The Third Expedition by Ray Bradbury (with thoughts on the tunnel of light)

Imagine that you died. And there, as you are leaving your body, you are welcomed with long dead friends, and relatives. They welcome you, and it is a joyous time. They take you by the hand and lead you towards the bright tunnel of light.

Would you go with them?

This is a story that ponders that question.

…

Without a doubt one of the Bradbury stories that has made the biggest impression on me. It’s about strategy.

And horror.

The story is taken from Bradbury’s amazing The Martian Chronicles, a collection of short stories strung together to tell the story of what happens when human beings try to colonize Mars.

In this particular tale, an expedition from Earth to Mars encounters a town that seems eerily, yet comfortingly, familiar to them. It’s even populated by long-lost relatives and family.

But, of course, it doesn’t have a happy ending.

The Third Expedition by Ray Bradbury

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and

the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent

gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and

men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence,

fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, induding a captain.

The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands

up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great

flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the

_third_ voyage to Mars!

Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the

upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty

and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like

a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown

itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men

within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well

again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the

remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and

their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars

swing up under them.

“Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.

“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.

“Well,” said Captain John Black.

The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon

this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood

a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all

covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and

pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were

hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the

porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and

forth, in a little breeze. At the summit of the house was a

cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof!

Through the front window you could see a piece of music

titled “Beautiful Ohio” sitting on the music rest.

Around the rocket in four directions spread the little

town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were

white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in

the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church

steeples with golden bells silent in them.

The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked

at one another and then they looked out again. They held to

each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed,

Their faces grew pale.

“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with

his numb fingers. “I’ll be damned.”

“It just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.

“Lord,” said Captain John Black.

There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere

is thin for breathing. But there’s enough oxygen. It’s safe.”

“Then we’ll go out,” said Lustig.

“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “How do we know what

this is?”

“It’s a small town with thin but breathable air in it,

sir.”

“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said

Hinkston, the archaeologist “Incredible. It can’t be, but it

_is_.”

Captain John Black looked at him idly. “Do you think that

the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate

and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”

Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there.

The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has

only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the

thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if

it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass

windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument

that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if

you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it

logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece

of music titled, strangely enough, ‘Beautiful Ohio’? All of

which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!”

“Captain Williams, of course!” cried Hinkston,

“What?”

“Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel

York and his partner. That would explain it!”

“That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we’ve

been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day

it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams

and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after

their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased

at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after

that they’d have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition

was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed

here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are

still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant

Martian race, have built such a town as this and _aged_ it in

so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it’s been

standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on

the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them!

No, this isn’t York’s work or Williams’. It’s something else.

I don’t like it. And I’m not leaving the ship until I know what

it is.”

“For that matter,” said Lustig, nodding, “Williams and his

men, as well as York, landed on the _opposite_ side of Mars.

We were very careful to land on _this_ side.”

“An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe

of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions

to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such

a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land

that Williams and York never saw.”

“Damn it,” said Hinkston, “I want to get out into this

town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar

thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our

sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest

psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!”

“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain John Black.

“It may be, sir, that we’re looking upon a phenomenon

that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence

of God, sir.”

“There are many people who are of good faith without such

proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could

not occur without divine intervention. The _detail_. It fills

me with such feelings that I don’t know whether to laugh or

cry.”

“Do neither, then, until we know what we’re up against.”

“Up against?” Lustig broke in. “Against nothing, Captain.

It’s a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one

I was born in. I like the looks of it.”

“When were you born, Lustig?”

“Nineteen-fifty, sir.”

“And you, Hinkston?”

“Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks

like home to me.”

“Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I’m

just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through

the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years,

knows how to make _some_ old men young again, here I am on

Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely

more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and

cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens

me. It’s too _much_ like Green Bluff.” He turned to the

radioman. “Radio Earth. Tell them we’ve landed. That’s all.

Tell them we’ll radio a full report tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face

that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like

the face of a man in his fortieth year. “Tell you what we’ll

do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston’ll look the town over. The

other men’ll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the

hell out. A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship.

If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket.

That’s Captain Wilder’s rocket, I think, due to be ready to

take off next Christmas. if there’s something hostile about

Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed.”

“So are we. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”

“Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on,

Lustig, Hinkston.”

The three men walked together down through the levels of

the ship.

It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming

apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted

down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom

scent drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town someone

was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and

went, softly, drowsily. The song was “Beautiful Dreamer.”

Somewhere else a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing

out a record of “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,” sung by Harry

Lauder.

The three men stood outside the ship. They sucked and

gasped at the thin, thin air and moved slowly so as not to

tire themselves.

Now the phonograph record being played was:

“_Oh, give me a June night

The moonlight and you_ . . .”

Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.

The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of

water ran through the cool caverns and tree shadings of a

ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by,

bumping.

“Sir,” said Samuel Hinkston, “it must be, it _has_ to be,

that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the first

World War!”

“No.”

“How else can you explain these houses, the iron deer,

the pianos, the music?” Hinkston took the captain’s elbow

persuasively and looked into the captain’s face. “Say that

there were people in the year 1905 who hated war and got

together with some scientists in secret and built a rocket and

came out here to Mars–”

“No, no, Hinkston.”

“Why not? The world was a different world in 1905; they

could have kept it a secret much more easily.”

“But a complex thing like a rocket, no, you couldn’t keep

it secret.”

“And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses

they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought

the culture with them.”

“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the

captain.

“In peace and quiet, yes. Maybe they made a few trips,

enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and

then stopped for fear of being discovered. That’s why this town

seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing, myself, older than

the year 1927, do you? Or maybe, sir, rocket travel is older

than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world

centuries ago and was kept secret by the small number of men

who came to Mars with only occasional visits to Earth over

the centuries.”

“You make it sound almost reasonable.”

“It has to be. We’ve the proof here before us; all we have

to do is find some people and verify it.”

Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green

grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself,

Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had

been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the

buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and

the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

They set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from

under the boards as they walked to the screen door. Inside they

could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a

crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on

one wall over a comfortable Morris chair. The house smelled

old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could

hear the tinkle of ice in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant

kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing

a cold lunch. Someone was humming under her breath, high and

sweet.

Captain John Black rang the bell.

Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and

a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in a sort of

dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black uncertainly. “But

we’re looking for–that is, could you help us–” He stopped.

She looked out at him with dark, wondering eyes.

“If you’re selling something–” she began.

“No, wait!” he cried. “What town is this?”

She looked him up and down. “What do you mean, what town

is it? How could you be in a town and not know the name?”

The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady

apple tree. “We’re strangers here. We want to know how this

town got here and how you got here.”

“Are you census takers?”

“No.”

“Everyone knows,” she said, “this town was built in 1868.

Is this a game?”

“No, not a game!” cried the captain. “We’re from Earth.”

“Out of the _ground_, do you mean?” she wondered.

“No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship. And

we’ve landed here on the fourth planet, Mars–”

“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing

a child, “is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of

America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a

place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away

now. Goodby.”

She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through

the beaded curtains.

The three men looked at one another.

“Let’s knock the screen door in,” said Lustig.

“We can’t do that. This is private property. Good God!”

They went to sit down on the porch step.

“Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we

got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident

came back and landed on Earth?”

“How could we have done that?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh God, let me think.”

Hinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way.

Our chronometers said so many miles. We went past the Moon and

out into space, and here we are. I’m _positive_ we’re on Mars.”

Lustig said, “But suppose, by accident, in space, in time,

we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is

thirty or forty years ago.”

“Oh, go away, Lustig!”

Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into

the cool dim rooms: “What year is this?”

“Nineteen twenty-six, of course,” said the lady, sitting

in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.

“Did you hear that?” Lustig turned wildly to the others.

“Nineteen twenty-six! We _have_ gone back in time! This _is_

Earth!”

Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and

terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred

fitfully on their knees. The captain said, “I didn’t ask for

a thing like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a

thing like this happen? I wish we’d brought Einstein with us.”

“Will anyone in this town believe us?” said Hinkston. “Are

we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t

we just take off and go home?”

“No. Not until we try another house.”

They walked three houses down to a little white cottage

under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can be,” said

the captain. “And I don’t believe we’ve put our finger on it

yet. Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that

rocket travel occurred years ago? And when the Earth people

lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for

Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged

psychosis. Then threatened insanity. What would you do as

a psychiatrist if faced with such a problem?”

Hinkston thought “Well, I think I’d rearrange the

civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each

day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every

road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I’d do so. Then by

some vast crowd hypnosis I’d convince everyone in a town this

size that this really _was_ Earth, not Mars at all.”

“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track

now. That woman in that house back there just _thinks_ she’s

living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others

in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment

in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay eyes on in your

life.”

“That’s _it_, sir!” cried Lustig.

“Right!” said Hinkston.

“Well.” The captain sighed. “Now we’ve got somewhere. I

feel better. It’s all a bit more logical. That talk about time

and going back and forth and traveling through time turns

my stomach upside down. But _this_ way–” The captain smiled.

“Well, well, it looks as if we’ll be fairly popular here.”

“Or will we?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims,

these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be

too happy to see us. Maybe they’ll try to drive us out or kill

us.”

“We have superior weapons. This next house now. Up we go.”

But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped

and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming

afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.

“What is it, Lustig?”

“Oh, sir, _sir_, what I _see_–” said Lustig, and he began

to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and shaking, and his face

was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if at

any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked

down the street and began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling,

picking himself up, and running on. “Look, look!”

“Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.

Now Lustig was running swiftly, shouting. He turned into

a yard halfway down the shady street and leaped up upon the

porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof.

He was beating at the door, hollering and crying, when

Hinkston and the captain ran up behind him. They were all

gasping and wheezing, exhausted from their run in the thin

air. “Grandma! Grandpa!” cried Lustig.

Two old people stood in the doorway.

“David!” their voices piped, and they rushed out to

embrace and pat him on the back and move around him. “David,

oh, David, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy; how

big you are, boy. Oh, David boy, how are you?”

“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed David Lustig. “You look fine,

fine!” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them,

cried on them, held them out again, blinking at the little

old people. The sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass

was green, the screen door stood wide.

“Come in, boy, come in. There’s iced tea for you, fresh,

lots of it!”

“I’ve got friends here.” Lustig turned and waved at the

captain and Hinkston frantically, laughing. “Captain, come on

up.”

“Howdy,” said the old people. “Come in. Any friends of

David’s are our friends too. Don’t stand there!”

In the living room of the old house it was cool, and

a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one

corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls

filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern, and

iced tea in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue.

“Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to

her porcelain teeth.

“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.

“Ever since we died,” she said tartly.

“Ever since you what?” Captain John Black set down his

glass.

“Oh yes.” Lustig nodded. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”

“And you sit there calmly!” shouted the captain.

“Tush.” The old woman winked glitteringly. “Who are you

to question what happens? Here we are. What’s life, anyway? Who

does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive

again, and no questions asked. A second chance.” She toddled

over and held out her thin wrist. “Feel.” The captain felt.

“Solid, ain’t it?” she asked. He nodded. “Well, then,” she

said triumphantly, “why go around questioning?”

“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never

thought we’d find a thing like this on Mars.”

“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every

planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”

“Is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.

“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance.

Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on

Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from.

How do we know there wasn’t _another_ before _that_ one?”

“A good question,” said the captain.

Lustig kept smiling at his grandparents. “Gosh, it’s good

to see you. Gosh, it’s good.”

The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in

a casual fashion. “We’ve got to be going. Thank you for the

drinks.”

“You’ll be back, of course,” said the old people. “For

supper tonight?”

“We’ll try to make it, thanks. There’s so much to be done.

My men are waiting for me back at the rocket and–”

He stopped. He looked toward the door, startled.

Far away in the sunlight there was a sound of voices,

a shouting and a great hello.

“What’s that?” asked Hinkston,

“We’ll soon find out.” And Captain John Black was out the

front door abruptly, running across the green lawn into the

street of the Martian town.

He stood looking at the rocket. The ports were open and

his crew was streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of

people had gathered, and in and through and among these people

the members of the crew were hurrying, talking, laughing,

shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The

rocket lay empty and abandoned.

A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay

tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of

drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair

jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hooray!” Fat men

passed around ten-cent cigars. The town mayor made a speech.

Then each member of the crew, with a mother on one arm, a

father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street

into little cottages or big mansions.

“Stop!” cried Captain Black.

The doors slammed shut.

The heat rose in the clear spring sky, and all was silent.

The brass band banged off around a corner, leaving the rocket

to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight

“Abandoned!” said the captain. “They abandoned the ship,

they did! I’ll have their skins, by God! They had orders!”

“Sir,” said Lustig, “don’t be too hard on them. Those were

all old relatives and friends.”

“That’s no exuse!”

“Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces

outside the ship!”

“They had their orders, damn it!”

“But how would you have felt, Captain?”

“I would have obeyed orders–” The captain’s mouth

remained open.

Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall,

smiling, eyes amazingly clear and blue, came a young man of

some twenty-six years. “John!” the man called out, and broke

into a trot.

“What?” Captain John Black swayed.

“John, you old son of a bitch!”

The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on

the back.

“It’s you,” said Captain Black.

“Of course, who’d you _think_ it was?”

“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston,

holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother Edward. Ed,

meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston! My brother!”

They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then

finally embraced.

“Ed!”

“John, you bum, you!”

“You’re looking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what _is_ this? You

haven’t changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you

were twenty-six and I was nineteen. Good God, so many years

ago, and here you are and, Lord, what goes on?”

“Mom’s waiting,” said Edward Black, grinning.

“Mom?”

“And Dad too.”

“Dad?” The captain almost fell as if he had been hit by

a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and without co.ordination.

“Mom and Dad alive? Where?”

“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.”

“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amaze.

“Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”

Hinkston was gone. He had seen his own house down the

street and was running for it. Lustig was laughing. “You

see, Captain, what happened to everyone on the rocket? They

couldn’t help themselves.”

“Yes. Yes.” The captain shut his eyes. “When I open my

eyes you’ll be gone.” He blinked. “You’re still there. God, Ed,

but you look _fine!_”

“Come on, lunch’s waiting. I told Mom.”

Lustig said, “Sir, I’ll be with my grandfolks if you need

me.”

“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”

Edward seized his arm and marched him. “There’s the

house. Remember it?”

“Hell! Bet I can beat you to the front porch!”

They ran. The trees roared over Captain Black’s head; the

earth roared under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward

Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw

the house rush forward, the screen door swing wide. “Beat you!”

cried Edward. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re

still young. But then, you _always_ beat me, I remember!”

In the doorway, Mom, pink, plump, and bright. Behind

her, pepper-gray, Dad, his pipe in his hand.

“Mom, Dad!”

He ran up the steps like a child to meet them.

It was a fine long afternoon. They finished a late lunch

and they sat in the parlor and he told them all about his

rocket and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just

the same and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted

it thoughtfully in his old fashion. There was a big turkey

dinner at night and time flowing on. When the drumsticks were

sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain

leaned back and exhaled his deep satisfaction, Night was in all

the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of

pink light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down

the street came sounds of music, pianos playing, doors slammng.

Mom put a record on the victrola, and she and Captain John

Black had a dance. She was wearing the same perfume he

remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in

the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they

danced lightly to the music. “It’s not every day,” she said,

“you get a second chance to live.”

“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be

in my rocket, in space, and all this will be gone.”

“No, don’t think that,” she cried softly. “Don’t question.

God’s good to us. Let’s be happy.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

The record ended in a circular hissing.

“You’re tired, Son.” Dad pointed with his pipe. “Your

old bedroom’s waiting for you, brass bed and all.”

“But I should report my men in.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No, none at

all. They’re all eating or in bed. A good night’s sleep won’t

hurt them.”

“Good night, Son.” Mom kissed his cheek. “It’s good to

have you home.”

“It’s good to _be_ home.”

He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books

and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking

with Edward. Edward pushed a door open, and there was the

yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college and

a very musty raccoon coat which he stroked with muted

affection. “It’s too much,” said the captain. “I’m numb and

I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been

out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an

umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”

Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the

pillows. He slid the window up and let the night-blooming

jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant

dancing and whispering.

“So this is Mars,” said the captain, undressing.

“This is it.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves,

drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders

and the good muscular neck.

The lights were out; they were in bed, side by side, as in

the days how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was

flourished by the scent of jasmine pushing the lace curtains

out upon the dark air of the room. Among the trees, upon a

lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it

was playing softly, “Always.”

The thought of Marilyn came to his mind.

“Is Marilyn here?”

His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from

the window, waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town.

But she’ll be here in the morning.”

The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Marilyn very

much.”

The room was square and quiet except for their breathing.

“Good night, Ed.”

A pause. “Good night, John.”

He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the

first time the stress of the day was moved aside; he could

think logically now, It had all been emotion. The bands

playing, the familiar faces. But now . . .

How? he wondered. How was all this made? And why? For

what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention?

Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and

why and what for?

He considered the various theories advanced in the first

heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds

of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind,

turning, throwing out dull flashes of light. Mom. Dad. Edward.

Mars. Earth. Mars. Martians.

Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians?

Or had this always been the way it was today?

Martians. He repeated the word idly, inwardly.

He laughed out loud almost. He had the most ridiculous

theory quite suddenly. It gave him a kind of chill. It was

really nothing to consider, of course. Highly improbable.

Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.

But, he thought, just _suppose_ . . . Just suppose, now,

that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship

coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us, Suppose, now,

just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us,

as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a

very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well,

what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against

Earth Men with atomic weapons?

The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory,

and imagination.

Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed

not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given

substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians,

thought Captain John Black. Suppose these houses are really

some _other_ shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my

desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my

old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions.

What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father

as bait?

And this town, so old, from the year 1926, long before

_any_ of my men were born. From a year when I was six years old

and there _were_ records of Harry Lauder, and Maxfield Parrish

paintings _still_ hanging, and bead curtains, and “Beautiful

Ohio,” and turn-of-the-century architecture. What if the

Martians took the memories of a town _exclusively_ from _my_

mind? They say childhood memories are the clearest. And after

they built the town from my mind, they populated it with

the most-loved people from all the minds of the people on

the rocket!

And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are

not my mother and father at all, But two Martians, incredibly

brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming

hypnosis all of the time.

And that brass band today? What a startlingly wonderful

plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then Hinkston, then

gather a crowd; and all the men in the rocket, seeing mothers,

aunts, uncles, sweethearts, dead ten, twenty wears ago,

naturally, disregarding orders, rush out and abandon ship. What

more natural? What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A

man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is soddenly

brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And here we all

are tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no

weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight,

empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover

that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the

Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during

the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change

form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a terrible thing,

a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in

bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other

houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers

suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to

the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. . . .

His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was

cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very

afraid.

He lifted himself in bed and listened. The night was very

quiet The music had stopped. The wind had died. His brother

lay sleeping beside him.

Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back. He

slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when

his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”

“What?”

His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you

think you’re going?”

“For a drink of water.”

“But you’re not thirsty.”

“Yes, yes, I am.”

“No, you’re not.”

Captain John Black broke and ran across the room. He

screamed. He screamed twice.

He never reached the door.

In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge.

From every house in the street came little solemn processions

bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping,

came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and

uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were

new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. Sixteen

holes in all, and sixteen tombstones.

The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes

looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.

Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward,

and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face

into something else.

Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their

faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a

hot day.

The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about “the

unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the

night–”

Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.

The brass band, playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,”

marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day

off.

The End

Conclusion

And this is only the beginning.

Who knows what greatness, and strange mysteries lie in the future ahead of you?

Do you want more?

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Ray Bradbury

Articles & Links

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A collection of really eye-popping articles and stories from 1950s and 60s Men’s pulp magazines

Ah, they don’t write stories like they used to.

I once read an article. It’s maybe six years ago that said that SJW types were scouring old used bookstores for “sexist” and “racist” books. Buying them up in huge lots and burning them, and generally trashing them outright.

I don’t know if it was true or not.

I certainly hope not.

What I do know is that my brother told me that when he visits the used books stores, he simply cannot find science fiction anthologies or collections of short stories anywhere. He said that he visited perhaps fifteen stores in the Colorado region and none could be had.

It would be a shame to see my boyhood erased simply becuase some bight-eyed utopian wanted to make the world better though tyranny.

Sigh.

But that’s the United States today. The internet is a corporate-technologist controlled dictatorship-based white-board. Things pop up, and then are erased as new narratives take hold, develop, conduct their purposes and then die.

Then new narratives materialize.

Now, it’s Ukraine. It was Coronavirus. Before that it was China. Before that was 5G radiation, before that was…

I need a beer.

By the way. You do know that beer goes great with steaks, meats, potatoes, and all sort of fine delicious and tasty foods. How about a fine, fine pot roast, eh?

2022 03 15 11 53 — Pot roast. Needs some thick gravy and some fine icy cold beer.

It’s an old clichéd joke to say you read adult magazines for the articles. However, if you’re talking about men’s mags from the 1950s and 60s, there might actually be some truth in your statement.

Magazines like Playboy, Adam, Jem, and Rogue often featured genuinely well-written articles and short fiction.

Getting published in a men’s magazine wasn’t the shameful smudge on an author’s reputation as it is today – in fact, it was a common stepping stone for soon-to-be-famous authors.

Like Ray Bradbury.

But it isn’t just the stories that deserve respect – it’s the artwork that complimented them. Often sleazy and purposefully outrageous, the illustrations were designed to entice you to read the story in a not-so-subtle way.

Here in this article, we are going to present some most excellent examples. Grab some snacks, pour a large bowl with potato chips, get some nice dip, and start reading.

Oh, and don’t forget a tall frosty glass of beer. Or, if you are like MM, a fine bottle of wine , and share with your beloved pet.

Have fun.

Be with your kitties.

I mean, more like this…

R C.ebdbbc4a191b046a8f43997e9a33c323 — Not shown is a book, magazine, and a beloved pet next to you.

Let’s begin our fun adventure…

They were two drunken lovers having an affair in her bed while her husband was away. But, was he away? Wasn’t that he – respected adviser to the President – they now overheard plotting to kill the man in the White House?

Lured by his smoldering eyes and magnetic personality, adoring women flocked to Rasputin. Peasant girls, prostitutes, princesses – they came, they saw, and they were conquered!

We got home about midnight. Shelia, the sitter, lay fast asleep on the couch. Maria woke her. Then I drove her home… an hour later, she’d been raped and strangled – and I was suspect number one!

Getting Avis pregnant, and other sinful shenanigans, proved that the passionate pastor simply didn’t practice what he preached…. it finally took the electric chair to deliver him from all evil.

As the whistling whip snaked across her back, the young woman writhed in pleasure. For this was the joy that she’d paid to feel and relish.

I could hear Ted’s screams, but I couldn’t get to him, the bull sea lions were surrounding me and the angry sea was at my back…

With a 2,000-horse-soldier combat team, the mad Russian set out to take all Asia for a harem. And he would have made it if he hadn’t touched the man millions call God.

The Sewer rats are the only ones you’ll share your secret with.

The couple’s honeymoon yacht turned into a craft of horrors when it was boarded by a lust-crazed psychopath who butchered anyone who dared invade his private inlet.

Big blondes in dime-store dresses, tender teenagers with eager smiles, they converge in front of fancy bars and good hotels in all the big towns bordering the hill country.

According to one automotive expert, these prestige-heavy imported hot rods are often badly made, unsafe, cash-eating tin cans perfectly designed for carrying you to the morgue.

A wanton, lush-bodied kitten of a blonde, she gave Mike Webster the sweetest, most loving hideout any murderer-on-the-run ever had.

Housemaids, heiresses, coeds and countesses – this brawling blackmailer sampled them all on a 75-year love binge so bawdy his memoirs still can’t be printed…

In life, she was a nymphomaniac with a very high taste in jewels and men. In death, she was Mike Shayne’s fourty-first murder case.

Laos was in flames, and in that bloody, steaming jungle hid a broken and dying pilot guarding a cargo the Reds would give their birthright to get…

In the waning days of world war two, Germany was in a state of utter collapse and chaos.

Angel terror across Dixie… Girl Rage Rampage!

In the grim violence of the Mate Grosso, two lusting men and two equally desire lashed females were stripped of all defenses before the furious onslaught of body-snatching banditoes…

…!

Jack Murphy primed her talents and showed her to the right people, all the while sating his desires on the sensuous blonde’s promise of passionate reward.

Roaring out of the back alleys of Los Angles on their souped-up hogs, four piston-fast “leather jacket looters” and their “desire debs” hatched a plot for the greatest armored truck robbery ever attempted.

…she didn’t even have time to…

A tough yank enforcer, two revenge-hungry nymphs vs. a crazed murder genius.

An Englishman who produced a .30 caliber carbine compact enough to fit in a cigarette pack…

Everyone in the third-floor room tried to laugh off what was happening to the girl on the bed – everyone but her boyfriend and the doctor, who found more in her stomach than just milk and cookies.

…he turned an island into a cross between Fort Knox and the sexiest Siegfried line ever built.

Those oriental Nazi dancing girls were all they were supposed to be… and more.

A murderer at the age of eleven, Ben Hogan led a life of crime and depravity that had no equal outside of Hell.

Blood was dripping from his slavering fangs…

With a bleching sound, the torrent gushed into the street. For tipplers it was a perfect way to die. For others it was an unheard of death.

…his wrist and ankles manacled to a steel bed.

Women, whiskey and dope made the Japanese town of Chitose “the wickedest city in the far east”.

They pumped two bullets into Al Cooke and left him for dead, but he wasn’t ready for the grave yet… not until he could get the laust laugh.

he was determined to even an old score. But the grim climax with the giant tusker was unexpected.

The trappers poured into camp hunting for their week of women…

Murderous females who were armed to the teeth tricked Fred hardin into stopping his car for them. Then, by threatening to slit the throat of his wife on a moment’s notice, forced him to accompany them on a journey through Hell.

To save his mate from a fate worse than death, the incredibly swift cat invaded a camp swarming with professional hunters, ready to kill or be killed if necessary…

Brother Briggs’s 3,300,00 members game kept his desert empire polygamy happy until the day the disciples caught on to the reason behind the leaders 9-1 ratio.

The Reds were bleeding the West of vital defense secrets. And even after a seven-year manhunt, counterintelligence had only one clue – a case of nylon undies.

“Being a Lady of the Night in jolly old London is never easy – but when somebody wants to carve you up, it’s sheer murder”

“He writhed in agony as they tore at his wife’s clothing… Dan’s car was the only weapon which could avenge their heinous crime.”

“Trapped by the mafia’s maniacal sadist, Garry had only one chance to save himself and the woman he loved”….And by the looks of things, Garry had damn well better hurry up!

“Reilly was doomed to a life without women – unless he could force the leprechaun to lift its double-whammy”

Possibly my favorite of all time.

One moment of frenzied passion could destroy his only chance for a perfect future.

“The telephone had killed his wife – and the telephone offered the perfect revenge”

Until he saw with his own eyes, the refused to believe a United Nations report -40,000 girls to be kidnapped this year in Europe and Africa and marched across the Sarah for sale to wealthy Arabian harem owners!

In an age of charm and delicacy, Madame Laramie was a demon incarnate.

The gallows beckoned and even Rand’s woman couldn’t save him from the gambler’s double-cross.

One minute you’re there, the next… poof! you’re ashes. Never a dull moment for drinkers.

Threatened with ultimate degradation, Mira became a slave to the strangest of passions.

The farewell party was so wild, he almost missed the journey…

Parker knew he must kill his wife’s lover… but he had one growing problem…

“Was Marie Antoinette a victim of character assassination, or did she diddle?”

“It was no ordinary shipboard romance. Her bull of a husband was along for the ride. Yet Allen knew he had to have her”

“Telsa had to save the mission from destruction because of Heroq’s passion to remain a Homo sapien”

As this illustration from 1968 demonstrates, artists were free to stylize their work by the late sixties, rather than stick to the somewhat homogeneous look of the mid-century illustrations.

“With five sex-starved wives to satisfy, a man can have a myriad of problems”

“Dollar for dollar, corpse for corpse, Holmes might have become America’s most successful lady killer – if one pretty doll hadn’t talked out of turn and exposed the most shocking mass murder in history”

“There are so many physiological differences between men and women that it is hard to believe they belong in the same species, says this noted psychologist”

The hang-up on the telephone saved him from getting hung up on the couch.

“The night was cold – and so was his wife. All of which led to Pete Landon’s tantalizing adventure.”

“Telling others what a big make out artist you are could very well help you become one”

All the hush-hush planning for the Allied invasion of Europe almost went out the window of a beautiful Hungarian’s bedroom.

“Iona screamed as Peggy stripped for the two men…. only one desperate gamble could stop the crazed convicts”

With a quick slap of the hand, Joe sent the shake-down artist to the floor.

He was a hostage of the Orient’s most notorious fighting brigade – a band of torture-trained females currently terrorizing the border region of Vietnam.

“If sexy strategist Suzanne had been a general, the South might have won the Civil War”

Broom and Board; a Witches tale.

“Hollywood’s a bad influence”… with the sordid Harvey Weinstein stories in the news of late, a very appropriate title. We’ll end here. Until next time.

Fun huh?

Yes. It was.

Back in the day, these magazines were everywhere. Young guys like myself would take our shoe-shine box and earn a few quarters spit-shing shoes and then use the money for candy and other treats. I used to happily get those comic books that were on this wire revolving display.

OIP C.qWuaUWJrSeL7I7qHXweviwHaOM — Comic book heaven.

This was at the local corner drugstore.

I would ride my bike there, and just leave it outside. There was no crime. And even if someone stole it, the community would easily track down who stole it and bring it back. I’d park my banana-seat, long handlebars, Schwinn bicycle outside and go in. The mesh screen door would slam behind me with this little tiny brass bell ringing as I entered.

At that store was a selection of scant housewares, household good, woman’s cosmetics, and a pharmacy in the back. They always had this counter at the side where you could get a simple hamburger platter, eggs and toast, a milkshake or some other delicious treat. Though, as a boy who only had coins, I would get a soda out of the machine outside.

These small town businesses have largely disappeared in America. The small towns are deserted. Big mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and other enormous “box stores” pretty much devistated the smaller communities. Which is a real shame.

A real shame.

a lunch counter in a five and dime store — A lunch counter in a five and dime store.

Oh, I’ll bet that you are all wonderign what these strange businesses might look like. Well, they came in many different sizes and shapes. Some were just standard brick storefronts, while others were standalone oeprations.

Here’s a very “modern” small-town drugstore.

2022 03 15 15 22 — Small town drugstore.

And what’s more, there were many, many other establishments in the small towns throughout the United States.

Here’s The Krystal. It’s a “fast food” hamburger “joint” that popped up and existed before McDonald’s acted like “The Borg” and assimulated all of them.

And there were all sorts of establishments to eat.

Most people, having two hour lunches, would eat and then go home and take a nap before returning back to work. In those days, long lunches with naps were the norm.

Here’s a typical restaurant at lunch time.

My father had a routine that he would have a lunch at the tavern across from the mill where he worked, and on Thursdays, he would mosey over to the Barber Shop for a haircut and trip afterwards.

Those were the days.

When I entered the work force, they were busy removing benefits left and right, eventually asking us to dash for a 15 minute drive through burger, and return back to a “Lunch Meeting”. This continued though the 1990s. Eventually they eliminated technnical and engineering / manufacturing work completely.

It wasn’t profitable, they said.

Conclusion

We have to understand what we lost before we can understand what we need to change.

The United States today is in turmoil. This is at every level. But if you want to simplify everything, it’s really easy. Greed and the search for profits over all has bankrupted the nation. It hollowed it out, and destroyed the population and society in the process.

It will change.

But right now, most people have no idea what they lost, so how are they supposed to regain any true and real freedoms?

I’ll tell you what…

Real freedom is going into a Men’s-only Barber Shop, picking up a “Girlie Magazine” while a baseball game plays in the backgound. You light up a cigarette, and inhale it deeply.

Is it sexist? Yes.

Is it racist? I don’t know.

Is it unhealthy? Probably.

But so what? It’s no ones business except yours alone.

Freedom is absolute.

You either have it or you do not.

Bye Bye America. You were a dream; and ideal that was never truly possible.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

Master Index

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Howard Pyle’s illustrations of Blood-Thirsty Buccaneers and Cut-Throat Marauders

When I was a boy, my father bought me this used hard-cover book.

I was in the bedroom, playing around. He came home from work, and handed me the book. Stuck around a while, and then back downstairs. I way a young boy. Maybe eleven years old.

I loved the illustrations in it. They were well done, beautiful, really. I treasured that book. And I kept it with me for years and years until I was “retired”, and my belongings sold by my “friends” and “family” for what ever profit they could derive from our relationship.

2022 03 11 10 25 1 — *Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates*.

Later, as I got older, I realized what I once had. Sigh.

It’s called life.

Today, we will visit the beautiful illustrations of pirates and buccaneers that so colored my childhood with adventure, treasure and high piracy on the seven seas.

Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone.

Vincent Van Gogh admitted to his brother Theo, he was struck “dumb with admiration” when he saw Howard Pyle’s illustrations in a magazine. Pyle (1853-1911) was the top American illustrator circa 1880-1910. His work made top moolah pulling in five times the going rate or $75 for a double-page spread in Harper’s Bizarre, 1878.

Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone. In modern parlance: his work was cinematic, powerful, and dramatic. If he’d been born a few decades later, Pyle may have been a film director. He used strange angles to look down on battle scenes or cast figures centre frame while mayhem occurred all around. He sketched deserted figures in a landscape which explained the whole narrative in a single frame.

When I, as a boy of perhaps 11 or 12 was given the Book of Pirates by my father, I was enthralled.

The book was a collection of popular pirate stories, which mostly centered around brave non-pirates who crossed paths with an infamous pirate and yet who lived to tell the tale.

Sure, they were very romanticized stories focusing on the more adventurous side of piracy than the true aspect of it (though the sacking and slaughter of entire towns is mentioned, just not in gory detail). But for me, as a young boy, I found it all to be an enjoyable, quick read.

Pyle was born in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents early recognised his prodigious talent for drawing and painting. They encouraged him to focus on developing this talent. He was lucky he got sent to a private school which fostered his genius.

08 HOWARD PYLE KIDD WATCHES PIRATES BURY TREASURE

When he first moved to New York to become a magazine illustrator, he had no idea how to sell himself. He needn’t have worried.

One glance by the editor of Pyle’s artistry pulled in commissions.

He was soon illustrating books like the The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood which created the imagery we are all familiar with today. Or books about knights in shining armour like Men of Iron and Otto of the Silver Hand.

Publishers would hire Pyle knowing no matter how trashy the novel, Pyle’s artwork would make it a hit.

In the 1890s, Pyle, by then married with seven kids, was asked to teach drawing at university.

This led him to set up the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art in 1900. His school launched a whole new generation of artists who shaped the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

As a young boy, when I read the book, what really stood out were the absolutely stunning and beautiful illustrations throughout the book. Looking at them, you could smell the rum, fish and cannon powder and hear the ocean and gun shots.

Pyle’s imagination created a universal template for pirates.

Every book, magazine, and Hollywood film used Pyle’s illustrations of pirates to dress Errol Flynn as Captain Blood or Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.

What is not well know, however, is that once he mastered his work, he turned to teaching others in his technique.

Howard Pyle was an instructor at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) from 1894-1900, and in that time, he taught a generation of celebrated illustrators including, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Frank E. Schoonover, and Violet Oakley.

More than 20 oil paintings will hang in the Paul Peck Gallery, including Howard Pyle’s “Here, Andre! A Spy! (1897)” on display with a variety of works on paper, as well as accompanying artifacts.

A majority of the exhibit will be presented in the Paul Peck Alumni Center, which is a historic Frank Furness designed building itself.

Some of the featured original paintings and drawings decorated American homes during their time period — also gracing the covers of publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post.

“A.J. Drexel founded the Drexel Institute in 1891, and when he died, he made it clear that his vision should be accessible to men and women from all backgrounds, which was unique for a college of that time period,” said Paula Marantz Cohen, Pennoni Honors College dean.

“Pyle’s time at Drexel undoubtedly shaped the field of American Illustration. He was an early parallel advocate of Drexel’s philosophy of ‘learning by doing’ encouraging his students to go out into the world to study their subject matter, an approach reflected in Drexel’s present-day Co-op program.

Not long after Drexel’s founding, Philadelphia’s publishing industry took off — greatly influencing Pyle’s artistic philosophy.

Pyle honored Drexel’s mission of experiential, democratic learning. His influences greatly contributed to illustrative painting and drawing becoming one of the truest forms of applied art.

He taught his students to be practical and commercially focused by observing reality first-hand.

020 HOWARD PYLE DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES 1280x900 1 — 020 HOWARD PYLE DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES 1280×900 1

“Today everyone knows the name Norman Rockwell but few people know the name Howard Pyle, let alone his art or his impact on generations of artists and American illustration,” says Judy Goffman Cutler, co-founder of the National Museum of American Illustration.

After his death from Bright’s disease in 1911, a giant compilation of Pyle’s illustrations of swashbuckling buccaneers was published under the title Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.

It became a go-to-book for Hollywood costumiers and pulp fiction illustrators when conjuring up those daring pirates of the seven seas.

The book that I dedicate this entire article towards is a formula for (almost) every piece of swashbuckling fiction, namely scarred pirate captains, roguish and witty surogates, forced romance and the triumph of the just and lawful citizen whose virtue is rewarded with oh-so-fairly-gained and definitely-not-tainted-by-piracy wealth.

It’s perfect fodder for the young boy in all of us, and yes, you girls too.

Many pirates were women. And I hear that many of them were absolutely ruthless.

I lament that I lost the book to someone who found more pleasure in getting the fifty cents from a used book store from it, than any real value. To others, I suppose it’s just an item to profit from. Not one that held value. For me, the greatest pleasures of this book are the occasional descriptions that place you on a ship or an island, where you can briefly feel yourself bobbing over the swells or smell the brine.

The illustrations in the book are phenomenal, and it reads like you are at the bar or a pub during a rainy day and your friend is recounting a story his grandfather once told him.

Here’s an excerpt from the book…

Then the pirates marched into the town, and what followed may be conceived. It was a holocaust of lust, of passion, and of blood such as even the Spanish West Indies had never seen before. Houses and churches were sacked until nothing was left but the bare walls; men and women were tortured to compel them to disclose where more treasure lay hidden.

Then, having wrenched all that they could from Maracaibo, they entered the lake and descended upon Gibraltar, where the rest of the panic-stricken inhabitants were huddled together in a blind terror.

014 HOWARD PYLE THE TREASURE WAS DIVIDED 1280x871 1 — 014 HOWARD PYLE THE TREASURE WAS DIVIDED 1280×871 1

I will admit that the writing style is old and not easy for all of us used to contemporaneous feeds.

After him came one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of lesser note, who first made a descent upon the isle of Saint Catharine, now Old Providence, which he took, and, with this as a base, made an unsuccessful descent upon Neuva Granada and Cartagena. His name might not have been handed down to us along with others of greater fame had he not been the master of that most apt of pupils, the great Captain Henry Morgan, most famous of all the buccaneers, one time governor of Jamaica, and knighted by King Charles II.

But for a young boy of eleven the stories were rich and ripe of adventure…

The attack of the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce, bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, and again and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and it seemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just at this juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of the buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniards flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many who were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held as prisoners.

With the text and the illustrations, as well as the swash-buckling battles, it was a great escapist adventure for me to live out my boyhood dreams.

As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there and then for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never more at home than in the slaughter of cattle.

Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting and they were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging, dram-drinking, and giving full vent to all the vile and nameless lusts that burned in their hearts like a hell of fire. And now followed the usual sequence of events—rapine, cruelty, and extortion; only this time there was no town to ransom, for Morgan had given orders that it should be destroyed. The torch was set to it, and Panama, one of the greatest cities in the New World, was swept from the face of the earth. Why the deed was done, no man but Morgan could tell. Perhaps it was that all the secret hiding places for treasure might be brought to light; but whatever the reason was, it lay hidden in the breast of the great buccaneer himself. For three weeks Morgan and his men abode in this dreadful place; and they marched away with one hundred and seventy-five beasts of burden loaded with treasures of gold and silver and jewels, besides great quantities of merchandise, and six hundred prisoners held for ransom.

Whatever became of all that vast wealth, and what it amounted to, no man but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was found that there was only two hundred pieces of eight to each man.

The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunes in those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and had no mind to fritter away his time in the West Indies, squeezed dry by buccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a bold stroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.

On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself—two sloops off Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of India, and for a time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain history. But only for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of glory. It was reported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul, laden with treasure and bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy pilgrimage to Mecca (they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the pirates, and after a short resistance had been surrendered, with the damsel, her court, and all the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and gold aboard. It was rumored that the Great Mogul, raging at the insult offered to him through his own flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe out of existence the few English settlements scattered along the coast; whereat the honorable East India Company was in a pretty state of fuss and feathers. Rumor, growing with the telling, has it that Avary is going to marry the Indian princess, willy-nilly, and will turn rajah, and eschew piracy as indecent. As for the treasure itself, there was no end to the extent to which it grew as it passed from mouth to mouth.

And now Blackbeard, following the plan adopted by so many others of his kind, began to cudgel his brains for means to cheat his fellows out of their share of the booty.

At Topsail Inlet he ran his own vessel aground, as though by accident. Hands, the captain of one of the consorts, pretending to come to his assistance, also grounded his sloop. Nothing now remained but for those who were able to get away in the other craft, which was all that was now left of the little fleet. This did Blackbeard with some forty of his favorites. The rest of the pirates were left on the sand spit to await the return of their companions—which never happened.

As for Blackbeard and those who were with him, they were that much richer, for there were so many the fewer pockets to fill. But even yet there were too many to share the booty, in Blackbeard's opinion, and so he marooned a parcel more of them—some eighteen or twenty—upon a naked sand bank, from which they were afterward mercifully rescued by another freebooter who chanced that way—a certain Major Stede Bonnet, of whom more will presently be said. About that time a royal proclamation had been issued offering pardon to all pirates in arms who would surrender to the king's authority before a given date. So up goes Master Blackbeard to the Governor of North Carolina and makes his neck safe by surrendering to the proclamation—albeit he kept tight clutch upon what he had already gained.

It was a glorious thing for our captain, for here were thirteen Yankee crafts at one and the same time. So he took what he wanted, and then sailed away, and it was many a day before Marblehead forgot that visit.

Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloop of war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low was glad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him, as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worse fate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage around the blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken, and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as pretty a bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.

The end of this worthy is lost in the fogs of the past: some say that he died of a yellow fever down in New Orleans; it was not at the end of a hempen cord, more's the pity.

The cheat was kept up until the fruit of mischief was ripe for the picking; then, when the governor and the guards of the castle were lulled into entire security, and when Davis's band was scattered about wherever each man could do the most good, it was out pistol, up cutlass, and death if a finger moved. They tied the soldiers back to back, and the governor to his own armchair, and then rifled wherever it pleased them. After that they sailed away, and though they had not made the fortune they had hoped to glean, it was a good snug round sum that they shared among them.

Their courage growing high with success, they determined to attempt the island of Del Principe—a prosperous Portuguese settlement on the coast. The plan for taking the place was cleverly laid, and would have succeeded, only that a Portuguese negro among the pirate crew turned traitor and carried the news ashore to the governor of the fort. Accordingly, the next day, when Captain Davis came ashore, he found there a good strong guard drawn up as though to honor his coming. But after he and those with him were fairly out of their boat, and well away from the water side, there was a sudden rattle of musketry, a cloud of smoke, and a dull groan or two. Only one man ran out from under that pungent cloud, jumped into the boat, and rowed away; and when it lifted, there lay Captain Davis and his companions all of a heap, like a pile of old clothes.

Capt. Bartholomew Roberts was the particular and especial pupil of Davis, and when that worthy met his death so suddenly and so unexpectedly in the unfortunate manner above narrated, he was chosen unanimously as the captain of the fleet, and he was a worthy pupil of a worthy master. Many were the poor fluttering merchant ducks that this sea hawk swooped upon and struck; and cleanly and cleverly were they plucked before his savage clutch loosened its hold upon them.

Not a word was spoken after they had thus left the shore, and presently they might all have been ghosts, for the silence of the party. Barnaby True was too full of his own thoughts to talk—and serious enough thoughts they were by this time, with crimps to trepan a man at every turn, and press gangs to carry a man off so that he might never be heard of again. As for the others, they did not seem to choose to say anything now that they had him fairly embarked upon their enterprise.

And so the crew pulled on in perfect silence for the best part of an hour, the leader of the expedition directing the course of the boat straight across the harbor, as though toward the mouth of the Rio Cobra River. Indeed, this was their destination, as Barnaby could after a while see, by the low point of land with a great long row of coconut palms upon it (the appearance of which he knew very well), which by and by began to loom up out of the milky dimness of the moonlight. As they approached the river they found the tide was running strong out of it, so that some distance away from the stream it gurgled and rippled alongside the boat as the crew of black men pulled strongly against it. Thus they came up under what was either a point of land or an islet covered with a thick growth of mangrove trees. But still no one spoke a single word as to their destination, or what was the business they had in hand.

The night, now that they were close to the shore, was loud with the noise of running tide-water, and the air was heavy with the smell of mud and marsh, and over all the whiteness of the moonlight, with a few stars pricking out here and there in the sky; and all so strange and silent and mysterious that Barnaby could not divest himself of the feeling that it was all a dream.

So, the rowers bending to the oars, the boat came slowly around from under the clump of mangrove bushes and out into the open water again.

There he lay for I know not how long, staring into the darkness, until by and by, in spite of his suffering and his despair, he dozed off into a loose sleep, that was more like waking than sleep, being possessed continually by the most vivid and distasteful dreams, from which he would awaken only to doze off and to dream again.

It was from the midst of one of these extravagant dreams that he was suddenly aroused by the noise of a pistol shot, and then the noise of another and another, and then a great bump and a grinding jar, and then the sound of many footsteps running across the deck and down into the great cabin. Then came a tremendous uproar of voices in the great cabin, the struggling as of men's bodies being tossed about, striking violently against the partitions and bulkheads. At the same instant arose a screaming of women's voices, and one voice, and that Sir John Malyoe's, crying out as in the greatest extremity: "You villains! You damned villains!" and with the sudden detonation of a pistol fired into the close space of the great cabin.

Barnaby was out in the middle of his cabin in a moment, and taking only time enough to snatch down one of the pistols that hung at the head of his berth, flung out into the great cabin, to find it as black as night, the lantern slung there having been either blown out or dashed out into darkness. The prodigiously dark space was full of uproar, the hubbub and confusion pierced through and through by that keen sound of women's voices screaming, one in the cabin and the other in the stateroom beyond. Almost immediately Barnaby pitched headlong over two or three struggling men scuffling together upon the deck, falling with a great clatter and the loss of his pistol, which, however, he regained almost immediately.

What all the uproar meant he could not tell, but he presently heard Captain Manly's voice from somewhere suddenly calling out, "You bloody pirate, would you choke me to death?" wherewith some notion of what had happened came to him like a flash, and that they had been attacked in the night by pirates.

The vessel in which they sailed was a brigantine of good size and build, but manned by a considerable crew, the most strange and outlandish in their appearance that Barnaby had ever beheld—some white, some yellow, some black, and all tricked out with gay colors, and gold earrings in their ears, and some with great long mustachios, and others with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, and all talking a language together of which Barnaby True could understand not a single word, but which might have been Portuguese from one or two phrases he caught. Nor did this strange, mysterious crew, of God knows what sort of men, seem to pay any attention whatever to Barnaby or to the young lady. They might now and then have looked at him and her out of the corners of their yellow eyes, but that was all; otherwise they were indeed like the creatures of a nightmare dream. Only he who was the captain of this outlandish crew would maybe speak to Barnaby a few words as to the weather or what not when he would come down into the saloon to mix a glass of grog or to light a pipe of tobacco, and then to go on deck again about his business. Otherwise our hero and the young lady were left to themselves, to do as they pleased, with no one to interfere with them.

As for her, she at no time showed any great sign of terror or of fear, only for a little while was singularly numb and quiet, as though dazed with what had happened to her. Indeed, methinks that wild beast, her grandfather, had so crushed her spirit by his tyranny and his violence that nothing that happened to her might seem sharp and keen, as it does to others of an ordinary sort.

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The Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls

I am more than a bit “burnt out” on all the Geo-political bullshit. When I read an article about “containing China”, and how “America is roaring back” I just exit the browser tab. I’ve have enough. I am “toast”.

America is so full-on crazy right now, and they treat us “citizens” as slaves, and dumbed down nincompoops. It’s just an insult to see what constitutes “news” these days.

Instead, what I want to do do is relive a simpler time when I was a boy. And for me, that meant chilling out with my dog, and my cat in my tree house. It meant riding all over town and going on “hikes” and all-day-long “bike rides” and exploring old abandoned bridges, trestles, tunnels, and long abandoned rural homes. It meant lazying around eating home-made sandwiches, and sprawling out upon the couch as I read one of my hundreds of boyhood paperback books.

And one of the books that I loved then, and still love today, is the “Mad Scientist’s Club” series of short stories.

I still remember the book fair as one of the highlights of my elementary school year. For a half hour or so the teacher would take us down the long hall to the multipurpose room. I lived in rural Western Pennsylvania, and my school was too small to have a separate gym. Though it did have a basement cafeteria and a library on the nearby High School. There, in the gym where table after table had been set up with stacks of books arranged by interest and age level.

I loved books as a kid and I always looked forward to the event.

As a boy, I used to hang out in the tree house with my cat and read. But other times my friends would come up and we would read comic books together, and do other things that kids are forbidden to do.

Some of the books I purchased there would shape my reading habits for the rest of my life. I still remember taking the two dollars my mom gave me for the fair and investing it in Chariots of the Gods. It was astounding to me, and I found it impossible to put down.

Since then I have collected a small mountain of paperbacks. With science fiction and history being my favorites. I also had some war literature, some “how to” books, and Marmaduke comics paperbacks.

Another book fair introduced me to yet another author: Bertrand R. Brinley.

Few of you will recognize his name, though some will fondly remember series he authored: The Mad Scientists’ Club (referred to as MSC among fans).

His initial work consisted of two volumes of short stories and a novel. A second novel written by Brinley but not really published until after his death completes the set. In my opinion his stories rank as one of the best young people’s reading series ever created.

