’t kicked before? And who was he to decide whether Garson was right or wrong?

Go back, he thought. There’s the microphone. Pick it up and tell Commsubron that you went stir-crazy for a little while. Tell him wilco on his message. They won’t do anything to you except send you to a nut doctor. Maybe you need one. Go on back like a sane man.

But he drew his hand back from the microphone. He wiped his face nervously. Mitch had never spent much time worrying about ethics and creeds and political philosophies. He’d had a job to do, and he did it, and he sometimes sneered at people who could wax starry-eyed about patriotism and such. It didn’t make sense. The old school spirit was okay for football games, and even for small-time wars, but he had never felt much of it. He hadn’t needed it in order to be a good fighter. He fought because it was considered the “thing to do,” because he liked the people he had to live with, and because those people wouldn’t have a good opinion of him if he didn’t fight. People never needed much of a philosophic motive to make them do the socially approved things.

He moistened his lips nervously and stared at the microphone. He was scared. Scared to run away. He had never been afraid of a fight, frightened maybe, but not afraid. Why now? It takes a lot of courage to be a coward, he thought, but the word coward made him wince. He groped blindly for a reasonable explanation of his desire to desert. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, because he was the kind of man who could think best in an argument. But there was no one to talk to except the radio.

The computer’s keyboard was almost at his elbow. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly typed:

Data: Wind out of the north, wave factor 0.50 roughness scale.

Instructions: Suggest action.

The machine chewed on the entry noisily for a few seconds, then answered: Insufficient data.

He nodded thoughtfully. That was his predicament too: insufficient data about his own motives. How could a man trust himself to judge wisely, when his judgement went completely against that of his society? He typed again.

Data for hypothetical problem: You have just solved a navigational problem whose solution requires course due west. Three other computers solve same problem and get course due south. Malfunction not evident in any of four computers.

Instructions: Furnish a course.

The computer clattered for awhile, then typed: Suggestion: Malfunction indicators are possibly malfunctioning. Is data available?

He stared at it, then laughed grimly. His own malfunction-indicator wasn’t telling him much either. With masochistic fatalism he touched the keyboard again.

Data not available. Furnish a course.

The computer replied almost immediately this time: Course: Due west.

Mitch stared at it and bit his lip. The machine would follow its own solution, even if the other three contradicted it. Naturally⁠—it would have to follow its own solution, if there was no indication of malfunction. But could a human being make such a decision? Could a man decide, “I am right, and everyone else is wrong?”

No evidence of malfunction, he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane.

His heart cried: “I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it.”

He sighed deeply, then arose. There was nothing else to do. The atomic engines could go six months without refueling. There were enough undersea rations to last nearly that long.

He switched on the radio again, goosed the engines to full speed, and after a moment’s thought, swung around on a northeasterly heading. His first impulse had been to head south, aiming for Yucatan, or the Guianas⁠—but that impulse would also be the first to strike his pursuers who were sure to come.

A new voice was growling on the radio, and he recognized it as Captain Barkley, his usually jovial, slightly cynical commanding officer. “Listen, Mitch⁠—if you can hear me, better answer. What’s wrong with you anyhow? I can’t hold off much longer. If you don’t reply, I’ll have to hunt you down. You’re ordered to proceed immediately to the nearest base. Over.”

Mitch wanted to answer, wanted to argue and fume and curse, hoping that he could explain his behaviour to his own satisfaction. But they might not be certain of his exact location, and if he used the radio, half-a-dozen direction-finders would swing around to aim along his signal, and Barkley would plot the half-a-dozen lines on the map in his office before speaking crisply into his telephone: all right, boys⁠—get him! 29° 10′ North, 79° 50′ West. Use a P-charge if you can’t spot him by radar or sonar.

Mitch left the controls in the hands of the computer and went up to stand in the conning tower with the churning spray washing his face. Surfaced, the sub could make sixty knots, and he meant to stay surfaced until there were hints of pursuit.

A three-quarter moon was rising in gloomy orange majesty out of the quiet sea. It made a river of syrupy light across the water to the east, and it heightened his sense of unreality, his feeling of detachment from danger.

Is it always like this, he wondered? Can a man toss aside his society so easily, become a traitor with so little logical reason? A day ago, he would not have dreamed it possible. A day ago, he would have proclaimed with the cynical Barkley, “A sailor’s got no politics. What the hell’s it to me if Garson is Big Boss? I’m just a little tooth in a big gear. Uncle pays my keep. I ask no questions.”

And now he was running like hell and stealing several million bucks worth of Uncle’s Navy, all because Garson’s pomposity and a radio operator’s voice got under his skin. How could a man be so crazy?

But no, that couldn’t be it, he thought. Jeezil! He must have some better reason. Sort of a last straw, maybe. But he had been conscious of no great resentment against the war or the Navy or the government. Historically speaking, wars had never done a great deal of harm⁠—no more harm than industrial or traffic accidents.

Why was this war any different? It promised to be more destructive than the others, but that was drawing a rather narrow line. Who was he to draw his bayonet across the road and say, “Stop here. This is the limit.”

Mitch turned his back toward the whipping spray and stared aft along the phosphorescent, moon-swept wake of his mechanical shark. The radio was still barking at him with Barkley’s clipped tones.

“Last warning, Laskell! Get on that microphone or suffer the consequences! We know where you are. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, then we’ll come get you. Over and out.”

Thanks for the warning, Mitch thought. In a few minutes, he would have to submerge. His eyes swept the moon-washed heavens for signs of aircraft, and he watched the dark horizon for hints of pursuit.

He meant to keep the northeasterly course for perhaps ten hours, then turn off and cruise southeast, passing below Bermuda and on out into the central Atlantic. Then south⁠—perhaps to Africa or Brazil. A fugitive for the rest of his days.

“Sugar William Niner Zero,” barked the radio. “This is Commsubfleet Jaybird. Over.”

Mitch moistened his lips nervously. The voice was no longer Barkley’s. Commsubfleet Jaybird was Admiral Harrinore. He chuckled bitterly then, realizing that he was still automatically startled by rank. He remained in the conning tower, listening.

“Sugar William Niner Zero, this is Commsubfleet Jaybird. If you will obey orders immediately, I guarantee that you will be allowed to accept summary discipline. No court martial if you comply. You are to return to base at once. Otherwise, we shall be forced to blast you out of the ocean as a deserter to the enemy. Over.”

So that was it, he thought. They were worried about the sub falling into Soviet paws. Some of its equipment was still classified “secret,” although the Reds probably already had it.

No, he wasn’t deserting to the enemy. Neither side was right in the struggle, although he preferred the West’s brand of wrongness to the bloodier wrongness of the Reds. But a man in choosing the lesser of two evils must first decide whether the choice really has to be made, and if there is not a third and more desirable way. Before picking a weapon for self-destruction, it might help to reason whether or not suicide is really necessary.