I mean…

…the BEST.

Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a closer look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.

His mother and father greeted the tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them.

That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.

It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artists conception" of the thing he'd seen. It was gruesome-looking -- something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.

It was the artists' sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is First Vice President and also Chief of Research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with the gag -- especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper ...

Bertrand R. Brinley

Bertrand Brinley was born in Hudson, New York, in 1917. As a child he moved with his family from place to place, eventually living in West Newbury, Massachusetts as a teenager where he graduated from the local high school.

West Newbury, Massachusetts. Small town America.

He worked at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in California as a systems analyst during the early years of World War II and joined the army in 1944. His tour with the army allowed him to see much of the world.

He left the army for a short time, then reentered it during the Korean War.

Much of his work with the army involved public relations and in the late 50’s, right after the Sputnik launch, he was put in charge of a program to instruct amateur rocketeers in safety.

This lead to his first book published in 1960, Rocket Manual for Amateurs.

This book taught young boys, and maybe High School teenagers, how to make their own rockets from scratch. Not just the shape; nose cones, and fins, but also how to make solid rocket propellant motors, firing systems, and parachute escape and retrieval devices.

Sigh.

You would never see that today.

This is ancient history – even to me – but the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 sent the United States into a crisis.

The successful orbiting of a satellite by America’s rival after the failure of several of our own rockets created the impression of a scientific gap between the two countries.

In 1958 the U.S. would orbit its own satellite, Vanguard, but by then the idea that America was behind the USSR in science and technology was firmly planted in the public’s mind.

To close this supposed “gap,” money was poured into education for the next decade or so. Not just funding for schools, and extra courses, but real STEM courses for everyone.

Everyone, all over America, were training to be engineers, designers, and scientists.

The introduction of new curriculum – such as the so-called New Math designed to promote engineering and science-was common. While it is doubtful that New Math really turned ten-year-olds into rocket engineers, it is indisputable that these events had Americans thinking about science and technology.

Elementary textbooks for fourth through six grade doesn’t resemble anything being taught in America today.

It was in this atmosphere that Brinley conceived his stories.

In 1961 the first of Brinley’s tales was published in Boy’s Life. Boy’s Life was, and remains, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts.

The story, The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake, told of a group of small-town teenagers whose genius for technology gets them both into and out of trouble when they build a fake sea serpent.

The story of the club was continued in two more stories that year in Boy’s Life. In 1965 the first seven of the short stories were gathered into book form and published under the title The Mad Scientists Club. It was a paperback copy of this I came across and purchased at a book fair several years later.

The crew in their tree-house. Plotting and scheming.

To say that I liked this book would be quite an understatement.

I read the seven tales contained in it over and over again.

Each, while involving the same characters and setting, were very different and engaging.

My personal favorite is The Secret of the Old Cannon, where the club probes the mystery of what is in the breech of a giant civil war cannon in the local park.

Mammoth Falls

A strange sea monster appears on the lake...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen. 

Watch out as the Mad Scientists turn Mammoth Falls upside down! 

Take seven, lively, "normal" boys -- one an inventive genius -- give them a clubhouse for cooking up ideas, an electronics lab above the town hardware store, and a good supply of Army surplus equipment, and you, dear reader, have a boyhood dream come true and a situation that bears watching. 

In the hands of an author whose own work involved technological pioneering, the proceedings are well worth undivided attention, as the boys explore every conceivable possibility for high and happy adventure in the neighborhood of Mammoth Falls. 

To the unutterable confusion of the local dignitaries -- and the unalloyed delight of Bertrand Brinley's fans -- the young heroes not only outwit their insidious rival, Harmon Muldoon, but emerge as town heroes.

The stories were told in first person by character Charlie Finckledinck (who didn’t have a last name until the first novel came out) but clearly the club’s most prominent member was the bespeckled teenager Henry Mulligan.

Henry, the group’s resident science genius, was just as likely to come up with some outlandish prank as a legitimate experiment or invention.

Other MSC members included Jeff Crocker, the president (by virtue of the club meeting in his father’s barn), Homer Snodgrass and Mortimer Dalrymple (experts in electronics and radio).

The club membership was rounded out by Freddy Mulldoon and Dinky Poore, the group’s Mutt and Jeff pair.

A couple of points about the characters: Freddy Muldoon was originally called Fatso Brown, and his cousin, the notorious Harmon Muldoon, Skinny Brown, in The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake. My father changed the names in the version that was published in Boys' Life and subsequently in The Mad Scientists' Club. Charlie Finckledinck, the narrator, did not have a last name until The Big Kerplop!

-The Mad Scientists Club

The adults of the mythical town of Mammoth Falls where the stories were set found themselves forever involved in some scheme or prank the club had thought up.

These, for example, took the forms of a fake monster in the local lake, an electronically-haunted house at the city limits and a mad balloonist in the town square.

When the boys weren’t giving Mayor Scragg, Police Chief Putney or Constable Billy Dahr problems, they often found themselves at odds with a rival gang formed by Harmon Mulldoon who had been a MSC member but had been thrown out for activity unbecoming of a scientist.

It always amazed me how the characters in the books were so clearly and finely drawn. Unfortunately Bertrand Brinley is no longer with us, but his son, Sheridan Brinley, explained how his father had come up with the characters.

Like many authors, Bertrand Brinley’s own personality found its ways into the people he created. “Henry is my father through and through,” said Sheridan. “A guy who thinks before he speaks, has an unusual perspective on things, has a vivid imagination, secretly feeds the dog at the table, is late to dinner because he is thinking about something, etc., etc.”

“Dinky Poore, I have always thought, was in part me, as I was small and skinny as a child and a bit of a whiner,” said Sheridan. “The Poore name is a family name in Westbury, Massachusetts, which is the source of a number of the names and places in the stories. For example, Billy Dahr is based on the constable in West Newbury in the ’30s. He was a bumbling sort of cop, as is Dahr.”

At least some of the events in the stories were inspired by real incidents that would have appeared in the news at the time. The accidental loss of a nuclear device off the coast of Spain in 1966 surely provided inspiration for the first novel, The Big Kerplop!, where an atomic bomb splashes into Mammoth Fall’s Strawberry Lake.

The Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings, may have also been material for Brinley’s imagination to chew on. “The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls was, I think, a parody of the Air Force program spending taxpayers’ dollars to trace down UFO sightings,” muses Sheridan.

“What a great joke: create a flying mannequin that makes fools of the town elders and police and scrambles the planes from the nearby Air Force base. Some of the same stuff is in The Flying Sorcerer.“

Engineers and Scientists

I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years about how the original Star Trek TV show in the 60’s influenced people to become scientists and engineers, and as a longtime Treker myself, I believe it is true.

However, I think there may quite a few people who made their career choices based on Brinley’s work. A gentleman named Mark Maxham runs a MSC tribute site and has collected some quotes from anonymous fans including this one:

I have had at least 5 copies of the Mad Scientist's Club over the years. I just gave away my only duplicate set. [...] They too were my favorites when I was younger. I am now a spacecraft flight engineer (worked with NASA controlling the Magellan Spacecraft to Venus) thanks in part to those books.

I suspect that this sentiment is widespread. There aren’t as many MSC fans around as Trekers, but those that exist seem to cherish their memories of the stories just as much as episodes of that seminal TV series.

I even suspect that my own choice of career as an Aerospace engineer hearkens back to Brinley’s tales of crazed boys tinkering around with electronics, rockets, and machinery. Sure there were many other influences. But only Brinley translated that love for gadgetry and messing around with machines that I so very love today.

Like all my books, I eventually lost my old tattered book. My best guess is that it lies at the bottom of some landfill in San Luis Obispo California.

By the way, do you know what I could use right now?

I could use a thin-crust cheese pizza with a goodly amount of salt on it. Maybe with a icy Coke. Not a beer. My doctor is telling me that my beer-drinking days are over. Beer is a “cold” food. I can only drink “warm” foods; like red wine and 53% alcohol. Sigh.

Anyways. For some reason, when I would plop myself and read these books, it was always with either sandwiches or pizza. I guess that I am just that kind of a silly guy. Eh?

What I liked about the thin crust pizza was that you could fold it up, and eat it like a gooey taco. I would plop myself down on this big sprawling 1940’s chair inherited from my grandparents, or our La-Z-boy and chill out. Smunching on a pizza, book about other kids like you, a nice breeze though the window, and a television or radio playing softly in the other room was what my boyhood was like.

Anyways, I had two books. They actually had a second volume that I had bought. It was titled The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club. I thought that it was even better than the first!

Unfortunately a novel entitled The Big Kerplop! Came out that I was unaware of, and so I never had the opportunity to read it.

Trying to get all these books has been a herculean task over the years. Not only due to the lack of availability, but also to the fact that I am in China. And obscure books in English are not readily available.

Unfortunately all of them had been out of print for many years and were almost impossible to find. This was bad news as I desperately wanted to get a hold of them for both myself and all the kids.

Purple House Press Reprints

Sheridan Brinley had been trying to get his father’s works republished for a number of years without success.

No publisher wanted to risk the money necessary to run off several thousand copies of the books no matter how ardent the small fan base might be.

Fortunately, Brinley came in contact with Purple House Press (PHP), a new publisher formed by a woman named Jill Morgan. Morgan had been locating and collecting out-of-print children books and had come to realize the cost of these original volumes were being driven through the roof.

Parents who wanted to share their favorite children’s books with their own kids were priced out of the market.This is that profit-greed based society that I always lament about. People in America do not care about society. They care about themselves; as a nation driven by psychopathic personalities, those of us with a different value system are often left out in the cold.

Morgan started contacting authors and their heirs and arranging for these works to be reprinted in small volumes. The company now has thirty-two books in its catalog including the original Mad Scientists’ Club, The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club and The Big Kerplop!

In fact for MSC fans there was perhaps an unexpected bonus from this alliance with PHP. Bertrand Brinley had written a second MSC novel, but it had never been published in the United States. After some editing, The Big Chunk of Ice – the story of the Mad Scientists entangled in a mystery in Austria – became available for readers for what was probably the first time.

I truly believe that one of the secrets of getting your kids to be great readers is not just to read to them, but to read to them stories you yourself are in love with.

The kind of excitement you radiate can’t be faked and kids pick up on it. That is one of the reasons why I am so happy to see efforts like Purple House Press succeed.

As a Rufus I’ve had the opportunity to not only share MSC stories with my kids, but my nieces and nephews as well.

From a technical point of view the stories show some signs of age – the radios, model rockets and remote controls the MSC kids used aren’t exactly cutting edge technology anymore (one can only wonder what trouble Henry and friends could get into using computers, the Internet and various wireless devices), but the stories are still great and worth sharing with a new generation.

Author’s Legacy

Bertrand Brinley died in 1994, but not without having left a significant mark in a lot of people’s lives.

I still can’t see more than two hot air balloons together without thinking of The Great Gas Bag Race.

I was ecstatic a few decades ago when I visited Fort McHenry in Baltimore and found they had a 15-inch Rodman cannon (the same one featured in The Secret of the Old Cannon).

I stood there pondering, could Homer Snodgrass really have wiggled his way down that barrel to find out what was inside?

In a way I like to think of this website, The Museum of UnNatural Mystery, as partly a tribute to Brinley’s work. I’m sure his stories inspired my interest in weird science.

I’d like to think that the halls of the museum are a place where the spirits of Henry Mulligan and Jeff Crocker, embodied into the children of today, can still find some adventure, or at least some mischief, to get into that would vex Mayor Scragg and the citizens of Mammoth Falls.

The Mad Scientist’s Club Series

The Mad Scientists’ Club – Seven Short Stories

– The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake – The club decides to shake up the town with a fake lake monster, but things go frather than they ever envisioned.

– The Big Egg – The kids find a dinosaur egg and it hatches, or does it?

– The Secret of the Old Cannon – What is hidden in an old civil war cannon up on Memorial Point?

-The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls – A mad ballooner upsets the town’s Founder’s Day celebration.

– The Great Gas Bag Race – The club enters a balloon in the annual race and find themselves up against their old rival, Harmon Mulldoon.

– The Voice in the Chimney – The old house on Blueberry Hill is haunted, or is it just peoples’ imagination?

– Night Rescue – The club tries to rescue a downed jet pilot.

The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club – Five Short Stories

– The Telltale Transmitter – The club goes up against bank robbers.

– The Cool Cavern – The kids try to rescue Harmon’s gang from a cave in.

– Big Chief Rainmaker – The club tries to bring an end to a devastating drought.

– The Flying Sorcerer – A UFO seems to be visiting Mammoth Falls.

– The Great Confrontation – Harmon Mulldoon’s rival gang goes too far.

The Big Kerplop! – A full length novel that tells the story of the formation of the club during a scare when an atomic bomb is lost in Strawberry Lake.

The Big Chunk of Ice – A full length novel that tells the story of the club as it goes on a scientific expedition to Austria and gets entangled in the mystery of a lost diamond.

Do you want more?

You can go through the index page and explore. A lot of gems there. Have fun.

Master Index

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The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

This is the science fiction short story that eventually was made into the famous movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) It’s a great read, and as much as I loved the movie, in many ways this short story was actually better. I hope that you all will enjoy it as much as I have.

THE SENTINEL

Arthur C. Clarke

1951 Avon Periodicals Inc.

The next time you see the full moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain,

one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium-the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisiurn is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.

I was geologist-or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic in charge of. the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliff s, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.

We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the spacesuits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.

I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisiurn is a vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young.

Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.

We kept Earth-time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 22.00 hours the final radio message would be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone would switch on the short-wave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying sausages began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world – everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.

It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favorite melodies, the old Welsh air, “David of the White, Rock.”

Our driver was already outside in his space-suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.

As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance-none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.

Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.

I lifted my eyes toward the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullenly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.

I was turning away when my eye caught a metallic glitter high on the ridge of a great promontory thrusting out into the sea thirty miles to the west. It was a dimensionless point of light, as if a star had been clawed from the sky by one of those cruel peaks, and I imagined that some smooth rock surface was catching the sunlight and heliographing it straight into my eyes. Such things were not uncommon. When the Moon is in her second quarter, observers on Earth can sometimes see the great ranges in the Oceanus Procellarum burning with a blue-white iridescence as the sunlight flashes from their slopes and leaps again from world to world. But I was curious to know what kind of rock could be shining so brightly up there, and I climbed into the observation turret and swung our four inch telescope round to the west.

I could see just enough to tantalize me. Clear and sharp in the field of vision, the mountain peaks seemed only half a mile away, but whatever was catching the sunlight was still too small to be resolved. Yet it seemed to have an elusive symmetry, and the summit upon which it rested was curiously flat. I stared for a long time at that glittering enigma, straining my eyes into space, until presently a smell of burning from the galley told me that our breakfast sausages had made their quarter-million mile journey in vain. .

All that morning we argued our way across the Mare Crisium while the western mountains reared higher in the sky. Even when we were out prospecting in the space-suits, the discussion would continue over the radio. It was absolutely certain, my companions argued, that there had never been any form of intelligent life on the Moon. The only living things that had ever existed there were a few primitive plants and their slightly less degenerate ancestors. I knew that as well as anyone, but there are times when a scientist must not be afraid to make a fool of himself.

“Listen,” I said at last, “I’m going up there, if only for my own peace of mind. That mountain’s less than twelve thousand feet high -that’s only two thousand under Earth gravity-and I can make the trip in twenty hours at the outside. I’ve always wanted to go up into those hills, anyway, and this gives me an excellent excuse.”

“If you don’t break your neck,” said Garnett, “you’ll be the laughing-stock of the expedition when we get back to Base. That mountain will probably be called Wilson’s Folly from now on.”

“I won’t break my neck,” I said firmly. “Who was the first man to climb Pico and Helicon?” “But weren’t you rather younger in those days?” asked Louis gently.

“That,” I said with great dignity, “is as good a reason as any for going.”

We went to bed early that night, after driving the tractor to within half a mile of the promontory. Garnett was coming with me in the morning; he was a good climber, and had often been with me on such exploits before. Our driver was only too glad to be left in charge of the machine.

At first sight, those cliffs seemed completely unscalable, but to anyone with a good head for heights, climbing is easy on a world where all weights are only a sixth of their normal value. The real danger in lunar mountaineering lies in overconfidence; a six-hundred-foot drop on the Moon can kill you just as thoroughly as a. hundred-foot fall on Earth.

We made our first halt on a wide ledge about four thousand feet above the plain. Climbing had not been very difficult, but my limbs were stiff with the unaccustomed effort, and I was glad of the rest. We could still see the tractor as a tiny metal insect far down at the foot of the cliff, and we reported our progress to the driver before starting on the next ascent.

Inside our suits it was comfortably cool, for the refrigeration units were fighting the fierce sun and carrying away the body-heat of our exertions. We seldom spoke to each other, except to pass climbing instructions and to discuss our best plan of ascent. I do not know what Garnett was thinking, probably that this was the craziest goose-chase he had ever embarked upon. I more than half agreed with him, but the joy of climbing, the knowledge that no man had ever gone this way before and the exhilaration of the steadily widening landscape gave me all the reward I needed.

I don’t think I was particularly excited when I saw in front of us the wall of rock I had first inspected through the telescope from thirty miles away. It would level off about fifty feet above our heads, and there on the plateau would be the thing that had lured me over these barren wastes. It was, almost certainly, nothing more than a boulder splintered ages ago by a falling meteor, and with its cleavage planes still fresh and bright in this incorruptible, unchanging silence.

There were no hand-holds on the rock face, and we had to use a grapnel. My tired arms seemed to gain new strength as I swung the three-pronged metal anchor round my head and sent it sailing Lip toward the stars. The first time it broke loose and came falling slowly back when we pulled the rope. On the third attempt, the prongs gripped firmly and our combined weights could not shift it.

Garnett looked at me anxiously. I could tell that he wanted to go first, but I smiled back at him through the glass of my helmet and shook my head. Slowly, taking my time, I began the final ascent.

Even with my space-suit, I weighed only forty pounds here, so I pulled myself up hand over hand without bothering to use my feet. At the rim I paused and waved to my companion, then I scrambled over the edge and stood upright, staring ahead of me.

You must understand that until this very moment I had been almost completely convinced that there could be nothing strange or unusual for me to find here. Almost, but not quite; it was that haunting doubt that had driven me forward. Well, it was a doubt no longer, but the haunting had scarcely begun.

I was standing on a plateau perhaps a hundred feet across. It had once been smooth-too smooth to be natural-but falling meteors had pitted and scored its surface through immeasurable eons. It had been leveled to support a glittering, roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man, that was set in the rock like a gigantic, many-faceted jewel.

Probably no emotion at all filled my mind in those first few seconds. Then I felt a great lifting of my heart, and a strange, inexpressible joy. For I loved the Moon, and now I knew that the creeping moss of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes was not the only life she had brought forth in her youth. The old, discredited dream of the first explorers was true. There had, after all, been a lunar civilization- and I was the first to find it. That I had come perhaps a hundred million years too late did not distress me; it was enough to have come at all.

My mind was beginning to function normally, to analyze and to ask questions. Was this a building, a shrine-or something for which my language had no name? If a building, then why was it erected in so uniquely inaccessible a spot? I wondered if it might be a temple, and I could picture the adepts of some strange priesthood calling on their gods to preserve them as the life of the Moon ebbed with the dying oceans, and calling on their gods in vain.

I took a dozen steps forward to examine the thing more closely, but some sense of caution kept me from going too near. I knew a little of archaeology, and tried to guess the cultural level of the civilization that must have smoothed this mountain and raised the glittering mirror surfaces that still dazzled my eyes.

The Egyptians could have done it, I thought, if their workmen had possessed whatever strange materials these far more ancient architects had used. Because of the thing’s smallness, it did not occur to me that I might be looking at the handiwork of a race more advanced than my own. The idea that the Moon had possessed intelligence at all was still almost too tremendous to grasp, and my pride would not let me take the final, humiliating plunge.

And then I noticed something that set the scalp crawling at the back of my neck-something so trivial and so innocent that many would never have noticed it at all. I have said that the plateau was scarred by meteors; it was also coated inches-deep with the cosmic dust that is always filtering down upon the surface of any world where there are no winds to disturb it. Yet the dust and the meteor scratches ended quite abruptly in a wide circle enclosing the little pyramid, as though an invisible wall was protecting it from the ravages of time and the slow but ceaseless bombardment from space.

There was someone shouting in my earphones, and I realized that Garnett had been calling me for some time. I walked unsteadily to the edge of the cliff and signaled him to join me, not trusting myself to speak. Then I went back toward that circle in the dust. I picked up a fragment of splintered rock and tossed it gently toward the shining enigma. If the pebble had vanished at that invisible barrier I should not have been surprised, but it seemed to hit a smooth, hemispherical surface and slide gently to the ground.

I knew then that I was looking at nothing that could be matched in the antiquity of my own race. This was not a building, but a machine, protecting itself with forces that had challenged Eternity. Those forces, whatever they might be, were still operating, and perhaps I had already come too close. I thought of all the radiations man had trapped and tamed in the past century. For all I knew, I might be as irrevocably doomed as if I had stepped into the deadly, silent aura of an unshielded atomic pile.

I remember turning then toward Garnett, who bad joined me and was now standing motionless at my side. He seemed quite oblivious to me, so I did not disturb him but walked to the edge of the cliff in an effort to marshal my thoughts. There below me lay the Mare Crisium-Sea of Crises, indeed-strange and weird to most men, but reassuringly familiar to me. I lifted my eyes toward the crescent Earth, lying in her cradle of stars, and I wondered what her clouds had covered when these unknown builders had finished their work. Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land-or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Do not ask me why I did not guess the truth sooner-the truth, that seems so obvious now. In the first excitement of my discovery, I had assumed without question that this crystalline apparition had been built by some race belonging to the Moon’s remote past, but suddenly, and with overwhelming force, the belief came to me that it was as alien to the Moon as I myself.

In twenty years we had found no trace of life but a few degenerate plants. No lunar civilization, whatever its doom, could have left but a single token of its existence.

I looked at the shining pyramid again, and the more remote it seemed from anything that had to do with the Moon. And suddenly I felt myself shaking with a foolish, hysterical laughter, brought on by excitement and overexertion: for I had imagined that the little pyramid was speaking to me and was saying: “Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself.”

It has taken us twenty years to crack that invisible shield and to reach the machine inside those crystal walls. What we could not understand, we broke at last with the savage might of atomic power and now I have seen the fragments of the lovely, glittering thing I found up there on the mountain.

They are meaningless. The mechanisms-if indeed they are mechanisms-of the pyramid belong to a technology that lies far beyond our horizon, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces.

The mystery haunts us all the more now that the other planets have been reached and we know that only Earth has ever been the home of intelligent life in our Universe. Nor could any lost civilization of our own world have built that machine, for the thickness of the meteoric dust on the plateau has enabled us to measure its age. It was set there upon its mountain before life had emerged from the seas of Earth.

When our world was half its present age, something from the stars swept through the Solar System, left this token of its passage, and went again upon its way. Until we destroyed it, that machine was still fulfilling the purpose of its builders; and as to that purpose, here is my guess.

Nearly a hundred thousand million stars are turning in the circle of the Milky Way, and long ago other races on the worlds of other suns must have scaled and passed the heights that we have reached. Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of Creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.

They must have searched the star-clusters as we have searched the planets. Everywhere there would be worlds, but they would be empty or peopled with crawling, mindless things. Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the Sun and waiting for their stories to begin.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favorite of the Sun’s children. Here, in the distant future, would be intelligence; but there were countless stars before -them still, and they might never come this way again.

So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.

Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive -by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death.

Once we had passed that crisis, it was only a matter of time before we found the pyramid and forced it open. Now its signals have ceased, and those whose duty it is will be turning their minds upon Earth. Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilization. But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait.

I do not think we will have to wait for long.

The End

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Mars is Heaven! by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

Here is a nice story to get your mind off of whatever it might be on right now. Please relax, fix yourself a nice coffee, tea, or beer… get into your most comfortable chair, and relax.

MARS IS HEAVEN!

by Ray Bradbury

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.

The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!

Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered,, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

“Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.

The ship landed softly. on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze.

At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.

Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on~ to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.

“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “Ill be thinned, damned, damned.’~

“It can~t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord,” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for
breathing, sir.” –

Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?’
“No doubt of it, sir.”
“Then we’ll go. out,” said Lustig.
“Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders.”
“But, sir-.-”
“Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”

“We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”
“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston,
the archaeologist. “Incredible. it~ can’t be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a . piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, . if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Marst”

“It is quite strange, sir.”
“Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”

“Oh, sir,” said Lustig.
“Dam it,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”

“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain. John Black. – “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”
“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation I’ don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”
“Do neither,. then, until we know what we’re up against.”

“Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing.

It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”
“When were you born, Lustig?” –
– “In- 1910, sfr.”
“That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”
“This being 1960, yes, sir.”
– “And you, Hinkston?”
“1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”

“This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”
lie looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
‘Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Ilinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If’ anything untoward happens, lift ‘the Ship ‘and get the hell out, do you bear what I say, Craner?”

“Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,
“A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”

“So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”
“Tell the ‘men to stand by the guns, then, as. Lustig and Hinkston and I go out,”
“Right, sir.”
“Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”
The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.

It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin,’ sung by Harry Lapder.

The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.
Now the phonograph record being played was:

–
“Oh give me a June night
The moonlight and you—”

Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”
“And what is the solution, Hinkston?”

The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine.

Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.

“Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution!
Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first’ World War, sir!” S
The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”

“But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”

“Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking no , his lips blue.

“Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there -were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”

“No, no, Hinkston.”
“Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept
-it a secret much more easily.”

“But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked -at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.

“And they caine up here, and haturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they
brought the cultural -~architecture with them, and here it is!”

“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.
“In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing,
myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”

“No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”
“These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not
European!”
“That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”
“Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”

“You make it sound almost reasonable.”
“it is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have ‘to do now, is find some people and verify it!”

“You’re right- there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did’ you bring your gun?”
“Yes, but we won’t need it.”
“We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”

Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had een in a small’ town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfleld Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher~ In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drieL – –

Captain’ John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly.
“But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.
“If you’re selling something,” she said, “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.

“No, wail,” he cried bewilderingly. “What town is this?”
She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.
“What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you’ got here.”

“Are you census takers?” she asked.
“No,” be said. –
“What do you want then?” she demanded.
“Well,” said the captain.
“Well?” she asked. -‘
“How long has this town been here?” he wondered.
“It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them. “Is this a game?”
“No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” – be said. “Look here.
We’re from Earth”
“From where?” she said.

‘Prom Earth!” he said. –
“Where’s that?” she said.
“From Earth,” he cried. ‘ –
“Out of the ground, do you mean?”
“No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted.
“Here,” she insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.” , –
“No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad
from the sun.”

Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up.

“Mrs.,” he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to tb-is planet, which is Mars.

Now do you understand, Mrs.?”
“Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with his fists.”
“But—” said Hinkston. “This is Mars, is it not?”

“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and ~Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!”
She slammed the door. –

-The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.

They looked at one another.
– “Let’s knock the door down,” said Lustig.
“We can’t,” sighed the captain.
“Why not?”

“She didn’t do anything bad, did she? We’re the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkstonl” He went and sat down on the porchstep.
“What, sir?”

Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!”

“Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir.” And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it.
Lustig stood up in the sunlight. “How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, just let me think.”

}Iinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles ‘gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I’m sure we’re on Mars, ‘ sir.” Lustig said, “But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time.

Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?”

“Oh, go away, Lustig.” -‘
“Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hink..

ston?” , –
“At their guns, sir.”

Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, ‘What year is this?’ –
“1926, of, course!” cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again. “Did you bear that?” Lustig ran back to them, wildly, “She said 1926! We – have gone back in time. This is Earth!”

Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads.

The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. “I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How ‘can a thing like this happen?”

“Will anybody in the whole town believe us?” wondered Hinkston.
“Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No. We’ll try another house.”

They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can’ get,” said the captain, He nodded at the town. “How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you- said originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if fated with such a problem?”
– –
Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince veryone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”

“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just’ minks she’s living on Earth. It protects ‘her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life.” –

“That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.
“Well,” the captain sighed. “Now we’re getting some- – where. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside
down. But, this way—”- He actually smiled for the first time in a month. “Well. It looks as if we’ll be fairly welcome here.”

“Or, will we, sir?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they’ll try to drive us ~out or kill us?”

‘We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go.”

But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.

“What is it, Lustig?” asked the captain.

“Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!”

– “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof

He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard, The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, “Grandma! Grandpa!” –

Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces light. lug up.
“Albert!” Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, “Albert, oh, Albert, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh, lbert boy, how are you!”

“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed Albert Lustig. “Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine.” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people.- The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood
open.

“Come in, lad, come in, there’s lemonade for you,fresh, lots of- it!”

“Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I’ve got- friends down here!

Here!” Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in’ the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. “Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!”

“Howdy,” said the folks. “Any- friend of Albert’s is ours, too! Don’t stand there with your mouths open Come on!”

In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth. – –

“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.
“A good many years,” she said, tartly. “Ever since we died.”
“Ever since you what?” asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down. – –
“Oh, yes,” Lustig looked at his captain. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”

“And you sit there, calmly!” cried the captain.
“Tush,” said the old woman, and winked glitteringly – at John Black. “Who are we to question what happens?

Here we are. What’s life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions -asked. A second chance.”
She toddled over and held out her -thin wrist to Captain John Black.
“Feel” He felt.~ “Solid, ain’t I?” she ask~ed. He nodded.
“You hear my voice, don’t you?” she inquired. Yes, he did. “Well, then,” she said in triumph, “why go around questioning?”
“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a
thing like this on Mars.”

“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”
is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.
“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”

“A good question,” said the captain.
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. “We’ve got to be going. It’s been nice. Thank you for the drinks.”

He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled. ‘ –
Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.

“What’s that?” asked Hinkston.
“We’ll soon find out!” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.

He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay – empty and abandoned.

A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hoorayl” And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut.

The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.

“Abandoned!” cried the captain. “Abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins; by God! They had orders!”
“Sir,” said Lustig. “Don’t be too -hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”

“That’s no excuse!” – –
“Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!” –
“I would have obeyed orders! I would have~!’ The captain’s mouth
remained open.

Striding along the sidewalk – under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years. –
“John!” the man cried, and broke into a run.
“What?” said Captain .John Black. He swayed. –

“John, you old beggar, you!”
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him
on the back. –
“It’s you,” said John Black.
“Of course, who’d you think it was!” –
“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother – Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston My brother!” – – –
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced.

“Ed!” “John, you old bum, you!” “You!re locking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what .is this? You haven’t ,changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and 1 was nineteen, oh God,
so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?”

Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.
“Mom’s waiting,” he said.
“Mom?”
“And Dad, too.”
– “And Dad?” The- captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two ords at a time.

“Mom alive? Dad? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.” –
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amazement. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
~‘I know it’s hard for you to believe.”

“But alive. Real.”
“Don’t I feel real?” The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair.
Hinkaton was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.

“Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes,” said the captain, eyes shut. “Yes.” He put out his hand.
“When I open my eyes, you’ll be gone.” He opened his eyes. “You’re still here.
God, Edward, you look fine!” – – –
“Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom.” Lustig said, “Sir, Ui
be with my grandfolks if you want me.” –

“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. “You need support.” –
“I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God.”

“There’s the house. Remember it?” –
“Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!” –

They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black’s ears. The earth roared -under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush- forward, the door open, the screen swing back. “Beat you!” cried Edward, – bounding up the steps. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!”

In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.

“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up -the steps like a child, to meet them.

It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter.

Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black bad a – dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. –

“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone.”
“No, no, don’t think that,” she cried, softly, pleadingly~ “We’re here.
Don’t question. God is good to- us. Let’s be happy.”

The record ended with a – hissing.
“You’re tired, son,” said Dad. He waved his pipe. “You and Ed go on
upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you.” . – –
“The old one?”
“The brass bed and all,” laughed Edward.
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?” Mother was logical
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No,. none at all. What’s the difference?” He shook his head.

“I’m not being very logical these days,” –
“Good night, son.” She kissed his cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
“Sleep tight, son.” Dad shook his hand.
“Same to you, Pop.” – “It’s good to have you home.”

“It’s good to be home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a -very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. “It’s too much,” he said faintly. “Like -being in a thunder- shower without an umbrella. Fm soaked to the skin with emotion. I’m numb. I’m tired.” –

“A night’s sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko.” Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.

“So this is Mars,” said the captain undressing.
“So this is Mars.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck. –

– The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was
playing softly, “I’ll be loving you, always,- with a love that’s true, always.”

The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window,waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.” –
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Anna very much?’ –
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. “Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”

He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the — first time the stress of the day was -moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight – of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—

now… –

How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose?

Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? -How and why and what for? –

He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had – lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. –

He laughed out loud, – almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.

But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and -saw us inside our ship and hated – us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and – they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken- off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? –

The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination. –
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, – this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.

Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, -by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?

What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.

And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and- father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with –the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?

And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around -the rocket ship and wave. And- all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush- out and abandon the ship. What more natural?- What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And – the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some -great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, wifi change form, melt, shift, and become a one eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just – to -turn over in bed and put a- knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. –

His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold, -Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted- himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died.

His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.

Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”

“What?” –
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.” –
“No, you’re not.” –
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.
He screamed. He screamed twice. – He never reached- the door.

…

In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking -to the churchyard, where there were open holes – dug freshly and new- tombstones installed. Seventeen – holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON. – – –

The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the
mayor, sometimes looking like something else. — – – –

Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they ‘cried, their faces melting now – from a familiar face into something else. – –

Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping~ their faces. Also shifting- like wax, – shivering as a- thing does in waves of heat on a summer day. – –

The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured –about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”. – – – –

Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops. –

After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up. – –

The End

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The Star by Arthur C Clarke (full text)

This is a nice short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “The Star”. It’s actually wonderful. It’s the reason why many of us started reading science fiction short stories in the first place.

The Star

From The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.

The crew were already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious atheists?) Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned over and over with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

“Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.” Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that cause most amusement among the crew. In vain I pointed to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word “nebula” is misleading; this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.

Or what is left of a star. . .

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the Universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored Universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?

We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our Galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with hundreds of times their normal brilliance until they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novas—the commonplace disasters of the Universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.

But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.

When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the Galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.

Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a White Dwarf, smaller than earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of the cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many millions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished Solar System, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.

The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.

Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all-but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s eye like an arrow into its target.

The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruits of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest Solar System was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.

Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows, yet attracting no attention at all.

And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.

Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?

I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached that point at last.

We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached the Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.

There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

The End

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Inherit the Stars (full text) by James Hogan

Here is the full text of the wonderful science fiction story titled “Inherit the stars” by James Hogan. It is a fine “take you away” adventure about discovery, space, and history.

I got the science fiction bug when I was 12 reading Heinlein, Asimov, and Piper. This is one of my absolute favorite SciFi novels in the last 58 years. It appeals to my technical bent. I was a computer consultant for 32 years. I will never give up this copy.

-Amazon Customer review

My regular readers are going to hate me for this post.

As they slap themselves on the head! “Gosh no! Not another science fiction novel. What are you trying to do to us?”

It’s amazing to me the amount of flack that I get for having a website / blog. It seems that there are just miserable people that want to complain, disparage me, or my experiences, or are just hateful. I mean, really people! Up your game or shut the fuck up.

I have spelling or grammar mistakes. I need to “prove” myself. I don’t have a “unified message”. I ramble on and on and don’t get to the point. I don’t provide proof. Others can read the same kind of things on other websites, yada, yada, yada.

For goodness sakes!

To understand things, especially new and unique things, you need to have a different frame of reference. You need to look outside your echo chamber and your circle of “yes men”. You need to see and experience things form other alternative points of view.

What I have experienced is wholly outside “normal” human experience.

The best that I can provide is science fiction, and fantasy that helps explain some of the more complex concepts that I am trying to put forth.

Thus this story. It’s just a fine science fiction read…

…or is it?

Could it be shocking to believe that there are civilizations older than ours that has changed the human species? Could it be that the solar system was different millions or even billions of years ago? Could it be that humans had to adapt or perish?

Things for thought.

Change is universal. We must be adaptable, no matter what the situation and never, NEVER take what we have for granted.

Introduction

The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair, and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn’t know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was fifty thousand years old — and that meant this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed.

James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars deserves its status as a science fiction classic. The book is set in the mid-21st century. In the first chapter, a 50,000 year-old human skeleton dressed in a spacesuit is found on the moon. The inescapable conclusion is that a technologically-advanced race of humans existed 50 millenia ago. But where did this race evolve? How did this particular human get to the moon? What happened to the rest of his kind? And why is there no archeological evidence of this civilization on earth?

As the teams of paleontologists, physicists, biologists, linguists and government officials (not to mention the media) address these questions, even more astounding archeological findings are made and more questions are raised.

This tightly-woven, compact novel is rich in analysis and deductive reasoning. The book addresses the horror, destructiveness and irrationality of war.

Its themes and lessons are just as important today as in 1977 when Hogan penned this work.

From hindsight, Hogan's vision of the 21st century is startlingly accurate. Among other things, he predicted the internet and the factors that brought an end to the Cold War.

We haven't quite reached the age of routine space travel, but we have a couple of decades to go before we catch up to the timeframe of the novel. The work is so realistic, it is difficult to believe that it was written over 30 years ago.

Apart from Edgar Allan Poe and Umberto Eco, I'd be hard-pressed to name an author who is more adept at ratiocination than Hogan. This is a sensitive, timely and intellectually-satisfying novel. I'm looking forward to reading more of Hogan's work.

-Science Fiction Classic

Inherit the Stars

James P. Hogan

Inherit the Stars

Prologue

He became aware of consciousness returning.

Instinctively his mind recoiled, as if by some effort of will he could arrest the relentless flow of seconds that separated non-awareness from awareness and return again to the timeless oblivion in which the agony of total exhaustion was unknown and unknowable.

The hammer that had threatened to burst from his chest was now quiet. The rivers of sweat that had drained with his strength from every hollow of his body were now turned cold. His limbs had turned to lead. The gasping of his lungs had returned once more to a slow and even rhythm. It sounded loud in the close confines of his helmet.

He tried to remember how many had died. Their release was final; for him there was no release. How much longer could he go on? What was the point? Would there be anyone left alive at Gorda anyway?

“Gorda…? Gorda…?”

His mental defenses could shield him from reality no longer.

“Must get to Gorda!”

He opened his eyes. A billion unblinking stars stared back without interest. When he tried to move, his body refused to respond, as if trying to prolong to the utmost its last precious moments of rest. He took a deep breath and, clenching his teeth at the pain that instantly racked again through every fiber of his body, forced himself away from the rock and into a sitting position. A wave of nausea swept over him. His head sagged forward and struck the inside of his visor. The nausea passed.

He groaned aloud.

“Feeling better, then, soldier?” The voice came clearly through the speaker inside his helmet. “Sun’s getting low. We gotta be moving.”

He lifted his head and slowly scanned the nightmare wilderness of scorched rock and ash-gray dust that confronted him.

“Whe-” The sound choked in his throat. He swallowed, licked his lips, and tried again. “Where are you?”

“To your right, up on the rise just past that small cliff that juts out-the one with the big boulders underneath.”

He turned his head and after some seconds detected a bright blue patch against the ink-black sky. It seemed blurred and far away. He blinked and strained his eyes again, forcing his brain to coordinate with his vision. The blue patch resolved itself into the figure of the tireless Koriel, clad in a heavy-duty combat suit.

“I see you.” After a pause: “Anything?”

“It’s fairly flat on the other side of the rise-should be easier going for a while. Gets rockier farther on. Come have a look.”

He inched his arms upward to find purchase on the rock behind, then braced them to thrust his weight forward over his legs. His knees trembled. His face contorted as he fought to concentrate his remaining strength into his protesting thighs. Already his heart was pumping again, his lungs heaving. The effort evaporated and he fell back against the rock. His labored breathing rasped over Koriel’s radio.

“Finished… Can’t move…”

The blue figure on the skyline turned.

“Aw, what kinda talk’s that? This is the last stretch. We’re there, buddy-we’re there.”

“No-no good… Had it…” Koriel waited a few seconds.

“I’m coming back down.”

“No-you go on. Someone’s got to make it.”

No response.

“Koriel…”

He looked back at where the figure had stood, but already it had disappeared below the intervening rocks and was out of the line of transmission. A minute or two later the figure emerged from behind the nearby boulders, covering the ground in long, effortless bounds. The bounds broke into a walk as Koriel approached the hunched form clad in red.

“C’mon, soldier, on your feet now. There’s people back there depending on us.”

He felt himself gripped below his arm and raised irresistibly, as if some of Koriel’s limitless reserves of strength were pouring into him. For a while his head swam and he leaned with the top of his visor resting on the giant’s shoulder insignia.

“Okay,” he managed at last. “Let’s go.”

Hour after hour the thin snake of footprints, two pinpoints of color at its head, wound its way westward across the wilderness amid steadily lengthening shadows. He marched as if in a trance, beyond feeling pain, beyond feeling exhaustion-beyond feeling anything. The skyline never seemed to change; soon he could no longer look at it. Instead, he began picking out the next prominent boulder or crag, and counting off the paces until they reached it. “Two hundred and thirteen less to go.” And then he repeated it over again… and again… and again. The rocks marched by in slow, endless, indifferent procession. Every step became a separate triumph of will-a deliberate, conscious effort to drive one foot yet one more pace beyond the last. When he faltered, Koriel was there to catch his arm; when he fell, Koriel was always there to haul him up. Koriel never tired.

At last they stopped. They were standing in a gorge perhaps a quarter mile wide, below one of the lines of low, broken cliffs that flanked it on either side. He collapsed on the nearest boulder. Koriel stood a few paces ahead surveying the landscape. The line of crags immediately above them was interrupted by a notch, which marked the point where a steep and narrow cleft tumbled down to break into the wall of the main gorge. From the bottom of the cleft, a mound of accumulated rubble and rock debris led down about fifty feet to blend with the floor of the gorge not far from where they stood. Koriel stretched out an arm to point up beyond the cleft.

“Gorda will be roughly that way,” he said without turning. “Our best way would be up and onto that ridge. If we stay on the flat and go around the long way, it’ll be too far. What d’you say?” The other stared up in mute despair. The rockfall, funneling up toward the mouth of the cleft, looked like a mountain. In the distance beyond towered the ridge, jagged and white in the glare of the sun. It was impossible.

Koriel allowed his doubts no time to take root. Somehow-slipping, sliding, stumbling, and falling-they reached the entrance to the cleft. Beyond it, the walls narrowed and curved around to the left, cutting off the view of the gorge below from where they had come. They climbed higher. Around them, sheets of raw reflected sunlight and bottomless pits of shadow met in knife-edges across rocks shattered at a thousand crazy angles. His brain ceased to extract the concepts of shape and form from the insane geometry of white and black that kaleidoscoped across his retina. The patterns grew and shrank and merged and whirled in a frenzy of visual cacophony.

His face crashed against his visor as his helmet thudded into the dust. Koriel hoisted him to his feet.

“You can do it. We’ll see Gorda from the ridge. It’ll be all downhill from there…”

But the figure in red sank slowly to its knees and folded over. The head inside the helmet shook weakly from side to side. As Koriel watched, the conscious part of his mind at last accepted the inescapable logic that the parts beneath consciousness already knew. He took a deep breath and looked about him.

Not far below, they had passed a hole, about five feet across, cut into the base of one of the rock walls. It looked like the remnant of some forgotten excavation-maybe a preliminary digging left by a mining survey. The giant stooped, and grasping the harness that secured the backpack to the now insensible figure at his feet, dragged the body back down the slope to the hole. It was about ten feet deep inside. Working quickly, Koriel arranged a lamp to reflect a low light off the walls and roof. Then he removed the rations from his companion’s pack, laid the figure back against the rear wall as comfortably as he could, and placed the food containers within easy reach. Just as he was finishing, the eyes behind the visor flickered open.

“You’ll be fine here for a while.” The usual gruffness was gone from Koriel’s voice. “I’ll have the rescue boys back from Gorda before you know it.”

The figure in red raised a feeble arm. Just a whisper came through.

“You-you tried… Nobody could have…” Koriel clasped the gauntlet with both hands.

“Mustn’t give up. That’s no good. You just have to hang on a while.” Inside his helmet the granite cheeks were wet. He backed to the entrance and made a final salute. “So long, soldier.” And then he was gone.

Outside he built a small cairn of stones to mark the position of the hole. He would mark the trail to Gorda with such cairns. At last he straightened up and turned defiantly to face the desolation surrounding him. The rocks seemed to scream down in soundless laughing mockery. The stars above remained unmoved. Koriel glowered up at the cleft, rising up toward the tiers of crags and terraces that guarded the ridge, still soaring in the distance. His lips curled back to show his teeth.

“So-it’s just you and me now, is it?” he snarled at the Universe. “Okay, you bastard-let’s see you take this round!”

With his legs driving like slow pistons, he attacked the ever steepening slope.

Chapter One

Accompanied by a mild but powerful whine, a gigantic silver torpedo rose slowly upward to hang two thousand feet above the sugar-cube huddle of central London. Over three hundred yards long, it spread at the tail into a slim delta topped by two sharply swept fins. For a while the ship hovered, as if savoring the air of its newfound freedom, its nose swinging smoothly around to seek the north. At last, with the sound growing, imperceptibly at first but with steadily increasing speed, it began to slide forward and upward. At ten thousand feet its engines erupted into full power, hurling the suborbital skyliner eagerly toward the fringes of space. Sitting in row thirty-one of C deck was Dr. Victor Hunt, head of Theoretical Studies at the Metadyne Nucleonic Instrument Company of Reading, Berkshire-itself a subsidiary of the mammoth Intercontinental Data and Control Corporation, headquartered at Portland, Oregon, USA. He absently surveyed the diminishing view of Hendon that crawled across the cabin wall-display screen and tried again to fit some kind of explanation to the events of the last few days.

His experiments with matter-antimatter particle extinctions had been progressing well. Forsyth-Scott had followed Hunt’s reports with evident interest and therefore knew that the tests were progressing well. That made it all the more strange for him to call Hunt to his office one morning to ask him simply to drop everything and get over to IDCC Portland as quickly as could be arranged. From the managing director’s tone and manner it had been obvious that the request was couched as such mainly for reasons of politeness; in reality this was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had no say in the matter.

To Hunt’s questions, Forsyth-Scott had stated quite frankly that he didn’t know what it was that made Hunt’s immediate presence at IDCC so imperative. The previous evening he had received a videocall from Felix Borlan, the president of IDCC, who had told him that as a matter of priority he required the only working prototype of the scope prepared for immediate shipment to the USA and an installation team ready to go with it. Also, he had insisted that Hunt personally come over for an indefinite period to take charge of some project involving the scope, which could not wait. For Hunt’s benefit, Forsyth-Scott had replayed Borlan’s call on his desk display and allowed him to verify for himself that Forsyth-Scott in turn was acting under a thinly disguised directive. Even stranger, Borlan too had seemed unable to say precisely what it was that the instrument and its inventor were needed for.

The Trimagniscope, developed as a consequence of a two-year investigation by Hunt into certain aspects of neutrino physics, promised to be perhaps the most successful venture ever undertaken by the company. Hunt had established that a neutrino beam that passed through a solid object underwent certain interactions in the close vicinity of atomic nuclei, which produced measurable changes in the transmitted output. By raster scanning an object with a trio of synchronized, intersecting beams, he had devised a method of extracting enough information to generate a 3-D color hologram, visually indistinguishable from the original solid. Moreover, since the beams scanned right through, it was almost as easy to conjure up views of the inside as of the out. These capabilities, combined with that of high-power magnification that was also inherent in the method, yielded possibilities not even remotely approached by anything else on the market. From quantitative cell metabolism and bionics, through neurosurgery, metallurgy, crystallography, and molecular electronics, to engineering inspection and quality control, the applications were endless. Inquiries were pouring in and shares were soaring. Removing the prototype and its originator to the USA-totally disrupting carefully planned production and marketing schedules-bordered on the catastrophic. Borlan knew this as well as anybody. The more Hunt turned these things over in his mind, the less plausible the various possible explanations that had at first occurred to him seemed, and the more convinced he became that whatever the answer turned out to be, it would be found to lie far beyond even Felix Borlan and IDCC.

His thoughts were interrupted by a voice issuing from somewhere in the general direction of the cabin roof.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Mason speaking. I would like to welcome you aboard this Boeing 1017 on behalf of British Airways. We are now in level flight at our cruising altitude of fifty-two miles, speed 3,160 knots. Our course is thirty-five degrees west of true north, and the coast is now below with Liverpool five miles to starboard. Passengers are free to leave their seats. The bars are open and drinks and snacks are being served. We are due to arrive in San Francisco at ten thirty-eight hours local time; that’s one hour and fifty minutes from now. I would like to remind you that it is necessary to be seated when we begin our descent in one hour and thirty-five minutes time. A warning will sound ten minutes before descent commences and again at five minutes. We trust you will enjoy your journey. Thank you.”

The captain signed himself off with a click, which was drowned out as the regulars made their customary scramble for the vi-phone booths.

In the seat next to Hunt, Rob Gray, Metadyne’s chief of Experimental Engineering, sat with an open briefcase resting on his knees. He studied the information being displayed on the screen built into its lid.

“A regular flight to Portland takes off fifteen minutes after we get in,” he announced. “That’s a bit tight. Next one’s not for over four hours. What d’you reckon?” He punctuated the question with a sideways look and raised eyebrows.

Hunt pulled a face. “I’m not arsing about in Frisco for four hours. Book us an Avis jet-we’ll fly ourselves up.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Gray played the mini keyboard below the screen to summon an index, consulted it briefly, then touched another key to display a directory. Selecting a number from one of the columns, he mouthed it silently to himself as he tapped it in. A copy of the number appeared near the bottom of the screen with a request for him to confirm. He pressed the Y button. The screen went blank for a few seconds and then exploded into a whirlpool of color, which stabilized almost at once into the features of a platinum-blonde, who radiated the kind of smile normally reserved for toothpaste commercials.

“Good morning. Avis San Francisco, City Terminal. This is Sue Parker. Can I help you?”

Gray addressed the grille, located next to the tiny camera lens just above the screen.

“Hi, Sue. Name’s Gray-R. J. Gray, airbound for SF, due to arrive about two hours from now. Could I reserve an aircar, please?”

“Sure thing. Range?”

“Oh-about five hundred…” He glanced at Hunt.

“Better make it seven,” Hunt advised.

“Make that seven hundred miles minimum.”

“That’ll be no problem, Mr. Gray. We have Skyrovers, Mercury Threes, Honeybees, or Yellow Birds. Any preference?”

“No-any’ll do.”

“I’ll make it a Mercury, then. Any idea how long?”

“No-er-indefinite.”

“Okay. Full computer nav and flight control? Automatic VTOL?”

“Preferably and, ah, yes.”

“You have a full manual license?” The blonde operated unseen keys as she spoke.

“Yes.”

“Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?”

Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the screen, and touched a key.

The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. “Okay,” she pronounced. “Any other pilots?”

“One. A Dr. V. Hunt.”

“His personal data?”

Gray took Hunt’s already proffered card and substituted it for his own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes provided.

“Would you verify and authorize, please?” said the disembodied voice from the grille. “Charges are shown on the right.”

Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display. The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked “Authorization.” Then the clerk reappeared, still smiling.

“When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?” she asked.

Gray turned toward Hunt.

“Do we want lunch at the airport first?”

Hunt grimaced. “Not after that party last night. Couldn’t face anything.” His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a mouth. “Let’s eat tonight somewhere.”

“Make it round about eleven thirty hours,” Gray advised. “It’ll be ready.”

“Thanks, Sue.”

“Thank you. Good-bye.”

“Bye now.”

Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and stowed it behind his feet.

“Done,” he announced.

The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man, leading something of a free-lance existence within the organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies. The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne. He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the company’s organization charts, the box captioned “Theoretical Studies” stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree headed R D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it-a symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work, while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear infrastructure theory, and second-but by no means least-a steady supply of fallout.

Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on. He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had application potential and transforming them into developed, tested, marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and single into his midthirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered, they were a good team.

Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk shop.

“Figured it out yet?” he asked.

“This Borlan business?”

“Uh-huh.”

Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. “Beats me.”

“I was thinking… Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales prospect for scopes-maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could be setting up some super demo or something.”

Hunt shook his head again. “No. Felix wouldn’t go and screw up Metadyne’s schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn’t make sense-the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to where the scope is, not the other way round.”

“Mmmm… I suppose the same thing applies to the other thought that occurred to me-some kind of crash teach-in for IDCC people.”

“Right-same thing goes.”

“Mmmm…” When Gray spoke again, they had covered another six miles. “How about a takeover? The whole scope thing is big-Felix wants it handled stateside.”

Hunt reflected on the proposition. “Not for my money. He’s got too much respect for Francis, to pull a stunt like that. He knows Francis can handle it okay. Besides, that’s not his way of doing things-too underhanded.” Hunt paused to exhale a cloud of smoke. “Anyhow, I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. From what I saw, even Felix didn’t seem too sure what it’s all about.”

“Mmmm…” Gray thought for a while longer before abandoning further excursions into the realms of deductive logic. He contemplated the growing tide of humanity flowing in the general direction of C-deck bar. “My guts are a bit churned up, too,” he confessed. “Feels like a crate of Guinness on top of a vindaloo curry. Come on-let’s go get a coffee.”

In the star-strewn black velvet one thousand miles farther up, the Sirius Fourteen communications-link satellite followed, with cold and omniscient electronic eyes, the progress of the skyliner streaking across the mottled sphere below. Among the ceaseless stream of binary data that flowed through its antennae, it identified a call from the Boeing’s Gamma Nine master computer, requesting details of the latest weather forecast for northern California. Sirius Fourteen flashed the message to Sirius Twelve, hanging high over the Canadian Rockies, and Twelve in turn beamed it down to the tracking station at Edmonton. From here the message was relayed by optical cable to Vancouver Control and from there by microwave repeaters to the Weather Bureau station at Seattle. A few thousandths of a second later, the answers poured back up the chain in the opposite direction. Gamma Nine digested the information, made one or two minor alterations to its course and flight plan, and sent a record of the dialogue down to Ground Control, Prestwick.

Chapter Two

It had rained for over two days.

The Engineering Materials Research Department of the Ministry of Space Sciences huddled wetly in a fold of the Ural Mountains, an occasional ray of sunlight glinting from a laboratory window or from one of the aluminum domes of the reactor building. Seated in her office in the analysis section, Valereya Petrokhov turned to the pile of reports left on her desk for routine approval. The first two dealt with run-of-the-mill high-temperature corrosion tests. She flicked casually through the pages, glanced at the appended graphs and tables, scrawled her initials on the line provided, and tossed them across into the tray marked “Out.” Automatically she began scanning down the first page of number three. Suddenly she stopped, a puzzled frown forming on her face. Leaning forward in her chair, she began again, this time reading carefully and studying every sentence. She finally went back to the beginning once more and worked methodically through the whole document, stopping in places to verify the calculations by means of the keyboard display standing on one side of the desk.

“This is unheard of!” she exclaimed.

For a long time she remained motionless, her eyes absorbed by the raindrops slipping down the window but her mind so focused elsewhere that the sight failed to register. At last she shook herself into movement and, turning again to the keyboard, rapidly tapped in a code. The strings of tensor equations vanished, to be replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched over a console in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself into a full face as he turned.

“Ready to run in about twenty minutes,” he said, anticipating the question. “The plasma’s stabilizing now.”

“No-this has nothing to do with that,” she replied, speaking a little more quickly than usual. “It’s about your report 2906. I’ve just been through my copy.”

“Oh… yes?” His change in expression betrayed mild apprehension.

“So-a niobium-zirconium alloy,” she went on, stating the fact rather than asking a question, “with an unprecedented resistance to high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly, I won’t believe until I’ve done the tests myself.”

“Makes our plasma-cans look like butter,” Josef agreed.

“Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?”

“Macroscopic, yes-under a millibarn per square centimeter.”

“Interesting…” she mused, then resumed more briskly: “On top of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance.”

“Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites-we’ve been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but it’s rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete processing plant specially designed for the job!”

“And the microstructure,” Valereya said, gesturing toward the papers on her desk. “You’ve used the description fibrous.”

“Yes. That’s about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to be formed around a-well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It’s mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some titanium-magnesium compound that we haven’t been able to quantify yet. I’ve never come across anything like it. Any ideas?”

The woman’s face held a faraway look for some seconds.

“I honestly don’t know what to think at the moment,” she confessed. “But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay; it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up to my office and let’s go through the whole thing in detail.”

Chapter Three

The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the pass between Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south. It was here that at some time in the remote past a small inland sea had penetrated the Cascade Mountains and carved itself a channel to the Pacific, to become in time the mighty Columbia River.

Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the government-owned Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory. Here, American scientists, working in collaboration with the United States of Europe Federal Research Institute at Geneva, had developed the theory of meson dynamics that led to the nucleonic bomb. The theory predicted a “clean” reaction with a yield orders of magnitude greater than that produced by thermonuclear fusion. The holes they had blown in the Sahara had proved it.

During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with the spread of high-technology living. Traditional rocks of strife and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent, world demilitarization became fact.

One sphere of activity that benefited enormously from the surplus funds and resources that became available after demilitarization was the rapidly expanding United Nations Solar System Exploration Program. Already the list of responsibilities held by this organization was long; it included the operation of all artificial satellites in terrestrial, Lunar, Martian, Venusian, and Solar orbits; the building and operation of all manned bases on Luna and Mars, plus the orbiting laboratories over Venus; the launching of deep-space robot probes and the planning and control of manned missions to the outer planets. UNSSEP was thus expanding at just the right rate and the right time to absorb the supply of technological talent being released as the world’s major armaments programs were run down. Also, as nationalism declined and most of the regular armed forces were demobilized, the restless youth of the new generation found outlets for their adventure-lust in the uniformed branches of the UN Space Arm. It was an age that buzzed with excitement and anticipation as the new pioneering frontier began planet-hopping out across the Solar System.

And so NWRL Bonneville had been left with no purpose to serve. This situation did not go unnoticed by the directors of IDCC. Seeing that most of the equipment and permanent installations owned by NWRL could be used in much of the corporation’s own research projects, they propositioned the government with an offer to buy the place outright. The offer was accepted and the deal went through. Over the years IDCC had further expanded the site, improved its aesthetics, and eventually established it as their nucleonics research center and world headquarters.

The mathematical theory that had grown out of meson dynamics involved the existence of three hitherto unknown transuranic elements. Although these were purely hypothetical, they were christened hyperium, bonnevillium, and genevium. Theory also predicted that, due to a “glitch” in the transuranic mass-versus-binding-energy curve, these elements, once formed, would be stable. They were unlikely to be found occurring naturally, however-not on Earth, anyway. According to the mathematics, only two known situations could give the right conditions for their formation: the core of the detonation of a nucleonic bomb or the collapse of a supernova to a neutron star.

Sure enough, analysis of the dust clouds after the Sahara tests yielded minute traces of hyperium and bonnevillium; genevium was not detected. Nevertheless, the first prediction of the theory was accepted as amply supported. Whether, one day, future generations of scientists would ever verify the second prediction, was another matter entirely.

***

Hunt and Gray touched down on the rooftop landing pad of the IDCC administration building shortly after fifteen hundred hours. By fifteen thirty they were sitting in leather armchairs facing the desk in Borlan’s luxurious office on the tenth floor, while he poured three large measures of scotch at the teak bar built into the left wall. He walked back to the center, passed a glass to each of the Englishmen, went back around the desk, and sat down.

“Cheers, then, guys,” he offered. They returned the gesture. “Well,” he began, “it’s good to see you two again. Trip okay? How’d you make it up so soon-rent a jet?” He opened his cigar box as he spoke and pushed it across the desk toward them. “Smoke?”

“Yes, good trip. Thanks, Felix,” Hunt replied. “Avis.” He inclined his head toward the window behind Borlan, which presented a panoramic view of pine-covered hills tumbling down to the distant Columbia. “Some scenery.”

“Like it?”

“Makes Berkshire look a bit like Siberia.”

Borlan looked at Gray. “How are you keeping, Rob?”

The corners of Gray’s mouth twitched downwards. “Gutrot.”

“Party last night at some bird’s,” Hunt explained. “Too little blood in his alcohol stream.”

“Good time, huh?” Borlan grinned. “Take Francis along?”

“You’ve got to be joking!”

“Jollificating with the peasantry?” Gray mimicked in the impeccable tones of the English aristocracy. “Good God! Whatever next!”

They laughed. Hunt settled himself more comfortably amid a haze of blue smoke. “How about yourself, Felix?” he asked. “Life still being kind to you?”

Borlan spread his arms wide. “Life’s great.”

“Angie still as beautiful as the last time I saw her? Kids okay?”

“They’re all fine. Tommy’s at college now-majoring in physics and astronautical engineering. Johnny goes hiking most weekends with his club, and Susie’s added a pair of gerbils and a bear cub to the family zoo.”

“So you’re still as happy as ever. The responsibilities of power aren’t wearing you down yet.”

Borlan shrugged and showed a row of pearly teeth. “Do I look like an ulcerated nut midway between heart attacks?”

Hunt regarded the blue-eyed, deep-tanned figure with close-cropped fair hair as Borlan sprawled relaxedly on the other side of the broad mahogany desk. He looked at least ten years younger than the president of any intercontinental corporation had a right to.

For a while the small talk revolved around internal affairs at Metadyne. At last a natural pause presented itself. Hunt sat forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and contemplated the last drop of amber liquid in his glass as he swirled it around first from right to left and then back again. Finally he looked up.

“About the scope, Felix. What’s going on, then?”

Borlan had been expecting the question. He straightened slowly in his chair and appeared to think for a moment. At last he said:

“Did you see the call I made to Francis?”

“Yep.”

“Then…” Borlan didn’t seem sure of how to put it. “… I don’t know an awful lot more than you do.” He placed his hands palms-down on the desk man attitude of candor, but his sigh was that of one not really expecting to be believed. He was right.

“Come on, Felix. Give.” Hunt’s expression said the rest.

“You must know,” Gray insisted. “You fixed it all up.”

“Straight.” Borlan looked from one to the other. “Look, taking things worldwide, who would you say our biggest customer is? It’s no secret-UN Space Arm. We do everything for them from Lunar data links to-to laser terminal clusters and robot probes. Do you know how much revenue I’ve got forecast from UNSA next fiscal? Two hundred million bucks… two hundred million!”

“So?”

“So… well-when a customer like that says he needs help, he gets help. I’ll tell you what happened. It was like this: UNSA is a big potential user of scopes, so we fed them all the information we’ve got on what the scope can do and how development is progressing in Francis’s neck of the woods. One day-the day before I called Francis-this guy comes to see me all the way from Houston, where one of the big UNSA outfits has its HQ. He’s an old buddy of mine-their top man, no less. He wants to know can the scope do this and can it do that, and I tell him sure it can. Then he gives me some examples of the things he’s got in mind and he asks if we’ve got a working model yet. I tell him not yet, but that you’ve got a working prototype in England; we can arrange for him to go see it if he wants. But that’s not what he wants. He wants the prototype down there in Houston, and he wants people who can operate it. He’ll pay, he says-we can name our own figure-but he wants that instrument-something to do with a top-priority project down there that’s got the whole of UNSA in a flap. When I ask him what it is, he clams up and says it’s ‘security restricted’ for the moment.”

“Sounds a funny business,” Hunt commented with a frown. “It’ll cause some bloody awful problems back at Metadyne.”

“I told him all that.” Borlan turned his palms upward in a gesture of helplessness. “I told him the score regarding the production schedules and availability forecasts, but he said this thing was big and he wouldn’t go causing this kind of trouble if he didn’t have a good reason. He wouldn’t, either,” Borlan added with obvious sincerity. “I’ve known him for years. He said UNSA would pay compensation for whatever we figure the delays will cost us.” Borlan resumed his helpless attitude. “So what was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to tell an old buddy who happens to be my best customer to go take a jump?”

Hunt rubbed his chin, threw back his last drop of scotch, and took a long, pensive draw on his cigar.

“And that’s it?” he asked at last.

“That’s it. Now you know as much as I do-except that since you left England we’ve received instructions from UNSA to start shipping the prototype to a place near Houston-a biological institute. The bits should start arriving day after tomorrow; the installation crew is already on its way over to begin work preparing the site.”

“Houston… Does that mean we’re going there?” Gray asked.

“That’s right, Rob.” Borlan paused and scratched the side of his nose. His face screwed itself into a crooked frown. “I, ah-I was wondering… The installation crew will need a bit of time, so you two won’t be able to do very much there for a while. Maybe you could spend a few days here first, huh? Like, ah… meet some of our technical people and clue them in a little on how the scope works-sorta like a teach-in. What d’you say-huh?”

Hunt laughed silently inside. Borlan had been complaining to Forsyth-Scott for months that while the largest potential markets for the scope lay in the USA, practically all of the know-how was confined to Metadyne; the American side of the organization needed more in the way of backup and information than it had been getting.

“You never miss a trick, Felix,” he conceded. “Okay, you bum, I’ll buy it.”

Borlan’s face split into a wide grin.

“This UNSA character you were talking about,” Gray said, switching the subject back again. “What were the examples?”

“Examples?”

“You said he gave some examples of the kind of thing he was interested in knowing if the scope could do.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, lemme see, now… He seemed interested in looking at the insides of bodies-bones, tissues, arteries-stuff like that. Maybe he wanted to do an autopsy or something. He also wanted to know if you could get images of what’s on the pages of a book, but without the book being opened.”

This was too much. Hunt looked from Borlan to Gray and back again, mystified.

“You don’t need anything like a scope to perform an autopsy,” he said, his voice strained with disbelief.

“Why can’t he open a book if he wants to know what’s inside?” Gray demanded in a similar tone.

Borlan showed his empty palms. “Yeah. I know. Search me-sounds screwy!”

“And UNSA is paying thousands for this?”

“Hundreds of thousands.”

Hunt covered his brow and shook his head in exasperation. “Pour me another scotch, Felix,” he sighed.

Chapter Four

A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared on the pilot’s console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the Blue Mountains looming ahead.

Hunt spent the first part of the journey accessing his office files held on the computers back at Metadyne, to tidy up some of the unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the calculations that went with his last experimental report and was adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next two hours in conference with some of Borlan’s engineers discussing technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.

Hunt looked on with detached interest as the villain was unmasked, the hero claimed the admiring heroine he had just saved from a fate worse than death, and the rolling captions delivered today’s moral message for mankind. Stifling a yawn, he flipped the mode switch to MONITOR/CONTROL to blank out the screen and kill the theme music in midbar. He stretched, stubbed out his cigarette, and hauled himself upright in his seat to see how the rest of the universe was getting along.

Far to their right was the Brazos River, snaking south toward the Gulf, embroidered in gold thread on the light blue-gray of the distant haze. Ahead, he could already see the rainbow towers of Houston, standing at attention on the skyline in a tight defensive platoon. Houses were becoming noticeably more numerous in the foreground below. At intervals between them, unidentifiable sprawling constructions began to make their appearance-random collections of buildings, domes, girder lattices, and storage tanks, tied loosely together by tangles of roadways and pipelines. Farther away to the left, a line of perhaps half a dozen slim spires of silver reared up from a shantytown of steel and concrete. He identified them as gigantic Vega satellite ferries standing on their launch-pads. They seemed fitting sentinels to guard the approaches to what had become the Mecca of the Space Age.

As Victor Hunt gazed down upon this ultimate expression of man’s eternal outward urge, spreading away in every direction below, a vague restlessness stirred somewhere deep inside him.

Hunt had been born in New Cross, the shabby end of East London, south of the river. His father had spent most of his life on strike or in the pub on the corner of the street debating grievances worth going on strike for. When he ran out of money and grievances, he worked on the docks at Deptford. Victor’s mother worked in a bottle factory all day to make the money she lost playing bingo all evening. He spent his time playing football and falling in the Surrey Canal. There was a week when he stayed with an uncle in Worcester, a man who went to work dressed in a suit every day at a place that manufactured computers. And his uncle showed Victor how to wire up a binary adder.

Not long afterward, everyone was yelling at everyone more often than usual, so Victor went to live with his aunt and uncle in Worcester. There he discovered a whole new, undreamed-of world where anything one wanted could be made to happen and magic things really came true-written in strange symbols and mysterious diagrams through the pages of the books on his uncle’s shelves.

At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study mathematics, physics, and physical electronics. He moved into lodgings there with a fellow student named Mike who sailed boats, climbed mountains, and whose father was a marketing director.

When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son by Mike’s family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or climbing with Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake District, North Wales, and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They even tried the Eiger once, but were forced back by bad weather.

After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university for some years to further his researches in mathematical nucleonics, his papers on which were by that time attracting widespread attention. Eventually, however, he was forced to come to terms with the fact that a growing predilection for some of the more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while he went to work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government, but rebelled at a life made impossible by the meddlings of uninformed bureaucracy. He tried three jobs in private industry but found himself unable to muster more than a cynical indisposition toward playing the game of pretending that annual budgets, gross margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just turning thirty, the loner he had always been finally asserted itself; he found himself gifted with rare and acknowledged talents, lettered with degrees, credited with achievements, bestowed with awards, cited with honors-and out of a job.

For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by the chief R and D executive of Metadyne to help out on the mathematical interpretation of some of their experimental work. This assignment led to another, and before long a steady relationship had developed between him and the company. Eventually he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their equipment and services for his own researches-but under his conditions. And so the Theoretical Studies “Department” came into being.

And now… something was missing. The something within him that had been awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new worlds to discover. And as he gazed out at the Vega ships…

His thoughts were interrupted as a stream of electromagnetic vibrations from somewhere below was transformed into the code which alerted the Mercury’s flight-control processor. The stubby wing outside the cockpit dipped and the aircar turned, beginning the smooth descent that would merge its course into the eastbound traffic corridor that led to the heart of the city at two thousand feet.

Chapter Five

The morning sun poured in through the window and accentuated the chiseled crags of the face staring out, high over the center of Houston. The squat, stocky frame, conceivably modeled on that of a Sherman tank, threw a square slab of shadow on the carpet behind. The stubby fingers hammered a restless tattoo on the glass. Gregg Caldwell, executive director of the Navigation and Communications Division of UN Space Arm, reflected on developments so far.

Just as he’d expected, now that the initial disbelief and excitement had worn off, everyone was jostling for a slice of the action. In fact, more than a few of the big wheels in some divisions-Biosciences, Chicago, and Space Medicine, Farnborough, for instance-were mincing no words in asking just how Navcomms came to be involved at all, let alone running the show, since the project obviously had no more connection with the business of navigation than it had with communication. The down-turned corners of Caldwell’s mouth shifted back slightly in something that almost approached a smile of anticipation. So, the knives were being sharpened, were they? That was okay by him; he could do with a fight. After more than twenty years of hustling his way to the top of one of the biggest divisions of the Space Arm, he was a seasoned veteran at infighting-and he hadn’t lost a drop of blood yet. Maybe this was an area in which Navcomms hadn’t had much involvement before; maybe the whole thing was bigger than Navcomms could handle; maybe it was bigger than UNSA could handle; but-that was the way it was. It had chosen to fall into Navcomms’ lap and that was where it was going to stay. If anyone wanted to help out, that was fine-but the project was stamped as Navcomms-controlled. If they didn’t like it, let them try to change it. Man-let ’em try!

His thoughts were interrupted by the chime of the console built into the desk behind him. He turned around, flipped a switch, and answered in a voice of baritone granite:

“Caldwell.”

Lyn Garland, his personal assistant, greeted him from the screen. She was twenty-eight, pretty, and had long red hair and big, brown, intelligent eyes.

“Message from Reception. Your two visitors from IDC are here-Dr. Hunt and Mr. Gray.”

“Bring them straight up. Pour some coffee. You’d better sit in with us.”

“Will do.”

Ten minutes later formalities had been exchanged and everyone was seated. Caldwell regarded the Englishmen in silence for a few seconds, his lips pursed and his bushy brows gnarled in a knot across his forehead. He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers on the desk in front of him.

“About three weeks ago I attended a meeting at one of our Lunar survey bases-Copernicus Three,” he said. “A lot of excavation and site-survey work is going on in that area, much of it in connection with new construction programs. The meeting was attended by scientists from Earth and from some of the bases up there, a few people on the engineering side and certain members of the uniformed branches of the Space Arm. It was called following some strange discoveries there-discoveries that make even less sense now than they did then.”

He paused to gaze from one to the other. Hunt and Gray returned the look without speaking. Caldwell continued: “A team from one of the survey units was engaged in mapping out possible sites for clearance radars. They were operating in a remote sector, well away from the main area being leveled…”

As he spoke, Caldwell began operating the keyboard recessed into one side of his desk. With a nod of his head he indicated the far wall, which was made up of a battery of display screens. One of the screens came to life to show the title sheet of a file, marked obliquely with the word RESTRICTED in red. This disappeared to be replaced by a contour map of what looked like a rugged and broken stretch of terrain. A slowly pulsing point of light appeared in the center of the picture and began moving across the map as Caldwell rotated a tracker ball set into the panel that held the keyboard. The light halted at a point where the contours indicated the junction of a steep-sided cleft valley with a wider gorge. The cleft valley was narrow and seemed to branch off from the gorge in a rising curve.

“This map shows the area in question,” the director resumed. “The cursor shows where a minor cleft joins the main fault running down toward the left. The survey boys left their vehicle at this point and proceeded on up to the cleft on foot, looking for a way to the top of that large rock mass-the one tagged ‘five sixty’.” As Caldwell spoke, the pulsing light moved slowly along between the minor sets of contours, tracing out the path taken by the UN team. They watched it negotiate the bend above the mouth of the cleft and proceed some distance farther. The light approached the side of the cleft and touched it at a place where the contours merged into a single heavy line. There it stopped.

“Here the side was a sheer cliff about sixty feet high. That was where they came across the first thing that was unusual-a hole in the base of the rock wall. The sergeant leading the group described it as being like a cave. That strike you as odd?”

Hunt raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Caves don’t grow on moons,” he said simply.

“Exactly.”

The screen now showed a photo view of the area, apparently taken from the spot at which the survey vehicle had been parked. They recognized the break in the wall of the gorge where the cleft joined it. The cleft was higher up than had been obvious from the map and was approached by a ramp of loose rubble. In the background they could see a squat tower of rock flattened on top- presumably the one marked “560” on the map. Caldwell allowed them some time to reconcile the picture with the map before bringing up the second frame. It showed a view taken high up, this time looking into the mouth of the cleft. A series of shots then followed, progressing up to and beyond the bend. “These are stills from a movie record,” Caldwell commented. “I won’t bother with the whole set.” The final frame in the sequence showed a hole in the rock about five feet across.

“Holes like this aren’t unknown on the Moon,” Caldwell remarked. “But they are rare enough to prompt our men into taking a closer look. The inside was a bit of a mess. There had been a rockfall-maybe several falls; not much room-just a heap of rubble and dust… at first sight, anyway.” A new picture on the screen confirmed this statement. “But when they got to probing around a bit more, they came across something that was really unusual. Underneath they found a body-dead!”

The picture changed again to show another view of the interior, taken from the same angle as the previous one. This time, however, the subject was the top half of a human figure lying amid the rubble and debris, apparently at the stage of being half uncovered. It was clad in a spacesuit which, under the layer of gray-white dust, appeared to be bright red. The helmet seemed intact, but it was impossible to make out any details of the face behind the visor because of the reflected camera light. Caldwell allowed them plenty of time to study the picture and reflect on these facts before speaking again.

“That is the body. I’ll answer some of the more obvious questions before you ask. First-no, we don’t know who he is-or was-so we call him Charlie. Second-no, we don’t know for sure what killed him. Third-no, we don’t know where he came from.” The executive director caught the puzzled look on Hunt’s face and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Accidents can happen, and it’s not always easy to say what caused them-I’ll buy that,” Hunt said. “But to not know who he is…? I mean, he must have carried some kind of ID card; I’d have thought he’d have to. And even if he didn’t, he must be from one of the UN bases up there. Someone must have noticed he was missing.”

For the first time the flicker of a smile brushed across Caldwell’s face.

“Of course we checked with all the bases, Dr. Hunt. Results negative. But that was just the beginning. You see, when they got him back to the labs for a more thorough check, a number of peculiarities began to emerge which the experts couldn’t explain-and, believe me, we’ve had enough brains in on this. Even after we brought him back here, the situation didn’t get any better. In fact, the more we find out, the worse it gets.”

“‘Back here’? You mean…

“Oh, yes. Charlie’s been shipped back to Earth. He’s over at the Westwood Biological Institute right now-a few miles from here. We’ll go and have a look at him later on today.”

Silence reigned for what seemed like a long time as Hunt and Gray digested the rapid succession of new facts. At last Gray offered:

“Maybe someobody dumped him for some reason?”

“No, Mr. Gray, you can forget anything like that.” Caldwell waited a few more seconds. “Let me say that from what little we do know so far, we can state one or two things with certainty. First, Charlie did not come from any of the bases established to date on Luna. Furthermore”-Caldwell’s voice slowed to an ominous rumble-“he did not originate from any nation of the world as we know it today. In fact, it is by no means certain that he originated from this planet at all!”

His eyes traveled from Hunt to Gray, then back again, taking in the incredulous stares that greeted his words. Absolute silence enveloped the room. A suspense almost audible tore at their nerves. Caldwell’s finger stabbed at the keyboard.

The face leaped out at them from the screen in grotesque closeup, skull-like, the skin shriveled and darkened like ancient parchment, and stretched back over the bones to uncover two rows of grinning teeth. Nothing remained of the eyes but a pair of empty pits, staring sightlessly out through dry, leathery lids.

Caldwell’s voice, now a chilling whisper, hissed through the fragile air.

“You see, gentlemen-Charlie died over fifty thousand years ago!”

Chapter Six

Dr. Victor Hunt stared absently down at the bird’s-eye view of the outskirts of Houston sliding by below the UNSA jet. The mind-numbing impact of Caldwell’s revelations had by this time abated sufficiently for him to begin putting together in his mind something of a picture of what it all meant.

Of Charlie’s age there could be no doubt. All living organisms take into their bodies known proportions of the radioactive isotopes of carbon and certain other elements. During life, an organism maintains a constant ratio of these isotopes to “normal” ones, but when it dies and intake ceases, the active isotopes are left to decay in a predictable pattern. This mechanism provides, in effect, a highly reliable clock, which begins to run at the moment of death. Analysis of the decay residues enables a reliable figure to be calculated for how long the clock has been running. Many such tests had been performed on Charlie, and all the results agreed within close limits.

Somebody had pointed out that the validity of this method rested on the assumptions that the composition of whatever Charlie ate, and the constituents of whatever atmosphere he breathed, were the same as for modern man on modern Earth. Since Charlie might not be from Earth, this assumption could not be made. It hadn’t taken long, however, for this point to be settled conclusively. Although the functions of most of the devices contained in Charlie’s backpack were still to be established, one assembly had been identified as an ingeniously constructed miniature nuclear power plant. The U235 fuel pellets were easily located and analysis of their decay products yielded a second, independent answer, although a less accurate one: The power unit in Charlie’s backpack had been made some fifty thousand years previously. The further implication of this was that since the first set of test results was thus substantiated, it seemed to follow that in terms of air and food supply, there could have been little abnormal about Charlie’s native environment.

Now, Charlie’s kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their human form somewhere. That this “somewhere” was either Earth or not Earth was fairly obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no other possibility. He traced back over what he could recall of the conventional account of the evolution of terrestrial life forms and wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking effort and research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently supposed. Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by anybody’s standards; was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere in all those gulfs of uncertainty, there could be enough room to lose an advanced line of human descent which had flourished and died out long before modern man began his own ascent?

On the other hand, the fact that Charlie was found on the Moon presupposed a civilization sufficiently advanced technically to send him there. Surely, on the way toward developing space flight, they would have evolved a worldwide technological society, and in doing so would have made machines, erected structures, built cities, used metals, and left all the other hallmarks of progress. If such a civilization had once existed on Earth, surely centuries of exploration and excavation couldn’t have avoided stumbling on at least some traces of it. But not one instance of any such discovery had ever been recorded. Although the conclusion rested squarely on negative evidence, Hunt could not, even with his tendency toward open-mindedness, accept that an explanation along these lines was even remotely probable.

The only alternative, then, was that Charlie came from somewhere else. Clearly this could not be the Moon itself: It was too small to have retained an atmosphere anywhere near long enough for life to have started at all, let alone reach an advanced level-and of course, his spacesuit showed he was just as much an alien there as was man.

That only left some other planet. The problem here lay in Charlie’s undoubted human form, which Caldwell had stressed although he hadn’t elected to go into detail. Hunt knew that the process of natural evolution was accepted as occurring through selection, over a long period, from a purely random series of genetic mutations. All the established rules and principles dictated that the appearance of two identical end products from two completely isolated families of evolution, unfolding independently in different corners of the universe, just couldn’t happen. Hence, if Charlie came from somewhere else, a whole branch of accepted scientific theory would come crashing down in ruins. So-Charlie couldn’t possibly have come from Earth. Neither could he possibly have come from anywhere else. Therefore, Charlie couldn’t exist. But he did.

Hunt whistled silently to himself as the full implications of the thing began to dawn on him. There was enough here to keep the whole scientific world arguing for decades.

Inside the Westwood Biological Institute, Caldwell, Lyn Garland, Hunt, and Gray were met by a Professor Christian Danchekker. The Englishmen recognized him, since Caldwell had introduced them earlier by vi-phone. On their way to the laboratory section of the institute, Danchekker briefed them further.

In view of its age, the body was in an excellent state of preservation. This was due to the environment in which it had been found-a germ-free hard vacuum and an abnormally low temperature sustained, even at Lunar noon, by the insulating mass of the surrounding rock. These conditions had prevented any onset of bacterial decay of the soft tissues. No rupture had been found in the spacesuit. So the currently favored theory regarding cause of death was that a failure in the life-support system had resulted in a sudden fall in temperature. The body had undergone deep freezing in a short space of time with a consequent abrupt cessation of metabolic processes; ice crystals, formed from body fluids, had caused widespread laceration of cell membranes. In the course of time most of the lighter substances had sublimed, mainly from the outer layers, to leave behind a blackened, shriveled, natural kind of mummy. The most seriously affected parts were the eyes, which, composed for the most part of fluids, had collapsed completely, leaving just a few flaky remnants in their sockets.

A major problem was the extreme fragility of the remains, which made any attempt at detailed examination next to impossible. Already the body had undergone some irreparable damage in the course of being transported to Earth and in the removal of the spacesuit; only the body’s being frozen solid during these operations had prevented the situation from being even worse. That was when somebody had thought of Felix Borlan at IDCC and an instrument being developed in England that could display the insides of things. The result had been Caldwell’s visit to Portland.

Inside the first laboratory it was dark. Researchers were using binocular microscopes to study sets of photographic transparencies arranged on several glass-topped tables, illuminated from below. Danchekker selected some plates from a pile and, motioning the others to follow, made his way over to the far wall. He positioned the first three of the plates on an eye-level viewing screen, snapped on the screen light, and stepped back to join the expectant semicircle. The plates were X-ray images showing the front and side views of a skull. Five faces, thrown into sharp relief against the darkness of the room behind, regarded the screen in solemn silence. At last Danchekker moved a pace forward, at the same time half turning toward them.

“I need not, I feel, tell you who this is.” His manner was somewhat stiff and formal. “A skull, fully human in every detail-as far as it is possible to ascertain by X rays, anyway.” Danchekker traced along the line of the jaw with a ruler he had picked up from one of the tables. “Note the formation of the teeth-on either side we see two incisors, one canine, two premolars, and three molars. This pattern was established quite early in the evolutionary line that leads to our present day anthropoids, including, of course, man. It distinguishes our common line of descent from other offshoots, such as the New World monkeys with a count of two, one, three, three.”

“Hardly necessary here,” Hunt commented. “There’s nothing apelike or monkeylike about that picture.”

“Quite so, Dr. Hunt,” Danchekker returned with a nod. “The reduced canines, not interlocking with the upper set, and the particular pattern of the cusps-these are distinctly human characteristics. Note also the flatness of the lower face, the absence of any bony brow ridges… high forehead and sharply angled jaw, well-rounded braincase. These are all features of true man as we know him today, features that derive directly from his earlier ancestors. The significance of these details in this instance is that they demonstrate an example of true man, not something that merely bears a superficial resemblance to him.”

The professor took down the plates and momentarily flooded the room with a blaze of light. A muttered profanity from one of the scientists at the tables made him switch off the light hastily. He picked up three more plates, set them up on the screen, and switched on the light to reveal the side view of a torso, an arm, and a foot.

“Again, the trunk shows no departure from the familiar human pattern. Same rib structure… broad chest with well-developed clavicles… normal pelvic arrangement. The foot is perhaps the most specialized item in the human skeleton and is responsible for man’s uniquely powerful stride and somewhat peculiar gait. If you are familiar with human anatomy, you will find that this foot resembles ours in every respect.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Hunt conceded, shaking his head. “Nothing remarkable, then.”

“The most significant thing, Dr. Hunt, is that nothing is remarkable.”

Danchekker switched off the screen and returned the plates to the pile. Caldwell turned to Hunt as they began walking back toward the door.

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day,” he grunted. “An understandable reason for wanting some… er… irregular action, you would agree?”

Hunt agreed.

A passage, followed by a short flight of stairs and another passage, brought them to a set of double doors bearing the large red sign STERILE AREA. In the anteroom behind, they put on surgical masks, caps, gowns, gloves, and overshoes before passing out through another door at the opposite end.

In the first section they came to, samples of skin and other tissues were being examined. By reintroducing the substances believed to have escaped over the centuries, specimens had been restored to what were hoped to be close approximations to their original conditions. In general, the findings merely confirmed that Charlie was as human chemically as he was structurally. Some unfamiliar enzymes had, however, been discovered. Dynamic computer simulation suggested that these were designed to assist in the breakdown of proteins unlike anything found in the diet of modern man. Danchekker was inclined to dismiss this peculiarity with the rather vague assertion that “Times change,” a remark which Hunt appeared to find disturbing.

The next laboratory was devoted to an investigation of the spacesuit and the various other gadgets and implements found on and around the body. The helmet was the first exhibit to be presented for inspection. Its back and crown were made of metal, coated dull black and extending forward to the forehead to leave a transparent visor extending from ear to ear. Danchekker held it up for them to see and pushed his hand up through the opening at the neck. They could see clearly the fingers of his rubber glove through the facepiece.

“Observe,” he said, picking up a powerful xenon flash lamp from the bench. He directed the beam through the facepiece, and a circle of the material immediately turned dark. They could see through the area around the circle that the level of illumination inside the helmet had not changed appreciably. He moved the lamp around and the dark circle followed it across the visor.

“Built-in antiglare,” Gray observed.

“The visor is fabricated from a self-polarizing crystal,” Danchekker informed them. “It responds directly to incident light in a fashion that is linear up to high intensities. The visor is also effective with gamma radiation.”

Hunt took the helmet to examine it more closely. The blend of curves that made up the outside contained little of interest, but on turning it over he found that a section of the inner surface of the crown had been removed to reveal a cavity, empty except for some tiny wires and a set of fixing brackets.

“That recess contained a complete miniature communications station,” Danchekker supplied, noting his interest. “Those grilles at the sides concealed the speakers, and a microphone is built into the top, just above the forehead.” He reached inside and drew down a small retractable binocular periscope from inside the top section of the helmet, which clicked into position immediately in front of where the eyes of the wearer would be. “Built-in video, too,” he explained. “Controlled from a panel on the chest. The small hole in the front of the crown contained a camera assembly.” Hunt continued to turn the trophy over in his hands, studying it from all angles in absorbed silence. Two weeks ago he had been sitting at his desk in Metadyne doing a routine job. Never in his wildest fantasies had he imagined that he would one day come to be holding in his hands something that might well turn out to be one of the most exciting discoveries of the century, if not in the whole of history. Even his agile mind was having difficulty taking it all in.

“Can we see some of the electronics that were in here?” he asked after a while.

“Not today,” Caldwell replied. “The electronics are being studied at another location-that goes for most of what was in the backpack, too. Let’s just say for now that when it came to molecular circuits, these guys knew their business.”

“The backpack is a masterpiece of precision engineering in miniature,” Danchekker continued, leading them to another part of the laboratory. “The prime power source for all the equipment and heating has been identified, and is nuclear in nature. In addition, there was a water recirculation plant, life-support system, standby power and communications system, and oxygen liquefaction plant-all in that!” He held up the casing of the stripped-down backpack for them to see, then tossed it back on the bench. “Several other devices were also included, but their purpose is still obscure. Behind you, you will see some personal effects.”

The professor moved around to indicate an array of objects taken from the body and arranged neatly on another bench like museum exhibits.

“A pen-not dissimilar to a familiar pressurized ballpoint type; the top may be rotated to change color.” He picked up a collection of metallic strips that hinged into a casing, like the blades of a pocketknife. “We suspect that these are keys of some kind because they have magnetic codes written on their surfaces.”

To one side was a collection of what looked like crumpled pieces of paper, some with groups of barely discernible symbols written in places. Next to them were two pocket-size books, each about half an inch thick.

“Assorted oddments,” Danchekker said, looking along the bench. “The documents are made from a kind of plasticized fiber. Fragments of print and handwriting are visible in places-quite unintelligible, of course. The material has deteriorated severely and tends to disintegrate at the slightest touch.” He nodded toward Hunt. “This is another area where we hope to learn as much as we can with the Trimagniscope before we risk anything else.” He pointed to the remaining articles and listed them without further elaboration. “Pen-size torch; some kind of pocket flamethrower, we think; knife; pen-size electric pocket drill with a selection of bits in the handle; food and drink containers-they connect via valves to the tubes inside the lower part of the helmet; pocket folder, like a wallet-too fragile to open; changes of underclothes; articles for personal hygiene; odd pieces of metal, purpose unknown. There were also a few electronic devices in the pockets; they have been sent elsewhere along with the rest.”

The party halted on the way back to the door to gather around the scarlet spacesuit, which had been reassembled on a life-size dummy standing on a small plinth. At first sight the proportions of the figure seemed to differ subtly from those of an average man, the build being slightly on the stocky side and the limbs a little short for the height of about five feet, six inches. However, since the suit was not designed for a close fit, it was difficult to be sure. Hunt noticed the soles of the boots were surprisingly thick.

“Sprung interior,” Danchekker supplied, following his gaze.

“What’s that?”

“It’s quite ingenious. The mechanical properties of the sole material vary with applied pressure. With the wearer walking at normal speed, the sole would remain mildly flexible. Under impact, however-for example, if he jumped-it assumes the characteristics of a stiff spring. It’s an ideal device for kangarooing along in lunar gravity-utilizing conditions of reduced weight but normal inertia to advantage.”

“And now, gentlemen,” said Caldwell, who had been following events with evident satisfaction, “the moment I guess you’ve been waiting for-let’s have a look at Charlie himself.”

An elevator took them down to the subterranean levels of the institute. They emerged into a somber corridor of white-tiled walls and white lights, and followed it to a large metal door. Danchekker pressed his thumb against a glass plate set into the wall and the door slid silently aside on recognition of his print. At the same time, a diffuse but brilliant white glow flooded the room inside.

It was cold. Most of the walls were taken up by control panels, analytical equipment, and glass cabinets containing rows of gleaming instruments. Everything was light green, as in an operating theater, and gave the same impression of surgical cleanliness. A large table, supported by a single central pillar, stood to one side. On top of it was what looked like an oversize glass coffin. Inside that lay the body. Saying nothing, the professor led them across the room, his overshoes squeaking on the rubbery floor as he walked. The small group converged around the table and stared in silent awe at the figure before them.

It lay half covered by a sheet that stretched from its lower chest to its feet. In these clinical surroundings, the gruesome impact of the sight that had leaped at them from the screen in Caldwell’s office earlier in the day was gone. All that remained was an object of scientific curiosity. Hunt found it overwhelming to stand at arm’s length from the remains of a being who had lived as part of a civilization, had grown and passed away, before the dawn of history. For what seemed a long time he stared mutely, unable to frame any intelligent question or comment, while speculations tumbled through his mind on the life and times of this strange creature. When he eventually jolted himself back to the present, he realized that the professor was speaking again.

“… Naturally, we are unable to say at this stage if it was simply a genetic accident peculiar to this individual or a general characteristic of the race to which he belonged, but measurements of the eye sockets and certain parts of the skull indicate that, relative to his size, his eyes were somewhat larger than our own. This suggests that he was not accustomed to sunlight as bright as ours. Also, note the length of the nostrils. Allowing for shrinkage with age, they are constructed to provide a longer passage for the prewarming of air. This suggests that he came from a relatively cool climate… the same thing can be observed in modern Eskimos.” Danchekker made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole length of the body. “Again, the rather squat and stocky build is consistent with the idea of a cool native environment. A fat, round object presents less surface area per unit volume than a long, thin one and thus loses less heat. Contrast the compact build of the Eskimo with the long limbs and lean body of the Negro. We know that at the time Charlie was alive the Earth was just entering the last cold period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Life forms in existence at that time would have had about a million years to adapt to the cold. Also, there is strong reason to believe that ice ages are caused by a reduction in the amount of solar radiation falling on Earth, brought about by the Sun and planets passing through exceptionally dusty patches of space. For example, ice ages occur approximately every two hundred and fifty million years; this is also the period of rotation of our galaxy-surely more than mere coincidence. Thus, this being’s evident adaptation to cold, the suggestion of a lower level of daylight, and his established age all correlate well.”

Hunt looked at the professor quizzically. “You’re pretty sure already, then, that he’s from Earth?” he said in a tone of mild surprise. “I mean-it’s early days yet, surely?”

Danchekker drew back his head disdainfully and screwed up his eyebrows to convey a shadow of irritation. “Surely it is quite obvious, Dr. Hunt.” The tone was that of a professor reproaching an errant student. “Consider the things we have observed: the teeth, the skull, the bones, the types and layout of organs. I have deliberately drawn attention to these details to emphasize his kinship to ourselves. It is clear that his ancestry is the same as ours.” He waved his hand to and fro in front of his face. “No, there can be no doubt whatsoever. Charlie evolved from the same stock as modern man and all the other terrestrial primates.”

Gray looked dubious. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “I think Vic’s got a point. I mean, if his lot did come from Earth, you’d have expected someone to have found out about it before now, wouldn’t you?”

Danchekker sighed with an overplay of indifference. “If you wish to doubt my word, you have, of course, every right to do so,” he said. “However, as a biologist and an anthropologist, I for my part see more than sufficient evidence to support the conclusions I have stated.”

Hunt seemed far from satisfied and started to speak again, but Caldwell intervened.

“Cool it, you guys. D’you think we haven’t had enough arguments like this around here for the last few weeks?”

“I really think it’s about time we had some lunch,” Lyn Garland interrupted with well-timed tact.

Danchekker turned abruptly and began walking back toward the door, reciting statistics on the density of body hair and the thickness of subdermal layers of fat, apparently having dismissed the incident from his mind. Hunt paused to survey the body once more before turning to follow, and in doing so, he caught Gray’s eye for an instant. The engineer’s mouth twitched briefly at the corners; Hunt gave a barely perceptible shrug. Caldwell, still standing by the foot of the table, observed the brief exchange. He turned his head to look after Danchekker and then back again at the Englishmen, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. At last he fell in a few paces behind the group, nodding slowly to himself and permitting a faint smile.

The door slid silently into place and the room was once more plunged into darkness.

Chapter Seven

Hunt brought his hands up to his shoulders, stretched his body back over his chair, and emitted a long yawn at the ceiling of the laboratory. He held the position for a few seconds, and then collapsed back with a sigh. Finally he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, hauled himself upright to face the console in front of him once more, and returned his gaze to the three-foot-high wall of the cylindrical glass tank by his side.

The image on the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body, which Danchekker had shown them on their first day in Houston three weeks before. The book itself was enclosed in the scanner module of the machine, on the far side of the room. The scope was adjusted to generate a view that followed the change in density along the boundary surface of the selected page, producing an image of the lower section of the book only; it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut deck of cards. Because of the age and condition of the book, however, the characters on the page thus exposed tended to be of poor quality and in some places were incomplete. The next step would be to scan the image optically with TV cameras and feed the encoded pictures into the Navcomms computer complex. The raw input would then be processed by pattern recognition techniques and statistical techniques to produce a second, enhanced copy with many of the missing character fragments restored.

Hunt cast his eye over the small monitor screens on his console, each of which showed a magnified view of a selected area of the page, and tapped some instructions into his keyboard.

“There’s an unresolved area on monitor five,” he announced. “Cursors read X, twelve hundred to thirteen eighty; Y, nine ninety and, ah, ten seventy-five.”

Rob Gray, seated at another console a few feet away and almost surrounded by screens and control panels, consulted one of the numerical arrays glowing before him.

“Z mod’s linear across the field,” he advised. “Try a block elevate?”

“Can do. Give it a try.”

“Setting Z step two hundred through two ten… increment point one… step zero point five seconds.”

“Check.” Hunt watched the screen as the surface picked out through the volume of the book became distorted locally and the picture on the monitor began to change.

“Hold it there,” he called. Gray hit a key. “Okay?”

Hunt contemplated the modified view for a while.

“The middle of the element’s clear now,” he pronounced at last. “Fix the new plane inside forty percent. I still don’t like the strip around it, though. Give me a vertical slice through the center point.”

“Which screen d’you want it on?”

“Ah… number seven.”

“Coming up.”

The curve, showing a cross section of the page surface through the small area they were working on, appeared on Hunt’s console. He studied it for awhile, then called:

“Run an interpolation across the strip. Set thresholds of, say, minus five and thirty-five percent on Y.”

“Parameters set… Interpolator running… run complete,” Gray recited. “Integrating into scan program now.” Again the picture altered subtly. There was a noticeable improvement.

“Still not right around the edge,” Hunt said. “Try weighting the quarter and three-quarter points by plus ten. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to break it down into isodepth bands.”

“Plus ten on point two five zero and point seven five zero,” Gray repeated as he operated the keys. “Integrated. How’s it look?”

On the element of surface displayed on Hunt’s monitor, the fragments of characters had magically assembled themselves into recognizable shapes. Hunt nodded with satisfaction.

“That’ll do. Freeze it in. Okay-that clears that one. There’s another messy patch up near the top right. Let’s have a go at that next.”

***

Life had been reduced to much this kind of pattern ever since the day the installation of the scope was completed. They had spent the first week obtaining a series of cross-sectional views of the body itself. This exercise had proved memorable on account of the mild discomfort and not so mild inconvenience of having to work in electrically heated suits, following the medical authority’s insistence that Charlie be kept in a refrigerated environment. It had proved something of an anticlimax. The net results were that, inside as well as out, Charlie was surprisingly-or not so surprisingly, depending on one’s point of view-human. During the second week they began examining the articles found on the body, especially the pieces of “paper” and the pocket books. This investigation had proved more interesting.

Of the symbols contained in the documents, numerals were the first to be identified. A team of cryptographers, assembled at Navcomms HQ, soon worked out the counting system, which turned out to be based on twelve digits rather than ten and employed a positional notation with the least significant digit to the left. Deciphering the nonnumeric symbols was proving more difficult. Linguists from institutions and universities in several countries had linked into Houston and, with the aid of batteries of computers, were attempting to make some sense of the language of the Lunarians, as Charlie’s race had come to be called in commemoration of his place of discovery. So far their efforts had yielded little more than that the Lunarian alphabet comprised thirty-seven characters, was written horizontally from right to left, and contained the equivalent of upper-case characters.

Progress, however, was not considered to be bad for so short a time. Most of the people involved were aware that even this much could never have been achieved without the scope, and already the names of the two Englishmen were well-known around the division. The scope attracted a lot of interest among the UNSA technical personnel, and most evenings saw a stream of visitors arriving at the Ocean Hotel, all curious to meet the coinventors of the instrument and to learn more about its principles of operation. Before long, the Ocean became the scene of a regular debating society where anybody who cared to could give free rein to his wildest speculations concerning the Charlie mystery, free from the constraints of professional caution and skepticism that applied during business hours.

Caldwell, of course, knew everything that was said by anybody at the Ocean and what everybody else thought about it, since Lyn Garland was present on most nights and represented the next best thing to a hot line back to the HQ building. Nobody minded that much-after all, it was only part of her job. They minded even less when she began turning up with some of the other girls from Navcomms in tow, adding a refreshing party atmosphere to the whole proceedings. This development met with the full approval of the visitors from out-of-town; however, it had led to somewhat strained relationships on the domestic front for one or two of the locals.