He smiled sardonically into the gray gloom, knowing that his thinking was running backwards, that he had acted before reasoning why, that he was rationalizing in an attempt to soothe himself and absolve himself. But a lot of human thinking occurred beneath the level of consciousness, down in the darker regions of the mind where it was not allowed to become conscious lest it bring shame to the thinker. And perhaps he had reasoned it all out in that mental half-world where thoughts are inner ghosts, haunting the possessed man with vague stirrings of uneasiness, leading him into inexplicable behaviour.

I am free now, he told himself. I have given them my declaration of independence, and I am an animal struggling to survive. Living in society, a man must submit to its will, but now I am divorced from it, and I shall live apart from it if I live at all, and I shall owe it nothing. The “governed” no longer gives his consent. How many times have men said, “If you don’t like the system here, why don’t you get out?” Well, he was getting out, and as a freeborn human animal, born as a savage into the world, he had that right, if he had any rights at all.

He grunted moodily and lowered himself down into the belly of the sub. They would be starting the search soon. He sealed the hatches and opened the water intakes after slowing to a crawl. The sub shivered and settled. The indicator crept to ten feet, twenty, thirty. At fifty feet, he jabbed a button on the computer, and the engines growled a harder thrust. He kept the northeasterly heading at maximum underwater speed.

An hour crept by. He listened for code on the sonar equipment, but heard only the weird and nameless sea-sounds. He allowed himself a reading light in the cramped compartment, folded the map-table up from the wall, and studied the coastline of Africa.

He began to feel a frightening loneliness, although scarcely two hours had passed since his rebellious decision, and he was accustomed to long weeks alone at sea. He scoffed at himself. He would get along okay; the sub would take him any place he wanted to go, if he could escape pursuit. Surely there must be some part of the world where men were not concerned with the senseless struggle of the titans. But all such places were primitive, savage, almost unendurable to a man born and tuned to the violin-string pitch of technological culture.

Mitch realized dismally that he loved technological civilization, its giant tools, its roar of mighty engines, its proud structures of concrete and steel. He could sacrifice his love for particular people, for particular places and governments⁠—but it was going to be harder to relinquish mechanical civilization for some stone-age culture lingering in an out-of-the-way place. Changing tribes was easy, for all tribes belonged to Man, but renouncing machinery for jungle tools would be more difficult. A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Man’s tools were a part of his body. Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments.

That was it, he thought. The reason for his sudden rebellion, the narrow dividing line between tolerable and insufferable wars. A war that killed human beings might be tolerable, if it left most of civilizations’ industry intact, or at least restorable, for although men might die, Man lived on, still possessing his precious tools, still capable of producing greater ones. But a war that wrecked industry, left it a tangled jumble of radioactive concrete and steel⁠—that kind of war was insufferable, as this one threatened to be.

The idea shocked him. Kill a few men, and you scratch the hide of Historical Man. But wreck the industry, drive men out of the cities, leave the factories hissing with beta and gamma radiation, and you amputate the hands of Historical Man the Builder. The machinery of civilization was a living body, with organismic Man as its brain. And the brain had not yet learned to use the body for a constructive purpose. It lacked coordination, and the ability to reason its actions analytically.

Was he basing action on analytic reason?

Another hour had passed. And then he heard it. The sound of faint sonar communication. Quickly he nosed upward to twenty feet, throttled back to half speed, and raised the periscope. With his face pressed against the eyepiece, he scanned the moonlit ocean in a slow circle. No lights, no silhouettes against the reflections on the waves.

He started the pumps and prepared to surface. Then the conning tower was snorting through the water like a rolling porpoise. He shut off the engines, leaving the sub in utter silence except for the soft wash of the sea. He adjusted the sonar pickups, turned the amplifier to maximum, and listened intently. Nothing. Had he imagined it?

He jabbed a button, and a motor purred, rolling out the retractable radar antenna. Carefully he scanned the sky and sea, watching the green-mottled screen for blips. Nothing⁠—no ships or aircraft visible. But he was certain: for a moment he had heard the twitter of undersea communicators.

He sat waiting and listening. Perhaps they had heard his engines, although his own equipment had caught none of their drive-noise.

The computer was able to supervise several tasks at once, and he set it to continue sweeping the horizon with the radar, to listen for sonar code and engine purr while he attended to other matters. He readied two torpedoes and raised a rocket into position for launching. He opened the hatch and climbed to stand in the conning tower again, peering grimly around the horizon.

Minutes later, a buzzer sounded beneath him. The computer had something now. He glanced at the parabolic radar antenna, rearing its head a dozen feet above him. It had stopped its aimless scanning and was quivering steadily on the southeast horizon. Southeast?

He lowered himself quickly into the ship and stared at the luminous screen. Blips⁠—three blips⁠—barely visible. While he watched, a fourth appeared.

He clamped on his headsets. There it was! The faint engine-noise of ships. His trained senses told him they were subs. Subs out of the southeast? He had expected interception from the west⁠—first aircraft, then light surface vessels.

There was but one possible answer: the enemy.

He dived for the radio and waited impatiently for the tubes to warm again. He found himself shouting into the mic.

“Commsubron Killer, this is Sugar William Niner Zero. Urgent message. Over.”

He was a long way from the station. He repeated the call three times. At last a faintly audible voice came from the set.

“… this is Commsubron Killer. You are ordered to return immediately.⁠ ⁠…”

The voice faded again.

“Listen!” Mitch bellowed. “Four, no⁠—five enemy submarine⁠—position 31°50′ North, 73°10′ West, proceeding northwest⁠—roughly, toward Washington. Probably carrying an answer to Garson’s ultimatum. Get help out here. Over.”

He heard only a brief mutter this time. “… ordered not to proceed toward Washington. Return immediately to⁠—”

“Not me! You fool! Listen! Five⁠—enemy⁠—submarines⁠—” He repeated the message as slowly as he could, repeated it four times.

“… reading you S-1,” came the fading answer. “Are you in distress? I say again. Are you in distress? Over.”

Angrily Mitch keyed the carrier wave, screwed the button tightly down, and kicked on the four-hundred cycle modulator. Maybe they could get a directional fix on his signal and home on it.

The blips were gone from the radar scope. The subs had spotted him and submerged. In a moment he would be catching a torpedo, unless he moved. He started the engines quickly, and the surfaced sub lurched ahead. He nosed her toward the enemy craft and opened the throttle. She knifed through the water like a low-running P.T. boat, throwing a V-shaped fan of spray. When he reached the halfway point between his own former position and the place where the enemy submerged, he began jabbing a release at three second intervals, laying a trail of deadly eggs. He could hear the crash of the exploding depth-charges behind him. He swung around to make another pass.

Then he saw it⁠—the wet metal hulk rearing up like a massive whale dead ahead. They had discovered the insignificance of their lone and pint-sized attacker. They were coming up to take him with deck guns.

Mitch reversed the engines and swung quickly away. The range was too close for a torpedo. The blast would catch them both. He began submerging quickly. A sickening blast shivered his tiny craft, and then another. He dropped to sixty feet, then knifed ahead.

God! Why was he doing this? There was no sense in it, if he meant to run away. But then the thought came: they’re returning Old Man Garson’s big-winded threat. They’re bringing a snootful of radiological hell, and that’s the damned bayonet-line across the road.

Depth charges were crashing around him as he wove a zigzag course. The computer was buzzing frantically. Then he saw why. The rocket launcher hadn’t retracted; there was still a rocket in it⁠—with a snootful of Uranium 235. The thing was dragging at the water, slowing him down, causing the sub to shudder and lurch.

Apparently all the subs had surfaced, for the charges were falling on all sides. With the launcher dragging at him, they would get him sooner or later. He tried to nose upward, but the controls refused.

He knew what would happen if he tried to fire the rocket. Hell, he didn’t have to fire it. All he had to do was fuse it. It had a water-pressure fuse, and he was beneath exploding depth.

Don’t think about it! Do it!

No, you’ve got to think. That’s what’s wrong. Too much do, not enough think. They’re going to wreck mechanical civilization if they keep it up. They’re going to wreck Man’s tools, cut off his hands, and make him an ape again!

But what’s it to you? What can you do?

Dammit! You can destroy five wrong tools that were built to wreck the right tools.

Mitch, who wanted to quit an all-out war, reached for the fusing switch. This part was his war; destroy the destroyers, but not the producers. Even if it didn’t make good military sense⁠—

A close explosion sent him lurching aside. He grabbed at the wall and pushed himself back. The switch⁠—the damn double-toggle red switch! He screamed a curse and struck at it with both fists.

There came a beautiful, blinding light.

The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight⁠—gleaming slivers that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens. A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that marched above them.

There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and in the unconscious kulturverlaengerung, of the people. Because of the latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in the language to name them.

The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered in awed voices under the elms.⁠ ⁠…

The piping whine of a senile hag: “The ancient gods! The day of the judging! Repent, repent.⁠ ⁠…”

The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: “The alien! We’re lost, we’re lost! We’ve got to run for the hills!”

The voice of the child: “See the pretty birdlights? See? See?”

And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: “The sons of men⁠—they’ve come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers.”

The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.

Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty thousand years. The stargoers⁠—they had come home.

“Kulturverlaengerung!” grunted the tense young man in the toga of an Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club to hurl at the wingsman. “Kulturverlaengerung, that’s why!”

“I heard you the first time, Meikl,” the officer snapped. “Watch your tongue and your tone!”

A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the flagship’s drive units somewhere below.

The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his throat politely. “Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?” he asked.

“It should be clear enough to all of you,” the analyst retorted hotly. He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. “You can see what they are, what they’ve become. And you know what we are.”

The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the analyst’s voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained impassive, expressionless.

The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the other end of the desk. “You want to infect them, Thaüle?” he demanded.

The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. “Meikl, you’re in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!”

“Yes, sir.”

“There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the continuance of this conference,” the elderly gentleman announced icily, thus seizing the situation.

After a moment’s silence, he turned to the analyst again. “We’ve got to refuel,” he said flatly. “In order to refuel, we must land.”

“Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?”

“Because there will be some existing facilities on Earth, even though they’re out of space. The job would take five years on Mars.”

The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. “I’m thinking of a billion earthlings. Aren’t they worth considering, sir?”

“I’ve got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They’ve been through hell. We all have.”

“The hell was our own making, baron.”

“Meikl!”

“Sorry, sir.”

Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: “Besides, Meikl, your predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a thousand generations. I don’t know a great deal about culturetics, but I’ve read that kulturverlaengerung reaches a threshold of extinction after about a dozen generations, if there’s no restimulation.”

“Only in laboratory cultures, sir,” sighed the analyst. “Under rigid control to make certain there’s no restimulant. In practice, in a planet-wide society, there’s constant accidental restimulation, unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult’laenger linkage never really dies out⁠—although, it can stay recessive and unconscious.”

“That’s too bad,” a wingsman growled sourly. “We’ll wake it up, won’t we?”

“Let’s not be callous,” the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. “Analyst Meikl has sensitivities.”

The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. “Sir, I was summoned here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked about possible cultural dangers. I’ve told you.”

“You discussed the danger to earthlings.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I meant ‘danger’ to the personnel of this fleet⁠—to their esprit, their indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none.”

“On the contrary, I see several,” said the analyst, coming slowly to his feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. “Where were you born, Wingman?” he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.

“Lichter Six, Satellite,” the officer grunted after a moment of irritable silence.

“And you?”

“Omega Thrush,” said the other wingsman.

All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.

“It’s common stuff, gentlemen. We’ve shed a lot of it. And each of us is a walking sackful of it.” He paused, then turned to touch the point of his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass, on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her nights into days.

“It came from there,” he hissed. “She’s your womb, gentlemen. Are you going back?”

“Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?” the baron asked sharply, hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. “This becomes silly.”

“If you land on her,” Meikl promised ominously, “you’ll go away with a fleet full of hate.”

Meikl’s arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. “Is my presence at this meeting still imperative, sir?” he asked the baron.

“Have you anything else to say?”

“Yes⁠—don’t land on Earth.”

“That’s a repetition. No further reasons?⁠—in terms of danger to ourselves?”

The analyst paused. “I can think of nothing worse that could happen to us,” he said slowly, “than just being what we already are.”

He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of the cabin.

“I suggest,” said a wingsman, “that we speak to Frewek about tightening up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open contempt, Baron.”

“But he was also probably right,” sighed the graying officer and nobleman.

“Sir⁠—!”

“Don’t worry, Wingsman, there’s nothing else to do. We’ll have to land. Make preparations, both of you⁠—and try to make contact with surface. I’ll dictate the message.”

When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world, this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said⁠—but for this, the baron could feel only bitterness toward her.

But what of her inhabitants? I’m past feeling anything for them, he thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the surface of a world, any world. We’ll go down quickly, and take what we need quickly, and leave quickly. We’ll try not to infect them, but they’ve already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection will be only a recurrence.

Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for battle.

“Your hawk’s blude was never sae red,
Edward, Edward;
Your hawk’s blude was never sae red,
My dear son, I tell thee, O.”
“O I hae kill’d my red-roan steed,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill’d my red roan steed,
That erst was sae fair and free, O.”

—⁠Anonymous

False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled over the unidentified language used in the transmission.

Propauth Earth from Commstrafefleet Three, Space, Klaeden Comm, presents greetings!

If you have records, our use of ancient Anglo-Germanic should make our identity clear. Have you fueling facilities for 720 ships of Thor-Nine class? If not, we shall develop facilities from local resources, with, we trust, your peaceful cooperation. This cadre not reimmigrating, but en route to Ursan stars. Request landing suggestions, in view of our fueling needs.

Request intelligence concerning present level of terrestrial culture. Our oribital observations indicate a static agrarian-technical complex, but details not available. We come in arms, but without enmity. Please reply, if possible.