Hunt jabbed at the keyboard for the last time and sat back to inspect the image of the completed page.

“Not bad at all,” he said. “That one won’t need much enhancement.”

“Good,” Gray agreed. He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack across to Hunt without being asked. “Optical encoding’s finished,” he added, glancing at a screen. “That’s number sixty-seven tied up.” He rose from his chair and moved across to stand beside Hunt’s console to get a better view of the image in the tank. He looked at it for a while without speaking.

“Columns of numbers,” he observed needlessly at last. “Looks like some kind of table.”

“Looks like it…” Hunt’s voice sounded far away.

“Mmm… rows and columns… thick lines and thin lines. Could be anything-mileage chart, wire gauges, some sort of timetable. Who knows?”

Hunt made no reply but continued to blow occasional clouds of smoke at the glass, cocking his head first to one side and then to the other.

“None of the numbers there are very large,” he commented after a while. “Never more than two positions in any place. That gives us what in a duodecimal system? One hundred and forty-three at the most.” Then as an afterthought, “I wonder what the biggest is.”

“I’ve got a table of Lunarian-decimal equivalents somewhere. Any good?”

“No, don’t bother for now. It’s too near lunch. Maybe we could have a look at it over a beer tonight at the Ocean.”

“I can pick out their one and two,” Gray said. “And three and Hey! What do you know-look at the right-hand columns of those big boxes. Those numbers are in ascending order!”

“You’re right. And look-the same pattern repeats over and over in every one. It’s some kind of cyclic array.” Hunt thought for a moment, his face creased in a frown of concentration. “Something else, too-see those alphabetic groups down the sides? The same groups reappear at intervals all across the page…” He broke off again and rubbed his chin.

Gray waited perhaps ten seconds. “Any ideas?”

“Dunno… Sets of numbers starting at one and increasing by one every time. Cyclic… an alphabetic label tagged on to each repeating group. The whole pattern repeating again inside bigger groups, and the bigger groups repeat again. Suggests some sort of order. Sequence…”

His mumblings were interrupted as the door opened behind them. Lyn Garland walked in.

“Hi, you guys. What’s showing today?” She moved over to stand between them and peered into the tank. “Say, tables! How about that? Where’d they come from, the books?”

“Hello, lovely,” Gray said with a grin. “Yep.” He nodded in the direction of the scanner.

“Hi,” Hunt answered, at last tearing his eyes away from the image. “What can we do for you?”

She didn’t reply at once, but continued staring into the tank.

“What are they? Any ideas?”

“Don’t know yet. We were just talking about it when you came in.”

She marched across the lab and bent over to peer into the top of the scanner. The smooth, tanned curve of her leg and the proud thrust of her behind under her thin skirt drew an exchange of approving glances from the two English scientists. She came back and studied the image once more.

“Looks like a calendar, if you ask me,” she told them. Her voice left no room for dissent.

Gray laughed. “Calendar, eh? You sound pretty sure of it. What’s this-a demonstration of infaffible feminine intuition or something?” He was goading playfully.

She turned to confront him with out-thrust jaw and hands planted firmly on hips. “Listen, Limey-I’ve got a right to an opinion, okay? So, that’s what I think it is. That’s my opinion.”

“Okay, okay.” Gray held up his hands. “Let’s not start the War of Independence all over again. I’ll note it in the lab file: ‘Lyn thinks it’s a-’”

“Holy Christ!” Hunt cut him off in midsentence. He was staring wide-eyed at the tank. “Do you know, she could be right! She could just be bloody right!”

Gray turned back to face the side of the tank. “How come?”

“Well, look at it. Those larger groups could be something like months, and the labeled sets that keep repeating inside them could be weeks made up of days. After all, days and years have to be natural units in any calendar system. See what I mean?”

Gray looked dubious. “I’m not so sure,” he said slowly. “It’s nothing like our year, is it? I mean, there’s a hell of a lot more than three hundred sixty-five numbers in that lot, and a lot more than twelve months, or whatever they are-aren’t there?”

“I know. Interesting?”

“Hey. I’m still here,” said a small voice behind them. They moved apart and half turned to let her in on the proceedings.

“Sorry,” Hunt said. “Getting carried away.” He shook his head and regarded her with an expression of disbelief.

“What on Earth made you say a calendar?”

She shrugged and pouted her lips. “Don’t know, really. The book over there looks like a diary. Every diary I ever saw had calendars in it. So, it had to be a calendar.”

Hunt sighed. “So much for scientific method. Anyway, let’s run a shot of it. I’d like to do some sums on it later.” He looked back at Lyn. “No-on second thought, you run it. This is your discovery.”

She frowned at him suspiciously. “What d’you want me to do?”

“Sit down there at the master console. That’s right. Now activate the control keyboard… Press the red button-that one.”

“What do I do now?”

“Type this: FC comma DACCO seven slash PCH dot P sixty-seven slash HCU dot one. That means ‘functional control mode, data access program subsystem number seven selected, access data file reference “Project Charlie, Book one,” page sixty-seven, optical format, output on hard copy unit, one copy.”

“It does? Really? Great!”

She keyed in the commands as Hunt repeated them more slowly. At once a hum started up in the hard copier, which stood next to the scanner. A few seconds later a sheet of glossy paper flopped into the tray attached to the copier’s side. Gray walked over to collect it.

“Perfect,” he announced.

“This makes me a scope expert, too,” Lyn informed them brightly.

Hunt studied the sheet briefly, nodded, and slipped it into a folder lying on top of the console.

“Doing some homework?” she asked.

“I don’t like the wallpaper in my hotel room.”

“He’s got the theory of relativity all around the bedroom in his flat in Wokingham,” Gray confided, “… and wave mechanics in the kitchen.”

She looked from one to the other curiously. “Do you know, you’re crazy. Both of you-you’re both crazy. I was always too polite to mention it before, but somebody has to say it.”

Hunt gave her a solemn look. “You didn’t come all the way over here to tell us we’re crazy,” he pronounced.

“Know something-you’re right. I had to be in Westwood anyway. A piece of news just came in this morning that I thought might interest you. Gregg’s been talking to the Soviets. Apparently one of their materials labs has been doing tests on some funny pieces of metal alloy they got hold of-all sorts of unusual properties nobody’s ever seen before. And guess what-they dug them up on the Moon, somewhere near Mare Imbrium. And-when they ran some dating tests, they came up with a figure of about fifty thousand years! How about that! Interested?”

Gray whistled.

“It had to be just a matter of time before something else turned up,” Hunt said, nodding. “Know any more details?”

She shook her head. “’Fraid not. But some of the guys might be able to fill you in a bit more at the Ocean tonight. Try Hans if he’s there; he was talking a lot to Gregg about it earlier.”

Hunt looked intrigued but decided there was little point in pursuing the matter further for the time being.

“How is Gregg?” he asked. “Has he tried smiling lately?”

“Don’t be mean,” she reproached him. “Gregg’s okay. He’s busy, that’s all. D’you think he didn’t have enough to worry about before all this blew up?”

Hunt didn’t dispute it. During the few weeks that had passed, he had seen ample evidence of the massive resources Caldwell was marshaling from all around the globe. He couldn’t help but be impressed by the director’s organizational ability and his ruthless efficiency when it came to annihilating opposition. There were other things, however, about which Hunt harbored mild personal doubts.

“How’s it all going, then?” he asked. His tone was neutral. It did not escape the girl’s sharply tuned senses. Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“Well, you’ve seen most of the action so far. How do you think it’s going?”

He tried a sidestep to avoid her deliberate turning around of the question.

“None of my business, really, is it? We’re just the machine minders in all this.”

“No, really-I’m interested. What do you think?”

Hunt made a great play of stubbing out his cigarette. He frowned and scratched his forehead.

“You’ve got rights to opinions, too,” she persisted. “Our Constitution says so. So, what’s your opinion?”

There was no way off the hook, or of evading those big brown eyes.

“There’s no shortage of information turning up,” he conceded at last. “The infantry is doing a good job…” He let the rider hang.

“But what…”

Hunt sighed.

“But… the interpretation. There’s something too dogmatic-too rigid-about the way the big names higher up are using the information. It’s as if they can’t think outside the ruts they’ve thought inside for years. Maybe they’re overspecialized-won’t admit any possibility that goes against what they’ve always believed.”

“For instance?”

“Oh, I don’t know… Well, take Danchekker, for one. He’s always accepted orthodox evolutionary theory-all his life, I suppose; therefore, Charlie must be from Earth. Nothing else is possible. The accepted theory must be right, so that much is fixed; you have to work everything else to fit in with that.”

“You think he’s wrong? That Charlie came from somewhere else?”

“Hell, I don’t know. He could be right. But it’s not his conclusion that I don’t like; it’s his way of getting there. This problem’s going to need more flexibility before it’s cracked.”

Lyn nodded slowly to herself, as if Hunt had confirmed something.

“I thought you might say something like that,” she mused. “Gregg will be interested to hear it. He wondered the same thing, too.”

Hunt had the feeling that the questions had been more than just an accidental turn of conversation. He looked at her long and hard.

“Why should Gregg be interested?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Gregg knows a lot about you two. He’s interested in anything anybody has to say. It’s people, see-Gregg’s a genius with people. He knows what makes them tick. It’s the biggest part of his job.”

“Well, it’s a people problem he’s got,” Hunt said. “Why doesn’t he fix it?”

Suddenly Lyn switched moods and seemed to make light of the whole subject, as if she had learned all she needed to for the time being.

“Oh, he will-when he gets the feeling that the time’s right. He’s very good with timing, too.” She decided to finish the matter entirely. “Anyhow, it’s time for lunch.” She stood up and slipped a hand through an arm on either side. “How about two crazy Limeys treating a poor girl from the Colonies to a drink?”

Chapter Eight

The progress meeting, in the main conference room of the Navcomms Headquarters building, had been in session for just over two hours. About two dozen persons were seated or sprawled around the large table that stood in the center of the room, by now reduced to a shambles of files, papers, overflowing ashtrays, and half-empty glasses.

Nothing really exciting had emerged so far. Various speakers had reported the results of their latest tests, the sum total of their conclusions being that Charlie’s circulatory, respiratory, nervous, endocrine, lymphatic, digestive, and every other system anybody could think of were as normal as those of anyone sitting around the table. His bones were the same, his body chemistry was the same, his blood was a familiar grouping. His brain capacity and development were within the normal range for Homo sapiens, and evidence suggested that he had been right-handed. The genetic codes carried in his reproductive cells had been analyzed; a computer simulation of combining them with codes donated by an average human female had confirmed that the offspring of such a union would have inherited a perfectly normal set of characteristics.

Hunt tended to remain something of a passive observer of the proceedings, conscious of his status as an unofficial guest and wondering from time to time why he had been invited at all. The only reference made to him so far had been a tribute in Caldwell’s opening remarks to the invaluable aid rendered by the Trimagniscope; apart from the murmur of agreement that had greeted this comment, no further mention had been made of either the instrument or its inventor. Lyn Garland had told him: “The meeting’s on Monday, and Gregg wants you to be there to answer detailed questions on the scope.” So here he was. Thus far, nobody had wanted to know anything detailed about the scope-only about the data it produced. Something gave him the uneasy feeling there was an ulterior motive lurking somewhere.

After dwelling on Charlie’s computerized, mathematical sex life, the chair considered a suggestion, put forward by a Texas planetologist sitting opposite Hunt, that perhaps the Lunarians came from Mars. Mars had reached a later phase of planetary evolution than Earth and possibly had evolved intelligent life earlier, too. Then the arguments started. Martian exploration went right back to the 1970s; UNSA had been surveying the surface from satellites and manned bases for years. How come no sign of any Lunarian civilization had showed up? Answer: We’ve been on the Moon a hell of a lot longer than that and the first traces have only just shown up there. So you could expect discovery to occur later on Mars. Objection: If they came from Mars, then their civilization developed on Mars. Signs of a whole civilization should be far more obvious than signs of visits to a place like Earth’s Moon-therefore the Lunarians should have been detected a lot sooner on Mars. Answer: Think about the rate of erosion on the Martian surface. The signs could be largely wiped out or buried. At least that could account for there not being any signs on Earth. Somebody then pointed out that this did not solve the problem-all it did was shift it to another place. If the Lunarians came from Mars, evolutionary theory was still in just as big a mess as ever.

So the discussion went on.

Hunt wondered how Rob Gray was getting on back at Westwood. They now had a training schedule to fit in on top of their normal daily data-collection routine. A week or so before, Caldwell had informed them that he wanted four engineers from Navcomms fully trained as Trimagniscope operators. His explanation, that this would allow round-the-clock operation of the scope and hence better productivity from it, had not left Hunt convinced; neither had his further assertion that Navcomms was going to buy itself some of the instruments but needed to get some in-house expertise while they had the opportunity.

Maybe Caldwell intended setting up Navcomms as an independent and self-sufficient scope-operating facility. Why would he do that? Was Forsyth-Scott or somebody else exerting pressure to get Hunt back to England? If this was a prelude to shipping him back, the scope would obviously stay in Houston. That meant that the first thing he’d be pressed into when he got back would be a panic to get the second prototype working. Big deal!

The meeting eventually accepted that the Martian-origin theory created more problems than it solved and, anyway, was pure speculation. Last rites in the form of “No substantiating evidence offered” were pronounced, and the corpse was quietly laid to rest under the epitaph In Abeyance, penned in the “Action” columns of the memoranda sheets around the table.

A cryptologist then delivered a long rambling account of the patterns of character groupings that occurred in Charlie’s personal documents. They had already completed preliminary processing of all the individual papers, the contents of the wallet, and one of the books; they were about half way through the second. There were many tables, but nobody knew yet what they meant; some structured lines of symbols suggested mathematical formulas; certain page and section headings matched entries in the text. Some character strings appeared with high frequency, some with less; some were concentrated on a few pages, while others were evenly spread throughout. There were lots of figures and statistics. Despite the enthusiasm of the speaker, the mood of the room grew heavy and the questions fewer. They knew he was a bright guy; they wished he’d stop telling them.

At length, Danchekker, who had been noticeably silent through most of the proceedings and appeared to be growing increasingly impatient as they continued, obtained leave from the chair to address the meeting. He rose to his feet, clasped his lapels, and cleared his throat. “We have devoted as much time as can be excused to exploring improbable and far-flung suggestions which, as we have seen, turn out to be fallacious.” He spoke confidently, taking in the length of the table with side-to-side swings of his body. “The time has surely come, gentlemen, for us to dally no longer, but to concentrate our efforts on what must be the only viable line of reasoning open to us. I state, quite categorically, that the race of beings to whom we have come to refer as the Lunarians originated here, on Earth, as did the rest of us. Forget all your fantasies of visitors from other worlds, interstellar travelers, and the like. The Lunarians were simply products of a civilization that developed here on our own planet and died out for reasons we have yet to determine. What, after all, is so strange about that? Civilizations have grown and passed away in the brief span of our more orthodox history, and no doubt others will continue the pattern. This conclusion follows from comprehensive and consistent evidence and from the proven principles of the various natural sciences. It requires no invention, fabrication, or supposition, but derives directly from unquestionable facts and the straightforward application of established methods of inference!” He paused and cast his eyes around the table to invite comment.

Nobody commented. They already knew his arguments. Danchekker, however, seemed about to go through it all again. Evidently he had concluded that attempts to make them see the obvious by appealing to their powers of reason alone were not enough; his only resort then was insistent repetition until they either concurred or went insane.

Hunt leaned back in his chair, took a cigarette from a box lying nearby on the table, and tossed his pen down on his pad. He still had reservations about the professor’s dogmatic attitude, but at the same time he was aware that Danchekker’s record of academic distinction was matched by those of few people alive at the time. Besides, this wasn’t Hunt’s field. His main objection was something else, a truth he accepted for what it was and made no attempt to fool himself by rationalizing: Everything about Danchekker irritated him. Danchekker was too thin; his clothes were too old-fashioned-he carried them as if they had been hung on to dry. His anachronistic gold-rimmed spectacles were ridiculous. His speech was too formal. He had probably never laughed in his life. A skull vacuum-packed in skin, Hunt thought to himself.

“Allow me to recapitulate,” Danchekker continued. “Homo sapiens-modern man-belongs to the phylum Vertebrata. So, also, do all the mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles that have ever walked, crawled, flown, slithered, or swum in every corner of the Earth. All vertebrates share a common pattern of basic architecture, which has remained unchanged over millions of years despite the superficial, specialized adaptations that on first consideration might seem to divide the countless species we see around us.

“The basic vertebrate pattern is as follows: an internal skeleton of bone or cartilage and a vertebral column. The vertebrate has two pairs of appendages, which may be highly developed or degenerate, likewise a tail. It has a centrally located heart, divided into two or more chambers, and a closed circulatory system of blood made up of red cells containing hemoglobin. It has a dorsal nerve cord which bulges at one end into a five-part brain contained in a head. It also has a body cavity that contains most of its vital organs and its digestive system. All vertebrates conform to these rules and are thereby related.”

The professor paused and looked around as if the conclusion were too obvious to require summarizing. “In other words, Charlie’s whole structure shows him to be directly related to a million and one terrestrial animal species, extinct, alive, or yet to come. Furthermore, all terrestrial vertebrates, including ourselves and Charlie, can be traced back through an unbroken succession of intermediate fossils as having inherited their common pattern from the earliest recorded ancestors of the vertebrate line”-Danchekker’s voice rose to a crescendo-“from the first boned fish that appeared in the oceans of the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, over four hundred million years ago!” He paused for this last to take hold and then continued. “Charlie is as human as you or I in every respect. Can there be any doubt, then, that he shares our vertebrate heritage and therefore our ancestry? And if he shares our ancestry, then there is no doubt that he also shares our place of origin. Charlie is a native of planet Earth.”

Danchekker sat down and poured himself a glass of water. A hubbub of mixed murmurings and mutterings ensued, punctuated by the rustling of papers and the clink of water glasses. Here and there, chairs creaked as cramped limbs eased themselves into more comfortable positions. A metallurgist at one end of the table was gesturing to the man seated next to her. The man shrugged, showed his empty palms, and nodded his head in Danchekker’s direction. She turned and called to the professor. “Professor Danchekker… Professor…” Her voice made itself heard. The background noise died away. Danchekker looked up. “We’ve been having a little argument here-maybe you’d like to comment Why couldn’t Charlie have come from a parallel line of evolution somewhere else?”

“I was wondering that, too,” came another voice. Danchekker frowned for a moment before replying.

“No. The point you are overlooking here, I think, is that the evolutionary process is fundamentally made up of random events. Every living organism that exists today is the product of a chain of successive mutations that has continued over millions of years. The most important fact to grasp is that each discrete mutation is in itself a purely random event, brought about by aberrations in genetic coding and the mixing of the sex cells from different parents. The environment into which the mutant is born dictates whether it will survive to reproduce its kind or whether it will die out. Thus, some new characteristics are selected for further miprovement, while others are promptly eradicated and still others are diluted away by interbreeding.

“There are still people who find this principle difficult to accept-primarily, I suspect, because they are incapable of visualizing the implications of numbers and time scales beyond the ranges that occur in everyday life. Remember we are talking about billions of billions of combinations coming together over millions of years.

“A game of chess begins with only twenty playable moves to choose from. At every move the choice available to the player is restricted, and yet, the number of legitimate positions that the board could assume after only ten moves is astronomical. Imagine, then, the number of permutations that could arise when the game continues for a billion moves and at each move the player has a billion choices open to him. This is the game of evolution. To suppose that two such independent sequences could result in end products that are identical would surely be demanding too much of our credulity. The laws of chance and statistics are quite firm when applied to sufficiently large numbers of samples. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are nothing more than expressions of the probable behavior of gas molecules, yet the numbers involved are so large that we feel quite safe in accepting the postulates as rigid rules; no significant departure from them has ever been observed. The probability of the parallel line of evolution that you suggest is less than the probability of heat flowing from the kettle to the fire, or of all the air molecules in this room crowding into one corner at the same time, causing us all to explode spontaneously. Mathematically speaking, yes-the possibility of parallelism is finite, but so indescribably remote that we need consider it no further.”

A young electronics engineer took the argument up at this point

“Couldn’t God get a look in?” he asked. “Or at least, some kind of guiding force or principle that we don’t yet comprehend? Couldn’t the same design be produced via different lines in different places?”

Danchekker shook his head and smiled almost benevolently.

“We are scientists, not mystics,” he replied. “One of the fundamental principles of scientific method is that new and speculative hypotheses do not warrant consideration as long as the facts that are observed are adequately accounted for by the theories that already exist. Nothing resembling a universal guiding force has ever been revealed by generations of investigation, and since the facts observed are adequately explained by the accepted principles I have outlined, there is no necessity to invoke or invent additional causes. Notions of guiding forces and grand designs exist only in the mind of the misguided observer, not in the facts he observes.”

“But suppose it turns out that Charlie came from somewhere else,” the metallurgist insisted. “What then?”

“Ah! Now, that would be an entirely different matter. If it should be proved by some other means that Charlie did indeed evolve somewhere else, then we would be forced to accept that parallel evolution had occurred as an observed and unquestionable fact. Since this could not be explained within the framework of contemporary theory, our theories would be shown to be woefully inadequate. That would be the time to speculate on additional influences. Then, perhaps, your universal guiding force might find a rightful place. To entertain such concepts at this stage, however, would be to put the cart fairly and squarely before the horse. In so doing, we would be guilty of a breach of one of the most fundamental of scientific principles.”

Somebody else tried to push the professor from a different angle.

“How about convergent lines rather than parallel lines? Maybe the selection principles work in such a way that different lines of development converge toward the same optimum end product. In other words, although they start out in different directions, they will both eventually hit on the same, best final design. Like…” He sought for an analogy. “Like sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. They both came from different origins but ended up hitting on the same general shape.”

Danchekker again shook his head firmly. “Forget the idea of perfection and best end products,” he said. “You are unwittingly falling into this trap of assuming a grand design again. The human form is not nearly as perfect as you perhaps imagine. Nature does not produce best solutions-it will try any solution. The only test applied is that it be good enough to survive and reproduce itself. Far more species have proved unsuccessful and become extinct than have survived-far, far more. It is easy to contemplate a kind of preordained striving toward something perfect when this fundamental fact is overlooked-when looking back down the tree, as it were, with the benefit of hindsight from our particular successful branch and forgetting the countless other branches that got nowhere.

“No, forget this idea of perfection. The developments we see in the natural world are simply cases of something good enough to do the job. Usually, many conceivable alternatives would be as good, and some better.

“Take as an example the cusp pattern on the first lower molar tooth of man. It is made up of a group of five main cusps with a complex of intervening grooves and ridges that help to grind up food. There is no reason to suppose that this particular pattern is any more efficient than any one of many more that might be considered. This particular pattern, however, first occurred as a mutation somewhere along the ancestral line leading toward man and has been passed on ever since. The same pattern is also found on the teeth of the great apes, indicating that we both inherited it from some early common ancestor where it happened through pure chance.

“Charlie has human cusp patterns on all his teeth.

“Many of our adaptations are far from perfect. The arrangement of internal organs leaves much to be desired, owing to our inheriting a system originally developed to suit a horizontal and not an upright posture. In our respiratory system, for example, we find that the wastes and dirt that accumulate in the throat and nasal regions drain inside and not outside, as happened originally, a prime cause of many bronchial and chest complaints not suffered by four-footed animals. That’s hardly perfection, is it?” Danchekker took a sip of water and made an appealing gesture to the room in general.

“So, we see that any idea of convergence toward the ideal is not supported by the facts. Charlie exhibits all our faults and imperfections as well as our improvements. No, I’m sorry-I appreciate that these questions are voiced in the best tradition of leaving no possibility unprobed and I commend you for them, but really, we must dismiss them.”

Silence enveloped the room at his concluding words. On all sides, everybody seemed to be staring thoughtfully through the table, through the walls, or through the ceiling.

Caldwell placed his hands on the table and looked around until satisfied that nobody had anything to add.

“Looks like evolution stays put for a while longer,” he grunted. “Thank you, Professor.”

Danchekker nodded without looking up.

“However,” Caldwell continued, “the object of these meetings is to give everyone a chance to talk freely as well as listen. So far, some people haven’t had much to say-especially one or two of the newcomers.” Hunt realized with a start that Caldwell was looking straight at him. “Our English visitor, for example, whom most of you already know. Dr. Hunt, do you have any views that we ought to hear about…?”

Next to Caldwell, Lyn Garland was making no attempt to conceal a wide smile. Hunt took a long draw at his cigarette and used the delay to collect his thoughts. In the time it took for him to coolly emit one long, diffuse cloud of smoke and flick his hand at the ashtray, all the pieces clicked together in his brain with the smooth precision of the binary regiments parading through the registers of the computers downstairs. Lyn’s persistent cross-examinations, her visits to the Ocean, his presence here-Caldwell had found a catalyst.

Hunt surveyed the array of attentive faces. “Most of what’s been said reasserts the accepted principles of comparative anatomy and evolutionary theory. Just to clear the record for anyone with misleading ideas, I’ve no intention of questioning them. However, the conclusion could be summed up by saying that since Charlie comes from the same ancestors as we do, he must have evolved on Earth the same as we did.”

“That is so,” threw in Danchekker.

“Fine,” Hunt replied. “Now, all this is really your problem, not mine, but since you’ve asked me what I think, I’ll state the conclusion another way. Since Charlie evolved on Earth, the civilization he was from evolved on Earth. The indications are that his culture was about as advanced as ours, maybe in one or two areas slightly more advanced. So, we ought to find no end of traces of his people. We don’t. Why not?”

All heads turned toward Danchekker.

The professor sighed. “The only conclusion left open to us is that whatever traces were left have been erased by the natural processes of weathering and erosion,” he said wearily. “There are several possibilities: A catastrophe of some sort could have wiped them out to the extent that there were no traces; or possibly their civilization existed in regions which today are submerged beneath the oceans. Further searching will no doubt produce solutions to this question.”

“If any catastrophe as violent as that occurred so recently, we would already know about it,” Hunt pointed out. “Most of what was land then is still land today, so I can’t see them sinking into the ocean somewhere, either; besides, you’ve only to look at our civilization to see it’s not confined to localized areas-it’s spread all over the globe. And how is it that in spite of all the junk that keeps turning up with no trouble at all from primitive races from around the same time-bones, spears, clubs, and so on-nobody has ever found a single example of anything related to this supposed technologically advanced culture? Not a screw, or a piece of wire, or a plastic washer. To me, that doesn’t make sense.”

More murmuring broke out to mark the end of Hunt’s critique. “Professor?” Caldwell invited comment with a neutral voice.

Danchekker compressed his mouth into a grimace. “Oh, I agree, I agree. It is surprising-very surprising. But what alternative are you proposing?” His voice took on a note of sarcasm. “Do you suggest that man and all the animals came to Earth in some enormous celestial Noah’s Ark?” He laughed. “If so, the fossil record of a hundred million years disproves you.”

“Impasse.” The comment came from Professor Schorn, an authority on comparative anatomy, who had arrived from Stuttgart a few days before.

“Looks like it,” Caldwell agreed.

Danchekker, however, was not through. “Would Dr. Hunt care to answer my question?” he challenged. “Precisely what other place of origin is he suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anywhere in particular,” Hunt replied evenly. “What I am suggesting is that perhaps a more openminded approach might be appropriate at this stage. After all, we’ve only just found Charlie. This business will go on for years yet; there’s bound to be a lot more information surfacing that we don’t have right now. I think it’s too early to be jumping ahead and predicting what the answers might be. Better just to keep on plodding along and using every scrap of data we’ve got to put together a picture of the place Charlie came from. It might turn out to be Earth. Then again, it might not.”

Caldwell led him on further. “How would you suggest we go about that?”

Hunt wondered if this was a direct cue. He decided to risk it. “You could try taking a closer look at this.” He drew a sheet of paper out from the folder in front of him and slid it across to the center of the table. The paper showed a complicated tabular arrangement of Lunarian numerals.

“What’s that?” asked a voice.

“It’s from one of the pocket books,” Hunt replied. “I think the book is something not unlike a diary. I also believe that that”-he pointed at the sheet-“could well be a calendar.” He caught a sly wink from Lyn Garland and returned it.

“Calendar?”

“How d’you figure that one?”

“It’s all gobbledygook.”

Danchekker stared hard at the paper for a few seconds. “Can you prove it’s a calendar?” he demanded.

“No, I can’t. But I have analyzed the number pattern and can state that it’s made up of ascending groups that repeat in sets and subsets. Also, the alphabetic groups that seem to label the major sets correspond to the headings of groups of pages further on-remarkably like the layout of a diary.”

“Hmmph! More likely some form of tabular page index.”

“Could be,” Hunt granted. “But why not wait and see? Once the language has unraveled a bit more, it should be possible to cross-check a lot of what’s here with items from other sources. This is the kind of thing that maybe we ought to be a little more open-minded about. You say Charlie comes from Earth; I say he might. You say this is not a calendar; I say it might be. In my estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an unbiased appraisal of the problem. You’ve already made up your mind what you want the answers to be.”

“Hear, hear!” a voice at the end of the table called.

Danchekker colored visibly, but Caldwell spoke before he could reply.

“You’ve analyzed the numbers-right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, supposing for now it’s a calendar-what more can you tell us?”

Hunt leaned forward across the table and pointed at the sheet with his pen.

“First, two assumptions. One: the natural unit of time on any world is the day-that is, the time it takes the planet to rotate on its axis…”

“Assuming it rotates,” somebody tossed in.

“That was my second assumption. But the only cases we know of where there’s no rotation-or where the orbital period equals the axial period, which amounts to the same thing-occur when a small body orbits close to a far more massive one and is swamped by gravitational tidal effects, like our Moon. For that to happen to a body the size of a planet, the planet would have to orbit very close to its parent star-too close for it to support any life comparable to our own.”

“Seems reasonable,” Caldwell said, looking around the table. Various heads were nodding assent. “Where do we go from there?”

“Okay,” Hunt resumed. “Assuming it rotates and the day is its natural unit of time-if this complete table represents one full orbit around its sun, there are seventeen hundred days in its year, one entry for each.”

“Pretty long,” someone hazarded.

“To us, yes: at least, the year-to-day ratio is big. It could mean the orbit is large, the rotational period short, or perhaps a bit of both. Now look at the major number groups-the ones tagged with the heavy alphabetic labels. There are forty-seven of them. Most contain thirty-six numbers, but nine of them have thirty-seven-the first, sixth, twelfth, eighteenth, twenty-fourth, thirtieth, thirty-sixth, forty-second, and forty-seventh. That seems a bit odd at first sight, but so would our system to someone unfamiliar with it. It suggests that maybe somebody had to do a bit of fiddling with it to make it work.”

“Mmm… like with our months.”

“Exactly. This is just the sort of juggling you have to do to get a sensible fit of our months into our year. It happens because there’s no simple relationship between the orbital periods of planet and satellite; there’s no reason why there should be. I’m guessing that if this is a calendar that relates to some other planet, then the reason for this odd mix of thirty-sixes and thirty-sevens is the same as the one that causes problems with our calendar: That planet had a moon.”

“So these groups are months,” Caldwell stated.

“If it’s a calendar-yes. Each group is divided into three subgroups-weeks, if you like. Normally there are twelve days in each, but there are nine long months, in which the middle week has thirteen days.”

Danchekker looked for a long time at the sheet of paper, an expression of pained disbelief spreading slowly across his face.

“Are you proposing this as a serious scientific theory?” he queried in a strained voice.

“Of course not,” Hunt replied. “This is all pure speculation. But it does indicate some of the avenues that could be explored. These alphabetic groups, for example, might correspond to references that the language people might dig from other sources-such as dates on documents, or date stamps on pieces of clothing or other equipment. Also, you might be able to find some independent way of arriving at the number of days in the year; if it turned out to be seventeen hundred, that would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

“Anything else?” Caldwell asked.

“Yes. Computer correlation analysis of this number pattern may show hidden superposed periodicities; for all we know, there could have been more than one moon. Also, it should be possible to compute families of curves giving possible relationships between planet-to-satellite mass ratios against mean orbital radii. Later on you might know enough more to be able to isolate one of the curves. It might describe the Earth-Luna system; then again, it might not.”

“Preposterous!” Danchekker exploded.

“Unbiased?” Hunt suggested.

“There is something else that may be worth trying,” Schorn interrupted. “Your calendar, if that’s what it is, has so far been described in relative terms only-days per month, months per year, and so on. There is nothing that gives us any absolute values. Now-and this is a long shot-from detailed chemical analysis we are making some progress in building a quantitative model of Charlie’s cell-metabolism cycles and enzyme processes. We may be able to calculate the rate of accumulation of waste materials and toxins in the blood and tissues, and from these results form an estimate of his natural periods of sleep and wakefulness. If, in this way, I could provide a figure for the length of the day, the other quantities would follow immediately.”

“If we knew that, then we’d know the planet’s orbital period,” said somebody else. “But could we get an estimate of its mass?”

“One way might be by doing a structural analysis of Charlie’s bone and muscle formations and then working out the power-weight ratios,” another chipped in.

“That would give us the planet’s mean distance from its sun,” said a third.

“Only if it was like our Sun.”

“You could get a check on the planet’s mass from the glass and other crystalline materials in his equipment. From the crystal structure, we should be able to figure out the strength of the gravitational field they cooled in.”

“How could we get a figure for density?”

“You still need to know the planetary radius.”

“He’s like us, so the surface gravity will be Earthlike.”

“Very probable, but let’s prove it.”

“Prove that’s a calendar first.”

Remarks began pouring in from all sides. Hunt reflected with some satisfaction that at least he had managed to inject some spirit and enthusiasm into the proceedings.

Danchekker remained unimpressed. As the noise abated, he rose again to his feet and pointed pityingly to the single sheet of paper, still lying in the center of the table.

“All balderdash!” he spat. “There is the sum total of your evidence. There”-he slid his voluminous file, bulging with notes and papers, across beside it-“is mine, backed by libraries, data banks, and archives the world over. Charlie comes from Earth!”

“Where’s his civilization, then?” Hunt demanded. “Removed in an enormous celestial garbage truck?”

Laughter from around the table greeted the return of Danchekker’s own gibe. The professor darkened and seemed about to say something obscene. Caldwell held up a restraining hand, but Schorn saved the situation by interrupting in his calm, unruffled tone. “It would seem, ladies and gentlemen, that for the moment we must compromise by agreeing to a purely hypothetical situation. To keep Professor Danchekker happy, we must accept that the Lunarians evolved from the same ancestors as ourselves. To keep Dr. Hunt happy, we must assume they did it somewhere else. How we are to reconcile these two irreconcilables, I would not for one moment attempt to predict.”

Chapter Nine

Hunt saw less and less of the Trimagniscope during the weeks that followed the progress meeting. Caldwell seemed to go out of his way to encourage the Englishman to visit the various UNSA labs and establishments nearby, to “see what’s going on first-hand,” or the offices in Navcomms HQ to “meet someone you might find interesting.” Hunt was naturally curious about the Lunarian investigations, so these developments suited him admirably. Soon he was on familiar terms with most of the engineers and scientists involved, at least in the Houston vicinity, and he had a good idea of how their work was progressing and what difficulties they were encountering. He eventually acquired a broad overview of the activity on all fronts and found that, at least at the general level, the awareness of the whole picture that he was developing was shared by only a few privileged individuals within the organization.

Things were progressing in a number of directions. Calculations of structural efficiency, based on measurements of Charlie’s skeleton and the bulk supported by it, had given a figure for the surface gravity of his home planet, which agreed within acceptable margins of error with figures deduced separately from tests performed on the crystals of his helmet visor and other components formed from a molten state. The gravity field at the surface of Charlie’s home planet seemed to have been not much different from that of Earth; possibly it was slightly stronger. These results were accepted as being no more than rough approximations. Besides, nobody knew how typical Charlie’s physical build had been of that of the Lunarians in general, so there was no firm indication of whether the planet in question had been Earth or somewhere else. The issue was still wide open.

On equipment tags, document headings, and appended to certain notes, the Linguistics section had found examples of Lunarian words which matched exactly some of the labels on the calendar, just as Hunt had suggested they might. While this proved nothing, it did add further plausibility to the idea that these words indicated dates of some kind.

Then something else that seemed to connect with the calendar appeared from a totally unexpected direction. Site-preparation work in progress near Lunar Tycho Base Three turned up fragments of metal fabrications and structures. They looked like the ruins of some kind of installation. The more thorough probe that followed yielded no fewer than fourteen more bodies, or more accurately, bits of bodies from which at least fourteen individuals of both sexes could be identified. Clearly, none of the bodies was in anything approaching the condition of Charlie’s. They had all been literally blown to pieces. The remains comprised little more than splinters of charred bone scattered among scorched tatters of spacesuits. Apart from suggesting that besides being physically the same as humans, the Lunarians had been every bit as accident-prone, these discoveries provided no new information-until the discovery of the wrist unit. About the size of a large cigarette pack, not including the wrist bracelet, the device carried on its upper face four windows that looked like miniature electronic displays. From their size and shape, the windows seemed to have been intended to display character data rather than pictures, and the device was thought to be a chronometer or a computing-calculating aid; maybe it was both-and other things besides. After a perfunctory examination at Tycho Three the unit had been shipped to Earth along with some other items. It eventually found its way to the Navcomms laboratories near Houston, where the gadgets from Charlie’s backpack were being studied. After some preliminary experimenting the casing was safely removed, but detailed inspection of the complex molecular circuits inside revealed nothing particularly meaningful. Having no better ideas, the Navcomms engineers resorted to applying low voltages to random points to see what happened. Sure enough, when particular sequences of binary patterns were injected into one row of contacts, an assortment of Lunarian symbols appeared across the windows. This left nobody any the wiser until Hunt, who happened to be visiting the lab, recognized one sequence of alphabetic sets as the months that appeared on the calendar. Hence, at least one of the functions performed by the wrist unit seemed closely related to the table in the diary. Whether or not this had anything to do with recording the passage of time remained to be seen, but at least odd things looked as if they were beginning to tie up.

The Linguistics section was making steady if less spectacular progress toward cracking the language. Many of the world’s most prominent experts were getting involved, some choosing to move to Houston, while others worked via remote data links. As the first phase of their assault, they amassed volumes of statistics on word and character distributions and matchings, and produced reams of tables and charts that looked as meaningless to everybody else as the language itself. After that it was largely a matter of intuition and guessing games played on computer display screens. Every now and again somebody spotted a more meaningful pattern, which led to a better guess, which led to a still more meaningful pattern-and so on. They produced lists of words in categories believed to correspond to nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and later on added adjectival and adverbial phrases-fairly basic requirements for any advanced inflecting language. They began to develop a feel for the rules for deriving variants, such as plurals and verb tenses, from common roots, and for the conventions that governed the formation of word sequences. An appreciation of the rudiments of Lunarian grammar was emerging from all this, and the experts in Linguistics faced the future with optimism, suddenly confident that they were approaching the point where they would begin attempting to match the first English equivalents to selected samples.

The Mathematics section, organized on lines similar to Linguistics, was also finding things that were interesting. Part of the diary was made up of many pages of numeric and tabular material-suggesting, perhaps, a reference section of Useful Information. One of the pages was divided vertically, columns of numbers alternating with columns of words. A researcher noticed that one of the numbers, when converted to decimal, came out to 1836-the proton-electron mass ratio, a fundamental physical constant that would be the same anywhere in the Universe. It was suggested that the page might be a listing of equivalent Lunarian units of mass, similar to equivalence tables used for converting ounces to grams, grams to pounds… and so on. If so, they had stumbled on a complete record of the Lunarian system of measuring mass. The problem was that the whole supposition rested on the slender assumption that the figure 1836 did, in fact, denote the proton-electron mass ratio and was not merely a coincidental reference to something completely different. They needed a second source of information to check it against.

When Hunt talked to the mathematicians one afternoon, he was surprised to learn that they were unaware that the chemists and anatomists in other departments had computed estimates of surface gravity. As soon as he mentioned the fact, everybody saw the significance at once. If the Lunarians had adopted the practice that was common on Earth-using the same units to express mass and weight on their own planet-then the numbers in the table gave Lunarian weights. Furthermore, there was available to them at least one object whose weight they could estimate accurately: Charlie himself. Thus, since they already had an estimate of surface gravity, they could easily approximate how much Charlie would have weighed in kilograms back home. Only one piece of information was missing for a solution to the whole problem: a factor to convert kilograms to Lunarian weight units. Then Hunt speculated that there could well be among Charlie’s personal documents an identity card, a medical card-something that recorded his weight in his own units. If so, that one number would tell them all they needed to know. The discussion ended abruptly, with the head of the Mathematics section departing in great haste and a state of considerable excitement to talk to the head of the Linguistics section. Linguistics agreed to make a special note if anything like that turned up. So far nothing had.

Another small group, tucked away in offices in the top of the Navcomms HQ building, was working on what was perhaps the most exciting discovery to come out of the books so far. Twenty pages, right at the end of the second book, showed a series of maps. They were all drawn to an apparently small scale, each one depicting extensive areas of the world’s surface-but the world so depicted bore no resemblance to Earth. Oceans, continents, rivers, lakes, islands, and most other geographical features were easily distinguishable, but in no way could they be reconciled with Earth’s surface, even allowing for the passage of fifty thousand years-which would have made little difference anyway, aside from the size of the polar ice caps.

Each map carried a rectangular grid of reference lines, similar to those of terrestrial latitude and longitude, with the lines spaced forty-eight units (decimal) apart. These numbers were presumed to denote units of Lunarian circular measure, since nobody could think of any other sensible way to dimension coordinates on the surface of a sphere. The fourth and seventh maps provided the key: the zero line of longitude to which all the other lines were referenced. The line to the east was tagged “528” and that to the west “48,” showing that the full Lunarian circle was divided into 576 Lunarian degrees. The system was consistent with their duo-decimal counting method and their convention of reading from right to left. The next step was to calculate the percentage of the planet’s surface that each map represented and to fit them together to form the complete globe.

Already, however, the general scheme was clear. The ice caps were far larger than those believed to have existed on Earth during the Pleistocene Ice Age, stretching in some places to within twenty (Earth) degrees of the equator. Most of the seas around the equatorial belt were completely locked in by coastlines and ice. An assortment of dots and symbols scattered across the land masses in the ice-free belt and, more thinly, over the ice sheets themselves, seemed to indicate towns and cities.

When Hunt received an invitation to come up and have a look at the maps, the scientists working on them showed him the scales of distance that were printed at the edges. If they could only find some way of converting those numbers into miles, they would have the diameter of the planet. But nobody had told them about the tables the Mathematics section thought might be mass-unit conversion factors. Maybe one of the other tables did the same thing for units of length and distance? If so, and if they could find a reference to Charlie’s height among his papers, the simple process of measuring him would allow them to work out how many Earth meters there were in a Lunarian mile. Since they already had a figure for the planet’s surface gravity, its mass and mean density should follow immediately.

This was all very exciting, but all it proved was that a world had existed. It did not prove that Charlie and the Lunarians originated there. After all, the fact that a man carries a London street map in his pocket doesn’t prove him to be a Londoner. So the work of relating numbers derived from physical measurements of Charlie’s body to the numbers on the maps and in the tables could turn out to be based on a huge fallacy. If the diary came from the world shown on the maps but Charlie came from somewhere else, then the system of measurement deduced from the maps and tables in the diary might be a totally different system from the one used to record his personal characteristics in his papers, since the latter system would be the system used in the somewhere else, not in the world depicted on the maps. It all got very confusing.

Finally, nobody claimed to have proved conclusively that the world on the maps wasn’t Earth. Admittedly it didn’t look like Earth, and attempts to derive the modern distribution of terrestrial continents from the land areas on the maps had met with no success at all. But the planet’s gravity hadn’t been all that much different. Maybe the surface of Earth had undergone far greater changes over the last fifty thousand years than had been previously thought? Furthermore, Danchekker’s arguments still carried a lot of weight, and any theory that discounted them would have an awful lot of explaining to do. But by that time, most of the scientists working on the project had reached a stage where nothing would have surprised them any more, anyway.

“Got your message. Came straight over,” Hunt announced as Lyn Garland ushered him into Caldwell’s office. Caldwell nodded toward one of the chairs opposite his desk, and Hunt sat down. Caldwell glanced at Lyn, who was still standing by the door.

“It’s okay,” he said. She left, closing the door behind her.

Caldwell fixed Hunt with an expressionless stare for a few seconds, at the same time drumming his fingers on the desk. “You’ve seen a lot of the setup here during the past few months. What do you think of it?”

Hunt shrugged. The answer was obvious.

“I like it. Exciting things happen around here.”

“You like exciting things happening, huh?” The executive director nodded, half to himself. He remained thoughtful for what seemed a long time. “Well, you’ve only seen part of what goes on. Most people have no idea how big UNSA is these days. All the things you see around here-the labs, the installations, the launch areas-that’s just the backup. Our main business is up front.” He gestured toward the photographs adorning one of the walls. “We have people right now exploring the Martian deserts, flying probes down through the clouds of Venus, and walking on the moons of Jupiter. In the deep-space units in California, they’re designing ships that will make Vegas and even the Jupiter Mission ships look like paddleboats. Photon-drive robot probes that will make the first jump to the stars-some seven miles long! Think of it-seven miles long!”

Hunt did his best to react in the appropriate manner. The problem was, he wasn’t sure what manner was appropriate. Caldwell never said or did anything without a reason. The reason for this turn of conversation was far from obvious.

“And that’s only the beginning,” Caldwell went on. “After that, men will follow the robots. Then-who knows? This is the biggest thing the human race has ever embarked on: USA, US Europe, Canada, the Soviets, the Australians-they’re all in on it together. Where does a thing like that go once it starts moving, huh? Where does it stop?”

For the first time since his arrival at Houston, Hunt detected a hint of emotion in the American’s voice. He nodded slowly, though still not comprehending.

“You didn’t drag me here to give me a UNSA commercial,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” Caldwell agreed. “I dragged you over because it’s time we had a serious talk. I know enough about you to know how the wheels go round inside your head. You are made out of the same stuff as the guys who are making all the things happen out there.” He sat back in his chair and held Hunt’s gaze with a direct stare. “I want you to quit messing around at IDCC and come over to us.”

The statement caught Hunt like a right hook.

“What…! To Navcomms!”

“Correct. Let’s not play games. You’re the kind of person we need, and we can give you the things you need. I know I don’t have to make a big speech to explain myself.”

Hunt’s initial surprise lasted perhaps half a second. Already the computer in his head was churning out answers. Caldwell had been building toward this and testing him out for weeks. So, that was why he had moved in Navcomms engineers to take over running the scope. Had the thought been in his mind as long ago as that? Already Hunt had no doubt what the outcome of the interview would be. However, the rules of the game demanded that the set questions be posed and answered before anything final could be pronounced. Instinctively he reached for his cigarette case, but Caldwell preempted him and slid his cigar box across the desk.

“You seem pretty confident you’ve got what I need,” Hunt said as he selected a Havana. “I’m not sure even I know what that is.”

“Don’t you…? Or is it that you just don’t like talking about it?” Caldwell stopped to light his own cigar. He puffed until satisfied, then continued: “New Cross to the Journal of the Royal Society, solo. Some achievement.” He made a gesture of approval. “We like self-starters over here-sorta… traditional. What made you do it?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “First electronics, then mathematics… after that nuclear physics, later on nucleonics. What’s next, Dr. Hunt? Where do you go from there?” He settled back and exhaled a cloud of smoke while Hunt considered the question.

Hunt raised his eyebrows in mild admiration. “You seem to have been doing your homework,” he said.

Caldwell didn’t answer directly but asked, simply, “How was your uncle in Lagos when you visited him on vacation last year? Did he prefer the weather to Worcester, England? Seen much of Mike from Cambridge lately? I doubt it-he joined UNSA; he’s been at Hellas Two on Mars for the last eight months. Want me to go on?”

Hunt was too mature to feel indignant; besides, he liked to see a professional in action. He smiled faintly.

“Ten out of ten.”

At once Caldwell’s mood became deadly serious. He leaned forward and spread his elbows on the desk.

“I’ll tell you where you go from here, Dr. Hunt,” he said. “Out-out to the stars! We’re on our way to the stars over here! It started when Danchekker’s fish first crawled up out of the mud. The urge that made them do it is the same as the one that’s driven you all your life. You’ve gone inside the atom as far as you can go; there’s only one way left now-out. That’s what UNSA has to offer that you can’t refuse.”

There was nothing Hunt could add. Two futures lay spread out before him: One led back to Metadyne, the other beckoned onwards toward infinity. He was as incapable of choosing the first as his species was of returning to the depths of the sea.

“What’s your side of the deal, then?” he asked after some reflection.

“You mean, what do you have that we need?”

“Yes.”

“We need the way your brain works. You can think sideways. You see problems from different angles that nobody else uses. That’s what I need to bust open this Charlie business. Everybody argues so much because they’re making assumptions that seem obvious but that they shouldn’t be making. It takes a special kind of mind to figure out what’s wrong when things that anybody with common sense can see are true turn out to be not true. I think you’re the guy.”

The compliments made Hunt feel slightly uncomfortable. He decided to move things along. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well, the guys we have at present are top grade inside their own specialties,” Caldwell replied. “Don’t get me wrong, these people are good-but I’d like them to concentrate on doing the things they’re best at. However, aside from all that, I need someone with an unspecialized, and therefore impartial, outlook to coordinate the findings of the specialists and integrate them into an overall picture. If you like, I need people like Danchekker to paint the pieces of the puzzle, but I need someone like you to fit the pieces together. You’ve been doing a bit of that, unofficially, for quite a while anyway; I’m saying, ‘Let’s make it official’.”

“How about the organization?” Hunt asked.

“I’ve thought about that. I don’t want to alienate any of our senior people by subordinating them or any of their staffs to some new whiz kid. That’s only good politics. Anyhow, I don’t think you’d want it that way.”

Hunt shook his head to show his agreement.