So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults, pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After hours of hurried study.⁠ ⁠…

“It is found, it is found, a tongue of the ancients!” a joyous cry in the glades and the garden pathways.

Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.

“It is badly understood,” was the curious mutter along the garden pathways.

“Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are similar,” was the only explanation the sages could give.

In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance at the sky. “Invite our brothers to land,” was the impetuous cry of the young, but there were dissenters.

In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact with the children in their charge.

“I think we should tell them to go away,” said Letha, and looked around at the others for a response.

She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice, but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the glade, and had not heard her.

Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon’s eye. She was a graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha’s was more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained self-absorbed.

“I think we should tell them to go away,” she repeated a little sharply. “They’ll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them.”

Evon glanced at her briefly. “It’s up to the elders of the Geoark,” he muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own meditations.

“And all the big girls will run away with them,” she purred with a tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to waggle her foot.

Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually, she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He must be⁠—because she hadn’t seen him sit still this long in years. He was always doing something, or looking for something to do. It wasn’t like Evon just to sit still and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled didn’t fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily, with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just drooped.

She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.

“You wonder what it’s like, Evon?” she asked.

He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.

“To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean,” she added.

“Me? What are you thinking of, Letha?”

“Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad’s face. You remind me of an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens.”

“I don’t fiddle.”

“But your eyes are on the sky-fleet.”

Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. “It’s strange,” he murmured at last. “It’s as if I know them⁠—the star-birds, I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at something I expected to happen⁠ ⁠… or⁠ ⁠… or.⁠ ⁠…”

“Something familiar?”

“Yes.”

“You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?” she asked the blonde girl who sat on the cool rock by the spring.

Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. “I don’t believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief.”

“How silly! What’s that to do with it?”

“He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I’d remember where he buried it, wouldn’t I?” She pouted, and went back to dabbling a club toe in the spring.

Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. “We lie around here like sleepy pigs!” he grumbled. “Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on the Geoark to make up its mind?”

“What do you think they’ll do?”

“The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?”

“Tell them to go away.”

“And suppose they chose not to go?”

The girl looked bewildered. “I can’t imagine anyone refusing the Geoark.”

“Maybe they’ve got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with ours?”

“Two Geoarks? What a strange idea.”

“Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware that I have one too?”

“Evon! What a strange idea.”

He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring, then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon’s laughter broke the gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to wander into the clearing from the pathways.

“I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark,” someone suggested.

“About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?”

“I’m afraid,” said a girl. “Somehow I’m suddenly afraid of them.”

“Our brothers from the Exodus? But they’re people⁠—such as you and I.”

So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.

Propauth Earth from Commstrafefleet Three, Space, Klaeden Comm, presents greetings!

Having received no answer to our previous communication, we have no choice but to land at once. I am imposing an informational quarantine to avoid restimulating possible recessive kulturverlaengerung, but suggest you guard yourselves. Our cultures had a common origin. We come in arms, without enmity.

This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was going to land, without invitation.

Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans. “Can you revive the devices that speak across space?” they asked.

“They are revived,” answered the tech clans.

“Then let us speak to our brothers from space.”

And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:

Brethren to brethren, present love love love.

We welcome you to our glades and to our places of feeding and our places of sleeping. We welcome you to the bosom of the world of beginning. After twenty thousand years, earth has not forgotten. Come amid rejoicing.

“I’m afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to,” growled Ernstli Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an atmospheric-braking orbit.

And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.

“O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
Edward, Edward.
O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
And some other dule ye dree, O.”
“O I hae kill’d my ain father dear,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill’d my ain father dear,
Alas and woe is me, O.”

—⁠Anonymous

In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and established an “orbital shell” of criscrossing orbits, timed and interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.

From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.

“No signs of the natives yet,” came the report. “No signs of technology. No evidence of hostility.”

A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing more.

One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.

In accordance with the rules of officer’s conduct, Baron ven Klaeden, who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock, sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was born into his bones.

Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south, another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery. Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind changed, and the air that breathed about the commander’s face was full of perfume.

I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, “Refueling Method for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable.”

It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa, and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum⁠—or had been, before the War of Secession⁠—and when history moved into space, Earth was a half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the historians had reconstructed for the museums⁠—vistas of roaring industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully tended Japanese garden.

As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had already been issued. “All personnel are forbidden to attempt the learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives, shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden, Comm.”

It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile, the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in which the messages had been exchanged.

The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk⁠—a young girl, obviously frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in the ground about the base of the ship’s jets was still too high. The rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per unit. That meant it wouldn’t be safe for the crew to leave ship for twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.

“Keep clear!” he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.

She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.

“Go back, you little idiot!”

Her answer was a brief singsong chant and another smile. She kept coming⁠—into the charred area.

The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs. She yelped and fled back into the green garden.

He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly. She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human. But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.

It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a mutually recorded dead language.

“We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius,” ven Klaeden reported to the elders. “If our selection of this region is unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for our purposes.”

“Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren,” replied the gentle voice of the Geoark. “You are welcome to remain as you are.”

“Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted area, closed to civilian population.”

“But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have surrounded!”

“Evacuate them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Evacuate them. Make them get out.”

“My translator is working badly.”

The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the colonel in command of ground operations. “Start clearing the occupied zone. Get the population out unless they’ll work for us.”

“How much notice?”

The baron paused briefly. “Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius.”

“My translator is working badly,” the voice of the elder was parroting.

“Look,” the baron grunted at the mike. “All we want is to accomplish what we came here for, and then get out⁠—as quickly as possible. We don’t have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to confer in my flagship. We’ll try to make everything clear to you. Is this agreed?”

“My translator is working badly.”

“Aren’t you getting anything?”

A pause, then: “I understand that you wish us to come to the place where the sky-fleet rests.”

“Correct.”

“But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the feast-glades?”

“I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have aircraft of your own.”

“We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth.”

“Any of your population understand the mechanisms?”

“Certainly, brother.”

“Then bring technicians. They’ll be best able to understand what we want, and maybe they can make it clear to you.”

“As you wish, brother.”

The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a satisfied smile. “I think we shall have what we need and be gone quickly,” he said.

“The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us.”

“Respectful awe is more like it,” the baron grunted.

“I suggest the answer is in the word ‘brethren,’ ” came a voice from the back of the room.

“Meikl! What are you doing in here?” ven Klaeden barked irritably.

“You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go back?”

“It’s up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be useful.”

Meikl bowed stiffly. “Thank you, sir.”

“Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time⁠—have you got any suggestions?”

“About how to deal with the natives?”

“Certainly⁠ ⁠… but with the accent on our problems.”

Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. “From what we’ve gathered through limited observation, I think we’d better gather some more, and do our suggesting later.”

“That constitutes your entire opinion?”

“Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung.⁠ ⁠…”

“Our problems, I said!” the commander snapped.

“It’s likely to be our problem, sir.”

“How?”

“In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we’d regard as undesirable. We can’t know whether we’re still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don’t know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated.”

“What patterns do you mean?”

“The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron.”

A moment of hush in the room. “I see what you mean,” the commander grunted. “But ‘desertion’ is a pattern of action, not a transmittable determinant.”

Meikl shook his head. “We don’t know what is a transmittable determinant until after it’s happened.” He paused. “Suppose there’s some very simple psychic mechanism behind the ‘pioneer’ impulse. We don’t feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it in our kulturverlaengerung lines.”

A wingman coughed raucously. “To be blunt with you, Meikl⁠ ⁠… I think this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is farfetched.”

“What, the kult’laenger lines?”

“Exactly.” The wingsman snorted. “How could things like that get passed along from father to son. If you people’d stop the mystical gibberish, and deal in facts.⁠ ⁠…”

“Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?” Meikl turned to stare absently out a viewing port at the trees.

“You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don’t know much about it.”

“Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game⁠ ⁠… before they became parents. They did nothing but play the game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control group⁠—another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game.”

“Go on.”

“So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests on all two hundred.”

“Learning the game, you mean?”

“Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the patterns of the game easily.”

“So?”

“So⁠—during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind⁠—probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn’t ‘inherit it’ in the genes, but there’s an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal⁠—and it’s an analog of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung⁠—and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations.”

“How? If they hadn’t taught the children to play the game.⁠ ⁠…”

“If they hadn’t, it’d still be passed on⁠—as a predisposition-talent⁠—to the third and fourth and nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image⁠ ⁠… or a memory of a memory of a memory.⁠ ⁠…”

“This grows pedantic, and irrelevant,” the baron growled. “What are the chances of utilizing native labor?”

“And whatten penance will we dree for that,
Edward, Edward?
Whatten penance will ye dree for that?
My dear son, now tell me, O.”
“I’ll set my feet in yonder boat,
Mither, mither;
I’ll set my feet in yonder boat,
And I’ll fare over the sea, O.”

—⁠Anonymous

Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sun-swept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.

“How good it is for brethren to be reunited,” Meikl’s native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socioeconomic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: “In our gardens, there are no weeds,” and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.

This “weedlessness” had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.

This, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of “exploitation” or “property seizure” or “authoritarianism.” The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill⁠—but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks. There had been few cases of interpersonal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please.

He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze. Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.

“You belong to another, Letha?” he asked.

She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. “There is a boy named Evon.⁠ ⁠…”

He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can’t make love to her. You’ve got to leave with the rest of them.

“But I don’t really belong to him,” she said, and reddened.

“Letha, I.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, Meikl.”

“Nothing. I’m lonely, I guess.”

Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. “Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space⁠—how you’ve lived since the Exodus?”

“We are an evil people.”

“Not so.”

She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.

“What is it you wish to know?”

“Why will you never return to your home?”

“To space⁠—but we shall.”

“To the worlds of your birth, I mean.”

He stiffened slightly, stared at her. “What makes you think we won’t?” he asked, a little sharply.

“Will you?”

So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.

“No,” he admitted, “we can’t go back to the worlds of our birth.”

“But why? Where are your women and children?”

He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word “war.” The single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the native tongue’s output. There was no concept to equate it to.

“There is blood on our hands,” he grunted, and knew immediately he had said too much.

She continued to stare at the ships. “What are the metal tubes that point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?”

There was no word for “guns” or “weapons.”

“They hurl death, Letha.”

“How can ‘death’ be hurled?”

Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient kulturverlaengerung would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. The records had been systematically censored and rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute concepts of her understanding.

“There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a contention for property.”

“Was it settled?” she asked innocently.

He nodded slowly.

It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights⁠—a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.

“There is much you could not understand, Letha,” he told her. “Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all⁠—perhaps into a fourth and final.”

“And yours, Meikl?”

“I don’t know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture⁠—conquest, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures.”

“We were the mother-culture, Meikl?”

He nodded. “And the Exodus was your birth-giving.”

“Now we are old and withered, Meikl?”

He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?⁠—a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?

A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl’s fraternization permit, using the spacer’s tongue.

“Deserter troubles?” he asked, as they returned his papers.

“Nineteen last week,” said one of the officers. “We’ve lost about three hundred men since we landed.”

“Found any of them?”

“Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless.”

Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.

“What did they want, Meikl?” she asked.

“Just idle conversation. It’s nearly time for the meeting with the elders. Let’s go.”

They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.

From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important loss of personnel. What was important: the slow decay of discipline under the “no force” interdict. A policy of “no arrest” had been established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone, Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO₂ gun that could be concealed in the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization; if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.

The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives. The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation for any recessive kult’laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful people after twenty thousand years.

“I think Evon will be here,” the girl said too casually as they entered the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders had assembled.

He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.

“Letha⁠—you have worked for me many months.”

“Yes⁠—”

“I love you, Letha.”

She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her quietly, hating himself.

“You’ll take me with you,” she said.

“No.” It was impossible.

“Then you’ll stay.”

“It is⁠ ⁠… forbidden⁠ ⁠… verboten.⁠ ⁠…” There was no word in the tongue.

“I can’t understand.⁠ ⁠… If you love.⁠ ⁠…”

He swallowed hard. For the girl, “love” automatically settled everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.

“Letha⁠—in your culture, ‘life’ is the highest value.”

“How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl.”

He took a deep breath and straightened. “You understand ‘drama,’ Letha. I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious playacting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?”

She nodded slowly. “You dance a different dance⁠—act a different play.”

“It’s not a play, Letha. We act an unconscious drama, and thus the drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence over life.”

She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Can you understand?⁠—that I love you, and yet my⁠ ⁠… my.⁠ ⁠…” He groped for a word for “duty.” “My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you.”

Something went dead in her eyes. “Let us go to the glade,” she said in a monotone. “It’s growing late.”

“And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
Edward, Edward?
And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
My dear son, now tell me, O?”
“The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,
Mither, mither;
The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;
Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!”

—⁠Anonymous

The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night. Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.

Notice of sanctuary

To: All personnel
From: Ausland Committee
Subject: Freedom

1. Any officer or man who wishes to resign from the services of the imperial forces of the secession may do so of this date.

2. The procedure for resignation involves no formal statement. a man may terminate his period of service by departing from the occupied zone.

3. Any officer or man who attempts to interfere with the resignation of another shall be tried in absentia by this committee, and if found guilty, shall incur the death penalty.

“An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!” ven Klaeden had hissed. “Get them. Make an example of them.”

In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.

A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that had invaded their quarters.

Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.

Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were brought before the baron.

“Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a work contract.”

On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse. The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a massacre.

“We were nearly finished,” raged the baron, pacing like an angry predator in the glade. “Another two weeks, and the first ore would come out of the crushers. They can’t stop us now. They can’t quit.”

Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder, tightlipped, not understanding the colonel’s tongue, disdaining to speak in the intermediate language.

“Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear.”

Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly and turned to the girl. “Tell them,” he said in the Intermedia, “that death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the Geoark is.⁠ ⁠…” He paused. There was no word for “hostage.”

He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl’s face drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.

“They understood you, damn them!” ven Klaeden snapped. “They know the Intermedia.”

The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.

“No!” Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.

One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few feet away stirred restlessly.

The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade. The guard looked questioningly at the officers.

“Where are they going?” ven Klaeden demanded.

“Well, Letha?” Meikl muttered.

“I⁠—I don’t know⁠—”

“You’re lying, girl,” the baron grunted, then to the guards: “Tell them to halt.”

“Party, halt!” snapped the guard.

The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes gathered up from spindley shins.

“Party, halt!”

The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.

“Halt, I said.”

“Take the one in the middle,” ordered ven Klaeden.

The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief rattling hiss. The back of the elder’s robe went crimson, and he crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.

The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.

“Shoot for the legs, you fool!” barked the baron.

The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering softly.

Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for Letha. She had vanished from the glade.

“Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner,” the baron was growling.

Meikl turned on him. “Now it’s come to this, has it?” he snapped. “From the beginning, they were willing⁠—even eager, to give what we wanted. Why did they stop being willing?”

“That’s enough, Meikl!”

“I’ve hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you like a friend. You couldn’t bear it. ‘Brethren,’ they said. But there’s nothing about ‘brethren’ in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?”

“Shut up.”

Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand before the analyst and stare at him icily.

“You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst⁠—the kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the war plague, eh?”

Meikl paused. The baron’s eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment or triumph.

“Well, Meikl? Is that what we’ve done? Inflicted them with conflict? Brought back the old seeds of hate?”

The analyst drew himself up slightly. “You just killed a man, a man of dignity,” he snarled, “and you cut two others down like weeds.”

“Innocent old men.” The baron’s mouth twisted into a snarl.

“They wanted nothing but to help us.”

“Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?”

The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.

The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. “Look down at the ground, Analyst,” he hissed.

Ven Klaeden’s sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell to the turf at his feet⁠—moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the green.

The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. “Tell me where the infection came from, Analyst,” he growled. He scraped at the hole with his heel. “And why is the dirt so red right here?”

Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware. He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.

“I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers⁠—their own inner hell, Meikl⁠—the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden.”

The man was mad⁠ ⁠… perhaps. Meikl’s eyes followed the men who approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden⁠—the limp body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native. After a moment, he recognized the native.⁠ ⁠…

“Evon!”

As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped. Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.

“Letha!”

“Dead,” Evon hissed. “They killed her for running.⁠ ⁠…”

They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a gun.

“Put that away!” ven Klaeden snapped.

The young officer laughed sourly. “Sorry, baron, I’m from the committee.”

“Guard!”

“There’s no one in earshot, Baron.”

“Fool!” Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. “Drop that gun, or I’ll blade-whip you!”

“Easy, baron, easy. I’m your executioner.⁠ ⁠…”

The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.

“… but I want to take care of this one first.” The renegade waved the gun toward Meikl. “You, Baron, you can have it slower⁠—a needle in your official rump.”

Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with the sword. The officer’s lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired again⁠—a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.

Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in midair and slashed the man’s face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.

Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank back into shrubs.

“Get him,” croaked ven Klaeden.

Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.

There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven Klaeden’s wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.

“Your woman, Earthling?”

Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.

“You have brought us death, you have brought us hate,” he said slowly, his eyes clinging to the sword.

“Pick it up,” hissed the baron.

“You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done. Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we.⁠ ⁠…”

“Pick it up.”

The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and fascination was in his eyes.

“You know what it is for?” the analyst asked.

The native shook his head slowly.

Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt⁠—as the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus. His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.

“Now do you know?” the baron gasped.

“My⁠—my hand⁠—it knows,” the native whispered.

Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes glazed with pain. “He’ll need it now, won’t he, Analyst?” he breathed, then fell to the moss.

Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl brandished the gun slightly.

The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the mines.

“You loved her too,” Evon said.

He nodded.

The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.

“Keep it,” the analyst grunted. “You remembered its feel after twenty thousand years. That’s why you’ll need it.”

Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and there was no erasing them⁠ ⁠… for they were the soul, self-made, lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored the mind of the man and the woman. Kulturverlaengerung.

The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.

The Hoofer

They all knew he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched face, and so they tolerated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him.

Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus, dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn’t have seen it too well now, even if he had been sober. Glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were excuses for a lot of things, when a man was just back from Big Bottomless. And who could blame a man for acting strangely?

Minutes later, he was back up the aisle and swaying giddily over the little housewife. “How!” he said. “Me Chief Broken Wing. You wanta Indian wrestle?”

The girl, who sat nervously staring at him, smiled wanly, and shook her head.

“Quiet li’l pigeon, aren’tcha?” he burbled affectionately, crashing into the seat beside her.

The two men slid out of their seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder. “Come on, Broken Wing, let’s go back to bed.”

“My name’s Hogey,” he said. “Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding about being a Indian.”

“Yeah. Come on, let’s go have a drink.” They got him on his feet, and led him stumbling back down the aisle.

“My ma was half Cherokee, see? That’s how come I said it. You wanta hear a war whoop? Real stuff.”

“Never mind.”

He cupped his hands to his mouth and favored them with a bloodcurdling proof of his ancestry, while the female passengers stirred restlessly and hunched in their seats. The driver stopped the bus and went back to warn him against any further display. The driver flashed a deputy’s badge and threatened to turn him over to a constable.

“I gotta get home,” Big Hogey told him. “I got me a son now, that’s why. You know? A little baby pigeon of a son. Haven’t seen him yet.”

“Will you just sit still and be quiet then, eh?”

Big Hogey nodded emphatically. “Shorry, officer, I didn’t mean to make any trouble.”

When the bus started again, he fell on his side and lay still. He made retching sounds for a time, then rested, snoring softly. The bus driver woke him again at Caine’s junction, retrieved his gin bottle from behind the seat, and helped him down the aisle and out of the bus.

Big Hogey stumbled about for a moment, then sat down hard in the gravel at the shoulder of the road. The driver paused with one foot on the step, looking around. There was not even a store at the road junction, but only a freight building next to the railroad track, a couple of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road, and, just across the way, a deserted filling station with a sagging roof. The land was Great Plains country, treeless, barren, and rolling.

Big Hogey got up and staggered around in front of the bus, clutching at it for support, losing his duffle bag.

“Hey, watch the traffic!” The driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome compassion he trotted around after his troublesome passenger, taking his arm as he sagged again. “You crossing?”

“Yah,” Hogey muttered. “Lemme alone, I’m okay.”

The driver started across the highway with him. The traffic was sparse, but fast and dangerous in the central ninety-mile lane.