“So,” Caldwell resumed, “what I figure is, the various departments and sections will continue to function as they do at present. Our relationship with outfits outside Navcomms will remain unaffected. However, all the conclusions that everybody has reached so far, and new findings as they turn up, will be referred to a centralized coordinating section-that’s you. Your job will be to fit the bits together, as I said earlier. You’d build up your own staff as time goes on and the work load increases. You’d be able to request any particular items of information you find you need from the specialist functions; that way you’d be defining some of their objectives. As for your objectives, they’re abeady spelled out: Find out who these Charlie people were, where they came from, and what happened to them. You report directly to me and get the whole problem off my back. I’ve got enough on my schedule without worrying about corpses.” Caldwell threw out an arm to show that he was finished. “Well, what do you say?”

Hunt had to smile within himself. As Caldwell had said, there was really nothing to think about. He took a long breath and turned both hands upward. “As you said-an offer I can’t refuse.”

“So, you’re in?”

“I’m in.”

“Welcome aboard, then.” Caldwell looked pleased. “This calls for a drink.” He produced a flask and glasses from somewhere behind the desk. He poured the whiskey and passed a glass to his newest employee.

“When do you want it to start?” Hunt asked after a moment.

“Well, you probably need a couple of months or so to sort out formalities with IDCC. But why wait for formalities? You’re on loan here from IDCC anyway and under my direction for the duration; also, we’re paying for you. So what’s wrong with tomorrow morning?”

“Christ!”

Caldwell’s manner at once became brisk and businesslike.

“I’ll allocate offices for you in this building. Rob Gray takes full charge of scope operations and keeps the engineers I’ve assigned to him as his permanent staff for as long as he’s in Houston. That frees you totally. By the end of this week I want estimates of what you think you’ll need in the way of clerical and secretarial staff, technical personnel, equipment, furniture, lab space, and computer facilities.

“By this time next week I want you to have a presentation ready for a meeting of section and department heads that I’m going to call, to tell them how you see yourself and them working together. Make it tactful. I won’t issue any official notification of these changes until after the meeting, when everybody knows what’s going on. Don’t talk about it until then, except to myself and Lyn.

“Your ouffit will be designated Special Assignment Group L, and your position will be section head, Group L. The post is classed as ‘Executive, grade four, civilian,’ within the Space Arm. It carries all the appropriate benefits of free use of UNSA vehicles and aircraft, access to restricted files up to category three, and standard issues of clothing and accessories for duties overseas or off-planet. All that is in the Executive Staff Manual; details of reporting structures, admin procedures, and that kind of thing are in the UNSA Corporate Policy Guide. Lyn will get you copies.

“You’ll have to get in touch with the federal authorities in Houston regarding permanent residence in the USA; Lyn knows the right people. Arrange transfer of your personal belongings from England at your own convenience and charge it to Navcomms. We’ll help out finding you somewhere to live, but in the meantime stay on at the Ocean.”

Hunt had the fleeting thought that had Caldwell been born three thousand years previously, Rome might well have been built in a day.

“What’s your current salary?” Caldwell asked.

“Twenty-five thousand European dollars.”

“We’ll make it thirty.”

Hunt nodded mutely.

Caldwell paused and checked mentally for anything he might have overlooked. Finding nothing, he sat back and raised his glass. “Cheers, then, Vic.”

It was the first time he had addressed Hunt informally.

“Cheers.”

“To the stars.”

A low roar from a point outside the city reached the room. They glanced toward the window to see a column of light climbing into the blue as a Vega lifted off from a distant launch pad. A quiet surge of excitement welled up in Hunt’s veins as he took in the sight. It was a symbol of the ultimate expression of man’s outward urge, and he was about to become part of it.

Chapter Ten

Demands for the services of Special Assignment Group L commenced as soon as the new unit officially went into operation, and they continued to increase rapidly in the weeks that followed. By the end of a month Hunt was swamped and forced to take on extra people at a faster rate than he had intended. Originally his idea had been to keep going with a skeleton staff for a while, at least until he formed a better idea of what was required. When Caldwell first announced the establishment of the new group, there had been one or two instances of petty jealousy and resentment, but the attitude that prevailed in the end was that Hunt had contributed several worthwhile ideas, and it seemed only sensible to get him in on the team permanently. After a while, even the dissenters grudgingly began to concede that things seemed to run more smoothly with Group L around. Some of them eventually did a complete about-face and became enthusiastic supporters of the scheme, as they came to appreciate that the communication channels to Hunt’s people worked in bidirectional mode, and for every bit of data they fed in, ten bits came back in the other direction. As the oil thus added to Caldwell’s jigsaw-puzzle-solving machine began to prove effective, the machine shifted fully into top gear, and suddenly pieces started fitting together.

The Mathematics section was still working on the equations and formulas found in the books. Since mathematical relationships would remain true irrespective of the conventions used to express them, their interpretation was a far less arbitrary affair than that of deciphering the Lunarian language. The mathematicians had been stimulated by the discovery of the mass conversion table. They turned their attention to the other tables contained in the same book and soon found one that listed many commonly used physical and mathematical constants. From it they quickly picked out pi as well as e, the base of natural logarithms, and one or two more, but they still didn’t understand the system of units well enough to evaluate the majority.

Another set of tables turned out to be simple trigonometric functions; these were easily recognized once the cartographers had provided the units of circular measure. The headings of the columns of these tables gave the Lunarian symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and the like. Once these were known, many of the mathematical expressions elsewhere started making more sense; some of them fell out immediately as familiar trigonometric relationships. These in turn helped establish the conventions used to denote normal arithmetic operations and that of exponentiation, which led to the identification of the equations of mechanical motion. Nobody was surprised when these equations revealed that Lunarian scientists had deduced the same laws as Newton. The mathematicians progressed to tables of elementary first integrals and standard forms of low-order differential equations. On later pages were expressions which they suspected might describe systems of resonance and damped oscillations. Here again, the uncertainty over units presented a problem; expressions of this type would be in a standard form that could apply equally well to electrical, mechanical, thermal, or many other types of physical phenomena. Until they knew more about Lunarian units, they could not be sure precisely what these equations meant, even if they succeeded in interpreting them mathematically.

Hunt remembered having noticed that many of the electrical subassemblies from Charlie’s backpack had small metal labels mounted adjacent to plugs, sockets, and other input-output connections. He speculated that some of the symbols engraved on these labels might represent ratings in units of voltage, current, power, frequency, and so on. He spent a day in the electronics labs, produced a full report on these markings, and passed it on to Mathematics. Nobody had thought to tell them about it sooner.

The electronics technicians located the battery in the wrist unit from Tycho, took it to pieces, and with the assistance of an electrochemist from another department, worked out the voltage it had been designed to produce. Linguistics translated the markings on the casing, and that gave a figure for the Lunarian unit for electrical voltage. Well, it was a start.

Professors Danchekker and Schom were in charge of the biological side of the research. Perhaps surprisingly, Danchekker exhibited no reluctance to cooperate with Group L and kept them fully updated with a regular flow of information. This was more the result of his deeply rooted sense of propriety than of any change of heart. He was a formalist, and if this procedure was what the formalities of the arrangement required, he would adhere to it rigidly. His refusal to budge one inch from his uncompromising views regarding the origins of the Lunarians, however, was total.

As promised, Schorn had set up investigations to determine the length of Charlie’s natural day from studies of body chemistry and cell metabolism, but he was running into trouble. He was getting results, all right, but the results made no sense. Some tests gave a figure of twenty-four hours, which meant that Charlie could be from Earth; some gave thirty-five hours, which meant he couldn’t be; and other tests came up with figures in between. Thus, if the aggregate of these results meant anything at all, it indicated that Charlie came from a score of different places all at the same time. Either it was crazy, or there was something wrong with the methods used, or there was more to the matter than they thought.

Danchekker was more successful in a different direction. From an analysis of the sizes and shapes of Charlie’s blood vessels and associated muscle tissues, he produced equations describing the performance of Charlie’s circulatory system. From these he then derived a set of curves that showed the proportions of body heat that would be retained and lost for any given body temperature and outside temperature. He came up with a figure for Charlie’s normal body temperature from some of Schorn’s figures that were not suspect and were based on the assumption that, as in the case of terrestrial mammals, the process of evolution would have led to Charlie’s body regulating its temperature to such a level that the chemical reactions within its cells would proceed at their most efficient rates. By substituting this figure back into his original equations, Danchekker was able to arrive at an estimate of the outside temperature or, more precisely, the temperature of the environment in which Charlie seemed best adapted to function. Allowing for error, it came out at somewhere between two and nine degrees Celsius.

With Schorn’s failure to produce a reliable indication of the length of the Lunarian day, there was still no way of assigning any absolute values to the calendar, although sufficient corroborating evidence had been forthcoming from various sources to verify beyond reasonable doubt that it was indeed a calendar. As more clues to Lunarian electrical units were found by Electronics, an alternative approach to obtaining the elusive Lunarian unit of time suggested itself. If Mathematics could untangle the equations of electrical oscillation, they should be able to manipulate the quantities involved in such a way as to express the two constants denoting the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of free space in Lunarian units. The ratio of these constants would yield the velocity of light, expressed in Lunarian units of distance per Lunarian units of time. The units for representing distance were understood already; therefore, those used for measuring time would be given automatically.

All this activity in UNSA naturally attracted widespread public attention. The discovery of a technologically advanced civilization from fifty thousand years in the past was not something that happened very often. Some of the headlines flashed around the World News Grid when the story was released, a few weeks after the original find, were memorable: MAN ON MOON BEFORE ARMSTRONG; some were hilarious: EXTINCT CIVILIZATION ON MARS; some were just wrong: CONTACT MADE WITH ALIEN INTELLIGENCE. But most summed up the situation fairly well.

In the months that followed, UNSA’s public relations office in Washington, long geared to conducting steady and predictable dealings with the news media, reeled under a deluge of demands from hard-pressed editors and producers all over the globe. Washington struggled valiantly for a while, but in the end did the human thing, and delegated the problem to Navcomms’ local PR department at Houston. The PR director at Houston found a ready-made clearinghouse of new information in the form of Group L, right on his doorstep, so still another dimension was added to Hunt’s ever growing work load. Soon, press conferences, TV documentaries, filmed interviews, and reporters became part of his daily routine; so did the preparation of weekly progress bulletins. Despite the cold objectivity and meticulous phrasing of these bulletins, strange things seemed to happen to them between their departure from the offices of Navcomms and their arrival on the world’s newspaper pages and wall display screens. Even stranger things happened in the minds of some people who read them.

One of the British Sunday papers presented just about all of the Old Testament in terms of the interventions of space beings as seen through the eyes of simple beholders. The plagues of Egypt were ecological disruptions deliberately brought about as warnings to the oppressors; flying saucers guided Moses through the Red Sea while the waters were diverted by nucleonic force fields; and the manna from heaven was formed from the hydrocarbon combustion products of thermonuclear propulsion units. A publisher in Paris observed the results, got the message, and commissioned a free-lancer to reexamine the life of Christ as a symbolic account of the apparent miracle workings of a Lunarian returning to Earth after a forty-eight-thousand-year meditation in the galactic wilderness.

“Authentic” reports that the Lunarians were still around abounded. They had built the pyramids, sunk Atlantis, and dug the Bosporus. There were genuine eyewitness accounts of Lunarian landings on Earth in modern times. Somebody had held a conversation with the pilot of a Lunarian spaceship two years before in the middle of the Colorado Desert. Every reference ever recorded to supernatural phenomena, apparitions, visitations, miracles, saints, ghosts, visions, and witches had a Lunarian connection.

But as the months passed and no dramatic revelations unfolded, the world began to turn elsewhere for new sensations. Reports of further findings became confined to the more serious scientific journals and proceedings of the professional societies. But the scientists on the project continued their work undisturbed.

Then a UNSA team erecting an optical observatory on the Lunar Farside detected unusual echoes on ultrasonics from about two hundred feet below the surface. They sank a shaft and discovered what appeared to be all that was left of the underground levels of another Lunarian base, or at any rate, some kind of construction. It was just a metal-walled box about ten feet high and as broad and as long as a small house; one end was missing, and about a quarter of the volume enclosed had filled up with dust and rock debris. In the space that was left at the end, they found the charred skeletons of eight more Lunarians, some pieces of furniture, a few items of technical equipment, and a heap of sealed metal containers. Whatever had formed the remainder of the structure that this gallery had been part of was gone without a trace.

The metal containers were later opened by the scientists at Westwood. Inside the cans was a selection of assorted foodstuffs, well preserved despite having been cooked. Presumably, whatever had done the cooking had also cooked the Lunarians. Most of the cans contained processed vegetables, meats, and sweet preparations; a few, however, yielded a number of fish, about the size of herrings and preserved intact.

When Danchekker’s assistant dissected one of the fish and began looking inside, he couldn’t make sense of what he found, so he called the professor down to the lab to ask what he made of it. Danchekker didn’t go home until eight o’clock the next morning. A week later he announced to an incredulous Vic Hunt: “This specimen never swam in any of our oceans; it did not evolve from, nor is it in any way related to, any form of life that has ever existed on this planet!”

Chapter Eleven

The Apollo Seventeen Mission, in December 1972, had marked the successful conclusion to man’s first concerted effort to reach and explore first-hand a world other than his own. After the Apollo program, NASA activities were restricted, mainly as a result of the financial pressures exerted on the USA by the economic recessions that came and went across the Western world throughout that decade, by the politically inspired oil crisis and various other crises manufactured in the Middle East and the lower half of Africa, and by the promotion of the Vietnam War. During the mid and late seventies, a succession of unmanned probes were dispatched to Mars, Venus, Mercury, and some of the outer planets. When manned missions were resumed in the 1980’s, they focused on the development of various types of space shuttle and on the construction of permanently manned orbiting laboratories and observatories, the main objective being the consolidation of a firm jumping-off point prior to resumed expansion outward. Thus, for a period, the Moon was left once more on its own, free to continue its billion-year contemplation of the Universe without further interruption by man.

The information brought back by the Apollo astronauts finally resolved the conflicting speculations concerning the Moon’s nature and origins that had been mooted by generations of Earth-bound observers. Soon after the Solar System was formed, 4,500 million years ago, give or take a few, the Moon became molten to a considerable depth, possibly halfway to the center; the heat was generated by the release of gravitational energy as the Moon continued to accumulate. During the cooling that followed, the heavier, iron-bearing minerals sank toward the interior, while the less dense, aluminum-rich ones floated to the surface to form the highland crust. Continual bombardment by meteorites stirred up the mixture and complicated the process to some degree but by 4,300 million years ago the formation of the crust was virtually complete. The bombardment continued until 3,900 million years ago, by which time most of the familiar surface features already existed. From then until 3,200 million years ago, basaltic lavas flowed from the interior, induced in some places by remelting due to concentrations of radioactive heat sources below the surface, to fill in the impact basins and create the darker maria. The crust continued cooling to greater depths until molten material could no longer penetrate. Thereafter, all remained unchanging through the ages. Occasionally an additional impact crater appeared and falling dust gradually eroded the top millimeter of surface, but essentially, the Moon became a dead planet.

This history came from detailed observations and limited explorations of Nearside. Orbital observations of Farside suggested that much of the same story applied there also, and since this sequence was consistent with existing theory, nobody doubted its validity for many years after Apollo. Of course, details remained to be added, but the broad picture was convincingly clear. However, when man returned to the Moon in strength and to stay, ground exploration of Farside threw up a completely different and totally unexpected story.

Although the surface of Farside looked much the same as Nearside to the distant observer, it proved at the microscopic level to have undergone something radically different in its history. Furthermore, as bases, launch sites, communications installations, and all the other paraphernalia that accompanied man wherever he went, began proliferating on Nearside, the methodical surface coverage that this entailed produced oddities there, too.

All the experiments performed on the rock samples brought back from the eight sites explored before the mid-seventies gave consistent results supporting the orthodox theories. When the number of sites grew to thousands, by far the majority of additional data confirmed them-but some curious exceptions were noted, exceptions which seemed to indicate that some of the features on Nearside ought, rightfully, to be on Farside.

None of the explanations hazarded were really conclusive. This made little difference to the executives and officers of UNSA, since by that time the pattern of Lunar activity had progressed from that of pure scientific research to one of intense engineering operations. Only the academic fraternity of a few universities found time to ponder and correspond on the spectral inconsistencies between dust samples. So for many years the well-documented problem of “lunar hemispheric anomalies” remained filed, along with a million and one other items, in the “Awaiting Explanation” drawer of science.

A methodical review of the current state of knowledge in any branch of science that might have a bearing on the Lunarian problem was a routine part of Group L’s business. Anything to do with the Moon was, naturally, high on the list of things to check up on, and soon the group had amassed enough information to start a small library on the subject. Two junior physicists, who didn’t duck quickly enough when Hunt was giving out assignments, were charged with the Herculean task of sifting through all this data. It took some time for them to get around to the topic of hemispheric anomalies. When they did, they found reports of a series of dating experiments performed some years previously by a nucleologist named Kronski at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. The data that appeared in those reports caused the two physicists to drop everything and seek out Hunt immediately.

After a long discussion, Hunt made a vi-phone call to a Dr. Saul Steinfield of the Department of Physics of the University of Nebraska, who specialized in Lunar phenomena. As a consequence of that call, Hunt made arrangements for the deputy head of Group L to take charge for a few days, and he flew north to Omaha early the next morning. Steinfleld’s secretary met Hunt at the airport, and within an hour Hunt was standing in one of the physics department laboratories, contemplating a three-foot-diameter model of the Moon.

“The crust isn’t evenly distributed,” Steinfield said, waving toward the model. “It’s a lot thicker on Farside than on Nearside-something that has been known for a long time, ever since the first artificial satellites were hung around the Moon in the nineteen sixties. The center of mass is about two kilometers away from the geometric center.”

“And there’s no obvious reason,” Hunt mused.

Steinfleld’s flailing arm continued to describe wild circles around the sphere in front of them. “There’s no reason for the crust to solidify a lot thicker on one side, sure, but that doesn’t really matter, because that’s not the way it happened. The material that makes up the Farside surface is much younger than anything anybody ever believed existed on the Moon in any quantity up until about, ah, thirty or so years back-one hell of a lot younger! But you know that-that’s why you’re here.”

“You don’t mean it was formed recently,” Hunt stated.

Steinfield shook his head vigorously from side to side, causing the two tufts of white hair that jutted from the sides of his otherwise smooth head to wave about in a frenzy. “No. We can tell that it’s about as old as the rest of the Solar System. What I mean is-it hasn’t been where it is very long.”

He caught Hunt’s shoulder and half turned him to face a wall chart showing a sectional view through the Lunar center. “You can see it on this. The red shell is the original outer crust going right around-it’s roughly circular, as you’d expect. On Farside-here-this blue stuff sits on top of it and wasn’t added very long ago.”

“On top of what used to be the surface.”

“Exactly. Somebody dumped a couple of billion tons of junk down on the old crust-but only on this side.”

“And that’s been verified pretty conclusively?” Hunt asked, just to be doubly sure.

“Yeah… yeah. Enough bore holes and shafts have been sunk all over Farside to tell us pretty closely where the old surface was. I’ll show you something over here…” A major section of the far wall comprised nothing but rows of small metal drawers, each with its own neatly lettered label, extending from floor to ceiling. Steinfield walked across the room, and stooped to scan the labels, at the same time mumbling to himself semi-intelligibly. With a sudden “That’s it!” he pounced on one of the drawers, opened it, and returned bearing a closed glass container about the size of a small pickle jar. It contained a coarse piece of a light gray rocky substance that glittered faintly in places, mounted on a wire support.

“This is a fairly common KREEP basalt from Farside. It-“

“‘Creep’?”

“Rich in potassium-that is, K-rare earth elements, and phosphorus: KREEP.”

“Oh-I see.”

“Compounds like this,” Steinfield continued, “make up a lot of the highlands. This one solidified around 4.1 billion years ago. Now, by analyzing the isotope products produced by cosmic-ray exposure, we can tell how long it’s been lying on the surface. Again, the figure for this one comes out at about 4,100 million years.”

Hunt looked slightly puzzled. “But that’s normal. It’s what you’d expect, isn’t it?”

“If it had been lying on the surface, yes. But this came from the bottom of a shaft over seven hundred feet deep! In other words, it was on the surface for all that time-then suddenly it’s seven hundred feet down.” Steinfleld gestured toward the wall chart again. “As I said, we find the same thing all over Farside. We can estimate how far down the old surface used to be. Below it we find old rocks and structures that go way back, just like on Nearside; above it everything’s a mess-the rock all got pounded up and lots of melting took place when the garbage came down, all the way up to what’s now the surface. It’s what you’d expect.”

Hunt nodded his agreement. The energy released by that amount of mass being stopped dead in its tracks would have been phenomenal.

“And nobody knows where it came from?” he asked.

Steinfield repeated his head-shaking act. “Some people say that a big meteorite shower must have got in the way of the Moon. That may be true-it’s never been argued conclusively one way or the other. The composition of the garbage isn’t really like a lot of meteorites, though-it’s closer to the Moon itself. It’s as if they were made out of the same stuff-that’s why it looks the same from higher up. You have to look at the microstructure to see the things I’ve been talking about.”

Hunt examined the specimen curiously for a while in silence. At length he laid it carefully on the top of one of the benches. Steinfield picked it up and returned it to its drawer.

“Okay,” Hunt said as Steinfield rejoined him. “Now, what about the Farside surface?”

“Kronski and company.”

“Yes-as we discussed yesterday.”

“The Farside surface craters were made by the tail end of the garbage-dumping process, unlike the Nearside craters, which came from meteorite impacts oh… a few billion years back. In rock samples from around the rims of Farside craters we find that things like the activity levels of long half-life elements are very low-for instance, aluminum twenty-six and chlorine thirty-six; also the rates of absorption of hydrogen, helium, and inert gases from the Solar wind. Things like that tell us that those rocks haven’t been lying there very long; and since they got where they were by being thrown out of the craters, the craters haven’t been there very long, either.” Steinfield made an exaggerated empty-handed gesture. “The rest you know. People like Kronski have done all the figuring and put them at around fifty thousand years old-yesterday!” He waited for a few seconds. “There must be a Lunarian connection somewhere. The number sounds like too much of a coincidence to me.”

Hunt frowned for a while and studied the detail of the Farside hemisphere of the model. “And yet, you must have known about all this for years,” he said, looking up. “Why the devil did you wait for us to call you?”

Steinfield showed his hands again and held the pose for a second or two. “Well, you UNSA people are pretty smart cookies. I figured you already knew about all this.”

“We should have picked it up sooner, I admit,” Hunt agreed. “But we’ve been rather busy.”

“Guess so,” Steinfield murmured. “Anyhow, there’s even more to it. I’ve told you all the consistent things. Now I’ll tell you some of the funny things…” He broke off as if just struck by a new thought. “I’ll tell you about the funny things in a second. How about a cup of coffee?”

“Great.”

Steinfield lit a Bunsen burner, filled a large laboratory beaker from the nearest tap, and positioned it on a tripod over the flame. Then he squatted down to rummage in the cupboard beneath the bench and at last emerged triumphantly with two battered enamel mugs.

“First funny thing: The distribution of samples that we dig up on Farside that have a history of recent radioactive exposure doesn’t match the distribution or strength of the activity sources. There ought to be sources clustered in places where there aren’t.”

“How about the meteorite storm including some, highly active meteorites?” Hunt suggested.

“No, won’t wash,” Steinfield answered, looking along a shelf of glass jars and eventually selecting one that contained a reddish-brown powder and was labeled “Ferric Oxide.” “If there were meteorites like that, bits of them should still be around. But the distribution of active elements in the garbage is pretty even-about normal for most rocks.” He began spooning the powder into the mugs. Hunt inclined his head apprehensively in the direction of the jar.

“Coffee doesn’t seem to last long around here if you leave it lying around in coffee jars,” Steinfield explained. He nodded toward a door that led into the room next-door and bore the sign “RESEARCH STUDENTS.” Hunt nodded understandingly.

“Vaporized?” Hunt tried.

Again Steinfield shook his head.

“In that case they wouldn’t have been in proximity to the rock long enough to produce the effects observed.” He opened another jar marked “Disodium Hydrogen Phosphate.” “Sugar?”

“Second funny thing,” Steinfield continued. “Heat balance. We know how much mass came down, and from the way it fell, we can figure its kinetic energy. We also know from statistical sampling how much energy needed to be dissipated to account for the melting and structural deformations; also, we know how much energy gets produced by underground radioactivity and where. Problem: The equations don’t balance; you’d need more energy to make what happened happen than there was available. So, where did the extra come from? The computer models of this are very complex and there could be errors in them, but that’s the way it looks right now.”

Steinfield allowed Hunt to digest this while he picked up the beaker with a pair of tongs and proceeded to fill the mugs. Having safely completed this operation, he began filling his pipe, still silent.

“Any more?” Hunt asked at last, reaching for his own cigarette case.

Steinfield nodded affirmatively. “Nearside exceptions. Most of the Nearside craters fit with the classic model: old. However, there are some scattered around that don’t fit the pattern; cosmic-ray dating puts them at approximately the same age as those on Farside. The usual explanation is that some strays from the recent Farside bombardment overshot around to the Nearside…” He shrugged. “But there are peculiarities in some instances that don’t really support that.”

“Like?”

“Like some of the glasses and breccia formations show heating patterns that aren’t consistent with recent impact… I’ll show you what I mean later.”

Hunt turned this new information over in his mind as he lit a cigarette and sipped his drink. It tasted like coffee, anyway.

“And that’s the last funny thing?”

“Yep, that’s about the broad outline. No, wait a minute-last funny thing plus one. How come none of the meteorites in the shower hit Earth? Plenty of eroded remains of terrestrial meteorite craters have been identified and dated. All the computer simulations say that there should be a peak of abnormal activity at around this time, judging from how big the heap of crud that hit the Moon must have been. But there aren’t any signs of one, even allowing for the effects of the atmosphere.”

Hunt and Steinfield spent the rest of that day and all of the next sifting through figures and research reports that went back many years. Hunt did not sleep at all during the following night, but smoked a pack of cigarettes and consumed a gallon of coffee while he stared at the walls of his hotel room and twisted the new information into every contortion his mind could devise.

Fifty thousand years ago the Lunarians were on the Moon. Where they came from didn’t really matter for the time being; that was another question. At about the same time an intense meteorite storm obliterated the Farside surface. Did the storm wipe out the Lunarians on the Moon? Possibly-but that wouldn’t have had any effect on them back on whatever planet they had come from. If all the UNSA people on Luna were wiped out, it wouldn’t make any lasting difference to Earth. So, what happened to the rest of the Lunarians? Why hadn’t anybody seen them since? Had something else happened to them that was more widespread than whatever happened on the Moon? Could the something else have caused the meteorite storm? Could a second something else have both caused the first and extinguished the Lunarians in other places? Perhaps there was no connection? Unlikely.

Then there were the inconsistencies that Steinfield had talked about… An absurd idea came from nowhere, which Hunt rejected impatiently. But as the night wore on, it kept coming back again with growing insistence. Over breakfast he decided that he had to know the story that lay below those billions of tons of rubble. There had to be some way of extracting enough information to reconstruct the characteristics of the surface just before the bombardment commenced. He put the question to Steinfield later on that morning, back in the lab.

Steinfield shook his head firmly. ‘We tried for over a year to make a picture like that. We had twelve programmers working on it. They got nowhere. It’s too much of a mess down there-all ploughed up. All you get is garbage.”

“How about a partial picture?” Hunt persisted. Was there any way that a contour map could be calculated, showing just the distribution of radiation sources immediately prior to the bombardment?

“We tried that, too. You do get a degree of statistical clustering, yes. But there’s no way we could tell where each individual sample was when it got irradiated. They would have been thrown miles by the impacts; a lot of them would have been bounced all over the place by repeat impacts. Nobody ever built a computer that could unscramble all that entropy. You’re up against the second law of thermodynamics; if you ever built one, it wouldn’t be a computer at all-it would be a refrigerator.”

“What about a chemical approach? What techniques are available that might reveal where the prebombardment craters were? Could their ‘ghosts’ still be detected a thousand feet down below the surface?”

“No way!”

“There has to be some way of reconstructing what the surface used to look like.”

“Did you ever try reconstructing a cow from a truckload of hamburger?”

They talked about it for another two days and into the nights at Steinfield’s home and Hunt’s hotel. Hunt told Steinfield why he needed the information. Steinfield told Hunt he was crazy. Then one morning, back at the laboratory, Hunt exclaimed, “The Nearside exceptions!”

“Huh?”

“The Nearside craters that date from the time of the storm. Some of them could be right from the beginning of it.”

“So?”

“They didn’t get buried like the first craters on Farside. They’re intact.”

“Sure-but they won’t tell you anything new. They’re from recent impacts, same as everything that’s on the surface of Farside.”

“But you said some of them showed radiation anomalies. That’s just what I want to know more about.”

“But nobody ever found any suggestion of what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe they weren’t looking for the right things. They never had any reason to.”

The physics department had a comprehensive collection of Lunar rock samples, a sizeable proportion of which comprised specimens from the interiors and vicinities of the young, anomalous craters on Nearside. Under Hunt’s persistent coercion, Steinfleld agreed to conduct a specially devised series of tests on them. He estimated that he would need a month to complete the work.

Hunt returned to Houston to catch up on developments there and a month later flew back to Omaha. Steinfield’s experiments had resulted in a series of computer-generated maps showing anomalous Nearside craters. The craters divided themselves into two classes on the maps: those with characteristic irradiation patterns and those without.

“And another thing,” Steinfield informed him. “The first class, those that show the pattern, have also got another thing in common that the second class hasn’t got: glasses from the centers were formed by a different process. So now we’ve got anomalous anomalies on Nearside, too!”

Hunt spent a week in Omaha and then went directly to Washington to talk to a group of government scientists and to study the archives of a department that had ceased to exist more than fifteen years before. He then returned to Omaha once again and showed his findings to Steinfleld. Steinfield persuaded the university authorities to allow selected samples from their collection to be loaned to the UNSA Mineralogy and Petrology Laboratories in Pasadena, California, for further testing of an extremely specialized nature, suitable equipment for which existed at only a few establishments in the world.

As a direct consequence of these tests, Caldwell authorized the issue of a top-priority directive to the UNSA bases at Tycho, Crisium, and some other Lunar locations, to conduct specific surveys in the areas of certain selected craters. A month after that, the first samples began arriving at Houston and were forwarded immediately to Pasadena; so were the large numbers of samples collected from deep below the surface of Farside.

The outcome of all this activity was summarized in a memorandum stamped “SECRET” and written on the anniversary of Hunt’s first arrival in Houston.

9 September 2028

TO: G. Caldwell

Executive Director

Navigation and Communications

Division

FROM: Dr. V. Hunt

Section Head

Special Assignment Group L

ANOMALIES OF LUNAR CRATERING

(1) Hemispheric Anomalies

For many years, radical differences have been known to exist between the nature and origins of Lunar Nearside and Farside surface features.

(a) Nearside

Original Lunar surface from 4 billion years ago. Nearly all surface cratering caused by explosive release of kinetic energy by meteorite impacts. Some younger-e.g., Copernicus, 850 million years old.

(b) Farside

Surface comprises large mass of recently added material to average depth circa 300 meters. Craters formed during final phase of this bombardment. Dating of these events coincides with Lunarian presence. Origin of bombardment uncertain.

(2) Nearside Exceptions

Known for approx. the last thirty years that some Nearside craters date from same period as those on Farside. Current theory ascribes them to overshoots from Farside bombardment.

(3) Conclusion From Recent Research at Omaha and Pasadena

All Nearside exceptions previously attributed to meteoritic impacts. This belief now considered incorrect. Two classes of exceptions now distinguished:

(a) Class I Exceptions

Confirmed as meteoritic impacts occurring 50,000 years ago.

(b) Class II Exceptions Differing from Class I in irradiation history, formation of glasses, absence of impact corroboration and positive results to tests for elements hyperium, bonnevilliuin, genevium. Example: Crater Lunar Catalogue reference MB 3076/K2/E currently classed as meteoritic. Classification erroneous. Crater MB 3076/K2/E was made by a nucleonic bomb. Other cases confirmed. Investigations continuing.

(4) Farside Subsurface

Intensive sampling from depths approximating that of the original crust indicate widespread nucleonic detonations prior to meteorite bombardment. Thermonuclear and fission reactions also suspected but impossible to confirm.

(5) Implications

(a) Sophisticated weapons used on Luna at or near time of Lunarian presence, mainly on Farside. Lunarian involvement implied but not proved.

(b) If Lunarians involved, possibility of more widespread conflict embracing Lunarian home planet. Possible cause of Lunarian extinction.

(c) Charlie was a member of more than a small, isolated expedition to our Moon. A significant Lunarian presence on the Moon is indicated. Mainly concentrated on Farside. Practically all traces since obliterated by meteorite storm.

Chapter Twelve

Front page feature of the New York Times,

14 October 2028:

LUNARIAN PLANET LOCATED

Did Nuclear War Destroy Minerva?

Sensational new announcements by UN Space Arm Headquarters, Washington, D.C., at last positively identify the home planet of the Lunarian civilization, known to have achieved space flight and reached Earth’s Moon fifty thousand years ago. Information pieced together during more than a year of intense work by teams of scientists based at the UNSA Navigation and Communications Division Headquarters, Houston, Texas, shows conclusively that the Lunarians came from an Earth-like planet that once existed in our own Solar System.

A tenth planet, christened Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom, is now known to have existed approximately 250 million miles from the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in the position now occupied by the Asteroid Belt, and is firmly established as having been the center of the Lunarian civilization.

In a further startling announcement, a UNSA spokesman stated that data collected recently at the Lunar bases, following research at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and the UNSA Mineralogy and Petrology Laboratories, Pasadena, California, indicate that a large-scale nuclear conflict took place on the Moon at the time the Lunarians were there. The possibility that Minerva was destroyed in a full-scale nuclear holocaust of interplanetary dimensions cannot be ruled out.

Nucleonic Bombs Used at Crisium

Investigations in recent months at the University of Nebraska and Pasadena give positive evidence that nucleonic bombs have caused craters on the Moon previously attributed to meteorite impacts. H-bomb and A-bomb effects are also suspected but cannot be confirmed.

Dr. Saul Steinfield of the Department of Physics at the University of Nebraska explained: “For many years we have known that Lunar Farside craters are very much younger than most of the craters on Nearside. All the Farside craters, and a few of the Nearside ones, date from about the time of the Lunarians, and have always been thought to be meteoritic. Most of them, including all Farside ones, are. We have now proved, however, that some of the Nearside ones were made by bombs-for example, a few on the northern periphery of Mare Crisium and a couple near Tycho. So far, we’ve identified twenty-three positively and have a long list to check out.”

Further evidence collected from deep below the Farside surface indicates heavier bombing there than on Nearside. Obliteration of the original Farside surface by a heavy meteorite storm immediately after these events accounts for only meteorite craters being found there today and makes detailed reconstruction of exactly what took place unlikely. “The evidence for higher activity on Farside is mainly statistical,” said Steinfield yesterday. “There’s no way you could figure anything specific-for example, an actual crater count-under all that garbage.”

The new discoveries do not explain why the meteorite storm happened at this time. Professor Pierre Guillemont of the Hale Observatory commented: “Clearly, there could be a connection with the Lunarian presence. Personally, I would be surprised if the agreement in dates is just a coincidence, although that, of course, is possible. For the time being, it must remain an unanswered question.”

Clues from ILIAD Mission

Startling confirmation that Minerva disintegrated to form the Asteroid Belt has been received from space. Examination of Asteroid samples carried out on board the spacecraft Iliad, launched from Luna fifteen months ago to conduct a survey of parts of the Belt, shows many Asteroids to be of recent origin. Data beamed back to Mission Control Center at UNSA Operational Command Headquarters, Galveston, Texas, gives cosmic-ray exposure times and orbit statistics pinpointing Minerva’s disintegration at fifty thousand years ago.

Earth scientists are eagerly awaiting arrival of the first Asteroid material to be sent back from Iliad, which is due at Luna in six weeks time.

Lunarian Origin Mystery

Scientists do not agree that Lunarians necessarily originated on Minerva. Detailed physical examinations of “Charlie” (Times, 7 November 2027) shows Lunarian anatomy identical to that of humans and incapable of being the product of a separate evolutionary process, according to all accepted theory. Conversely, absence of traces of Lunarian history on Earth seems to rule out any possibility of terrestrial origins. This remains the main focus of controversy among the investigators.

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Victor Hunt, the British-born UNSA nucleonics expert coordinating Lunarian investigations from Houston, explained to a Times reporter: “We know quite a lot about Minerva now-its size, its mass, its climate, and how it rotated and orbited the Sun. Upstairs we’ve built a six-foot scale model of it that shows you every continent, ocean, river, mountain range, town, and city. Also, we know it supported an advanced civilization. We also know a lot about Charlie, including his place of birth, which is given on several of his personal documents as a town easily identified on Minerva. But that doesn’t prove very much. My deputy was born in Japan, but both his parents come from Brooklyn. So until we know a lot more than we do, we can’t even say for sure that the Minervan civilization and the Lunarian civilization were one and the same.

“It’s possible the Lunarians originated on Earth and either went to live on Minerva or made contact with another race who were there already. Maybe the Lunarians originated on Minerva. We just don’t know. Whichever alternative you choose, you’ve got problems.”

Alien Marine Life Traced to Minerva

Professor Christian Danchekker, an eminent biologist at Westwood Laboratories, Houston, and also involved in Lunarian research from the beginning, confirmed that the alien species of fish discovered among foodstocks in the ruin of a Lunarian base on Lunar Farside several months ago (Times, 6 July 2028) appear to have been a life form native to Minerva. Markings on the containers in which the fish were preserved show that they came from a well-defined group of equatorial islands on Minerva. According to Professor Danchekker: “There is no question whatsoever that this species evolved on a planet other than Earth. It seems clear that the fish belong to an evolutionary line that developed on Minerva, and they were caught there by members of a group of colonists from Earth who established an extension of their civilization there.”

The professor described the suggestion that the Lunarians might also be natives of Minerva as “ludicrous.”

Despite a wealth of new information, therefore, much remains to be explained about recent events in the Solar System. Almost certainly, the next twelve months will see further exciting developments.

(See also the Special Supplement by our Science Editor on page 14.)

Chapter Thirteen

Captain Hew Mills, UN Space Arm, currently attached to the Solar System Exploration Program mission to the moons of Jupiter, stood gazing out of the transparent dome that surmounted the two-story Site Operations Control building. The building stood just clear of the ice, on a rocky knoll overlooking the untidy cluster of domes, vehicles, cabins, and storage tanks that went to make up the base he commanded. In the dim gray background around the base, indistinct shadows of rock buttresses and ice cliffs vanished and reappeared through the sullen, shifting vapors of the methane-ammonia haze. Despite his above-average psychological resilience and years of strict training, an involuntary shudder ran down his spine as he thought of the thin triple wall of the dome-all that separated him from this foreboding, poisonous, alien world, cold enough to freeze him as black as coal and as brittle as glass in seconds. Ganymede, largest of the moons of Jupiter, was, he thought, an awful place.

“Close-approach radars have locked on. Landing sequence is active. Estimated time to touchdown: three minutes, fifty seconds.” The voice of the duty controller at one of the consoles behind Mills interrupted his broodings.

“Very good, Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “Do you have contact with Cameron?”

“There’s a channel open on screen three, sir.”

Mills moved around in front of the auxiliary console. The screen showed an empty chair and behind it an interior view of the low-level control room. He pressed the call button, and after a few seconds the face of Lieutenant Cameron moved into the viewing angle.

“The brass are due in three minutes,” Mills advised. “Everything okay?”

“Looking good, sir.”

Mills resumed his position by the wall of the dome and noted with satisfaction the three tracked vehicles lurching into line to take up their reception positions. Minutes ticked by.

“Sixty seconds,” the duty controller announced. “Descent profile normal. Should make visual contact any time now.”

A patch of fog above the landing pads in the central area of the base darkened and slowly materialized into the blurred outline of a medium-haul surface transporter, sliding out of the murk, balanced on its exhausts with its landing legs already fully extended. As the transporter came to rest on one of the pads and its shock absorbers flexed to dispose of the remaining momentum, the reception vehicles began moving forward. Mills nodded to himself and left the dome via the stairs that led down to ground level.

Ten minutes later, the first reception vehicle halted outside the Operations Control building and an extending tube telescoped out to dock with its airlock. Major Stanislow, Colonel Peters, and a handful of aides walked through into the outer access chamber, where they were met by Mills and a few other officers. Mutual introductions were concluded, and without further preliminaries the party ascended to the first floor and proceeded through an elevated walkway into the adjacent dome, constructed over the head of number-three shalt. A labyrinth of stairs and walkways brought them eventually to number-three high-level airlock anteroom. A capsule was waiting beyond the airlock. For the next four minutes they plummeted down, down, deep into the ice crust of Ganymede.

They emerged through another airlock into number-three low-level anteroom. The air vibrated with the humming and throbbing of unseen machines. Beyond the anteroom, a short corridor brought them at last to the low-level control room. It was a maze of consoles and equipment cubicles, attended by perhaps a dozen operators, all intent on their tasks. One of the longer walls, constructed completely from glass, gave a panoramic view down over the workings in progress outside the control room. Lieutenant Cameron joined them as they lined up by the glass to take in the spectacle beyond.

They were looking out over the floor of an enormous cathedral, over nine hundred feet long and a hundred feet high, hewn and melted out of the solid ice. Its rough-formed walls glistened white and gray in the glare of countless arc lights. The floor was a litter of steel-mesh roadways, cranes, gantries, girders, pipes, tubes, and machinery of every description. The left-side wall, stretching away to the far end of the tunnel, carried a lattice of ladders, scaffolding, walkways, and cabins that extended up to the roof. All over the scene, scores of figures in ungainly heavy-duty spacesuits bustled about in a frenzy of activity, working in an atmosphere of pressurized argon to eliminate any risk of explosion from methane and the other gases released from the melted ice. But all eyes were fixed on the right-hand wall of the tunnel.

For almost the entire length, a huge, sweeping wall of smooth, black metal reared up from the floor and curved up and over, out of sight above their heads to be lost below the roof of the cavern. It was immense-just a part of something vast and cylindrical, lying on its side, the whole of which must have stretched far down into the ice below floor level. At the near end, outside the control room, a massive, curving wing flared out of the cylinder and spanned the cavern above their heads like a bridge, before disappearing into the ice high on the far left. At intervals along the base of the wall, where metal and ice met, a series of holes six feet or so across marked the ends of the network of pilot tunnels that had been driven all around and over and under the object.

It was far larger than a Vega. How long it had lain there, entombed beneath the timeless ice sheets of Ganymede, nobody knew. But the computations of field-vector resultants collected from the satellites had been right; there certainly had been something big down here-and it hadn’t been just ore deposits.

“Ma-an,” breathed Stanislow, after staring for a long time. “So that’s it, huh?”

“That is big!” Peters added with a whistle. The aides echoed the sentiments dutifully.

Stanislow turned to Mills. “Ready for the big moment, then, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Mills confirmed. He indicated a point about two hundred feet away where a group of figures was gathered close to the wall of the hull, surrounded by an assortment of equipment. Beside them a rectangular section of the skin about eight feet square had been cut away. “First entry point will be there- approximately amidships. The outer hull is double layered; both layers have been penetrated. Inside is an inner hull…” For the benefit of the visitors, he gestured toward a display positioned near the observation window showing the aperture in close-up.

“Preliminary drilling shows that it’s a single layer. The valves that you can see projecting from the inner hull were inserted to allow samples of the internal atmosphere to be taken before opening it up. Also, the cavity behind the access point has been argon-flooded.”

Mills turned to Cameron before going on to describe further details of the operation. “Lieutenant, carry out a final check of communications links, please.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Cameron walked back to the supervisory console at the end of the room and scanned the array of screens.

“Ice Hole to Subway. Come in, please.”

The face of Commander Stracey, directing activities out near the hull, moved into view, encased in its helmet. “All checks completed and go,” he reported. “Standing by, ready to proceed.”

“Ice Hole to Pithead. Report transmission quality.”

“All clear, vision and audio,” responded the duty controller from the dome far above them.

“Ice Hole to Ganymede Main.” Cameron addressed screen three, which showed Foster at Main Base, situated seven hundred miles away to the south.

“Clear.”

“Ice Hole to Jupiter Four. Report, please.”

“All channels clear and checking positive.” The last acknowledgment came from the deputy mission director on screen four, speaking from his nerve center in the heart of the mile-long Jupiter Mission Four command ship, at that moment orbiting over two thousand miles up over Ganymede.

“All channels positive and ready to proceed, sir,” Cameron called to Mills.

“Carry on, then, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Cameron passed the order to Stracey, and out by the hull the ponderous figures lumbered into action, swinging forward a rockdrill supported from an overhead gantry. The group by the window watched in silence as the bit chewed relentlessly into the inner wall. Eventually the drill was swung back.

“Initial penetration complete,” Stracey’s voice informed them. “Nothing visible inside.”

An hour later, a pattern of holes adorned the exposed expanse of metal. When lights were shone through and a TV probe inserted, the screen showed snatches of a large compartment crammed with ducts and machinery. Shortly afterward, Stracey’s team began cutting out the panel with torches. Mills invited Peters and Stanislow to come and observe the operations first-hand. The trio left the control room, descended to the lower floor, and a few minutes later emerged, clad in spacesuits, through the airlock onto the tunnel floor. As they arrived at the aperture, the rectangle of metal was just being swung aside.

The spotlights confirmed the general impression obtained via the drill holes. When preliminary visual examinations were completed, two sergeants who had been standing by stepped forward. Communications lines were plugged into their backpacks and they were handed TV cameras trailing cables, flashlights, and a pouch of tools and accessories. At the same time, other members of the team were smoothing over the jagged edges of the hole with pads of adhesive plastic to prevent tearing of the lines. An extending aluminum ladder was lowered into the hole and secured. The first sergeant to enter turned about on the edge of the hole, carefully located the top rung with his feet, and inch by inch disappeared down into the chamber. When he had found a firm footing, the second followed.

For twenty minutes they clambered through the mechanical jungle, twisting and turning among the chaotic shadows cast by the lights pouring in through the hole above. Progress was slow; they had difficulty finding level surfaces to move on, since the ship appeared to be lying on its side. But foot by foot, the lines continued to snake sporadically down into the darkness. Eventually the sergeants stopped before the noseward bulkhead of the compartment. The screens outside showed their way barred by a door leading through to whatever lay forward; it was made of a steely-gray metal and looked solid. It was also about ten feet high by four wide. A long conference produced the decision that there was no alternative but for them to return to where the hole had been cut to collect drills, torches, and all the other gadgetry needed to go through the whole drilling, purging, argon-filling, and cutting routine all over again. From the look of the door, it could be a long job. Mills, Stanislow, and Peters went back to the control room, collected the remainder of their party, and went to the surface installations for lunch. They returned three hours later.

Behind the bulkhead was another machinery compartment, as confusing as the first but larger. This one had many doors leading from it-all closed. The two sergeants selected one at random in the ceiling above their heads, and while they were cutting through it, others descended into the first and second compartments to position rollers for minimizing the drag of their trailing cables, which was beginning to slow them down appreciably. When the door was cut, a second team relieved the first.

They used another ladder to climb up through the door and found themselves standing on what was supposed to be the wall of a long corridor running toward the nose of the ship. A succession of closed doors, beneath their feet and over their heads, passed across the screens outside. Over two hundred feet of cabling had disappeared into the original entry point.

“We’re just passing the fifth bulkhead since entering the corridor,” the commentary on the audio channel informed the observers. “The walls are smooth, and appear to be metallic, but covered with a plastic material. It’s coming away in most places. The floor up one side is black and looks rubbery. There are lots of doors in both walls, all big like the first one. Some have…”

“Just a second, Joe,” the voice of the speaker’s companion broke in. “Swing the big light down here… by your feet. See, the door you’re standing on slides to the side. It’s not closed all the way.”

The screens showed a pair of standard-issue heavy-duty UNSA boots, standing on a metal panel in the middle of a pool of light. The boots shuffled to one side to reveal a black gap, about twelve inches wide, running down one side of the panel. They then stepped off the panel and onto the surrounding area as their owner evidently inspected the situation.

“You’re right,” Joe’s voice announced at last. “Let’s see if it’ll budge.”

There then followed a jumbled sequence of arms, legs, walls, ceilings, lightness, and darkness as TV cameras and lamps exchanged hands and were waved about. When a stable picture resulted, it showed two heavily clad arms braced across the gap.

Eventually:

“No dice. Stuck solid.”

“How about the jack?”

“Yeah, maybe. Pass it down, willya?”

A long dialogue followed during which the jack was maneuvered into place and expanded. It slipped off. Muttered curses. Another try. And then:

“It’s moving! Come on, baby…-let’s have a bit more light I think it’ll go easy now…- See if you can get a foot against it…”

On the monitors the gray slab graunched gradually out of the picture. A black, bottomless pit fell away beneath.

“The door is about two-thirds open,” a breathless voice resumed. “It’s gummed up there and won’t go any further. We’re gonna have a quick looksee around from up here, then we’ll have to come back to get another ladder. Can somebody have one ready at the door that leads up into this corridor?”

The camera closed in on the pitch-black oblong. A few seconds later a circle of light appeared in the scene, picking out part of the far wall. The light began moving around inside and the camera followed. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment… corners of cubicles… legs of furniture… sections of bulkhead… moved through the circle.

“There’s a lot of loose junk down at that end… Move the light around a bit…” Several colored cylinders in a heap, about the size of jelly jars… something like a braided belt, lying in a tangle… a small gray box with buttons on one face…

“What was that? Go over a bit, Jerry… No, a bit more to the left.”

Something white. A bar of white.

“Jeez! Look at that! Jerry, will you look at that?”

The skull, grinning up out of the pool of eerie white light, startled even the watchers out in the tunnel. But it was the size of the skeleton that stunned them; no man had ever boasted a chest that compared with those massive hoops of bone. But besides that, even the most inexpert among the observers could see that whatever the occupants of this craft had been, they bore no resemblance to man.