“I’m okay,” Hogey kept protesting. “I’m a tumbler, ya know? Gravity’s got me. Damn gravity. I’m not used to gravity, ya know? I used to be a tumbler⁠—huk!⁠—only now I gotta be a hoofer. ’Count of li’l Hogey. You know about li’l Hogey?”

“Yeah. Your son. Come on.”

“Say, you gotta son? I bet you gotta son.”

“Two kids,” said the driver, catching Hogey’s bag as it slipped from his shoulder. “Both girls.”

“Say, you oughta be home with them kids. Man oughta stick with his family. You oughta get another job.” Hogey eyed him owlishly, waggled a moralistic finger, skidded on the gravel as they stepped onto the opposite shoulder, and sprawled again.

The driver blew a weary breath, looked down at him, and shook his head. Maybe it’d be kinder to find a constable after all. This guy could get himself killed, wandering around loose.

“Somebody supposed to meet you?” he asked, squinting around at the dusty hills.

“Huk!⁠—who, me?” Hogey giggled, belched, and shook his head. “Nope. Nobody knows I’m coming. S’prise. I’m supposed to be here a week ago.” He looked up at the driver with a pained expression. “Week late, ya know? Marie’s gonna be sore⁠—woo-hoo!⁠—is she gonna be sore!” He waggled his head severely at the ground.

“Which way are you going?” the driver grunted impatiently.

Hogey pointed down the side-road that led back into the hills. “Marie’s pop’s place. You know where? ’Bout three miles from here. Gotta walk, I guess.”

“Don’t,” the driver warned. “You sit there by the culvert till you get a ride. Okay?”

Hogey nodded forlornly.

“Now stay out of the road,” the driver warned, then hurried back across the highway. Moments later, the atomic battery-driven motors droned mournfully, and the bus pulled away.

Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing the back of his neck. “Nice people,” he said. “Nice buncha people. All hoofers.”

With a grunt and a lurch, he got to his feet, but his legs wouldn’t work right. With his tumbler’s reflexes, he fought to right himself with frantic arm motions, but gravity claimed him, and he went stumbling into the ditch.

“Damn legs, damn crazy legs!” he cried.

The bottom of the ditch was wet, and he crawled up the embankment with mud-soaked knees, and sat on the shoulder again. The gin bottle was still intact. He had himself a long fiery drink, and it warmed him deep down. He blinked around at the gaunt and treeless land.

The sun was almost down, forge-red on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked sky faded into sulphurous yellow toward the zenith, and the very air that hung over the land seemed full of yellow smoke, the omnipresent dust of the plains.

A farm truck turned onto the side-road and moaned away, its driver hardly glancing at the dark young man who sat swaying on his duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just kept staring at the crazy sun.

He shook his head. It wasn’t really the sun. The sun, the real sun, was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in the dead black pit. It painted everything with pure white pain, and you saw things by the reflected pain-light. The fat red sun was strictly a phoney, and it didn’t fool him any. He hated it for what he knew it was behind the gory mask, and for what it had done to his eyes.

With a grunt, he got to his feet, managed to shoulder the duffle bag, and started off down the middle of the farm road, lurching from side to side, and keeping his eyes on the rolling distances. Another car turned onto the side-road, honking angrily.

Hogey tried to turn around to look at it, but he forgot to shift his footing. He staggered and went down on the pavement. The car’s tires screeched on the hot asphalt. Hogey lay there for a moment, groaning. That one had hurt his hip. A car door slammed and a big man with a florid face got out and stalked toward him, looking angry.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, fella?” he drawled. “You soused? Man, you’ve really got a load.”

Hogey got up doggedly, shaking his head to clear it. “Space legs,” he prevaricated. “Got space legs. Can’t stand the gravity.”

The burly farmer retrieved his gin bottle for him, still miraculously unbroken. “Here’s your gravity,” he grunted. “Listen, fella, you better get home pronto.”

“Pronto? Hey, I’m no Mex. Honest, I’m just space burned. You know?”

“Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway? Do you live around here?”

It was obvious that the big man had taken him for a hobo or a tramp. Hogey pulled himself together. “Goin’ to the Hauptman’s place. Marie. You know Marie?”

The farmer’s eyebrows went up. “Marie Hauptman? Sure I know her. Only she’s Marie Parker now. Has been, nigh on six years. Say⁠—” He paused, then gaped. “You ain’t her husband by any chance?”

“Hogey, that’s me. Big Hogey Parker.”

“Well, I’ll be⁠—! Get in the car. I’m going right past John Hauptman’s place. Boy, you’re in no shape to walk it.”

He grinned wryly, waggled his head, and helped Hogey and his bag into the back seat. A woman with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly beside the farmer in the front, and she neither greeted the passenger nor looked around.

“They don’t make cars like this anymore,” the farmer called over the growl of the ancient gasoline engine and the grind of gears. “You can have them new atomics with their loads of hot isotopes under the seat. Ain’t safe, I say⁠—eh, Martha?”

The woman with the sunbaked neck quivered her head slightly. “A car like this was good enough for Pa, an’ I reckon it’s good enough for us,” she drawled mournfully.

Five minutes later the car drew in to the side of the road. “Reckon you can walk it from here,” the farmer said. “That’s Hauptman’s road just up ahead.”

He helped Hogey out of the car and drove away without looking back to see if Hogey stayed on his feet. The woman with the sunbaked neck was suddenly talking garrulously in his direction.

It was twilight. The sun had set, and the yellow sky was turning gray. Hogey was too tired to go on, and his legs would no longer hold him. He blinked around at the land, got his eyes focused, and found what looked like Hauptman’s place on a distant hillside. It was a big frame house surrounded by a wheatfield, and a few scrawny trees. Having located it, he stretched out in the tall grass beyond the ditch to take a little rest.

Somewhere dogs were barking, and a cricket sang creaking monotony in the grass. Once there was the distant thunder of a rocket blast from the launching station six miles to the west, but it faded quickly. An A-motored convertible whined past on the road, but Hogey went unseen.

When he awoke, it was night, and he was shivering. His stomach was screeching, and his nerves dancing with high voltages. He sat up and groped for his watch, then remembered he had pawned it after the poker game. Remembering the game and the results of the game made him wince and bite his lip and grope for the bottle again.

He sat breathing heavily for a moment after the stiff drink. Equating time to position had become second nature with him, but he had to think for a moment because his defective vision prevented him from seeing the Earth-crescent.

Vega was almost straight above him in the late August sky, so he knew it wasn’t much after sundown⁠—probably about eight o’clock. He braced himself with another swallow of gin, picked himself up and got back to the road, feeling a little sobered after the nap.

He limped on up the pavement and turned left at the narrow drive that led between barbed-wire fences toward the Hauptman farmhouse, five hundred yards or so from the farm road. The fields on his left belonged to Marie’s father, he knew. He was getting close⁠—close to home and woman and child.

He dropped the bag suddenly and leaned against a fence post, rolling his head on his forearms and choking in spasms of air. He was shaking all over, and his belly writhed. He wanted to turn and run. He wanted to crawl out in the grass and hide.

What were they going to say? And Marie, Marie most of all. How was he going to tell her about the money?

Six hitches in space, and every time the promise had been the same: One more tour, baby, and we’ll have enough dough, and then I’ll quit for good. One more time, and we’ll have our stake⁠—enough to open a little business, or buy a house with a mortgage and get a job.

And she had waited, but the money had never been quite enough until this time. This time the tour had lasted nine months, and he had signed on for every run from station to moon-base to pick up the bonuses. And this time he’d made it. Two weeks ago, there had been forty-eight hundred in the bank. And now⁠ ⁠…

“Why?” he groaned, striking his forehead against his forearms. His arm slipped, and his head hit the top of the fencepost, and the pain blinded him for a moment. He staggered back into the road with a low roar, wiped blood from his forehead, and savagely kicked his bag.

It rolled a couple of yards up the road. He leaped after it and kicked it again. When he had finished with it, he stood panting and angry, but feeling better. He shouldered the bag and hiked on toward the farmhouse.

They’re hoofers, that’s all⁠—just an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers, even Marie. And I’m a tumbler. A born tumbler. Know what that means? It means⁠—God, what does it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless, where Earth’s like a fat moon with fuzzy mold growing on it. Mold, that’s all you are, just mold.

A dog barked, and he wondered if he had been muttering aloud. He came to a fence-gap and paused in the darkness. The road wound around and came up the hill in front of the house. Maybe they were sitting on the porch. Maybe they’d already heard him coming. Maybe⁠ ⁠…

He was trembling again. He fished the fifth of gin out of his coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over half a pint. He decided to kill it. It wouldn’t do to go home with a bottle sticking out of his pocket. He stood there in the night wind, sipping at it, and watching the reddish moon come up in the east. The moon looked as phoney as the setting sun.

He straightened in sudden determination. It had to be sometime. Get it over with, get it over with now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped through, and closed it firmly behind him. He retrieved his bag, and waded quietly through the tall grass until he reached the hedge which divided an area of sickly peach trees from the field. He got over the hedge somehow, and started through the trees toward the house. He stumbled over some old boards, and they clattered.

“Shhh!” he hissed, and moved on.

The dogs were barking angrily, and he heard a screen door slam. He stopped.

“Ho there!” a male voice called experimentally from the house.

One of Marie’s brothers. Hogey stood frozen in the shadow of a peach tree, waiting.

“Anybody out there?” the man called again.

Hogey waited, then heard the man muttering, “Sic ’im, boy, sic ’im.”

The hound’s bark became eager. The animal came chasing down the slope, and stopped ten feet away to crouch and bark frantically at the shadow in the gloom. He knew the dog.

“Hooky!” he whispered. “Hooky boy⁠—here!”

The dog stopped barking, sniffed, trotted closer, and went “Rrrooff!” Then he started sniffing suspiciously again.

“Easy, Hooky, here boy!” he whispered.

The dog came forward silently, sniffed his hand, and whined in recognition. Then he trotted around Hogey, panting doggy affection and dancing an invitation to romp. The man whistled from the porch. The dog froze, then trotted quickly back up the slope.

“Nothing, eh, Hooky?” the man on the porch said. “Chasin’ armadillos again, eh?”

The screen door slammed again, and the porch light went out. Hogey stood there staring, unable to think. Somewhere beyond the window lights were⁠—his woman, his son.

What the hell was a tumbler doing with a woman and a son?

After perhaps a minute, he stepped forward again. He tripped over a shovel, and his foot plunged into something that went squelch and swallowed the foot past the ankle. He fell forward into a heap of sand, and his foot went deeper into the sloppy wetness.

He lay there with his stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud⁠—sticky sandy mud.

The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt better.

The stars were swimming over him, dancing crazily, and the mud cooled his feet, and the sand was soft behind him. He saw a rocket go up on a tail of flame from the station, and waited for the sound of its blast, but he was already asleep when it came.

It was far past midnight when he became conscious of the dog licking wetly at his ear and cheek. He pushed the animal away with a low curse and mopped at the side of his face. He stirred, and groaned. His feet were burning up! He tried to pull them toward him, but they wouldn’t budge. There was something wrong with his legs.

For an instant he stared wildly around in the night. Then he remembered where he was, closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened them again, the moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete mixer⁠—well, it added up.

He gripped his ankles and pulled, but his feet wouldn’t budge. In sudden terror, he tried to stand up, but his ankles were clutched by the concrete too, and he fell back in the sand with a low moan. He lay still for several minutes, considering carefully.

He pulled at his left foot. It was locked in a vise. He tugged even more desperately at his right foot. It was equally immovable.

He sat up with a whimper and clawed at the rough concrete until his nails tore and his fingertips bled. The surface still felt damp, but it had hardened while he slept.

He sat there stunned until Hooky began licking at his scuffed fingers. He shouldered the dog away, and dug his hands into the sand-pile to stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at his face, panting love.

“Get away!” he croaked savagely.

The dog whined softly, trotted a short distance away, circled, and came back to crouch down in the sand directly before Hogey, inching forward experimentally.

Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry sand and cursed between his teeth, while his eyes wandered over the sky. They came to rest on the sliver of light⁠—the space station⁠—rising in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless where the gang was⁠—Nichols and Guerrera and Lavrenti and Fats. And he wasn’t forgetting Keesey, the rookie who’d replaced him.

Keesey would have a rough time for a while⁠—rough as a cob. The pit was no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell, with it. Everything. The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks and nightmare shapes⁠—all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide that bore it.

Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you months to teach your body that all ways were down and that the pit was bottomless.

He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to listen.

It was a baby crying.

It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him where he lived, and he began jerking frantically at his encased feet and sobbing low in his throat. They’d hear him if he kept that up. He stopped and covered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the infant’s cry had ceased.

Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a disease, and he had it.

“Help!” he cried out suddenly. “I’m stuck! Help me, help me!”

He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fighting the relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he stopped.

The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant’s wail came on the breeze.

Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up⁠ ⁠…

But that was no good. It wasn’t the kid’s fault. It wasn’t Marie’s fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn’t their fault either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was an accident, but that didn’t change anything. Not a thing in the world. It remained a tragedy.

A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do? Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And when a man came down from a year’s hitch, what was he going to do? Live in a lonely shack and read books for kicks? Because you were a man, you sought out a woman. And because she was a woman, she got a kid, and that was the end of it. It was nobody’s fault, nobody’s at all.

He stared at the red eye of Mars low in the southwest. They were running out there now, and next year he would have been on the long long run⁠ ⁠…

But there was no use thinking about it. Next year and the years after belonged to little Hogey.

He sat there with his feet locked in the solid concrete of the footing, staring out into Big Bottomless while his son’s cry came from the house and the Hauptman menfolk came wading through the tall grass in search of someone who had cried out. His feet were stuck tight, and he wouldn’t ever get them out. He was sobbing softly when they found him.