The stream of data taken in by the cameras flashed back to preprocessors in the low-level control room, and from there via cable to the surface of Ganymede. After encoding by the computers in the Site Operations Control building, it was relayed by microwave repeaters seven hundred miles to Ganymede Main Base, restored to full strength, and redirected up to the orbiting command ship. Here, the message was fed into the message exchange and scheduling processor complex, transformed into high-power laser modulations, and slotted into the main outgoing signal beam to Earth. For over an hour the data streaked across the Solar System, covering 186,000 miles every second, until the sensors of the long-range relay beacon, standing in Solar orbit not many million miles outside that of Mars, fished it out of the void, a microscopic fraction of its original power. Retransmission from here found the Deep Space Link Station, lodged in Trojan equilibrium with Earth and Luna, and eventually a synchronous communications satellite hanging high over the central USA, which beamed it down to a ground station near San Antonio. A landline network completed the journey to UNSA Mission Control, Galveston, where the information was greedily consumed by the computers of Operational Command Headquarters.

The Jupiter Four command ship had taken eleven months to reach the giant planet. Within four hours of the event, the latest information to be gathered by the mission was safely lodged in the data banks of UN Space Arm.

Chapter Fourteen

The discovery of the giant spaceship, frozen under the ice field of Ganymede, was a sensation but, in a sense, not something totally unexpected. The scientific world had more or less accepted as fact that an advanced civilization had once flourished on Minerva; indeed, if the arguments of the orthodox evolutionists were accepted, at least two planets-Minerva and Earth-had supported high-technology civilizations to some extent at about the same time. It did not come as a complete surprise, therefore, that man’s persistent nosing around the Solar System should uncover more evidence of its earlier inhabitants. What did surprise everybody was the obvious anatomical difference between the Ganymeans-as the beings on board the ship soon came to be called-and the common form shared by the Lunarians and mankind.

To the still unresolved question of whether the Lunarians and the Minervans had been one and the same or not, there was immediately added the further riddle: Where had the Ganymeans come from, and had they any connection with either? One bemused UNSA scientist summed up the situation by declaring that it was about time UNSA established an Alien Civilizations Division to sort out the whole damn mess!

The pro-Danchekker faction quickly interpreted the new development as full vindication of evolutionary theory and of the arguments they had been promoting all along. Clearly, two planets in the Solar System had evolved intelligent life at around the same period in the past; the Ganymeans had evolved on Minerva and the Lunarians had evolved on Earth. They came independently from different lines and that was why they were different. Lunarian pioneers made contact with the Ganymeans and settled on Minerva-that was how Charlie had come to be born there. Extreme hostilities broke out between the two civilizations at some point, resulting in the extinction of both and the destruction of Minerva. The reasoning was consistent, plausible, and convincing. Against it, the single objection-that no evidence of any Lunarian civilization on Earth had ever been detected-began to look more lonely and more feeble every day. Deserters left the can’t-be-of-Earth-origin camp in droves to join Danchekker’s growing legions. Such was his gain in prestige and credibility that it seemed perfectly natural for his department to assume responsibility for conducting the preliminary evaluation of the data coming in from Jupiter.

Despite his earlier skepticism, Hunt too found the case compelling. He and a large part of Group L’s staff spent much time searching every available archive and record from such fields as archeology and paleontology for any reference that could be a pointer to the one-time existence of an advanced race on Earth. They even delved into the realms of ancient mythology and combed various pseudoscientific writings to see if anything could be extracted that was capable of substantiation, that suggested the works of superbeings in the past. But always the results were negative.

While all this was going on, things began to happen in an area where progress had all but ground to a halt for many months. Linguistics had run into trouble: The meager contents of the documents found about Charlie’s person simply had not contained enough information to make great inroads into deciphering a whole new, alien language. Of the two small books, one-that containing the maps and tables and resembling a handy pocket reference-together with the loose documents, had been translated in parts and had yielded most of the fundamental data about Minerva and quite a lot about Charlie. The second book contained a series of dated entries in handwritten script, but despite repeated attempts, it had obstinately defied decoding.

This situation changed dramatically some weeks after the opening up of the underground remains of the devastated Lunarian base on Lunar Farside. Among the pieces of equipment included in that find had been a metal drum, containing a series of glass plates, rather like the magazines of some slide projectors. Closer examination of the plates revealed them to be simple projection slides, each holding a closely packed matrix of nilcrodot images which, under a microscope, were seen to be pages of printed text. Constructing a system of lamps and lenses to project them onto a screen was straightforward, and in one fell swoop Linguistics became the owners of a miniature Lunarian library. Results followed in months.

Don Maddson, head of the Linguistics section, rummaged through the litter of papers and files that swamped the large table standing along the left-hand wall of his office, selected a loosely clipped wad of typed notes, and returned to the chair behind his desk.

“There’s a set of these on its way up to you,” he said to Hunt, who was sitting in the chair opposite. “I’ll leave you to read the details for yourself later. For now, I’ll just sum up the general picture.”

“Fine,” Hunt said. “Fire away.”

“Well, for a start, we know a bit more about Charlie. One of the documents found in a pouch on the backpack appears to be something like army pay records. It gives an abbreviated history of some of the things he did and a list of the places he was posted to-that kind of thing.”

“Army? Was he in the army, then?”

Maddson shook his head. “Not exactly. From what we can gather, they didn’t differentiate much between civilian and military personnel in terms of how their society was structured. It’s more like everybody belonged to different branches of the same big organization.”

“A sort of last word in totalitarianism?”

“Yeah, that’s about it. The State ran just about everything; it dominated every walk of life and imposed a rigid discipline everywhere. You went where you were sent and did what you were told to do; in most cases, that meant into industry, agriculture, or the military forces. Whatever you did, the State was your boss anyway… that’s what I meant when I said they were all different branches of the same big organization.”

“Okay. Now, about the pay records?”

“Charlie was born on Minerva, we know that. So were his parents. His father was some kind of machine operator; his mother worked in industry, too, but we can’t make out the exact occupation. The records also tell us where he went to school, for how long, where he took his military training-everybody seemed to go through some kind of military training-and where he learned about electronics. It tells us all the dates, too.”

“So he was something like an electronics engineer, was he?” Hunt asked.

“Sort of. More of a maintenance engineer than a design or development engineer. He seems to have specialized in military equipment-there’s a long list of postings to combat units. The last one is interesting-” Maddson selected a sheet and passed it across to Hunt. “That’s a translation of the last page of postings. The final entry gives the name of a place and, alongside it, a description which, when translated literally, means ‘off-planet.’ That’s probably the Lunarian name for whatever part of our Moon he was sent to.”

“Interesting,” Hunt agreed. “You’ve found out quite a lot more about him.”

“Yep, we’ve got him pretty well taped. If you convert their dates into our units, he was about thirty-two years old at the date of his last posting. Anyhow, that’s all really incidental; you can read the details. I was going to run over the picture we’re getting of the kind of world he was born into.” Maddson paused to consult his notes again. Then he resumed: “Minerva was a dying world. At the time we’re talking about, the last cold period of the Ice Age was approaching its peak. I’m told that ice ages are Solar System-wide phenomena; Minerva was a lot farther from the Sun than here, so as you can imagine, things were pretty bleak there.”

“You’ve only got to look at the size of those ice caps,” Hunt commented.

“Yes, exactly. And it was getting worse. The Lunarian scientists figured they had less than a hundred years to go before the ice sheets met and blanketed the whole planet completely. Now, as you’d expect, they had studied astronomy for centuries-centuries before Charlie’s time, that is-and they’d known for a long time that things were going to get worse before they got better. So, they’d reached the conclusion, way back, that the only way out was to escape to another world. The problem, of course, was that for generations after they got the idea, nobody knew anything about how to do something about it. The answer had to lie somewhere along the line of better science and better technology. It became kind of a racial goal-the one thing that mattered, that generation after generation worked toward-the development of the sciences that would get them to places they knew existed, before the ice wiped out the whole race.”

Maddson pointed to another pile of papers on the corner of his desk. “This was the prime objective that the State was set up to achieve, and because the stakes were so high, everything was subordinated to that objective. Hence, from birth to death the individual was subordinated to the needs of the State. It was implied in everything they wrote and drummed into them from the time they were knee-high. Those papers are a translation of a kind of catechism they had to memorize at school; it reads like Nazi stuff from the nineteen thirties.” He stopped at that point and looked at Hunt expectantly.

Hunt looked puzzled. After a moment he said, “This doesn’t quite make sense. I mean-how could they be striving to develop space flight if they were colonists from Earth? They must have already developed it.”

Maddson gave an approving nod. “Thought you might say that.”

“But… it’s bloody silly.”

“I know. It implies they must have evolved on Minerva from scratch-unless they came from Earth, forgot everything they knew, and had to learn it all over. But that also sounds crazy to me.”

“Me, too.” Hunt thought for a long time. At last he shook his head with a sigh. “Doesn’t make sense. Anyhow, what else is there?”

“Well, we’ve got the general picture of a totally authoritarian State, demanding unquestioning obedience from the individual and controlling just about everything that moves. Everything needs a license; there are travel licenses, off-work licenses, sick-ration licenses-even procreation licenses. Everything is in short supply and rationed by permits-food, every kind of commodity, fuel, light, accommodation-you name it. And to keep everybody in line, the State operates a propaganda machine like you never dreamed of. To make things worse, the whole planet was desperately short of every kind of mineral. That slowed them down a lot. Despite their concentrated effort, their rate of technological progress was probably not as fast as you’d think. Maybe a hundred years didn’t give them as long as it sounds.” Maddson turned some sheets, scanned the next one briefly, and then went on. “To make matters worse still, they also had a big political problem.”

“Go on.”

“Now, we’re assuming that as their civilization developed, it followed similar lines to ours-first tribes, then villages, towns, nations, and so on. Seems reasonable. So, somewhere along the way they started discovering the different sciences, same as we did. As you’d expect, the same ideas started occurring to different people in different places at around the same time-like, we’ve gotta get outa this place. As these ideas became accepted, the Lunarians seem to have figured also that there just weren’t sufficient resources for more than a few lucky ones to make it. No way were they going to get a whole planet full of people out.”

“So they fought about it,” Hunt offered.

“That’s right. The way I picture it, lots of nations grew up, all racing each other, as well as the ice, to get the technological edge. Every other one was a rival, so they fought it out. Another thing that made them fight was the mineral shortage, especially the shortage of metallic ores.” Maddson pointed at a map of Minerva mounted above the table. “See those dots on the ice sheets? Most of them were a combination of fortress and mining town. They dug right down through the ice to get at the deposits, and the army was there to make sure they kept the stuff.”

“And that was the way life was. Mean people, eh?”

“Yeah, for generation after generation.” Maddson shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe if we were freezing over fast, we’d be forced in the same direction. Anyhow, the situation had complications. They had the problem of having to divide their efforts and resources between two different demands all the time: first, developing a technology that would support mass interplanetary travel and, second, armaments and the defense organization to protect it-and there weren’t a lot of resources to divide in the first place. Now, how would you solve a problem like that?”

Hunt pondered for a while. “Cooperate?” he tried.

“Forget it. They didn’t think that way.”

“Only one other strategy possible, then: Wipe out the opposition first and then concentrate everything on the main objective.”

Maddson nodded solidly. “That is exactly what they did. War, or near war, was pretty well a natural way of life all through their history. Gradually the smaller fish were eliminated until, by the time we get to Charlie, there are only two superpowers left, each dominating one of the two big equatorial continental land masses…” He pointed at the map again. “… Cerios and Lambia. From various references, we know Charlie was a Cerian.”

“All set for the big showdown, then.”

“Check. The whole planet was one big fortress-factory. Every inch of surface was covered by hostile missiles; the sky was full of orbiting bombs that could be dropped anywhere. We get the impression that relative to the pattern of our own civilization, their armaments programs had taken a bigger share than space research and had progressed faster.” Maddson shrugged again. “The rest you can guess.”

Hunt nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “It all fits,” he mused. “It must have been a huge con, though. I mean, even from whichever side won, only a handful would have been able to get away in the end; I suppose they’d have been the ruling clique and its minions. Christ! No wonder they needed good propaganda; they-“

Hunt stopped in midsentence and looked at Maddson with a curious expression. “Just a minute-there’s something else in all this that doesn’t add up.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “They had already developed interplanetary travel-how else did they get to our Moon?”

“We wondered that,” Maddson said. “The only thing we could think of was that maybe they’d already figured on making for Earth eventually-that had to be the obvious choice. Maybe they were capable of sending a scouting group to stake the place out, but didn’t have full-scale mass-transportation capacity yet. Probably they weren’t too far away from their goal when they blew it. Perhaps if they’d pooled their marbles at that point instead of starting a crazy war over it, things might have been different.”

“Sounds plausible,” Hunt agreed. “So Charlie could have been part of a reconnaissance mission sent on ahead, only the opposition had the same idea and they bumped into each other. Then they started blowing holes in our Moon. Disgraceful.”

A short silence ensued.

“There’s another thing I don’t get, either,” Hunt said, rubbing his chin.

“What’s that?”

“Well, the opposition-the Lambians. Everybody in Navcomms is going around saying that the war that clobbered Minerva was fought between colonists from Earth-that must be Charlie’s lot, the Cerians-and an alien race that belonged to Minerva-the Ganymeans, who, from what you said, would be the Lambians. We said a moment ago that this idea of the Cerians being from Earth doesn’t make sense, because if they had originated there, they wouldn’t be trying to develop space flight. We can’t be one hundred percent certain of that because something unusual could have happened, such as the colony being cut off for a few thousand years for some reason. But you can’t say that about the Lambians; they couldn’t have been neck-and-neck rivals trying to develop space flight.”

“They already had it, for sure,” Maddson completed for him. “We sure as hell found them on Ganymede.”

“Quite. And that ship was no beginner’s first attempt, either. You know, I’m beginning to think that whoever the Lambians were, they weren’t Ganymeans.”

“I think you’re right,” Maddson confirmed. “The Ganymeans were a totally different biological species. Wouldn’t you expect that if they were the opposition in Lambia, somehow it would show up in the Lunarian writings? But it doesn’t. Everything we’ve examined suggests that the Cerians and the Lambians were simply different nations of the same race. For example, we’ve found extracts from what appear to be Cerian newspapers, which included political cartoons showing Lambian figures; the figures are drawn as human forms. That wouldn’t be so if the Lambians looked anything like the Ganymeans must have looked.”

“So it appears the Ganymeans had nothing to do with the war,” Hunt concluded.

“Right.”

“So where do they fit in?”

Maddson showed his empty palms. “That’s the funny thing. They don’t seem to fit anywhere-at least, we haven’t even found anything that looks like a reference to them.”

“Maybe they’re just a big red herring, then. I mean, we’ve only supposed that they came from Minerva; nothing actually demonstrates that they did. Perhaps they never had anything to do with the place at all.”

“Could well be. But I can’t help feeling that…”

The chime on Maddson’s desk display console interrupted the discussion. He excused himself and touched a button to accept the call.

“Hi, Don,” said the face of Hunt’s assistant, upstairs in Group L’s offices. “Is Vic there?” He sounded excited. Maddson swiveled the unit around to point in Hunt’s direction.

“It’s for you,” he said needlessly.

“Vic,” said the face without preamble. “I’ve just had a look at the reports of the latest tests that came in from Jupiter Four two hours ago. That ship under the ice and the big guys inside it-they’ve completed the dating tests.” He drew a deep breath. “It looks like maybe we can forget the Ganymeans in all this Charlie business. Vic, if all the figures are right, that ship has been sitting there for something like twenty-five million years!”

Chapter Fifteen

Caldwell moved a step closer to inspect more carefully the nine-foot-high plastic model standing in the middle of one of the laboratories of the Westwood Biological Institute. Danchekker gave him plenty of time to take in the details before continuing.

“A full-size replica of a Ganymean skeleton,” he said. “Built on the strength of the data beamed back from Jupiter. The first indisputable form of intelligent alien life ever to be studied by man.” Caldwell looked up at the towering frame, pursed his lips in a silent whistle, and walked in a slow circle around and back to where the professor was standing. Hunt simply stood and swept his eyes up and down the full length of the model in wordless fascination.

“That structure is in no way related to that of any animal ever studied on Earth, living or extinct,” Danchekker informed them. He gestured toward it. “It is based on a bony internal skeleton, walks upright as a biped, and has a head on top-as you can see; but apart from such superficial similarities, it has clearly evolved from completely unfamiliar origins. Take the head as an obvious example. The arrangement of the skull cannot be reconciled in any way with that of known vertebrates. The face has not receded back into the lower skull, but remains a long, down-pointing snout that widens at the top to provide a broad spacing for the eyes and ears. Also, the back of the skull has enlarged to accommodate a developing brain, as in the case of man, but instead of assuming a rounded contour, it bulges back above the neck to counterbalance the protruding face and jaw. And look at the opening through the skull in the center of the forehead; I believe that this could have housed a sense organ that we do not possess-possibly an infrared detector inherited from a nocturnal, carnivorous ancestor.”

Hunt moved forward to stand next to Caldwell and peered intently at the shoulders. “These are unlike anything I’ve ever come across, too,” he commented. “They’re made up of… kind of overlapping plates of bone. Nothing like ours at all.”

“Quite,” Danchekker confirmed. “Probably adapted from the remains of ancestral armor. And the rest of the trunk is also quite alien. There is a dorsal spine with an arrangement of ribs below the shoulder plates, as you can see, but the lowermost rib-immediately above the body cavity-has developed into a massive hoop of bone with a diametral strut stretching forward from an enlarged spinal vertebra. Now, notice the two systems of smaller linked bones at the sides of the hoop…” He pointed them out. “They were probably used to assist with breathing by helping to expand the diaphragm. To me, they look suspiciously like the degenerate remnants of a paired-limb structure. In other words, although this creature, like us, had two arms and walked on two legs, somewhere in his earlier ancestry were animals with three pairs of appendages, not two. That in itself is enough to immediately rule out any kinship with every vertebrate of this planet.”

Caldwell stooped to examine the pelvis, which comprised just an arrangement of thick bars and struts to contain the thigh sockets. There was no suggestion of the splayed dish form of the lower human torso.

“Must’ve had peculiar guts, too,” he offered.

“It could be that the internal organs were carried more by suspension from the hoop above than by support from underneath,” Danchekker suggested. He stepped back and indicated the arms and legs. “And last, observe the limbs. Both lower limbs have two bones as do ours, but the upper arm and thigh are different-they have a double-bone arrangement as well. This would have resulted in vastly improved flexibility and the ability to perform a whole range of movements that could never be duplicated by a human being. And the hand has six digits, two of them opposing; thus its owner effectively enjoyed the advantages of having two thumbs. He would have been able to tie his shoes easily with one hand.”

Danchekker waited until Caldwell and Hunt had fully studied every detail of the skeleton to their satisfaction. When they looked toward him again, he resumed: “Ever since the age of the Ganymeans was verified, there has been a tendency for everybody to discount them as merely a coincidental discovery and having no direct bearing on the Lunarian question. I believe, gentlemen, that I am now in a position to demonstrate that they had a very real bearing indeed on the question.”

Hunt and Caldwell looked at him expectantly. Danchekker walked over to a display console by the wall of the lab, tapped in a code, and watched as the screen came to life to reveal a picture of the skeleton of a fish. Satisfied, he turned to face them.

“What do you notice about that?” he asked.

Caldwell stared obediently at the screen for a few seconds while Hunt watched in silence.

“It’s a funny fish,” Caldwell said at last. “Okay-you tell me.”

“It is not obvious at first sight,” Danchekker replied, “but by detailed comparison it is possible to relate the structure of that fish, bone for bone, to that of the Ganymean skeleton. They’re both from the same evolutionary line.”

“That fish is one of those that were found on the Lunarian base on Farside,” Hunt said suddenly.

“Precisely, Dr. Hunt. The fish dates from some fifty thousand years ago, and the Ganymean skeleton from twenty-five million or so. It is evident from anatomical considerations that they are related and come from lines that branched apart from a common ancestral life form somewhere in the very remote past. It follows that they share a place of origin. We already know that the fish evolved in the oceans of Minerva; therefore, the Ganymeans also came from Minerva. We thus have proof of something that has been merely speculation for some time. All that was wrong with the earlier assumption was our failure to appreciate the gap in time between the presence of the Ganymeans on Minerva, and that of the Lunarians.”

“Okay,” Caldwell accepted. “The Ganymeans came from Minerva, but a lot earlier than we thought. What’s the big message and why did you call us over here?”

“In itself, this conclusion is interesting but no more,” Danchekker answered. “But it looks pale by comparison with what comes next. In fact”-he shot a glance at Hunt-“the rest tells us all we need to know to resolve the whole question once and for all.”

The two regarded him intently.

The professor moistened his lips, then went on: “The Ganymean ship has been opened up fully, and we now have an extremely comprehensive inventory of practically everything it contained. The ship was constructed for large freight-carrying capacity and was loaded when it met with whatever fate befell it on Ganymede. The cargo that it was carrying, in my opinion, constitutes the most sensational discovery ever to be made in the history of paleontology and biology. You see, that ship was carrying, among other things, a large consignment of botanical and zoological specimens, some alive and in cages, the rest preserved in canisters. Presumably the stock was part of an ambitious scientific expedition or something of that nature, but that really doesn’t matter for now. What does matter is that we now have in our possession a collection of animal and plant trophies the like of which has never before been seen by human eyes: a comprehensive cross section of many forms of life that existed on Earth around the late Oligocene and early Miocene periods, twenty-five million years ago!”

Hunt and Caldwell stared at him incredulously. Danchekker folded his arms and waited.

“Earth!” Caldwell managed, with difficulty, to form the word. “Are you telling me that the ship had been to Earth?”

“I can see no alternative explanation,” Danchekker returned. “Without doubt, the ship was carrying a variety of animal forms that have every appearance of being identical to species that have been well-known for centuries as a result of the terrestrial fossil record. The biologists on the Jupiter Four Mission are quite positive of their conclusions, and from the information they have sent back, I see no reason to doubt their opinions.” Danchekker moved his hand back to the keyboard. “I will show you some examples of the kind of thing I mean,” he said.

The picture of the fish skeleton vanished and was replaced by one of a massive, hornless, rhinoceroslike creature. In the background stood an enormous opened canister from which the animal had presumably been removed. The canister was lying in front of what looked like a wall of ice, surrounded by cables, chains, and parts of a latticework built of metal struts.

“The Baluchitherium, gentlemen,” Danchekker informed them, “or something so like it that the difference escapes me. This animal stood eighteen feet high at the shoulder and attained a bulk in excess of that of the elephant. It is a good example of the titanotheres, or titanic beasts, that were abundant in the Americas during the Oligocene but which died out fairly rapidly soon afterward.”

“Are you saying that baby was alive when the ship ditched?” Caldwell asked in a tone of disbelief.

Danchekker shook his head. “Not this particular one. As you can see, it has come to us in practically as good a condition as when it was alive. It was taken from that container in the background, in which it had been packed and preserved to keep for a long time. Fortunately, whoever packed it was an expert. However, as I said earlier, there were cages and pens in the ship that originally held live specimens, but by the time they were discovered they had deteriorated to skeletons condition, as had the crew. There were six of this particular species in the pens.”

The professor changed the picture to show a small quadruped with spindly legs.

“Mesohippus-ancestor of the modern horse. About the size of a collie dog and walking on a three-toed foot with the center toe highly elongated, clearly foreshadowing the single-toed horse of today. There is a long list of other examples such as these, every one immediately recognizable to any student of early terrestrial life forms.”

Speechless, Hunt and Caldwell continued to watch as the view changed once more. This time it showed something that at first sight suggested a medium-sized ape from the gibbon or chimpanzee family. Closer examination, however, revealed differences that set it apart from the general category of ape. The skull construction was lighter, especially in the area of the lower jaw, where the chin had receded back to fall almost below the tip of the nose. The arms were proportionately somewhat on the short side for an ape, the chest broader and flatter, and the legs longer and straighter. Also, the opposability of the big toe had gone.

Dancbekker allowed plenty of time for these points to register before continuing with his commentary.

“Clearly, the creature you now see before you belongs to the general anthropoid line that includes both man and the great apes. Now, remember, this specimen dates from around the early Miocene period. The most advanced anthropoid fossil from around that time so far found on Earth was discovered during the last century in East Africa and is known as Proconsul. Proconsul is generally accepted as representing a step forward from anything that had gone before, but he is definitely an ape. Here, on the other hand, we have a creature from the same period in time, but with distinctly more pronounced humanlike characteristics than Proconsul. In my opinion, this is an example of something that occupies a position corresponding to that of Proconsul, but on the other side of the split that occurred when man and ape went their own separate ways-in other words, a direct ancestor to the human line!” Danchekker concluded with a verbal flourish and gazed at the other two men expectantly. Caldwell stared back with widening eyes, and his jaw dropped as impossible thoughts raced through his mind.

“Are you telling… that the Charlie guys could have… from that?”

“Yes!” Danchekker snapped off the screen and swung back to face them triumphantly. “Established evolutionary theory is as sound as I’ve insisted all along. The notion that the Lunarians might have been colonists from Earth turns out indeed to be true, but not in the sense that was intended. There are no traces of their civilization to be found on Earth, because it never existed on Earth-but neither was it the product of any parallel process of evolution. The Lunarian civilization developed independently on Minerva from the same ancestral stock as we did and all other terrestrial vertebrates-from ancestors that were transported to Minerva, twenty-five million years ago, by the Ganymeans!” Danchekker thrust out his jaw defiantly and clasped the lapels of his jacket. “And that, Dr. Hunt, would seem to be the solution to your problem!”

Chapter Sixteen

The trail behind this rapid succession of new developments was by this time littered with the abandoned carcases of dead ideas. It reminded the scientists forcibly of the pitfalls that await the unwary when speculation is given too free a rein and imagination is allowed to float further and further aloft from the firm grounds of demonstrable proof and scientific rigor. The reaction against this tendency took the form of a generally cooler reception to Danchekker’s attempted abrupt wrapping up of the whole issue than might have been expected. So many blind alleys had been exhausted by now, that any new suggestion met with instinctive skepticism and demands for corroboration.

The discovery of early terrestrial animals on the Ganymean spaceship proved only one thing conclusively: that there were early terrestrial animals on the Ganymean spaceship. It didn’t prove beyond doubt that other consignments had reached Minerva safely, or indeed, that this particular consignment was ever intended for Minerva. For one thing, Jupiter seemed a strange place to find a ship that had been bound for Minerva from Earth. All it proved, therefore, was that this consignment hadn’t got to wherever it was supposed to go.

Danchekker’s conclusions regarding the origins of the Ganymeans, however, were fully endorsed by a committee of experts on comparative anatomy in London, who confirmed the affinity between the Ganymean skeleton and the Minervan fish. The corollary to this deduction-that the Lunarians too had evolved on Minerva from displaced terrestrial stock-although neatly accounting for the absence of Lunarian traces on Earth and for the evident lack of advanced Lunarian space technology, required a lot more in the way of substantiating evidence.

In the meantime, Linguistics had been busy applying their newfound knowledge from the microdot library to the last unsolved riddle among Charlie’s papers, the notebook containing the handwritten entries. The story that emerged provided vivid confirmation of the broad picture already deduced in cold and objective terms by Hunt and Steinfield; it was an account of the last days of Charlie’s life. The revelations from the book lobbed yet another intellectual grenade in among the already disarrayed ranks of the investigators. But it was Hunt who finally pulled the pin.

Clasping a folder of loose papers beneath his arm, Hunt strolled along the main corridor of the thirteenth floor of the Navcomms Headquarters building, toward the Linguistics section. Outside Don Maddson’s office he stopped to examine with curiosity a sign bearing a string of two-inch-high Lunarian characters that had been pinned to the door. Shrugging and shaking his head, he entered the room. Inside, Maddson and one of his assistants were sitting in front of the perpetual pile of litter on the large side table away from the desk. Hunt pulled up a chair and joined them.

“You’ve been through the translations,” Maddson observed, noting the contents of the folder as Hunt began arranging them on the table.

Hunt nodded. “Very interesting, this. There are a few points I’d like to go over just to make sure I’ve got it straight. Some parts just don’t make sense.”

“We should’ve guessed,” Maddson sighed resignedly. “Okay, shoot.”

“Let’s work through the entries in sequence,” Hunt suggested. “I’ll stop when we get to the odd bits. By the way…” He inclined his head in the direction of the door. “What’s the funny sign outside?”

Maddson grinned proudly. “It’s my name in Lunarian. Literally it means Scholar Crazy-Boy. Get it? Don Mad-Son. See?”

“Oh, Christ,” Hunt groaned. He returned his attention to the papers.

“You’ve expressed the Lunarian-dated entries simply as consecutive numbers starting at Day One, but subdivisions of their day are converted into our hours.”

“Check,” Maddson confirmed. “Also, where there’s doubt about the accuracy of the translation, the phrase is put in parentheses with a question mark. That helps keep things simple.”

Hunt selected his first sheet. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning.” He read aloud:

“Day One. As expected, today we received full (mobilization alert?) orders. Probably means a posting somewhere. Koriel

“This is Charlie’s pal who turns up later, isn’t it?”

“Correct.”

“thinks it could be to one of the (ice nests far-intercept?).

“What’s that?”

“That’s an awkward one,” Maddson replied. “It’s a composite word; that’s the literal translation. We think it could refer to a missile battery forming part of an outer defense perimeter, located out on the ice sheets.”

“Mmm-sounds reasonable. Anyhow, Hope so. It would be a change to get away from the monotony of this place. Bigger food ration in (ice-field combat zones?). Now…” Hunt looked up. “He says, ‘the monotony of this place.’ How sure are we that we know where ‘this place’ is?”

“Pretty sure,” Maddson replied with a firm nod. “The name of a town is written above the date at the top of the entry. It checks with the name of a coastal town on Cerios and also with the place given in his pay book for his last posting but one.”

“So you’re sure he was on Minerva when he wrote this?”

“Sure, we’re sure.”

“Okay. I’ll skip the next bit that talks about personal thoughts.

“Day Two. Koriel’s hunches have proved wrong for once. We’re going to Luna.”

Hunt looked up again, evidently considering this part important. “How do you know he means Earth’s Moon there?”

“Well, one reason is that the word he uses there is the same as the last place the pay book says he was posted to. We guess it means Luna because that’s where we found him. Another reason is that later on, as you’ll have read, he talks about being sent specifically to a base called Seltar. Now, we’ve found a reference among some of the things turned up on Farside to a list of bases on place ‘X,’ and the name Seltar appears on the list. X is the same word that is written in the pay book and in the entry you’ve just read. Implication: X is a Lunarian name for Earth’s Moon.”

Hunt thought hard for a while.

“He arrived at Seltar, too, didn’t he?” he said at last. “So if he knew where he was being sent as early as that, and you’re certain he was being sent to the Moon, and he got where he was supposed to go… that rules out the other possibility that occurred to me. There’s no way he could have been scheduled for Luna but rerouted somewhere else at the last minute without the entry in the pay book being changed, is there?”

Maddson shook his head. “No way. Why’d you want to make up things like that anyhow?”

“Because I’m looking for ways to get around what comes later. It gets crazy.”

Maddson looked at Hunt curiously but suppressed his question. Hunt looked down at the papers again.

“Days Three and Four describe news reports of the fighting on Minerva. Obviously a large-scale conflict had already broken out there. It looks as if nuclear weapons were being used by then-that bit near the end of Day Four, for instance: It looks like the Lambians have succeeded in confusing the (sky nets?) over Paverol-That’s a Cerian town, isn’t it? Over half the city vaporized instantly. That doesn’t sound like a limited skirmish. What’s a sky net-some kind of electronic defense screen?”

“Probably,” Maddson agreed.

“Day Five he spent helping to load the ships. From the descriptions of the vehicles and equipment, it sounds as if they were embarking a large military force of some kind.” Hunt scanned rapidly down the next sheet. “Ah, yes-this is where he mentions Seltar. We’re going with the Fourteenth Brigade to join the Annihilator emplacement at Seltar. There’s something crazy about this Annihilator. But we’ll come back to that in a minute.

“Day Seven. Embarked four hours ago as scheduled. Still sitting here. Takeoff delayed, since whole area under heavy missile attack. Hills inland all on fire. Launching pits intact but situation overhead confused. Unneutralized Lambian satellites still covering our flight path.

“Later. Received clearance for takeoff suddenly, and the whole flight was away in minutes. Didn’t delay in planetary orbit at all-still not very healthy-so set course at once. Two ships reported lost on the way up. Koriel is taking bets on how many ships from our flight touch down on Luna. We’re flying inside a tight defense screen but must stand out clearly on Lambian search radars. There’s a bit about Koriel flirting with one of the girls from a signals unit-quite a character, this Koriel, wasn’t he…? More war news received en route… Now-this is the part I meant.” Hunt found the entry with his finger.

“Day Eight. In Lunar orbit at last!” He laid the sheet down on the table and looked from one linguist to the other. “‘In Lunar orbit at last.’ Now, you tell me: Exactly how did that ship travel from Minerva to our Moon in under two of our days? Either there is some form of propulsion that UNSA ought to be finding out about, or we’ve been very wrong about Lunarian technology all along. But it doesn’t fit. If they could do that, they didn’t have any problem about developing space flight; they were way ahead of us. But I don’t believe it-everything says they had a problem.”

Maddson made a show of helplessness. He knew it was crazy. Hunt looked inquiringly at Maddson’s assistant, who merely shrugged and pulled a face.

“You’re sure he means Lunar orbit-our Moon?”

“We’re sure.” Maddson was sure.

“And there’s no doubt about the date he shipped out?” Hunt persisted.

“The embarkation date is stamped in the pay book, and it checks with the date of the entry that says he shipped out. And don’t forget the wording on Day-where was it?-here, Day Seven. ‘Embarked four hours ago as scheduled’- See, ‘as scheduled.’ No suggestion of a change in timetable.”

“And how certain is the date he reached Luna?” asked Hunt.

“Well that’s a little more difficult. Just going by the dates of the notes, they’re one Lunarian day apart, all right. Now, it’s possible that he used a Minervan time scale on Minerva, but switched to some local system when he got to Luna. If so, it’s a big coincidence that they tally like they do, but”-he shrugged-“it’s possible. The thing that bothers me about that idea, though, is the absence of any entries between the ship-out date and the arrival-at-Luna date. Charlie seems to have written his diary regularly. If the voyage took months, like you’re saying it should have, it looks funny to me that there’s nothing at all between those dates. It’s not as if he’d have been short of free time.”

Hunt reflected for a few moments on these possibilities. Then he said, “There’s worse to come. Let’s press on for now.” He picked up the notes and resumed:

“Landed at last, five hours ago. (Expletive) what a mess! The landscape below as we came in on the (approach run?) was glowing red in places all around Seltar for miles. There were lakes of molten rock, bright orange, some with walls of rocks plunging straight into them where whole mountains have been blown away. The base is covered deep in dust, and some of the surface installations have been crushed by flying debris. The defenses are holding out, but the outer perimeter is (torn to shreds?). Most important-[unreadable] diameter dish of the Annihilator is intact and it is operational. The last group of ships in our flight was wiped out by an enemy strike coming in from deep space. Koriel has been collecting on all sides.”

Hunt laid the paper down and looked at Maddson. “Don,” he said, “how much have you been able to piece together about this Annihilator thing?”

“It was a kind of superweapon. There was more information in some of the other texts. Both sides had them, sited on Minerva itself and, from what you’re reading right now, on Luna too.” He added as an afterthought, “Maybe on other places as well.”

“Why on Luna? Any ideas?”

“Our guess is that the Cerians and the Lambians must have developed space-fight technology further than we thought,” Maddson said. “Perhaps both sides had selected Earth as their target destination for the big move, and they both sent advance parties to Luna to set up a bridgehead and… protect the investment.”

“Why not on Earth itself, then?”

“I dunno.”

“Let’s stick with it for now, anyway,” Hunt said. “How much do we know about what these Annihilators were?”

“From the description dish, apparently it was some kind of radiation projector. From other clues, they fired a high-energy photon beam probably produced by intense matter-antimatter reaction. If so, the term Annihilator is particularly apt; it carries a double meaning.”

“Okay.” Hunt nodded. “That’s what I thought. Now it goes silly.” He consulted his notes. “Day Nine they were getting organized and repairing battle damage. What about Day Ten, then, eh?” He resumed reading:

“Day Ten. Annihilator used for the first time today. Three fifteen-minute blasts aimed at Calvares, Paneris, and Sellidorn. Now, they’re all Lambian cities, right?

“So they have this Annihilator emplacement, sitting on our Moon, happily picking off cities on the surface of Minerva?”

“Looks like it,” Maddson agreed. He didn’t look very happy. “Well, I don’t believe it,” Hunt declared firmly. “I don’t believe they had the ability to register a weapon that accurately over that distance, and even if they could, I don’t believe they could have held the beam narrow enough not to have burned up the whole planet. And I don’t believe the power density at that range could have been high enough to do any damage at all.” He looked at Maddson imploringly. “Christ, if they had technology like that, they wouldn’t have been trying to perfect interplanetary travel-they’d have been all over the bloody Galaxy!”

Maddson gestured wide with his arms. “I just translate what the words tell me. You figure it out.”

“It goes completely daft in a minute,” Hunt warned. “Where was I, now…?”

He continued to read aloud, describing the duel that developed between the Cerian Annihilator at Seltar and the last surviving Lambian emplacement on Minerva. With a weapon firing from far out in space and commanding the whole Minervan surface, the Cerians held the key that would decide the war. Destroying it was obviously the first priority of the Lambian forces and the prime objective of their own Annihilator on Minerva. The Annihilators required about one hour to recharge between firings, and Charlie’s notes conveyed vividly the tension that built up in Seltar as they waited, knowing that an incoming blast could arrive at any second. All around Seltar the battle was building up to a frenzy as Lambian ground and space-borne forces hurled everything into knocking out Seltar before it could score on its distant target. The skill in operating the weapon lay in computing and compensating for the distortions induced in the aiming system by enemy electronic countermeasures. In one passage, Charlie detailed the effects of a near miss from Minerva that lasted for sixteen minutes, during which time it melted a range of mountains about fifteen miles from Seltar, including the Twenty-second and Nineteenth Armored Divisions and the Forty-fifth Tactical Missile Squadron that had been positioned there.

“This is it,” Hunt said, waving one of the sheets in the air. “Listen to this. We’ve got it! Four minutes ago we fired a concentrated burst at maximum power. The announcement has just come over the loudspeaker down here that it scored a direct hit. Everyone is laughing and clapping each other on the back. Some of the women are crying with relief. That,” said Hunt, slapping the papers down on the table and slumping back in his chair with exasperation, “is bloody ridiculous! Within four minutes of firing they had confirmation of a hit! How? How in God’s name could they have? We know that when Minerva and Earth were at their closest, the distance between them would have been one hundred fifty to one hundred sixty million miles. The radiation would have taken something like thirteen minutes to cover that distance, and there would have to be at least another thirteen minutes before anybody on Luna could possibly know about where it struck. So, even with the planets at their closest positions, they’d have needed at least twenty-six minutes to get that report. Charlie says they got it in under four! That is absolutely, one-hundred-percent impossible! Don, how sure are you of those numbers?”

“As sure as we are of any other Lunarian time units. If they’re wrong, you might as well tear up that calendar you started out with and go all the way back to square one.”

Hunt stared at the page for a long time, as if by sheer power of concentration he could change the message contained in the neatly formatted sheets of typescript. There was only one thing that these figures could mean, and it put them right back to the beginning. At length he carried on:

“The next bit tells how the whole Seltar area came under sustained bombardment. A detachment including Charlie and Koriel was sent out overland to man an emergency command post about eleven miles from Seltar Base… I’ll skip the details of that.

“Yes, here’s the next bit that worries me. Under Day Twelve: Set off on time in a small convoy of two scout cars and three tracked trucks. The journey was weird-miles of scorched rocks and glowing pits. We could feel the heat inside the truck. Hope the shielding was good. Our new home is a dome, and underneath it are levels going down about fifty feet. Army units dug in the hills all around. We have landline contact with Seltar, but they seem to have lost touch with Main HQ at Gorda. Probably means all long distance landlines are out and our comsats are destroyed. Again no broadcasts from Minerva. Lots of garbled military traffic. They must have assumed (frequency priority?). Today was the first time above surface for many days. The face of Minerva looks dirty and blotchy. There,” Hunt said. “When I first read that, I thought he was referring to a video transmission. But thinking about it, why would he say it that way in that context? Why right after ‘the first time above surface for many days’? But he couldn’t have seen any detail of Minerva from where he was, could he?”

“Could have used a pretty ordinary telescope,” Maddson’s assistant suggested.

“Could have, I suppose,” Hunt reflected. “But you’d think there’d be more important things to worry about than star gazing in the middle of all that. Anyhow, he goes on: About two-thirds is blotted out by huge clouds of brown and gray, and coastal outlines are visible only in places. There is a strange red spot glowing through, somewhere just north of the equator, with black spreading out from it hour by hour. Koriel reckons it’s a city on fire, but it must be a tremendous blaze to be visible through all that. We’ve been watching it move across all day as Minerva rotates. Huge explosions over the ridge where Seltar Base is.”

The narrative continued and confirmed that Seltar was totally destroyed as the fighting reached its climax. For two days the whole area was systematically pounded, but miraculously the underground parts of the dome remained intact, although the upper levels were blown away. Afterward the scattered survivors from the military units occupying the surrounding hills began straggling back, some in vehicles and many on foot, to the dome, which by this time was the only inhabitable place left for miles.

The expected waves of victorious Lambian troopships and armored columns failed to materialize. From the regular pattern of incoming salvos, the Cerian officers slowly realized that there was nothing left of the enemy army that had moved forward into the mountains around Seltar. In the fighting with the Cerian defenses, the Lambians had suffered immense losses and their survivors had pulled out, leaving missile batteries programmed to fire robot mode to cover their withdrawal.

On Day Fifteen, Charlie wrote: Two more red spots on Minerva, one northeast of the first and the other well south. The first has elongated from northwest to southeast. The whole surface is now just a snags of dirty brown with huge areas of black mixing in with it. Nothing at all on radio or video from Minerva; everything blotted out by atmospherics.

There was nothing further to be done at Seltar. The inhabitable parts of what had been the dome were packed with survivors and wounded; already many were having to live in the assortment of vehicles huddled around outside it. Supplies of food and oxygen, never intended for more than a small company, would give only a temporary respite. The only hope, slender as it was, lay in reaching HQ Base at Gorda overland-a journey estimated to require twenty days.

On Day Eighteen, the departure from the dome was recorded as follows: Formed up in two columns of vehicles. Ours moved out half an hour ahead of the second as a small advanced scouting group. We reached a ridge about three miles from the dome and could see the main column finish loading and begin lining up. That was when the missiles hit. The first salvo caught them all out in the open. They didn’t have a chance. We trained our receivers on the area for a while, but there was nothing. The only way we’ll ever get off this death furnace is if there are ships left at Gorda. As far as I know, there are 340 of us, including over a hundred girls. The column comprises five scout cars, eight tracked trucks, and ten heavy tanks. It will be a grim journey. Even Koriel isn’t taking bets on how many get there.

Minerva is just a black, smoky ball, difficult to pick out against the sky. Two of the red spots have joined up to form a line stretching at an angle across the equator. Must be hundreds of miles long. Another red line is growing to the north. Every now and then, parts of them glow orange through the smoke clouds for a few hours and then die down again. Must be a mess there.

The column moved slowly through the desert of scorched gray dust, and its numbers shrank rapidly as wounds and radiation sickness took their toll. On Day Twenty-six they encountered a Lambian ground force and for three hours fought furiously among the crags and boulders. The battle ended when the remaining Lambian tanks broke cover and charged straight into the Cerian position, only to be destroyed right on the perimeter line by Cerian women firing laser artillery at point-blank range. After the battle there were 165 Cerians left, but not enough vehicles to carry them.

After conferring, the Cerian officers devised a plan to continue the journey leapfrog fashion. Half the company would be moved half a day’s distance forward and left there with one truck to use as living accommodation, while the remaining vehicles returned to collect the group left behind. So it would go on all the way to Gorda. Charlie and Koriel were among the first group lifted on ahead.

Day Twenty-eight. Uneventful drive. Set up camp in a shady gorge and watched the convoy about-face again and begin its long haul back for the others. They should be back this time tomorrow. Nothing much to do until then. Two died on the drive, so there are fifty-eight of us here. We take turns to rest and eat inside the truck. When it’s not your turn, you make yourself as comfortable as you can sitting among the rocks. Koriel is furious. He’s just spent two hours sitting outside with four of the artillery girls. He says whoever designed spacesuits should have thought of situations like that.

The convoy never returned.

Using the single remaining truck, the group continued the same tactic as before, ferrying one party on ahead, dumping them, and returning for the rest. By Day Thirty-three, sickness, mishaps, and one suicide had depleted the numbers such that all the survivors could be carried in the truck at once, so the leapfrogging was discontinued. Driving steadily, they estimated they would reach Gorda on Day Thirty-eight. On Day Thirty-seven, the truck broke down. The spare parts needed to repair it were not available.

Many were weak. It was clear that an attempt to reach Gorda on foot would be so slow that nobody would make it.

Day Thirty-seven. Seven of us-four men (myself, Koriel, and two of the combat troopers) and three girls-are going to make a dash for Gorda while the others stay put in the truck and wait for a rescue party. Koriel is cooking a meal before we set out. He has been saying what he thinks of life in the infantry-doesn’t seem to think much of it at all.

Some hours after they left the truck, one of the troopers climbed a crag to survey the route ahead. He slipped, gashed his suit, and died instantly from explosive decompression. Later on, one of the girls hurt her leg and lagged farther and farther behind as the pain worsened. The Sun was sinking and there was no time for slowing down. Everybody in the group wrestled with the same equation in his mind-one life or twenty-eight?-but said nothing. She solved the problem for them by quietly closing her air valve when they stopped to rest.

Day Thirty-eight. Just Koriel and me now-like the old days.

The trooper suddenly doubled up, vomiting violently inside his helmet. We stood and watched while he died, and could do nothing. Some hours later, one of the girls collapsed and said she couldn’t go on. The other insisted on staying with her until we sent help from Gorda. Couldn’t really argue-they were sisters. That was some time ago. We’ve stopped for a breather; I am getting near my limit. Koriel is pacing up and down impatiently and wants to get moving. That man has the strength of twelve.

Later. Stopped at last for a couple of hours sleep. I’m sure Koriel is a robot-just keeps going and going. Human tank. Sun very low in sky. Must make Gorda before Lunar night sets in.

Day Thirty-nine. Woke up freezing cold. Had to turn suit heating up to maximum-still doesn’t feel right. Think it’s developing a fault. Koriel says I worry too much. Time to be on the move again. Feel stiff all over. Seriously wondering if I’ll make it. Haven’t said so.

Later. The march has been a nightmare. Kept falling down. Koriel insisted that the only chance we had was to climb up out of the valley we were in and try a shortcut over a high ridge. I made it about halfway up the cleft leading toward the ridge. Every step up the cleft I could see Minerva sitting right over the middle of the ridge, gashes of orange and red all over it, like a (macabre?) face, taunting. Then I collapsed. When I came to, Koriel had dragged me inside a pilot digging of some sort. Maybe someone wag going to put an outpost of Gorda here. That was a while ago now. Koriel has gone on and says help will be back before I know it. Getting colder all the time. Feet numb and hands stiff. Frost starting to form in helmet-difficult to see.

Thinking about all the people strung out back there with night coming down, all like me, wondering if they’ll be picked up. if we can hold out we’ll be all right. Koriel will make it. If it were a thousand miles to Gorda, Koriel would make it.

Thinking about what has happened on Minerva and wondering if, after all this, our children will live on a sunnier world-and if they do, if they will ever know what we did.

Thinking about things I’ve never really thought about before. There should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in factories, mines, and army camps. Can’t think what, though-that’s all we’ve ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will come out of what we’ve been through.

Too much thinking for one day. Must sleep for a while now.

Hunt found he had read right through to the end, absorbed in the pathos of those final days. His voice had fallen to a sober pitch. A long silence ensued.

“Well, that’s it,” he concluded, a little more briskly. “Did you notice that bit right at the end? In the last few lines he was talking about seeing the surface of Minerva again. Now, they might have used telescopes earlier on, but in the situation he was in there, they’d hardly be lugging half an observatory along with them, would they?”

Maddson’s assistant looked thoughtful. “How about that periscope video gadget that was in the helmet?” he suggested. “Maybe there’s something wrong in the translation. Couldn’t he be talking about seeing a transmission through that?”

Hunt shook his head. “Can’t see it. I’ve heard of people watching TV in all sorts of funny places, but never halfway up a bloody mountain. And another thing: He described it as sitting up above the ridge. That implies it’s really out there. If it were a view on video, he’d never have worded it that way. Right, Don?”

Maddson nodded wearily. “Guess so,” he said. “So, where do we go from here?”

Hunt looked from Maddson to the assistant and back again. He leaned his elbows on the edge of the table and rubbed his face and eyeballs with his fingers. Then he sighed and sat back.

“What do we know for sure?” he asked at last. “We know that those Lunarian spaceships got to our Moon in under two days. We know that they could accurately aim a weapon, sited on our Moon, at a Minervan target. We also know that the round trip for electromagnetic waves was much shorter than it could possibly have been if we’ve been talking about the right place. Finally, we can’t prove but we think that Charlie could stand on our Moon and see quite clearly the surface features of Minerva. Well, what does that add up to?”

“There’s only one place in the Universe that fits all those numbers,” Maddson said numbly.

“Exactly-and we’re standing on it! Maybe there was a planet called Minerva outside Mars, and maybe it had a civilization on it. Maybe the Ganymeans took a few animals there and maybe they didn’t. But it doesn’t really matter any more, does it? Because the only planet Charlie’s ship could possibly have taken off from, and the only planet they could have aimed that Annihilator at, and the only planet he could have seen in detail from Luna-is this one!

“They were from Earth all along!

“Everyone will be jumping off the roof and out of every window in the building when this gets around Navcomms.”

Chapter Seventeen

With the first comprehensive translation of the handwritten notebook, the paradox was complete. Now there were two consistent and apparently irrefutable bodies of evidence, one proving that the Lunarians must have evolved on Earth, and the other proving that they couldn’t have.

All at once the consternation and disputes broke out afresh. Lights burned through the night at Houston and elsewhere as the same inevitable chains of reasoning were reeled out again and yet again, the same arrays of facts scrutinized for new possibilities or interpretations. But always the answers came out the same. Only the notion of the Lunarians having been the product of a parallel line of evolution appeared to have been abandoned permanently; more than enough theories were in circulation already without anyone having to invoke this one. The Navcomms fraternity disintegrated into a myriad of cliques and strays, scurrying about to ally first with this idea and then with that. As the turmoil subsided, the final lines of defense fortified themselves around four main camps.

The Pure Earthists accepted without reservation the deductions from Charlie’s diary, and held that the Lunarian civilization had developed on Earth, flourished on Earth, and destroyed itself on Earth and that was that. Thus, all references to Minerva and its alleged civilization were nonsense; there never had been any civilization on Minerva apart from that of the Ganymeans, and that was too far in the remote past to have any bearing on the Lunarian issue. The world depicted on Charlie’s maps was Earth, not Minerva, so there had to be a gross error somewhere in the calculations that put it at 250 million miles from the Sun. That this corresponded to the orbital radius of the Asteroids was just coincidence; the Asteroids had always been there, and anything from Iliad that said they hadn’t was suspect and needed double checking.

That left only one question unexplained: Why didn’t Charlie’s maps look like Earth? To answer this one, the Earthists launched a series of commando raids against the bastions of accepted geological theory and methods of geological dating. Drawing on the hypothesis that continents had been formed initially from a single granitic mass that had been shattered under the weight of immense ice caps and pushed apart by polar material rushing in to ifil the gaps, they pointed to the size of the ice caps shown on the maps and stressed how much larger they were than anything previously supposed to have existed on Earth. Now, if in fact the maps showed Earth and not Minerva, that meant that the Ice Age on Earth had been far more severe than previously thought, and its effects on surface geography correspondingly more violent. Add to this the effects of the crustal fractures and vulcanism as described in Charlie’s observations of Earth (not Minerva), and there was, perhaps, enough in all that to account for the transformation of Charlie’s Earth into modern Earth. So, why were there no traces to be found today of the Lunarian civilization? Answer: It was clear from the maps that most of it had been concentrated on the equatorial belt. Today that region was completely ocean, dense jungle, or drifting desert-adequate to explain the rapid erasure of whatever had been left after the war and the climatic cataclysm.

The Pure Earthist faction attracted mainly physicists and engineers, quite happy to leave the geologists and geographers to worry about the bothersome details. Their main concern was that the sacred principle of the constancy of the velocity of light should not be thrown into the melting pot of suspicion along with everything else.

By entrenching themselves around the idea of Earth origins, the Pure Earthists had moved into the positions previously defended fanatically by the biologists. Now that Danchekker had led the way by introducing his fleet of Ganymean Noah’s Arks, the biologists abruptly turned about-face and rallied behind their new assertion of Minervan origin from displaced terrestrial ancestors. What about Charlie’s Minerva-Luna flight time and the loop delay around the Annihilator fire-control system? Something was screwed up in the interpretation of Minervan time scales that accounted for both these. Okay, how could Charlie see Minerva from Luna? Video transmissions. Okay, how could they aim the Annihilator over that distance? They couldn’t. The dish at Seltar was only a remote-control tracking station. The weapon itself was mounted in a satellite orbiting Minerva.

The third flag flew over the Cutoff Colony Theory. According to this, an early terrestrial civilization had colonized Minerva, and then declined into a Dark Age during which contact with the colony was lost. The deteriorating conditions of the Ice Age later prompted a recovery on both planets, with the difference that Minerva faced a life-or-death situation and began the struggle to regain the lost knowledge in order that a return to Earth might be made. Earth, however, was going through lean times of its own and, when the advance parties from Minerva eventually made contact, didn’t react favorably to the idea of another planetful of mouths to feed. Diplomacy having failed, the Minervans set up an invasion beachhead on Luna. The Annihilator at Seltar had thus been firing at targets on Earth; the translators had been misled by identical place-names on both planets-like Boston, New York, Cambridge, and a hundred other places in the USA, many of the towns on Minerva had been named after places on Earth when the original colony was first established.

The defenders of these arguments drew heavily from the claims of the Pure Earthists to account for the absence of Lunarian relics on Earth. In addition, they produced further support from the unlikely domain of the study of fossil corals in the Pacific. It had been known for a long time that analysis of the daily growth rings of ancient fossil corals provided a measure of how many days there had been in the year at various times in the past, and from this how fast the forces of tidal friction were slowing down the rotation of the Earth about its axis. These researches showed, for example, that the year of 350 million years ago contained about four hundred days. Ten years previously, work conducted at the Darwin Institute of Oceanography in Australia, using more refined and more accurate techniques, had revealed that the continuity from ancient to modem had not been as smooth as supposed. There was a confused period in the recent past-at about fifty thousand years before-during which the curve was discontinuous, and a comparatively abrupt lengthening in the day had occurred. Furthermore, the rate of deceleration was measurably greater after this discontinuity than it had been before. Nobody knew why this should have happened, but it seemed to indicate a period of violent climatic upheaval, as the corals had taken generations to settle down to a stable growth pattern afterward. The data seemed to indicate that widespread changes had taken place on Earth around this mysterious point in time, probably accompanied by global flooding, and all in all there could be enough behind the story to explain the complete disappearance of any record of the Lunarians’ existence.

The fourth main theory was that of the Returning Exiles, which found these attempts to explain the disappearance of the terrestrial Lunarians artificial and inadequate. The basic tenet of this theory was that there could be only one satisfactory reason for the fact that there were no signs of Lunarians on Earth: There had never been any Lunarians on Earth worth talking about. Thus, they had evolved on Minerva as Danchekker maintained and had evolved an advanced civilization, unlike their contemporary brothers on Earth, who remained backward. Eventually, compelled by the Ice Age threat of extinction, the two superpowers of Cerios and Lambia had emerged and begun the race toward the Sun in the way described by Linguistics. Where Linguistics had gone wrong, however, was that by the time of Charlie’s narrative, these events were already historical; the goal was already achieved. The Lambians had drawn ahead by a small margin and had already commenced building settlements on Earth, several of them named after their own towns on Minerva. The Cerians followed hard on their heels and established a fire base on Luna, the objective of course being to knock out the Lambian outposts on Earth before moving in themselves.

This theory did not explain the flight time of Charlie’s ship, but its supporters attributed the difficulty to unknown differences between Minervan and local (Lunar) dating systems. On the other hand, it required only a few pilot Lambian bases to have been set up on Earth by the time of the war; thus, whatever remained of these after the Cerian assault, could credibly have vanished in fifty thousand years.

And as the battle lines were drawn up and the first ranging shots started whistling up and down the corridors of Navcomms, in no-man’s-land sat Hunt. Somehow, he was convinced, everybody was right. He knew the competence of the people around him and had no doubt in their ability to get their figures right. If, after weeks or months of patient effort, one of them pronounced that x was 2, then he was quite prepared to believe that, in all probability, it would turn out to be. Therefore, the paradox had to be an illusion. To try to argue which side was right and which was wrong was missing the whole point. Somewhere in the maze, probably so fundamental that nobody had even thought to question it, there had to be a fallacy-some wrong assumption that seemed so obvious they didn’t even realize they were making it. If they could just get back to fundamentals and identify that single fallacy, the paradox would vanish and everything that was being argued would slide smoothly into a consistent, unified whole.

Chapter Eighteen

“You want me to go to Jupiter?” Hunt repeated slowly, making sure he had heard correctly.

Caldwell stared back over his desk impassively. “The Jupiter Five Mission will depart from Luna in six weeks time,” he stated. “Danchekker has gone about as far as he can go with Charlie. What details are left to be found out can be taken care of by his staff at Westwood. He’s got better things he’d like to be doing on Ganymede. There’s a whole collection of alien skeletons there, plus a shipload of zoology from way back that nobody’s ever seen the like of before. It’s got him excited. He wants to get his hands on them. Jupiter Five is going right there, so he’s getting together a biological team to go with it.”

Hunt already knew all this. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of digesting the information and checking through it for any point he might have missed. After an appropriate pause he replied:

“That’s fine-I can see his angle. But what does it have to do with me?”

Caldwell frowned and drummed his fingers, as if he had been expecting this question to come, while hoping it wouldn’t.

“Consider this an extension of your assignment,” he said at last. “From all the arguing that’s going on around this place, nobody seems to be able to agree just how the Ganymeans fit into the Charlie business. Maybe they’re a big part of the answer, maybe they’re not. Nobody knows for sure.”

“True.” Hunt nodded.

Caldwell took this as all the confirmation he needed. “Okay,” he said with a gesture of finality. “You’ve done a good job so far on the Charlie side of the picture; maybe it’s time to balance things up a bit and give you a crack at the other side, too. Well”-he shrugged-“the information’s not here-it’s on Ganymede. In six weeks time, J Five shoves off for Ganymede. It makes sense to me that you go with it.”

Hunt’s brow remained creased in an expression that indicated he still didn’t quite see everything. He posed the obvious question. “What about the job here?”

“What about it? Basically you correlate information that comes from different places. The information will still keep coming from the places whether you’re in Houston or on board Jupiter Five. Your assistant is capable of stepping in and keeping the routine background research and cross-checking running smoothly in Group L. There’s no reason why you can’t continue to be kept updated on what’s going on if you’re out there. Anyhow, a change of scene never did anybody any harm. You’ve been on this job a year and a half now.”

“But we’re talking about a break of years, maybe.”

“Not necessarily. Jupiter Five is a later design than J Four; it will make Ganymede in under six months. Also, a number of ships are being ferried out with the Jupiter Five Mission to start building up a fleet that will be based out there. Once a reserve’s been established, there will be regular two-way traffic with Earth. In other words, once you’ve had enough of the place we’ll have no problem getting you back.”

Hunt reflected that nothing ever seemed to stay normal for very long when Caldwell was around. He felt no inclination to argue with this new directive. On the contrary, the prospect excited him. But there was something that didn’t quite add up in the reasons Caldwell was giving. Hunt had the same feeling he had experienced on previous occasions that there was an ulterior motive lurking beneath the surface somewhere. Still, that didn’t really matter. Caldwell seemed to have made up his mind, and Hunt knew from experience that when Caldwell made up his mind that something would be so, then by some uncanny power of preordination, so it would inevitably turn out to be.

Caldwell waited for possible objections. Seeing that none were forthcoming, he concluded: “When you joined us, I told you your place in UNSA was out front. That statement implied a promise. I always keep promises.”

For the next two weeks Hunt worked frantically, reorganizing the operation of Group L and making his own personal preparations for a prolonged absence from Earth. After that, he was sent to Galveston for two weeks.

By the third decade of the twenty-first century, commercial flight reservations to Luna could be made through any reputable travel agent, for seats either on regular UNSA ships or on chartered ships crewed by UNSA officers. The standards of comfort provided on passenger ifights were high, and accommodation at the larger Lunar bases was secure, enabling Lunar travel to become a routine chore in the lives of many businessmen and a memorable event for more than a few casual visitors, none of whom needed any specialized knowledge or training. Indeed, one enterprising consortium, comprised of a hotel chain, an international airline, a travel-tour operator, and an engineering corporation, had commenced the construction of a Lunar holiday resort, which was already fully booked for the opening season.

Places like Jupiter, however, were not yet open to the public. Persons detailed for assignments with the UNSA deep-space missions needed to know what they were doing and how to act in emergency situations. The ice sheets of Ganymede and the cauldron of Venus were no places for tourists.

At Galveston, Hunt learned about UNSA spacesuits and the standard items of ancillary equipment; he was taught the use of communication equipment, survival kits, emergency life support systems, and repair kits; he practiced test routines, radiolocation procedures, and equipment-fault diagnostic techniques. “Your life could depend on this little box,” one instructor told the group. “You could wind up in a situation where it fails and the only person inside a hundred miles to fix it is you.” Doctors lectured on the rudiments of space medicine and recommended methods of dealing with oxygen starvation, decompression, heat stroke, and hypothermia. Physiologists described the effects on bone calcium of long periods of reduced body weight, and showed how a correct balance could be maintained by a specially selected diet and drugs. UNSA officers gave useful hints that covered the whole gamut of staying alive and sane in alien environments, from navigating afoot on a hostile surface using satellite beacons as reference points, to the art of washing one’s face in zero gravity.

And so, just over four weeks after his directive from Caldwell, Hunt found himself fifty feet below ground level at pad twelve of number-two terminal complex twenty miles outside Houston, walking along one of the access ramps that connected the wall of the silo to the gleaming hull of the Vega. An hour later, the hydraulic ramps beneath the platform supporting the tail thrust the ship slowly upward and out, to stand clear on the roof of the structure. Within minutes the Vega was streaking into the darkening void above. It docked thirty minutes later, two and a half seconds behind schedule, with the half-mile-diameter transfer satellite Kepler.

On Kepler the passengers traveling on to Luna-including Hunt, three propulsion-systems experts keen to examine the suspected Ganymean gravity drives, four communications specialists, two structural engineers, and Danchekker’s team, all destined to join Jupiter Five-transferred to the ugly and ungainly Capella class moonship that would carry them for the remainder of the journey from Earth orbit to the Lunar surface. The voyage lasted thirty hours and was uneventful. After they had been in Lunar orbit for twenty minutes, the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the craft had been cleared for descent.

Shortly afterward, the unending procession of plains, mountains, crags, and hills that had been marching across the cabin display screen slowed to a halt and the view started growing perceptibly larger. Hunt recognized the twin ring-walled plains of Ptolemy and Albategnius, with its central conical mountain and Crater Klein interrupting its encircling wall, before the ship swung northward and these details were lost off the top of the steadily enlarging image. The picture stabilized, now centered upon the broken and crumbling mountain wall that separated Ptolemy from the southern edge of the Plain of Hipparchus. What had previously looked like smooth terrain resolved itself into a jumble of rugged cliffs and valleys, and in the center, glints of sunlight began to appear, reflected from the metal structures of the vast base below.

As the outlines of the surface installations materialized out of the gray background and expanded to fill the screen, a yellow glow in the center grew, gradually transforming into the gaping entrance to one of the underground moonship berths. There was a brief impression of tiers of access levels stretching down out of sight and huge service gantries swung back to admit the ship. Rows of brilliant arc lights flooded the scene before the exhaust from the braking motors blotted out the view. A mild jolt signaled that the landing legs had made contact with Lunar rock, and silence fell abruptly inside the ship as the engines were cut. Above the squat nose of the moonship, massive steel shutters rolled together to seal out the stars. As the berth filled with air, a new world of sound impinged on the ears of the ship’s occupants. Shortly afterward, the access ramps slid smoothly from the walls to connect the ship to the reception bays.

Thirty minutes after clearing arrival formalities, Hunt emerged from an elevator high atop one of the viewing domes that dominated the surface of Ptolemy Main Base. For a long time he gazed soberly at the harsh desolation in which man had carved this oasis of life. The streaky blue and white disk of Earth, hanging motionless above the horizon, suddenly brought home to him the remoteness of places like Houston, Reading, Cambridge, and the meaning of everything familiar, which until so recently he had taken for granted. In his wanderings he had never come to regard any particular place as home; unconsciously he had always accepted any part of the world to be as much home as any other. Now, all at once, he realized that he was away from home for the first time in his life.

As Hunt turned to take in more of the scene below, he saw that he was not alone. On the far side of the dome a lean, balding figure stood staring silently out over the wilderness, absorbed in thoughts of its own. Hunt hesitated for a long time. At last he moved slowly across to stand beside the figure. All around them the mile-wide clutter of silver-gray metallic geometry that made up the base sprawled amid a confusion of pipes, girders, pylons, and antennae. On towers above, the radars swept the skyline in endless circles, while the tall, praying-mantis-like laser transceivers stared unblinkingly at the heavens, carrying the ceaseless dialogues between the base computers and unseen communications satellites fifty miles up. In the distance beyond the base, the rugged bastions of Ptolemy’s mountain wall towered above the plain. From the blackness above them, a surface transporter was sliding toward the base on its landing approach.

Eventually Hunt said: “To think-a generation ago, all this was just desert.” It was more a thought voiced than a statement.

Danchekker did not answer for a long time. When he did, he kept his eyes fixed outside.

“But man dared to dream…” he murmured slowly. After a pause he added, “And what man dares to dream today, tomorrow he makes come true.”

Another long silence followed. Hunt took a cigarette from his case and lit it. “You know,” he said at last, blowing a stream of smoke slowly toward the glass wall of the dome, “it’s going to be a long voyage to Jupiter. We could get a drink down below-one for the road, as it were.”

Danchekker seemed to turn the suggestion over in his mind for a while. At length he shifted his gaze back within the confines of the dome and turned to face Hunt directly.

“I think not, Dr. Hunt,” he said quietly.

Hunt sighed and made as if to turn.

“However,…” The tone of Danchekker’s voice checked him before he moved. He looked up. “If your metabolism is capable of withstanding the unaccustomed shock of nonalcoholic beverages, a strong coffee might, ah, perhaps be extremely welcome.”

It was a joke. Danchekker had actually cracked a joke!

“I’ll try anything once,” Hunt said as they began walking toward the door of the elevator.

Chapter Nineteen

Embarkation on the orbiting Jupiter Five command ship was not scheduled to take place until a few days later. Danchekker would be busy making final arrangements for his team and their equipment to be ferried up from the Lunar surface. Hunt, not being involved in these undertakings, prepared an itinerary of places to visit during the free time he had available.

The first thing he did was fly to Tycho by surface transporter to observe the excavations still going on around the areas of some of the Lunarian finds, and to meet at last many of the people who up until then had existed only as faces on display screens. He also went to see the deep mining and boring operations in progress not far from Tycho, where engineers were attempting to penetrate to the core regions of the Moon. They believed that concentrations of rich metal-bearing ores might be found there. If this turned out to be so, within decades the Moon could become an enormous spaceship factory, where parts prefabricated in processing and forming plants on the surface would be ferried up for final assembly in Lunar orbit. The economic advantages of constructing deep-space craft here and from Lunar materials, without having to lift everything up out of Earth’s gravity pit to start with, promised to be enormous.

Next, Hunt visited the huge radio and optical observatories of Giordano Bruno on Farside. Here, sensitive receivers, operating fully shielded from the perpetual interference from Earth, and gigantic telescopes, freed from any atmosphere and not having to contend with distortions induced by their own weights, were pushing the frontiers of the known Universe way out beyond the limits of their Earth-bound predecessors. Hunt sat fascinated in front of the monitor screens and resolved planets of some of the nearer stars; he was shown one nine times the size of Jupiter, and another that described a crazy figure-eight orbit about a double star. He gazed deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which indicated that feasible methods could be devised for deforming astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided. If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition; one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross the Galaxy within fifty years.

Hunt’s final stop brought him back to Nearside-to the base at Copernicus near which Charlie had been found. Scientists at Copernicus had been studying descriptions of the terrain over which Charlie had traveled and the accompanying sketched maps; the information contained in the notebook had been transmitted up from Houston. From the traveling times, distances, and estimates of speed quoted, they suspected that Charlie’s journey had begun somewhere on Farside and had brought him, by way of the Jura Mountains, Sinus Iridum, and Mare Imbrium, to Copernicus. Not everybody subscribed to this opinion, however; there was a problem. For some unaccountable reason, the directions and compass points mentioned in Charlie’s notes bore no relationship to the conventional lunar north-south that derived from its axis of rotation. The only route for Charlie’s journey that could be interpreted to make any sense at all was the one from Farside across Mare Imbrium, but even that only made sense if a completely new direction was assumed for the north-south axis.

Attempts to locate Gorda had so far met with no positive success. From the tone of the final entries in the diary, it could not have been very far from the spot where Charlie was found. About fifteen miles south of this point was an area covered by numerous overlapping craters, all confirmed as being meteoritic and of recent origin. Most researchers concluded that this must have been the site of Gorda, totally obliterated by a freak concentration of meteorites in the as yet unexplained storm.

Before leaving Copernicus, Hunt accepted an invitation to drive out overland and visit the place of Charlie’s discovery. He was accompanied by a Professor Alberts from the base and the crew of the UNSA survey vehicle.

***

The survey vehicle lumbered to a halt in a wide gorge, between broken walls of slate-gray rock. All around it, the dust had been churned into a bewildering pattern of grooves and ridges by Caterpillar tracks, wheels, landing gear, and human feet-evidence of the intense activity that had occurred there over the last eighteen months. From the observation dome of the upper cabin, Hunt recognized the scene immediately; he had first seen it in Caldwell’s office. He identified the large mound of rubble against the near wall of the gorge, and above it the notch leading into the cleft.

A voice called from below. Hunt rose to his feet, his movements slow and clumsy in his encumbering spacesuit, and clambered through the floor hatch and down a short ladder to the control cabin. The driver was stretching back in his seat, taking a long drink from a flask of hot coffee. Behind him, the sergeant in command of the vehicle was at a videoscreen, reporting back to base via comsat that they had reached their destination without mishap. The third crew member, a corporal who was to accompany Hunt and Alberts outside and who was already fitted out, was helping the professor secure his helmet. Hunt took his own helmet from the storage rack by the door and fixed it in place. When the three were ready, the sergeant supervised the final checkout of life-support and communications systems and cleared them to pass, one by one, through the airlock to the outside.

“Well, there you are, Vic. Really on the Moon now.” Alberts’s voice came through the speaker inside Hunt’s helmet. Hunt felt the spongy dust yield beneath his boots and tried a few experimental steps up and down.

“It’s like Brighton Beach,” he said.

“Okay, you guys?” asked the voice of the UNSA corporal.

“Okay.”

“Sure.”

“Let’s go, then.”

The three brightly colored figures-one orange, one red, and one green-began moving slowly along the well-worn groove that ran up the center of the mound of rubble. At the top they stopped to gaze down at the survey vehicle, already looking toylike in the gorge below.

They moved into the cleft, climbing between vertical walls of rocks that closed in on both sides as they approached the bend. Above the bend the cleft straightened, and in the distance Hunt could see a huge wall of jagged buttresses towering over the foothills above them-evidently the ridge described in Charlie’s note. He could picture vividly the scene in this very place so long ago, when two other figures in spacesuits had toiled onward and upward, their eyes fixed on that same feature. Above it, the red and black portent of a tormented planet had glowered down on their final agony like…

Hunt stopped, puzzled. He looked up at the ridge again, then turned to stare at the bright disk of Earth, shining far behind his right shoulder. He turned to look one way, then back again the other.

“Anything wrong?” Alberts, who had continued on a few paces, had turned and was staring back at him.

“I’m not sure. Hang on there a second.” Hunt moved up alongside the professor and pointed up and ahead toward the ridge. “You’re more familiar with this place than I am. See that ridge up ahead there-At any time in the year, could the Earth ever appear in a position over the top of it?”

Alberts followed Hunt’s pointing finger, glanced briefly back at the Earth, and shook his head decisively behind his facepiece.

“Never. From the Lunar surface, the position of Earth is almost constant. It does wobble about its mean position a bit as a result of libration, but not by anything near that much.” He looked again. “Never anywhere near there. That’s an odd question. Why do you ask?”

“Just something that occurred to me. Doesn’t really matter for now.”

Hunt lowered his eyes and saw an opening at the base of one of the walls ahead. “That must be it. Let’s carry on up to it.”

The hole was exactly as he remembered from innumerable photographs. Despite its age, the shape betrayed its artificial origin. Hunt approached almost reverently and paused to finger the rock at one side of the opening with his gauntlet. The score marks had obviously been made by something like a drill.

“Well, that’s it,” came the voice of Alberts, who was standing a few feet back. “Charlie’s Cave, we call it-more or less exactly as it must have been when he and his companion first saw it. Rather like treading in the sacred chambers of one of the pyramids, isn’t it?”

“That’s one way of putting it.” Hunt ducked down to peer inside, pausing to fumble for the flashlight at his belt as the sudden darkness blinded him temporarily.

The rockfall that originally had covered the body had been cleared, and the interior was roomier than he expected. Strange emotions welled inside him as he stared at the spot where, millennia before the first page of history had been written, a huddled figure had painfully scrawled the last page of a story that Hunt had read so recently in an office in Houston, a quarter of a million miles away. He thought of the time that had passed since those events had taken place-of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly and been swallowed into the past-while all that time, unchanging, the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed. Many minutes passed before Hunt reemerged and straightened up in the dazzling sunlight.

Again he frowned up toward the ridge. Something tantalizing was dancing elusively just beyond the fringes of the thinking portions of his mind, as if from the subconscious shadows that lay below, something insistent was shrieking to be recognized. And then it was gone.

He clipped the flashlight back into position on his belt and walked across to rejoin Alberts, who was studying some rock formations on the opposite wall.

Chapter Twenty

The giant ships that would fly on the fifth manned mission to Jupiter had been under construction in Lunar orbit for over a year. Besides the command ship, six freighters, each capable of carrying thirty thousand tons of supplies and equipment, gradually took shape high above the surface of the Moon. During the final two months before scheduled departure, the floating jumbles of machinery, materials, containers, vehicles, tanks, crates, drums, and a thousand other items of assorted engineering that hung around the ships like enormous Christmas-tree ornaments, were slowly absorbed inside. The Vega surface shuttles, deep-space cruisers, and other craft also destined for the mission began moving in over a period of several weeks to join their respective mother ships. At intervals throughout the last week, the freighters lifted out of Lunar orbit and set course for Jupiter. By the time its passengers and final complement of crew were being ferried up from the Lunar surface, only the command ship was left, hanging alone in the void. As H hour approached, the gaggle of service craft and attendant satellites withdrew and a flock of escorts converged to stand a few miles off, cameras transmitting live via Luna into the World News Grid.

As the final minutes ticked by, a million viewscreens showed the awesome mile-and-a-quarter-long shape drifting almost imperceptibly against the background of stars; the serenity of the spectacle seemed somehow to forewarn of the unimaginable power waiting to be unleashed. Exactly on schedule, the flight-control computers completed their final-countdown-phase checkout, obtained “Go” acknowledgment from the ground control master processor, and activated the main thermonuclear drives in a flash that was visible from Earth.

The Jupiter Five Mission was under way.

For the next fifteen minutes the ship gained speed and altitude through successively higher orbits. Then, shrugging off the restraining pull of Luna with effortless ease, Jupiter Five soared out and away to begin overtaking and marshaling together its flock of freighters, by this time already strung out across a million miles of space. After a while the escorts turned back toward Luna, while on Earth the news screens showed a steadily diminishing point of light, being tracked by the orbiting telescopes. Soon even that had vanished, and only the long-range radars and laser links were left to continue their electronic exchanges across the widening gulf.

Aboard the command ship, Hunt and the other UNSA scientists watched on the wall screen in mess twenty-four as the minutes passed by and Luna contracted into a full disk, partly eclipsing that of Earth beyond. In the days that followed, the two globes waned and fused into a single blob of brilliance, standing out in the heavens to signpost the way they had come. As days turned into weeks, even this shrank to become just another grain of dust among millions until, after about a month, they could pick it out only with difficulty.

Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as part of a tiny man-made world, with the cosmos stretching away to infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second. Now they depended utterly for survival on the skills of those who had designed and built the ship. The green hills and blue skies of Earth were no longer factors of survival and seemed to shed some of their tangible attributes, almost like the aftermath of a dream that had seemed real. Hunt came to think of reality as a relative quantity-not something absolute that can be left for a while and then returned to. The ship became the only reality; it was the things left behind that ceased, temporarily, to exist.

He spent hours in the viewing domes along the outer hull, slowly coming to terms with the new dimension being added to his existence, gazing out at the only thing left that was familiar: the Sun. He found reassurance in the eternal presence of the Sun, with its limitless flood of life-giving warmth and light. Hunt thought of the first sailors, who had never ventured out of sight of land; they too had needed something familiar to cling to. But before long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the way to infinity.

What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those gulfs?

Danchekker was spending one of his relaxation periods in a zero-gravity section of the ship, watching a game of 3-D football being played between two teams of off-duty crew members. The game was based on American-style football and took place inside an enormous sphere of transparent, rubbery plastic. Players hurtled up, down, and in all directions, rebounding off the wall and off each other in a glorious roughhouse directed-vaguely-at getting the ball through two circular goals on opposite sides of the sphere. In reality, the whole thing was just an excuse to let off steam and flex muscles beginning to go soft during the long, monotonous voyage.

A steward tapped the scientist on the shoulder and informed him that a call was waiting in the videobooth outside the recreation deck. Danchekker nodded, unclipped the safety loop of his belt from the anchor pin attached to the seat, clipped it around the handrail, and with a single effortless pull, sent himself floating gracefully toward the door. Hunt’s face greeted him, speaking from a quarter of a mile away.

“Dr. Hunt,” he acknowledged. “Good morning-or whatever it happens to be at the present time in this infernal contraption.”

“Hello, Professor,” Hunt replied. “I’ve been having some thoughts about the Ganymeans. There are one or two points I could use your opinion on; could we meet somewhere for a bite to eat, say inside the next half hour or so?”

“Very well. Where did you have in mind?”

“Well, I’m on my way to the restaurant in B section right now. I’ll be there for a while.”

“I’ll join you there in a few minutes.” Danchekker cut off the screen, emerged from the booth, and hauled himself back into the corridor and along it to an entrance to one of the transverse shafts leading “down” toward the axis of the ship. Using the handrails, he sailed some distance toward the center before checking himself opposite an exit from the shaft. He emerged through a transfer lock into one of the rotating sections, with simulated G, at a point near the axis where the speed differential was low. He launched himself back along another rail and felt himself accelerate gently, to land thirty feet away, on his feet, on a part of the structure that had suddenly become the floor. Walking normally, he followed some signs to the nearest tube access point, pressed the call button, and waited about twenty seconds for a capsule to arrive. Once inside, he keyed in his destination and within seconds was being whisked smoothly through the tube toward B section of the ship.

The permanently open self-service restaurant was about half full. The usual clatter of cutlery and dishes poured from the kitchens behind the counter at one end, where a trio of UNSA cooks were dishing out generous helpings of assorted culinary offerings ranging from UNSA eggs and UNSA beans to UNSA chicken legs and UNSA steaks. Automatic food dispensers with do-it-yourself microwave cookers had been tried on Jupiter Four but hadn’t proved popular with the crew. So the designers of Jupiter Five had gone back to the good old-fashioned methods.

Carrying their trays, Hunt and Danchekker threaded their way between diners, card players, and vociferous debating groups and found an empty table against the far wall. They sat down and began transferring their plates to the table.

“So, you’ve been entertaining some thoughts concerning our Ganymean friends,” Danchekker commented as he began to butter a roll.

“Them and the Lunarians,” Hunt replied. “In particular, I like your idea that the Lunarians evolved on Minerva from terrestrial animal species that the Ganymeans imported. It’s the only thing that accounts acceptably for no traces of any civilization showing up on Earth. All these attempts people are making to show it might be different don’t convince me much at all.”

“I’m very gratified to hear you say so,” Danchekker declared. “The problem, however, is proving it.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. Maybe we shouldn’t have to.”

Danchekker looked up and peered inquisitively over his spectacles. He looked intrigued. “Really? How, might I ask?”

“We’ve got a big problem trying to figure out anything about what happened on Minerva because we’re fairly sure it doesn’t exist any more except as a million chunks of geology strewn around the Solar System. But the Lunarians didn’t have that problem. They had it in one piece, right under their feet. Also, they had progressed to an advanced state of scientific knowledge. Now, what must their work have turned up-at least to some extent?”

A light of comprehension dawned in Danchekker’s eyes.

“Ah!” he exclaimed at once. “I see. If the Ganymean civiization had flourished on Minerva first, then Lunarian scientists would surely have deduced as much.” He paused, frowned, then added: “But that does not get you very far, Dr. Hunt. You are no more able to interrogate Lunarian scientific archives than you are to reassemble the planet.”

“No, you’re right,” Hunt agreed. “We don’t have any detailed Lunarian scientific records-but we do have the microdot library. The texts it contains are pretty general in nature, but I couldn’t help thinking that if the Lunarians discovered an advanced race had been there before them, it would be big and exciting news, something everybody would know about; you’ve only got to look at the fuss that Charlie has caused on Earth. Perhaps there were references through all of their writings that pointed to such a knowledge-if we knew how to read them.” He paused to swallow a mouthful of sausage. “So, one of the things I’ve been doing over the last few weeks is going through everything we’ve got with a fine-tooth comb to see if anything could point to something like that. I didn’t expect to find firm proof of anything much-just enough for us to be able to say with a bit more confidence that we think we know what planet we’re talking about.”

“And did you find very much?” Danchekker seemed interested.

“Several things,” Hunt replied. “For a start, there are stock phrases scattered all through their language that refer to the Giants. Phrases like ‘As old as the Giants’ or ‘Back to the year of the Giants’… like we’d say maybe, ‘Back to the year one.’ In another place there’s a passage that begins ‘A long time ago, even before the time of the Giants’… There are lots of things like that. When you look at them from this angle, they all suddenly tie together.” Hunt paused for a second to allow the professor time to reflect on these points, then resumed: “Also, there are references to the Giants in another context, one that suggests superpowers or great knowledge-for example, ‘Gifted with the wisdom of the Giants.’ You see what I mean-these phrases indicate the Lunarians felt a race of giant beings-and probably one that was advanced technologically-had existed in the distant past.”

Danchekker chewed his food in silence for a while.

“I don’t want to sound overskeptical,” he said at last, “but all this seems rather speculative. Such references could well be to nothing more than mythical creations-similar to our own heroes of folklore.”

“That occurred to me, too,” Hunt conceded. “But thinking about it, I’m not so sure. The Lunarians were the last word in pragmatism-they had no time for romanticism, religion, matters of the spirit, or anything like that. In the situation they were in, the only people who could help them were themselves, and they knew it. They couldn’t afford the luxury and the delusion of inventing gods, heroes, and Father Christmases to work their problems out for them.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe the Lunarians made up any legends about these Giants. That would have been too much out of character.”

“Very well,” Danchekker agreed, returning to his meal. “The Lunarians were aware of the prior existence of the Ganymeans. I suspect, however, that you had more than that in mind when you called.”

“You’re right,” Hunt said. “While I was going through the texts, I pulled together some other bits and pieces that are more in your line.”

“Go on.”

“Well, supposing for the moment that the Ganymeans did ship a whole zoo out to Minerva, the Lunarian biologists later on would have had a hell of a problem making any sense out of what they found all around them, wouldn’t they? I mean, with two different groups of animals loose about the place, totally unrelated-and bearing in mind that they couldn’t have known what we know about terrestrial species…”

“Worse than that, even,” Danchekker supplied. “They would have been able to trace the native Minervan species all the way back to their origins; the imported types, however, would extend back through only twenty-five million years or so. Before that, there would have been no record of any ancestors from which they could have descended.”

“That’s precisely one of the things I wanted to ask you,” Hunt said. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “Suppose you were a Lunarian biologist and knew only the facts he would have known. What sort of picture would it have added up to?”

Danchekker stopped chewing and thought for a long time, his eyes staring far beyond where Hunt was sitting. At length he shook his head slowly.

“That is a very difficult question to answer. In that situation one might, I suppose, speculate that the Ganymeans had introduced alien species. But on the other hand, that is what a biologist from Earth would think; he would be conditioned to expect a continuous fossil record stretching back over hundreds of millions of years. A Lunarian, without any such conditioning, might not regard the absence of a complete record as in any way abnormal. If that was part of the accepted way of things in the world in which he had grown up…”

Danchekker’s voice faded away for a few seconds. “If I were a Lunarian,” he said suddenly, his voice decisive, “I would explain what I saw thus: Life began in the distant past on Minerva, evolved through the accepted process of mutation and selection, and branched into many diverse forms. About twenty-five million years ago, a particularly violent series of mutations occurred in a short time, out of which emerged a new family of forms, radically different in structure from anything before. This family branched to produce its own divergency of species, living alongside the older models, and culminating in the emergence of the Lunarians themselves. Yes, I would explain the new appearances in that way. It’s similar to the appearance of insects on Earth-a whole family in itself, structurally dissimilar to anything else.” He thought it over again for a second and then nodded firmly. “Certainly, compared to an explanation of that nature, suggestions of forced interplanetary migrations would appear very farfetched indeed.”

“I was hoping you’d say something like that.” Hunt nodded, satisfied. “In fact, that’s very much what they appear to have believed. It’s not specifically stated in anything I’ve read, but odds and ends from different places add up to that. But there’s something odd about it as well.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a funny word that crops up in a number of places that doesn’t have a direct English equivalent; it means something between ‘manlike’ and ‘man-related.’ They used it to describe many animal types.”

“Probably the animals descended from the imported types and related to themselves,” Danchekker suggested.

“Yes, exactly. But they also used the same word in a totally different context-to mean ‘ashore,’ ‘on land’… anything to do with dry land. Now, why should a word become synonymous with two such different meanings?”

Danchekker stopped eating again and furrowed his brow.

“I really can’t imagine. Is it important?”

“Neither could I, and I think it is. I’ve done a lot of cross-checking with Linguistics on this, and it all adds up to a very peculiar thing: ‘Manlike’ and ‘dry-land’ became synonymous on Minerva because they did in fact mean the same thing. All the land animals on Minerva were new models. We coined the word terrestoid to describe them in English.”

“All of them? You mean that by Charlie’s time there were none of the original Minervan species left at all?” Danchekker sounded amazed.

“That’s what we think-not on land, anyway. There was a full fossil record of plenty of types all the way up to, and including the Ganymeans, but nothing after that-just terrestoids.”

“And in the sea?”

“That was different. The old Minervan types continued right through-hence your fish.”

Danchekker gazed at Hunt with an expression that almost betrayed open disbelief.

“How extraordinary!” he exclaimed.

The professor’s arm had suddenly become paralyzed and was holding a fork in midair with half a roast potato impaled on the end. “You mean that all the native Minervan land life disappeared-just like that?”

“Well, during a fairly short time, anyway. We’ve been asking for a long time what happened to the Ganymeans. Now it looks more as if the question should be phrased in even broader terms: What happened to the Ganymeans and all their land-dwelling relatives?”

Chapter Twenty-One

For weeks the two scientists debated the mystery of the abrupt disappearance of the native Minervan land dwellers. They ruled out physical catastrophe on the assumption that anything of that kind would have destroyed the terrestoid types as well. The same conclusion applied to climatic cataclysm.

For a while they considered the possibility of an epidemic caused by microorganisms imported with the immigrant animals, one against which the native species enjoyed no inherited, in-built immunity. In the end they dismissed this idea as unlikely on two counts; first, an epidemic sufficiently virulent in its effects to wipe out each and every species of what must have numbered millions, was hard to imagine; second, all information received so far from Ganymede suggested that the Ganymeans had been considerably farther ahead in technical knowledge than either the Lunarians or mankind-surely they could never have made such a blunder.

A variation on this theme supposed that germ warfare had broken out, escalated, and got out of control. Both the previous objections carried less weight when viewed in this context; in the end, this explanation was accepted as possible. That left only one other possibility: some kind of chemical change in the Minervan atmosphere to which the native species hadn’t been capable of adapting to but the terrestoids had. But what?

While the pros and cons of these alternatives were still being evaluated on Jupiter Five, the laser link to Earth brought details of a new row that had broken out in Navcomms. A faction of Pure Earthists had produced calculations showing that the Lunarians could never have survived on Minerva at all, let alone flourished there; at that distance from the Sun it would simply have been too cold. They also insisted that water could never have existed on the surface in a liquid state and held this fact as proof that wherever the world shown on Charlie’s maps had been, it couldn’t have been anywhere near the Asteroids.

Against this attack the various camps of Minervaists concluded a hasty alliance and opened counterfire with calculations of their own, which invoked the greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide to show that a substantially higher temperature could have been sustained. They demonstrated further that the percentage of carbon dioxide required to produce the mean temperature that they had already estimated by other means was precisely the figure arrived at by Professor Schorn in his deduction of the composition of the Minervan atmosphere from an analysis of Charlie’s cell metabolism and respiratory system. The land mine that finally demolished the Pure Earthist position was Schorn’s later pronouncement that Charlie exhibited several physiological signs implying adaptation to an abnormally high level of carbon dioxide.

Their curiosity stimulated by all this sudden interest in the amount of carbon dioxide in the Minervan atmosphere, Hunt and Danchekker devised a separate experiment of their own. Combining Hunt’s mathematical skill with Danchekker’s knowledge of quantitative molecular biology, they developed a computer model of generalized Minervan microchemical behavior potentials, based on data derived from the native fish. It took them over three months to perfect. Then they applied to the model a series of mathematical operators that simulated the effects of different chemical agents in the environment. When he viewed the results on the screen in one of the console rooms Danchekker’s conclusion was quite definite: “Any air-breathing life form that evolved from the same primitive ancestors as this fish and inherited the same fundamental system of microchemistry, would be extremely susceptible to a family of toxins that includes carbon dioxide-far more so than the majority of terrestrial species.”

For once, everything added up. About twenty-five million years ago, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Minerva apparently increased suddenly, possibly through some natural cause that had liberated the gas from chemical combination in rocks, or possibly as a result of something the Ganymeans had done. This could also explain why the Ganymeans had brought in all the animals. Perhaps their prime objective had been to redress the balance by covering the planet with carbon-dioxide-absorbing, oxygen-producing terrestrial green plants; the animals had been included simply to preserve a balanced ecology in which the plants could survive. The attempt failed. The native life succumbed, and the more highly resistant immigrants flourished and spread out over a whole new world denuded of alien competition. Nobody knew for sure that it had been so on Minerva. Possibly nobody ever would.

And nobody knew what had become of the Ganymeans. Perhaps they had perished along with their cousins. Perhaps, when their efforts proved futile, they had abandoned Minerva to its new inhabitants and left the Solar System completely to find a new home elsewhere. Hunt hoped so. For some strange reason he had developed an inexplicable affection for this mysterious race. In one of the Lunarian texts he had come across a verse that began: “Far away among the stars, where the Giants of old now live…” He hoped it was true.

And so, quite suddenly, at least one chapter in the early history of Minerva had been cleared up. Everything now pointed to the Lunarians and their civilization as having developed on Minerva and not on Earth. It explained the failure of Schorn’s early attempt to fix the length of the day in Hunt’s calendar by calculating Charlie’s natural periods of sleep and wakefulness. The ancestors of the Lunarians had arrived from Earth carrying a deeply rooted metabolic rhythm evolved around a twenty-four-hour cycle. During the twenty-five million years that followed, some of the more flexible biological processes in their descendants adapted successfully to the thirty-five-hour day of Minerva, while others changed only partially. By Charlie’s time, all the Lunarians’ physiological clocks had gotten hopelessly out of synchronization; no wonder Schorn’s results made no sense. But the puzzling numbers in Charlie’s notebook still remained to be accounted for.

In Houston, Caldwell read Hunt and Danchekker’s joint report with deep satisfaction. He had realized long before that to achieve results, the abilities of the two scientists would have to be combined and focused on the problem at hand instead of being dissipated fruitlessly in the friction of personal incompatibility. How could he manipulate into being a situation in which the things they had in common outweighed their differences? Well, what did they have in common? Starting with the simplest and most obvious thing-they were both human beings from planet Earth. So where would this fundamental truth come to totally overshadow anything else? Where but on the barren wastes of the Moon or a hundred million miles out in the emptiness of space? Everything seemed to be working out better than he had dared hope.

“It’s like I always said,” Lyn Garland stated coyly when Hunt’s assistant showed her a copy of the report. “Gregg’s a genius with people.”

The arrival in Ganymede orbit of the seven ships from Earth was a big moment for the Jupiter Four veterans, especially those whose tour of duty was approaching an end and who could now look forward to going home soon. In the weeks to come, as the complex program of maneuvering supplies and equipment between the ships and the surface installations unfolded, the scene above Ganymede would become as chaotic as that above Luna had been during departure preparations. The two command ships would remain standing off ten miles apart for the next two months. Then Jupiter Four, accompanied by two of the recently arrived freighters, would move out to take up station over Callisto and begin expanding the pilot base already set up there. Jupiter Five would remain at Ganymede until joined by Saturn Two, which was at that time undergoing final countdown for Lunar lift-out and due to arrive in five months. After rendezvous above Ganymede, one of the two ships (exactly which was yet to be decided) would set course for the ringed planet, on the farthest large-scale manned probe yet attempted.

The long-haul sailing days of Jupiter Four were over. Too slow by the standards of the latest designs, it would probably be stripped down to become a permanent orbiting base over Callisto. After a few years it would suffer the ignoble end of being dismantled and cannibalized for surface constructions.

With all the hustle and traffic congestion that erupted in the skies over Ganymede, it was three days before the time came for the group of UNSA scientists to be ferried to the surface. After months of getting used to the pattern of life and the company aboard the ship, Hunt felt a twinge of nostalgia as he packed his belongings in his cabin and stood in line waiting to board the Vega moored alongside in the cavernous midships docking bay. It was probably the last he would see of the inside of this immense city of metal alloys; when he returned to Earth, it would be aboard one of the small, fast cruisers ferried out with the mission.

An hour later Jupiter Five, festooned in a web of astronautic engineering, was shrinking rapidly on the cabin display in the Vega. Then the picture changed suddenly and the sinister frosty countenance of Ganymede came swelling up toward them.

Hunt sat on the edge of his bunk inside a Spartan room in number-three barrack block of Ganymede Main Base and methodically transferred the contents of his kit bag into the aluminum locker beside him. The air-extractor grill above the door was noisy. The air drawn in through the vents set into the lower walls was warm, and tainted with the smell of engine oil. The steel floor plates vibrated to the hum of heavy machinery somewhere below. Propped up against a pillow on the bunk opposite, Danchekker was browsing through a folder full of facsimiled notes and color illustrations and chattering excitedly like a schoolboy on Christmas Eve.

“Just think of it, Vic, another day and we’ll be there. Animals that actually walked the Earth twenty-five million years ago! Any biologist would give his right arm for an experience like this.” He held up the folder. “Look at that. I do believe it to be a perfectly preserved example of Trilophodon-a four-tusked Miocene mammoth over fifteen feet high. Can you imagine anything more exciting than that?”

Hunt scowled sourly across the room at the collection of pin-ups adorning the far wall, bequeathed by an earlier UNSA occupant.

“Frankly, yes,” he muttered. “But equipped rather differently than a bloody Trilophodon.”

“Eh? What’s that you said?” Danchekker blinked uncomprehendingly through his spectacles.

Hunt reached for his cigarette case. “It doesn’t matter, Chris,” he sighed.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The flight northward to Pithead lasted just under two hours. On arrival, the group from Earth assembled in the officers’ mess of the control building for coffee, during which scientists from Jupiter Four updated them on Ganymean matters.

The Ganymean ship had almost certainly been destined for a large-scale, long-range voyage and not for anything like a limited exploratory expedition. Several hundred Ganymeans had died with their ship. The quantity and variety of stores, materials, equipment, and livestock that they had taken with them indicated that wherever they had been bound, they had meant to stay.

Everything about the ship, especially its instrumentation and control systems, revealed a very advanced stage of scientific knowledge. Most of the electronics were still a mystery, and some of the special-purpose components were unlike anything the UNSA engineers had ever seen. Ganymean computers were built using a mass-integration technology in which millions of components were diffused, layer upon layer, into a single monolithic silicon block. The heat dissipated inside was removed by electronic cooling networks interwoven with the functional circuitry. In some examples, believed to form parts of the navigation system, component packing densities approached that of the human brain. A physicist held up a slab of what appeared to be silicon, about the size of a large dictionary; in terms of raw processing power, he claimed, it was capable of outperforming all the computers in the Navcomms Headquarters building put together.

The ship was streamlined and strongly constructed, indicating that it was designed to fly through atmospheres and to land on a planet without collapsing under its own weight. Ganymean engineering appeared to have reached a level where the functions of a Vega and a deep-space interorbital transporter were combined in one vessel.

The propulsion system was revolutionary. There were no large exhaust apertures and no obvious reaction points to suggest that the ship had been kicked forward by any kind of thermodynamic or photonic external thrust. The main fuel-storages system fed a succession of convertors and generators designed to deliver enormous amounts of electrical and magnetic energy. This supplied a series of two-foot-square superconducting busbars and a maze of interleaved windings, fabricated from solid copper bars, that surrounded what appeared to be the main-drive engines. Nobody was sure precisely how this arrangement resulted in motion of the ship, although some of the theories were startling.

Could this have been a true starship? Had the Ganymeans left en masse in an interstellar exodus? Had this particular ship foundered on its way out of the Solar System, shortly after leaving Minerva? These questions and a thousand more remained to be answered. One thing was certain, though: If the discovery of Charlie had given two years’ work to a significant proportion of Navcomms, there was enough information here to keep half the scientific world occupied for decades, if not centuries.

The party spent some hours in the recently erected laboratory dome, inspecting items brought up from below the ice, including several Ganymean skeletons and a score of terrestrial animals. To Danchekker’s disappointment, his particular favorite-the man-ape anthropoid he had shown to Hunt and Caldwell many months before on a viewscreen in Houston-was not among them. “Cyril” had been transferred to the laboratories of the Jupiter Four command ship for detailed examination. The name, graciously bestowed by the UNSA biologists, was in honor of the mission’s chief scientist.

After lunch in the base canteen, they walked into the dome that covered one of the shaftheads. Fifteen minutes later they were standing deep below the surface of the ice field, gazing in awe at the ship itself.

It lay, fully uncovered, in the vast white floodlighted cavern, its underside still supported in its mold of ice. The hull cut a clean swath through the forest of massive steel jacks and ice pillars that carried the weight of the roof. Beneath the framework of ramps and scaffolding that clung to its side, whole sections of the hull had been removed to reveal the compartments inside. The floor all around was littered with pieces of machinery lifted out by overhead cranes. The scene reminded Hunt of the time he and Borlan had visited Boeing’s huge plant near Seattle where they assembled the 1017 skyliners-but everything here was on a far vaster scale. They toured the network of catwalks and ladders that had been laid throughout the ship, from the command deck with its fifteen-foot-wide display screen, through the control rooms, living quarters, and hospital, to the cargo holds and the tiers of cages that had contained the animals. The primary energy-convertor and generator section was as imposing and as complex as the inside of a thermonuclear power station. Beyond it, they passed through a bulkhead and found themselves dwarfed beneath the curves of the exposed portions of a pair of enormous toroids. The engineer leading them pointed up at the immense, sweeping surfaces of metal.

“The walls of those outer casings are sixteen feet thick,” he informed them. “They’re made from an alloy that would cut tungsten-carbide steel like cream cheese. The mass concentration inside them is phenomenal. We think they provided closed paths in which masses of highly concentrated matter were constrained in circulating or oscillating resonance, interacting with strong fields. It’s possible that the high rates of change of gravity potential that this produced were somehow harnessed to induce a controlled distortion in the space around the ship. In other words, it moved by continuously falling into a hole that it created in front of itself-kind of like a four-dimensional tank track.”

“You mean it trapped itself inside a space-time bubble, which propagated somehow through normal space?” somebody offered.

“Yes, if you like,” the engineer affirmed. “I guess a bubble is as good an analogy as any. The interesting point is, if it did work that way, every particle of the ship and everything inside it would be subjected to exactly the same acceleration. Therefore there would be no G effect. You could stop the ship dead from, say, a million miles an hour to zero in a millisecond, and nobody inside would even know the difference.”

“How about top speed?” someone else asked. ‘Would there have been a relativistic limit?”

“We don’t know. The theory boys up in Jupiter Four have been losing a lot of sleep over that. Conventional mechanics wouldn’t apply to any movement of the ship itself, since it wouldn’t be actually moving in the local space inside the bubble. The question of how the bubble propagates through normal space is a different ball game altogether. A whole new theory of fields has to be worked out. Maybe completely new laws of physics apply-as I said before, we just don’t know. But one thing seems clear: Those photon-drive starships they’re designing in California might turn out to be obsolete before they’re even built. If we can figure out enough about how this ship worked, the knowledge could put us forward a hundred years.”

By the end of the day Hunt’s mind was in a whirl. New information was coming in faster than he could digest it. The questions in his head were multiplying at a rate a thousand times faster than they could ever be answered. The riddle of the Ganymean spaceship grew more intriguing with every new revelation, but at the back of it there was still the Lunarian problem unresolved. He needed time to stand back and think, to put his mental house in order and sort the jumble into related thoughts that would slot into labeled boxes in his mind. Then he would be able to see better which question depended on what, and which needed to be tackled first. But the jumble was piling up faster than he could pick up the pieces.

The banter and laughter in the mess after the evening meal soon became intolerable. Alone in his room, he found the walls claustrophobic. For a while he walked the deserted corridors between the domes and buildings. They were oppressive; he had lived in metal cans for too long. Eventually he found himself in the control tower dome, staring out into the incandescent gray wall that was produced by the floodlights around the base soaking through the methane-ammonia fog of the Ganymedean night. After a while even the presence of the duty controller, his face etched out against the darkness by the glow from his console, became an intrusion. Hunt stopped by the console on his way to the stairwell.

“Check me out for surface access.”

The duty controller looked across at him. “You’re going outside?”

“I need some air.”

The controller brought one of his screens to life. “You are who, please?”

“Hunt. Dr. V. Hunt.”

“ID?”

“730289 C/EX4.”

The controller logged the details, then checked the time and keyed it in.

“Report in by radio in one hour’s time if you’re not back. Keep a receiver channel open permanently on 24.328 megahertz.”

“Will do,” Hunt acknowledged. “Good night.”

“Night.”

The controller watched Hunt disappear toward the floor below, shrugged to himself, and automatically scanned the displays in front of him. It was going to be a quiet night.

In the surface access anteroom on the ground level, Hunt selected a suit from the row of lockers along the right hand wall. A few minutes later, suited up and with his helmet secured, he walked to the airlock, keyed his name and ID code into the terminal by the gate, and waited a couple of seconds for the inner door to slide open.

He emerged into the swirling silver mist and turned right to follow the line of the looming black metal cliff of the control building. The crunch of his boots in the powder ice sounded faint and far away, through the thin vapors. Where the wall ended he continued walking slowly in a straight line, out into the open area and toward the edge of the base. Phantom shapes of steel emerged and disappeared in the silent shadows around him. The gloom ahead grew darker as islands of diffuse light passed by on either side. The ice began sloping upward. Irregular patches of naked, upthrusting rock became more frequent. He walked on as if in a trance.

Pictures from the past rolled by before his mind’s eye: a boy, reading books, shut away in the upstairs bedroom of a London slum… a youth, pedaling a bicycle each morning through the narrow streets of Cambridge. The people he had been were no more real than the people he would become. All through his life he had been moving on, never standing still, always in the process of changing from something he had been to something he would be. And beyond every new world, another beckoned. And always the faces around him were unfamiliar ones-they drifted into his life like the transient shadows of the rocks that now moved toward him from the mists ahead. Like the rocks, for a while the people seemed to exist and take on form and substance, before slipping by to dissolve into the shrouds of the past behind him, as if they had never been. Forsyth-Scott, Felix Borlan, and Rob Gray had already ceased to exist. Would Caldwell, Danchekker, and the rest soon fade away to join them? And what new figures would materialize out of the unknown worlds lying hidden behind the veils of time ahead?

He realized with some surprise that the mists around him were getting brighter again; also, he could suddenly see farther. He was climbing upward across an immense ice field, now smooth and devoid of rocks. The light was an eerie glow, permeating evenly through mists on every side as if the fog itself were luminous. He climbed higher. With every step the horizon of his vision broadened further, and the luminosity drained from the surrounding mist to concentrate itself in a single patch that second by second grew brighter above his head. And then he was looking out over the top of the fog bank. It was just a pocket, trapped in the depression of the vast basin in which the base had been built; it had no doubt been sited there to shorten the length of the shaft needed to reach the Ganymean ship. The slope above him finished in a long, rounded ridge not fifty feet beyond where he stood. He changed direction slightly to take the steeper incline that led directly to the summit of the ridge. The last tenuous wisps of whiteness fell away.

At the top, the night was clear as crystal. He was standing on a beach of ice that shelved down from his feet into a lake of cotton wool. On the opposite shore of the lake rose the summits of the rock buttresses and ice cliffs that stood beyond the base. For miles around, ghostly white bergs of Ganymedean ice floated on an ocean of cloud, shining against the blackness of the night.

But there was no Sun.

He raised his eyes, and gasped involuntarily. Above him, five times larger than the Moon seen from Earth, was the full disk of Jupiter. No photograph he had ever seen, or any image reproduced on a display screen, could compare with the grandeur of that sight. It filled the sky with its radiance. All the colors of the rainbow were woven into its iridescent bands of light, stacked layer upon layer outwards from its equator. They faded as they approached its edge and merged into a hazy circle of pink that encircled the planet. The pink turned to violet and finally to purple, ending in a clear, sharp outline that traced an enormous circle against the sky. Immutable, immovable, eternal… mightiest of the gods-and tiny, puny, ephemeral man had crawled on a pilgrimage of five hundred million miles to pay homage.

Maybe only seconds passed, maybe hours. Hunt could not tell. For a fraction of eternity he stood unmoving, a speck lost among the silent towers of rock and ice. Charlie too had stood upon the surface of a barren waste and gazed up at a world wreathed in light and color-but the colors had been those of death.

At that moment, the scenes that Charlie had seen came to Hunt more vividly than at any time before. He saw cities consumed by fireballs ten miles high; he saw gaping chasms, seared and blackened ash that had once held oceans, and lakes of fire where mountains had stood. He saw continents buckle and break asunder, and drown beneath a fury of white heat that came exploding outward from below. As clearly as if it were really happening, he saw the huge globe above him swelling and bursting, grotesque with the deceptive slowness of mighty events seen from great distances. Day by day it would rush outward into space, consuming its moons one after the other in an insatiable orgy of gluttony until its force was spent. And then…

Hunt snapped back to reality with a jolt.

Suddenly the answer he had been seeking was there. It had come out of nowhere. He tried to trace its root by backtracking through his thoughts-but there was nothing. The pathways up from the deeper levels of his mind had opened for a second, but now were closed. The illusion was exposed. The paradox had gone. Of course nobody had seen it before. Who would think to question a truth that was self-evident, and older than the human race itself?

“Pithead Control calling Dr. V. Hunt. Dr. Hunt, come in, please.” The sudden voice in his helmet startled him. He pressed a button in the control panel on his chest.

“Hunt answering,” he acknowledged. “I hear you.”

“Routine check. You’re five minutes overdue to report. Is everything okay?”

“Sorry, didn’t notice the time. Yes, everything’s okay… very okay. I’m coming back now.”

“Thank you.” The voice cut off with a click.

Had he been gone that long? He realized that he was cold. The icy fingers of the Ganymedean night were beginning to feel their way inside his suit. He wound his heating control up a turn and flexed his arms. Before he turned, he looked up once more for a final glimpse of the giant planet. For some strange reason it seemed to be smiling.

“Thanks, pal,” he murmured with a wink. “Maybe I’ll be able to do something for you someday.”

With that he began moving down from the ridge, and rapidly faded into the sea of cloud.

Chapter Twenty-Three

A group of about thirty people, mainly scientists, engineers, and UNSA executives, filed into the conference theater in the Navcomms Headquarters building. The room was arranged in ascending tiers of seats that faced a large blank screen at the far end from the double doors. Caldwell was standing on a raised platform in front of the screen, watching as the various groups and individuals found seats. Soon everybody was settled and an usher at the rear signaled that the corridor outside was empty. Caldwell nodded in acknowledgment, raised his hand for silence, and stepped a pace forward to the microphone in front of him.

“Your attention, please, ladies and gentlemen… Could we have quiet, please…” The baritone voice boomed out of the loudspeakers around the walls. The murmurs subsided.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” he resumed. “All of you have been engaged for some time now in some aspect or other of the Lunarian problem. Ever since this thing first started, there have been more than a few arguments and differences of opinion, as you all know. Taking all things into consideration, however, we haven’t done too badly. We started out with a body and a few scraps of paper, and from them we reconstructed a whole world. But there are still some fundamental questions that have remained unanswered right up to this day. I’m sure there’s no need for me to recap them for the benefit of anyone here.” He paused. “At last, it appears, we may have answers to those questions. The new developments that cause me to say this are so unexpected that I feel it appropriate to call you all together to let you see for yourselves what I saw for the first time only a few hours ago.” He waited again and allowed the mood of the gathering to move from one suited to preliminary remarks to something more in tune with the serious business about to begin.

“As you all know, a group of scientists left us many months ago with the Jupiter Five Mission to investigate the discoveries on Ganymede. Among that group was Vic Hunt. This morning we received his latest report on what’s going on. We are about to replay the recording for you now. I think you will find it interesting.”

Caldwell glanced toward the projection window at the back of the room and raised his hand. The lights began to fade. He stepped down from the platform and took his seat in the front row. Darkness reigned briefly. Then the screen illuminated to show a file header and reference frame in standard UNSA format. The header persisted for a few seconds, then disappeared to be replaced by the image of Hunt, facing the camera across a desktop.

“Navcomms Special Investigation to Ganymede, V. Hunt reporting, 20 November 2029, Earth Standard Time,” he announced. “Subject of transmission: A Hypothesis Concerning Lunarian Origins. What follows is not claimed to be rigorously proven theory at this stage. The object is to present an account of a possible sequence of events which, for the first time, explains adequately the origins of the Lunarians, and is also consistent with all the facts currently in our possession.” Hunt paused to consult some notes on the desk before him. In the conference theater the silence was absolute.

Hunt looked back up and out of the screen. “Up until now I’ve tended not to accept any particular one of the ideas in circulation in preference to the rest, primarily because I haven’t been sufficiently convinced that any of them, as stated, accounted adequately for everything that we had reason to believe was true. That situation has changed. I have now come to believe that one explanation exists which is capable of supporting all the evidence. That explanation is as follows:

“The Solar System was formed originally with nine planets, which included Minerva and extended out as far as Neptune. Akin to the inner planets and located beyond Mars, Minerva resembled Earth in many ways. It was similar in size and density and was composed of a mix of similar elements. It cooled and developed an atmosphere, a hydrosphere, and a surface composition.” Hunt paused for a second. “This has been one source of difficulty-reconciling surface conditions at this distance from the Sun with the existence of life as we know it. For proof that these factors can indeed be reconciled, refer to Professor Fuller’s work at London University during the last few months.” A caption appeared on the lower portion of the screen, giving details of the titles and access codes of Fuller’s papers on the subject.

“Briefly, Fuller has produced a model of the equilibrium states of various atmospheric gases and volcanically introduced water vapor, that is consistent with known data. To sustain the levels of free atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, and the existence of large amounts of water in a liquid state, the model requires a very high level of volcanic activity on the planet, at least in its earlier history. That this requirement was evidently met could suggest that relative to its size, the crust of Minerva was exceptionally thin, and the structure of this crust unstable. This is significant, as becomes clear later. Fuller’s model also ties in with the latest information from the Asteroid surveys. The thin crust could be the result of relatively rapid surface cooling caused by the vast distance from the Sun, but with the internal molten condition being prolonged by heat sources below the surface. The Asteroid missions report many samples being tested that are rich in radioactive heat-producing substances.

“So, Minerva cooled to a mean surface temperature somewhat colder than Earth’s but not as cold as you might think. With cooling came the formation of increasingly more complex molecules, and eventually life emerged. With life came diversification, followed by competition, followed by selection-in other words, evolution. After many millions of years, evolution culminated in a race of intelligent beings who became dominant on the planet These were the beings we have christened the Ganymeans.

“The Ganymeans developed an advanced technological civilization. Then, approximately twenty-five million years ago, they had reached a stage which we estimate to be about a hundred years ahead of our own. This estimate is based on the design of the Ganymean ship we’ve been looking at here, and the equipment found inside it.

“Sometime around this period, a major crisis developed on Minerva. Something upset the delicate mechanism controlling the balance between the amount of carbon dioxide locked up in the rocks and that in the free state; the amount in the atmosphere began to rise. The reasons for this are speculative. One possibility is that something triggered the tendency toward high volcanic activity inherent in Minerva’s structure-maybe natural causes, maybe something the Ganymeans did. Another possibility is that the Ganymeans were attempting an ambitious program of climate control and the whole thing went wrong in a big way. At present we really don’t have a good answer to this part. However, our investigations of the Ganymeans have hardly begun yet. There are still years of work to be done on the contents of the ship alone, and I’m pretty certain that there’s a lot more waiting to be discovered down under the ice here.

“Anyhow, the main point for the present is that something happened. Chris Danchekker has shown…” Another file reference appeared on the bottom of the screen. “… that all the higher, air-breathing Minervan life forms would almost certainly have possessed a very low tolerance to increases in carbon-dioxide concentration. This derives from the fundamental system of microchemistry inherited from the earliest ancestors of the line. This implies, of course, that the changing surface conditions on Minerva posed a threat to the very existence of most forms of land life, including the Ganymeans. If we accept this situation, we also have a plausible reason for supposing that the Ganymeans went through a phase of importing on a vast scale a mixed balance of plant and animal life from Earth. Perhaps, stuck out where it was, Minerva had nothing to compare with the quantity and variety of life teeming on the much warmer planet Earth.

“Evidently, the experiment didn’t work. Although the imported stock found conditions favorable enough to flourish in, they failed to produce the desired result. From various bits of information, we believe the Ganymeans gave the whole thing up as a bad job and moved out to find a new home somewhere outside the Solar System. Whether or not they succeeded we don’t know; maybe further study of what’s in the ship will throw more light on that question.”

Hunt stopped to pick up a case from the desk and went through the motions of lighting a cigarette. The break seemed to be timed to give the viewers a chance to digest this part of his narrative. A subdued chorus of mutterings broke out around the room. Here and there a light flared as individuals succumbed to the suggestion from the screen. Hunt continued:

“The native Minervan land species left on the planet soon died out. But the immigrant types from Earth enjoyed a better adaptability and survived. Not only that, they were free to roam unchecked and unhindered across the length and breadth of Minerva, where any native competition rapidly ceased to exist. The new arrivals were thus free to continue the process of evolutionary development that had begun millions of years before in the oceans of Earth. But at the same time, of course, the same process was also continuing on Earth itself. Two groups of animal species, possessing the same genetic inheritance from common ancestors and equipped with the same evolutionary potential, were developing in isolation on two different worlds.

“Now, for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure, allow me to introduce Cyril.” The picture of Hunt vanished and a view of the man-ape retrieved from the Ganymean ship appeared.

Hunt’s voice carried on with the commentary: “Chris’s team has made a thorough examination of this character in the Jupiter Four laboraties. Chris’s own summary of their results was, quote:

“‘We consider this to be something nearer the direct line of descent toward modern man than anything previously studied. Many fossil finds have been made on Earth of creatures that represented various branches of development from the early progressive apes in the general direction of man. All finds to date, however, have been classed as belonging to offshoots from the main stream; a specimen of a direct link in the chain leading to Homo sapiens has always persistently eluded us. Here, we have such a link.’ Unquote.” The image of Hunt reappeared. “We can be fairly sure, therefore, that among the terrestrial life forms left to develop on Minerva were numbers of primates as far advanced in their evolution as anything back on Earth.

“The faster evolution characteristic of Minerva thus far was repeated, possibly as a result of the harsher environment and climate. Millions of years passed. On Earth a succession of manlike beings came and went, some progressive, some degenerate. The Ice Age came and moved through into its final, glacial phase some fifty thousand years ago. By this time on Earth, primitive humanoids represented the apex of progress-crude cave dwellers, hunters, makers of simple weapons and tools chipped out of stone. But on Minerva, a new technological civilization already existed: the Lunarians-descended from the imported stock and from the same early ancestors as ourselves, human in every detail of anatomy.

“I won’t dwell on the problems that confronted the developing Lunarian civilization-they’re well-known by now. Their history was one long story of war and hardship enacted around a racial quest to escape from their dying world. Their difficulties were compounded by a chronic shortage of minerals, possibly because the planet was naturally deficient, or possibly because it had been thoroughly exploited by the Ganymeans. At any rate, the warring factions polarized into two superpowers, and in the showdown that followed they destroyed themselves and the planet.”

Hunt paused again at this point to allow another period of consolidation for the audience. This time, however, there was complete silence. Nothing he had said so far was new, but he had formed a set selected from the thousand and one theories and speculations that had raged around Navcomms for as long as many could remember. The silent watchers in the theater sensed that the real news was still to come.

“Let’s stop for a moment and examine how well this account fits in with the evidence we have. First, the original problem of Charlie’s human form. Well, that’s answered: He was human-descended from the same ancestors as the rest of us and requiring nothing as unlikely as a parallel line to explain him. Second, the absence of any signs of the Lunarians on Earth. Well, the reason is quite obvious: They never were on Earth. Third, all the attempts to reconcile the surface geography of Charlie’s world with Earth become unnecessary, since by this account they were indeed two different planets.

“So far so good, then. This by itself, however, does not explain all the facts. There are some additional pieces of evidence which must be taken into account by any theory that claims to be comprehensive. They can be summarized in the following questions:

“One: How could Charlie’s voyage from Minerva to our Moon have taken only two days?

“Two: How do we explain a weapons system, consistent with the Lunarian level of technology, that was capable of accurate registration over a range extending from our Moon to Minerva?

“Three: How could the loop feedback delay in the fire-control system have been substantially less than the minimum of twenty-six minutes that could have applied over that distance?

“Four: How could Charlie distinguish surface features of Minerva when he was standing on our Moon?”

Hunt looked out from the screen and allowed plenty of time for the audience to reflect on these questions. He stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward toward the camera, his elbows corning to rest on the desk.

“There is, in my submission, only one explanation which is capable of satisfying these apparently nonsensical requirements. And I put it to you now. The moon that orbited Minerva from time immemorial up until the time of these events fifty thousand years ago-and the Moon that shines in the sky above Earth today-are one and the same!”

Nothing happened for about three seconds.

Then gasps of incredulity erupted from around the darkened room. People gesticulated at their neighbors while some turned imploringly for comment from the row behind. Suddenly the whole theater was a turmoil of muttered exchanges.

“Can’t be!”

“By God-he’s right!”

“Of course… of course…

“Has to be…”

“Garbage!”

On the screen Hunt stared out impassively, as if he were watching the scene. His allowance for the probable reaction was well timed. He resumed speaking just as the confusion of voices was dying away.

“We know that the moon Charlie was on was our Moon-because we found him there, because we can identify the areas of terrain he described, because we have ample evidence of a large-scale Lunarian presence there, and because we have proved that it was the scene of a violent exchange of nucleonic and nuclear weapons. But that same place must also have been the satellite of Minerva. It was only a two-day flight from the planet-Charlie says so and we’re confident we can interpret his time scale. Weapons were sited there which could pick off targets on Minerva, and observations of hits were almost instantaneous; and if all that is not enough, Charlie could stand not ten yards from where we found him and distinguish details of Minerva’s surface. These things could only be true if the place in question was within, say, half a million miles of Minerva.

“Logically, the only explanation is that both moons were one and the same. We’ve been asking for a long time whether the Lunarian civilization developed on Earth or whether it developed on Minerva. Well, from the account I’ve given, it’s obvious it was Minerva. We thought we had two contradictory sets of information, one telling us it was Earth and the other telling us it wasn’t. But we had misinterpreted the data. It wasn’t telling us anything to do with Earth or Minerva at all-it was telling us about Earth’s or Minerva’s moon! Some facts told us we were dealing with Earth’s moon while others told us we were dealing with Minerva’s moon. As long as we insisted on introducing, quite unconsciously, the notion that the two moons were different, the conflict between these sets of facts couldn’t be resolved. But if, purely within the logical constraints of the situation, we introduce the postulate that both moons were the same, that conflict disappears before our eyes.”

Shock seemed to have overtaken the audience. At the front somebody was muttering, “Of course… of course…” half to himself and half aloud.

“All that remains is to reconcile these propositions with the situation we observe around us today. Again, only one explanation is possible. Minerva exploded and dispersed to become the Asteroid Belt. The greater part of its mass, we’re fairly sure, was thrown into the outer regions of the Solar System and became Pluto. Its moon, although somewhat shaken, was left intact. During the gravitational upheaval that occurred when its parent planet broke up, the satellite’s orbital momentum around the Sun was reduced and it began to fall inward.

“We can’t tell how long the orphaned moon plunged steadily nearer the Sun. Maybe the trip lasted months, maybe years. Next comes one of those million-to-one chances that sometimes happen in nature. The trajectory followed by the moon brought it close to Earth, which had been pursuing its own solitary path around the Sun ever since the beginning of time!” Hunt paused for a few seconds. “Yes, I repeat, solitary path! You see, if we are to accept what I believe to be the only satisfactory explanation open to us, we must accept also its consequence: that until this point in time, some fifty thousand years ago, planet Earth had no moon! The two bodies drew close enough for their gravitational fields to interact to the point of mutual capture; the new, common orbit turned out to be stable, and Earth adopted a foundling it has kept right up to this day.

“If we accept this account, many of the other things that have been causing problems suddenly make sense. Take, for example, the excess material that covers most of Lunar Farside and has been shown to be of recent origin, and coupled with that, the dating of all Farside craters and some Nearside ones to around the time we’re talking about. Now we have a ready explanation. When Minerva blew up, what is now Luna was sitting there right in the way of all the debris. That’s where the meteorite storm came from. That’s how practically all evidence of the Lunarian presence on Luna was wiped out. There’s probably no end to remains of their bases, installations, and vehicles still there waiting to be uncovered-a thousand feet below the Farside surface. We think that the Annihilator emplacement at Seltar was on Farside. That suggests that what is Farside to Earth today was Nearside to Minerva; hence it makes sense that most of the meteorite storm landed where it did.

“Charlie appears to have referred to compass directions different from ours on the Lunar surface, implying a different north-south axis. Now we see why. Some people have asked why, if Luna suffered such an intense bombardment, there should be no signs of any comparable increase in meteorite activity on Earth at the time. This too now makes sense: When Minerva blew up, Luna was in its immediate vicinity but Earth wasn’t. And a last point on Lunar physics-We’ve known for half a century that Luna is formed from a mix of rocky compounds different from those found on Earth, being low in volatiles and rich in refractories. Scientists have speculated for a long time that possibly the Moon was formed in another part of the Solar System. This indeed turns out to be true if what I’ve said is correct.

“Some explanations have suggested that the Lunarians set up advanced bridgeheads on Luna. This enabled their evident presence there to be reconciled with evolutionary origins on Minerva, but raised an equally problematical question: Why were they struggling to master interplanetary space-flight technology when they must have had it already? In the account I have described, this problem disappears. They had reached their own moon, but were still some ways from being able to move large populations to anyplace as remote as Earth. Also, there is now no need to introduce the unsupported notion of Lunarian colonies on either planet; either way, it would pose the same question.

“And finally, an unsolved riddle of oceanography makes sense in this light, too. Research into tidal motions has shown that catastrophic upheavals on a planetary scale occurred on Earth at about this time, resulting in an abrupt increase in the length of the day and an increase in the rate at which the day is further being lengthened by tidal friction. Well, the arrival of Minerva’s moon would certainly create enormous gravitational and tidal disturbances. Although the exact mechanics aren’t too clear right now, it appears that the kinetic energy acquired by Minerva’s moon as it fell toward the Sun was absorbed in neutralizing part of the Earth’s rotational energy, causing a longer day. Also, increased tidal friction since then is to be expected. Before the Moon appeared, Earth experienced only Solar tides, whereas from that time up until today, there have been both Solar and Lunar tides.”

Hunt showed his empty hand in a gesture of finality and pushed himself back in his chair. He straightened the pile of notes on the desk before going on to conclude:

“That’s it. As I said earlier, at this stage it represents no more than a hypothesis that accounts for all the facts. But there are some things we can do toward testing the truth of it.

“For a start, we have a large chunk of Minerva piled up all over Farside. The recent material is so like the original Lunar material that it was years before anybody realized it had been added only recently. That supports the idea that the Moon and the meteorites originated in the same part of the Solar System. I’d like to suggest that we perform detailed comparisons between data from Farside material and data from the Asteroid surveys. If the results indicate that they are both the same kind of stuff and appear to have come from the same place, the whole idea would be well supported.

“Another thing that needs further work is a mathematical model of the process of mutual capture between Earth and Luna. We know quite a lot about the initial conditions that must have existed before and, of course, a lot more about the conditions that exist now. It would be reassuring to know that for the equations involved there exist solutions that allow one situation to transform into the other within the normal laws of physics. At least, it would be nice to prove that the whole idea isn’t impossible.

“Finally, of course, there is the Ganymean ship here. Without doubt a lot of new information is waiting to be discovered-far more than we’ve had to work on so far. I’m hoping that somewhere in the ship there will be astronomic data to tell us something about the Solar System at the time of the Ganymeans. If, for example, we could determine whether or not the third planet from the Sun of their Solar System had a satellite, or if we could learn enough about their moon to identify it as Luna-perhaps by recognizing Nearside surface features-then the whole theory would be well on the way to being proved.

“This concludes the report.

“Personal addendum for Gregg Caldwell…” The view of Hunt was replaced by a landscape showing a wilderness of ice and rock. “This place you’ve sent us to, Gregg-the mail service isn’t too regular, so I couldn’t send a postcard. It’s over a hundred Celsius degrees below zero; there’s no atmosphere worth talking about and what there is, is poisonous; the only way back is by Vega, and the nearest Vega is seven hundred miles away. I wish you were here to enjoy all the fun with us, Gregg-I really do!

“V. Hunt from Ganymede Pithead Base. End of transmission.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The long-awaited answers to where the Lunarians had come from and how they came to be where they had been found sent waves of excitement around the scientific world and prompted a new frenzy of activity in the news media. Hunt’s explanation seemed complete and consistent. There were few objections or disagreements; the account didn’t leave much to object to or disagree with.

Hunt had therefore met fully the demands of his brief. Although detailed interdisciplinary work would continue all over the world for a long time to come, UNSA’s formal involvement in the affair was more or less over. So Project Charlie was run down. That left Project Ganymeans, which was just starting up. Although he had not yet received any formal directive from Earth to say so, Hunt had the feeling that Caldwell wouldn’t waste the opportunity offered by Hunt’s presence on Ganymede just when the focus of attention was shifting from the Lunarians to the Ganymeans. In other words, it would be some time yet before he would find himself walking aboard an Earth-bound cruiser.

A few weeks after the publication of UNSA’s interim conclusions, the Navcomms scientists on Ganymede held a celebration dinner in the officers’ mess at Pithead to mark the successful end of a major part of their task. The evening had reached the warm and mellow phase that comes with cigars and liqueurs when the last-course dishes have been cleared away. Talkative groups were standing and sitting in a variety of attitudes around the tables and by the bar, and beers, brandies, and vintage ports were beginning to flow freely. Hunt was with a group of physicists near the bar, discussing the latest news on the Ganymean field drive, while behind them another circle was debating the likelihood of a world government being established within twenty years. Danchekker seemed to have been unduly quiet and withdrawn for most of the evening.

“When you think about it, Vic, this could develop into the ultimate weapon in interplanetary warfare,” one of the physicists was saying. “Based on the same principles as the ship’s drive, but a lot more powerful and producing a far more intense and localized effect. It would generate a black hole that would persist, even after the generator that made it had fallen into it. Just think-an artificially produced black hole. All you’d have to do is mount the device in a suitable missile and fire it at any planet you took a dislike to. It would fall to the center and consume the whole planet-and there’d be no way to stop it.”

Hunt looked intrigued. “You mean it could work?”

“The theory says so.”

“Christ, how long would it take-to wipe out a planet?”

“We don’t know yet; we’re still working on that bit. But there’s more to it than that. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to put out a star using the same method. Think about that as a weapon-one black-hole bomb could destroy a whole solar system. It makes nucleonic weapons look like kiddie toys.”

Hunt started to reply, but a voice from the center of the room cut him off, rising to make itself heard above the buzz of conversation. It belonged to the commander of Pithead Base, special guest at the dinner.

“Attention, please, everybody,” he called. “Your attention for a moment, please.” The noise died as all faces turned toward him. He looked around until satisfied that everyone was paying attention. “You have invited me here tonight to join you in celebrating the successful conclusion of what has probably been one of the most challenging, the most astounding, and the most rewarding endeavors that you are ever likely to be involved in. You have had difficulties, contradictions, and disagreements to contend with, but all that is now in the past. The task is done. My congratulations.” He glanced toward the clock above the bar. “It is midnight-a suitable time, I think, to propose a toast to the being that started the whole thing off, wherever he may be.” He raised his glass. “To Charlie.”

“To Charlie,” came back the chorus.

“No!”

A voice boomed from the back of the room. It sounded firm and decisive. Everybody turned to look at Danchekker in surprise.

“No,” the professor repeated. “We can’t drink to that just yet.”

There was no suggestion of hesitation or apology in his manner. Clearly his action was reasoned and calculated.

“What’s the problem, Chris?” Hunt asked, moving forward away from the bar.

“I’m afraid that’s not the end of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“The whole Charlie business-There is more to it-more than I have chosen to mention to anybody, because I have no proof. However, there is a further implication in all that has been deduced-one which is even more difficult to accept than even the revelations of the past few weeks.”

The festive atmosphere had vanished. Suddenly they were in business again. Danchekker walked slowly toward the center of the room and stopped with his hands resting on the back of one of the chairs. He gazed at the table for a moment, then drew a deep breath and looked up.

“The problem with Charlie, and the rest of the Lunarians, that has not been touched upon is this: quite simply, they were too human.”

Puzzled looks appeared here and there. Somebody turned to his neighbor and shrugged. They all looked back at Danchekker in silence.

“Let us recapitulate for a moment some of the fundamental principles of evolution,” he said. “How do different animal species arise? Well, we know that variations of a given species arise from mutations caused by various agencies. It follows from elementary genetics that in a freely mixing and interbreeding population, any new characteristic will tend to be diluted, and will disappear within relatively few generations. However”-the professor’s tone became deadly serious-“when sections of the population become reproductively isolated from one another-for example, by geegraphical separation, by segregation of behavior patterns, or by seasonal differences, say, in mating times-dilution through interbreeding will be prevented. When a new characteristic appears within an isolated group, it will be confined to and reinforced within that group; thus, generation by generation, the group will diverge from the other group or groups from which it has been isolated. Finally a new species will establish itself. This principle is fundamental to the whole idea of evolution: Given isolation, divergence will occur. The origins of all species on Earth can be traced back to the existence at some time of some mechanism or other of isolation between variations within a single species. The animal life peculiar to Australia and South America, for instance, demonstrates how rapidly divergence takes effect even when isolation has existed only for a short time.

“Now we seem to be satisfied that for the best part of twenty-five million years, two groups of terrestrial animals-one on Earth, the other on Minerva-were left to evolve in complete isolation. As a scientist who accepts fully the validity of the principle I have just outlined, I have no hesitation in saying that divergence between these two groups must have taken place. That, of course, applies equally to the primate lines that were represented on both planets.”

He stopped and stood looking from one to the other of his colleagues, giving them time to think and waiting for a reaction. The reaction came from the far end of the room.

“Yes, now I see what you’re saying,” somebody said. “But why speculate? What’s the point in saying they should have diverged, when it’s clear that they didn’t?”

Danchekker beamed and showed his teeth. “What makes you say they didn’t?” he challenged.

The questioner raised his arms in appeal. “What my two eyes tell me-I can see they didn’t.”

“What do you see?”

“I see humans. I see Lunarians. They’re the same. So, they didn’t diverge.”

“Didn’t they?” Danchekker’s voice cut the air like a whiplash. “Or are you making the same unconscious assumption that everyone else has made? Let me go over the facts once again, purely from an objective point of view. I’ll simply list the things we observe and make no assumptions, conscious or otherwise, about how they fit in with what we think we already know.

“First: The two populations were isolated. Fact.

“Second: Today, twenty-five million years later, we observe two sets of individuals, ourselves and the Lunarians. Fact.

“Third: We and the Lunarians are identical. Fact.

“Now, if we accept the principle that divergence must have occurred, what must we conclude? Ask yourselves-If confronted by those facts and nothing else, what would any scientist deduce?”

Danchekker stood facing them, pursing his lips and rocking back and forth on his heels. Silence enveloped the room, broken after a few seconds by his whistling quietly and tunelessly to himself.

“Christ…!” The exclamation came from Hunt. He stood gaping at the professor in undisguised disbelief. “They couldn’t have been isolated from each other,” he managed at last in a slow, halting voice. “They must both be from the same…” The words trailed away.

Danchekker nodded with evident satisfaction. “Vic’s seen what I am saying,” he informed the group. “You see, the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from the statements I have just enumerated is this: If two identical forms are observed today, they must both come from the same isolated group. In other words, if two lines were isolated and branched apart, both forms must lie on the same branch!”

“How can you say that, Chris?” someone insisted. “We know they came from different branches.”

“What do you know?” Danchekker whispered.

“Well, I know that the Lunarians came from the branch that was isolated on Minerva…”

“Agreed.”

“… And I know that man comes from the branch that was isolated on Earth.”

“How?”

The question echoed sharply around the walls like a pistol shot.

“Well,” The speaker made a gesture of helplessness. “How do I answer a question like that? It… it’s obvious.”

“Precisely!” Danchekker showed his teeth again. “You assume it-just as everybody else does! That’s part of the conditioning you’ve grown up with. It has been assumed all through the history of the human race, and naturally so-there has never been any reason to suppose otherwise.” Danchekker straightened up and regarded the room with an unblinking stare. “Now perhaps you see the point of all this. I am stating that, on the evidence we have just examined, the human race did not evolve on Earth at all. It evolved on Minerva!”

“Oh, Chris, really…”

“This is getting ridiculous..

Danchekker hammered on relentlessly: “Because, if we accept that divergence must have occurred, then both we and the Lunarians must have evolved in the same place, and we already know that they evolved on Minerva!”

A murmur of excitement mixed with protest ran around the room.

“I am stating that Charlie is not just a distantly related cousin of man-he is our direct ancestor!” Danchekker did not wait for comment but pressed on in the same insistent tone: “And I believe that I can give you an explanation of our own origins which is fully consistent with these deductions.” An abrupt silence fell upon the room. Danchekker regarded his colleagues for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice had fallen to a calmer and more objective note.

“From Charlie’s account of his last days, we know that some Lunarians were left alive on the Moon after the fighting died down. Charlie himself was one of them. He did not survive for long, but we can guess that there were others-desperate groups such as the ones he described-scattered across that Lunar surface. Many would have perished in the meteorite storm on Farside, but some, like Charlie’s group, were on Nearside when Minerva exploded and were spared the worst of the bombardment. Even a long time later, when the Moon finally stabilized in orbit around Earth, a handful of survivors remained who gazed up at the new world that hung in their sky. Presumably some of their ships were still usable-perhaps just one, or two, or a few. There was only one way out. Their world had ceased to exist, so they took the only path open to them and set off on a last, desperate attempt to reach the surface of Earth. There could be no way back-there was no place to go back to.

“So we must conclude that their attempt succeeded. Precisely what events followed their emergence out into the savagery of the Ice Age we will probably never know for sure. But we can guess that for generations they hung on the very edge of extinction. Their knowledge and skills would have been lost. Gradually they reverted to barbarism, and for forty thousand years were lost in the midst of the general struggle for survival. But survive they did. Not only did they survive, they consolidated, spread, and flourished. Today their descendants dominate the Earth just as they dominated Minerva-you, I, and the rest of the human race.”

A long silence ensued before anybody spoke. When somebody did, the tone was solemn. “Chris, assuming for now that everything was like you’ve said, a point still bothers me: If we and the Lunarians both came from the Minervan line, what happened to the other line? Where did the branch that was developing on Earth go?”

“Good question.” Danchekker nodded approval. “We know from the fossil record on Earth that during the period that came after the visits of the Ganymeans several developments in the general human direction took place. We can trace this record quite clearly right up to the time in question, fifty thousand years ago. By that time the most advanced stage reached on Earth was that represented by Neanderthal man. Now, the Neanderthals have always been something of a riddle. They were hardy, tough, and superior in intelligence to anything prior to them or coexisting with them. They seemed well adapted to survive the competition of the Ice Age and should, one would think, have attained a dominant position in the era that was to follow. But that did not happen. Strangely, almost mysteriously, they died out abruptly between forty and fifty thousand years ago. Apparently they were unable to compete effectively against a new and far more advanced type of man, whose sudden appearance, as if from nowhere, has always been another of the unsolved riddles of science: Homo sapiens-us!”

Danchekker read the expressions on the faces before him and nodded slowly to confirm their thoughts.

“Now, of course, we see why this was so. He did indeed appear out of nowhere. We see why there is no clear fossil record in the soil of Earth to link Homo sapiens back to the chain of earlier terrestrial man-apes: He did not evolve there. And we see what it was that so ruthlessly and so totally overwhelmed the Neanderthals. How could they hope to compete against an advanced race, weaned on the warrior cult of Minerva?”

Danchekker paused and allowed his gaze to sweep slowly around the circle of faces. Everybody seemed to be suffering from mental punch-drunkenness.

“As I have said, all this follows purely as a chain of reasoning from the observations with which I began. I can offer no evidence to support it. I am convinced, however, that such evidence does exist. Somewhere on Earth the remains of the Lunarian spacecraft that made that last journey from Luna must still exist, possibly buried beneath the mud of a seabed, possibly under the sands of one of the desert regions. There must exist, on Earth, pieces of equipment and artifacts brought by the tiny handful who represented the remnant of the Lunarian civilization. Where on Earth, is anyone’s guess. Personally, I would suggest as the most likely areas the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean, or the eastern regions of North Africa. But one day proof that what I have said is true will be forthcoming. This I predict with every confidence.”

The professor walked around to the table and poured a glass of Coke. The silence of the room slowly dissolved into a rising tide of voices. One by one, the statues that had been listening returned to life. Danchekker took a long drink and stood in silence for a while, contemplating his glass. Then he turned to face the room again.

“Suddenly lots of things that we have always simply taken for granted start falling into place.” Attention centralized on him once again. “Have you ever stopped to think what it is that makes man so different from all the other animals on Earth? I know that we have larger brains, more-versatile hands, and so forth; what I am referring to is something else. Most animals, when in a hopeless situation will resign themselves to fate and perish in ignominy. Man, on the other hand, does not know how to give in. He is capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness and resilience that are without parallel on his planet. He is able to attack anything that threatens his survival, with an aggressiveness the like of which the Earth has never seen otherwise. It is this that has enabled him to sweep all before him, made him lord of all the beasts, helped him tame the winds, the rivers, the tides, and even the power of the Sun itself. This stubbornness has conquered the oceans, the skies, and the challenges of space, and at times has resulted in some of the most violent and bloodstained periods in his history. But without this side to his nature, man would be as helpless as the cattle in the field.”

Danchekker scanned the faces challengingly. “Well, where did it come from? It seems out of character with the sedate and easygoing pattern of evolution on Earth. Now we see where it came from: It appeared as a mutation among the evolving primates that were isolated on Minerva. It was transmitted through the population there until it became a racial characteristic. It proved to be such a devastating weapon in the survival struggle there that effective opposition ceased to exist. The inner driving force that it produced was such that the Lunarians were flying spaceships while their contemporaries on Earth were still playing with pieces of stone.

“That same driving force we see in man today. Man has proved invincible in every challenge that the Universe has thrown at him. Perhaps this force has been diluted somewhat in the time that has elapsed since it first appeared on Minerva; we reached the brink of that same precipice of self-destruction but stepped back. The Lunarians hurled themselves in regardless. It could be that this was why they did not seek a solution by cooperation-their in-built tendency to violence made them simply incapable of conceiving such a formula.

“But this is typical of the way in which evolution works. The forces of natural selection will always operate in such a way as to bend and shape a new mutation, and to preserve a variation of it that offers the best prospects of survival for the species as a whole. The raw mutation that made the Lunarians what they were was too extreme and resulted in their downfall. Improvement has taken the form of a dilution, which results in a greater psychological stability of the race. Thus, we survive where they perished.”

Danchekker paused to finish his drink. The statues remained statues.

“What an incredible race they must have been,” he said. “Consider in particular the handful who were destined to become the forefathers of mankind. They had endured a holocaust unlike anything we can even begin to imagine. They had watched their world and everything that was familiar explode in the skies above their heads. After this, abandoned in an airless, waterless, lifeless, radioactive desert, they were slaughtered beneath the billions of tons of Minervan debris that crashed down from the skies to complete the ruin of all their hopes and the total destruction of all they had achieved.

“A few survived to emerge onto the surface after the bombardment. They knew that they could live only for as long as their supplies and their machines lasted. There was nowhere they could go, nothing they could plan for. They did not give in. They did not know how to give in. They must have existed for months before they realized that, by a quirk of fate, a slim chance of survival existed.

“Can you imagine the feelings of that last tiny band of Lunarians as they stood amid the Lunar desolation, gazing up at the new world that shone in the sky above their heads, with nothing else alive around them and, for all they knew, nothing else alive in the Universe? What did it take to attempt that one-way journey into the unknown? We can try to imagine, but we will never know. Whatever it took, they grasped at the straw that was offered and set off on that journey.

“Even this was only the beginning. When they stepped out of their ships onto the alien world, they found themselves in the midst of one of the most ruthless periods of competition and extinction in the history of the Earth. Nature ruled with an uncompromising hand. Savage beasts roamed the planet; the climate was in turmoil following the gravitational upheavals caused by the arrival of the Moon; possibly they were decimated by unknown diseases. It was an environment that none of their experience had prepared them for. Still they refused to yield. They learned the ways of the new world: They learned to feed by hunting and trapping, to fight with spear and club; they learned how to shelter from the elements, to read and interpret the language of the wild. And as they became proficient in these new arts they grew stronger and ventured farther afield. The spark that they had brought with them and which had carried them through on the very edge of extinction began to glow bright once again. Finally that glow erupted into the flame that had swept all before it on Minerva; they emerged as an adversary more fearsome and more formidable than anything the Earth had ever known. The Neanderthals never stood a chance-they were doomed the moment the first Lunarian foot made contact with the soil of Earth.

“The outcome you see all around you today. We stand undisputed masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar space itself, just as they did fifty thousand years ago.”

Danchekker placed his glass carefully on the table and moved slowly toward the center of the room. His sober gaze shifted from eye to eye. He concluded: “And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars.

“Let us go out, then, and claim our inheritance. We belong to a tradition in which the concept of defeat has no meaning. Today the stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No force exists in the Universe that can stop us.”

Epilogue

Professor Hans Jacob Zeiblemann, of the Department of Paleontology of the University of Geneva, finished his entry for the day in his diary, closed the book with a grunt, and returned it to its place in the tin box underneath his bed. He hoisted his two-hundred-pound bulk to its feet and, drawing his pipe from the breast pocket of his bush shirt, moved a pace across the tent to knock out the ash on the metal pole by the door. As he stood packing a new fill of tobacco into the bowl, he gazed out over the arid landscape of northern Sudan.

The Sun had turned into a deep gash just above the horizon, oozing blood-red liquid rays that drenched the naked rock for miles around. The tent was one of three that stood crowded together on a narrow sandy shelf. The shelf was formed near the bottom of a steep-sided rocky valley, dotted with clumps of coarse bush and desert scrub that clustered together along the valley floor and petered out rapidly, without gaining the slopes on either side. On a wider shelf beneath stood the more numerous tents of the native laborers. Obscure odors wafting upward from this direction signaled that preparation of the evening meals had begun. From farther below came the perpetual sound of the stream, rushing and clattering and jostling on its way to join the waters of the distant Nile.

The crunch of boots on gravel sounded nearby. A few seconds later Zeiblemann’s assistant, Jorg Hutfauer, appeared, his shirt dark and streaked with perspiration and grime.

“Phew!” The newcomer halted to mop his brow with something that had once been a handkerchief. “I’m whacked. A beer, a bath, dinner, then bed-that’s my program for tonight.”

Zeiblemann grinned. “Busy day?”

“Haven’t stopped. We’ve extended sector five to the lower terrace. The subsoil isn’t too bad there at all. We’ve made quite a bit of progress.”

“Anything new?”

“I brought these up-thought you might be interested. There’s more below, but it’ll keep till you come down tomorrow.” Hutfauer passed across the objects he had been carrying and continued on into the tent to retrieve a can of beer from the pile of boxes and cartons under the table.

“Mmm…” Zeiblemann turned the bone over in his hand. “Human femur… heavy.” He studied the unusual curve and measured the proportions with his eye. “Neanderthal, I’d say, or very near related.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The professor placed the fossil carefully in a tray, covered it with a cloth, and laid the tray on the chest standing just inside the tent doorway. He picked up a hand-sized blade of flint, simply but effectively worked by the removal of long, thin flakes.

“What did you make of this?” he asked.

Hutfauer moved forward out of the shadow and paused to take a prolonged and grateful drink from the can.

“Well, the bed seems to be late Pleistocene, so I’d expect upper Paleolithic indications-which fits in with the way it’s been worked. Probably a scraper for skinning. There are areas of microliths on the handle and also around the end of the blade. Bearing in mind the location, I’d put it at something related fairly closely to the Capsian culture.” He lowered the can and cocked an inquiring eye at Zeiblemann.

“Not bad,” said the professor, nodding. He laid the flint in a tray beside the first and added the identification sheet that Hutfauer had written out. “We’ll have a closer look tomorrow when the light’s a little better.”

Hutfauer joined him at the door. The sound of jabbering and shouting from the level below told them that another of the natives’ endless minor domestic disputes had broken out over something.

“Tea’s up if anyone’s interested,” a voice called out from behind the next tent.

Zeiblemann raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. “What a splendid idea,” he said. “Come on, Jorg.”

They walked around to the makeshift kitchen, where Ruddi Magendorf was sitting on a rock, shoveling spoonfuls of tea leaves out of a tin by his side and into a large bubbling pot of water.

“Hi, Prof-hi, Jorg,” he greeted as the two joined him. “It’ll be brewed in a minute or two.”

Zeiblemann wiped his palms on the front of his shirt. “Good. Just what I could do with.” He cast his eye about automatically and noted the trays, covered by cloths, laid out on the trestle table by the side of Magendorf’s tent.

“Ah, I see you’ve been busy as well,” he observed. “What do we have there?”

Magendorf followed his gaze.

“Jomatto brought them up about half an hour ago. They’re from the upper terrace of sector two-east end. Take a look.”

Zeiblemann walked over to the table and uncovered one of the trays to inspect the neatly arrayed collection, at the same time mumbling absently to himself.

“More flint scrapers, I see… Mmmm… That could be a hand ax. Yes, I believe it is… Bits of jawbone, human… looks as if they might well match up. Skull cap… Bone spearhead… Mmm…” He lifted the cloth from the second tray and began running his eye casually over the contents. Suddenly the movement of his head stopped abruptly as he stared hard at something at one end. His face contorted into a scowl of disbelief.

“What the hell is this supposed to be?” he bellowed. He straightened up and walked back toward the stove, holding the offending object out in front of him.

Magendorf shrugged and pulled a face.

“I thought you’d better see it,” he offered, then added: “Jomatto says it was with the rest of that set.”

“Jomatto says what?” Zeiblemann’s voice rose in pitch as he glowered first at Magendorf and then back at the object in his hand. “Oh, for God’s sake! The man’s supposed to have a bit of sense. This is a serious scientific expedition…” He regarded the object again, his nostrils quivering with indignation. “Obviously one of the boys has been playing a silly joke or something.”

It was about the size of a large cigarette pack, not including the wrist bracelet, and carried on its upper face four windows that could have been meant for miniature electronic displays. It suggested a chronometer or calculating aid, or maybe it was both and other things besides. The back and contents were missing, and all that was left was the metal casing, somewhat battered and dented, but still surprisingly unaffected very much by corrosion.

“There’s a funny inscription on the bracelet,” Magenclorf said, rubbing his nose dubiously. “I’ve never seen characters like it before.”

Zeiblemann sniffed and peered briefly at the lettering.

“Pah! Russian or something.” His face had taken on a pinker shade than even that imparted by the Sudan sun. “Wasting valuable time with-with dime-store trinkets!” He drew back his arm and hurled the wrist set high out over the stream. It flashed momentarily in the sunlight before plummeting down into the mud by the water’s edge. The professor stared after it for a few seconds and then turned back to Magendorf, his breathing once again normal. Magendorf extended a mug full of steaming brown liquid.

“Ah, splendid,” Zeiblemann said in a suddenly agreeable voice. “Just the thing.” He settled himself into a folding canvas chair and accepted the proffered mug eagerly. “I’ll tell you one thing that does look interesting, Ruddi,” he went on, nodding toward the table. “That piece of skull in the first tray-number nineteen. Have you noticed the formation of the brow ridges? Now, it could well be an example of…”

In the mud by the side of the stream below, the wrist unit rocked back and forth to the pulsing ripples that every few seconds rose to disturb the delicate equilibrium of the position into which it had fallen. After a while, a rib of sand beneath it was washed away and it tumbled over into a hollow, where it lodged among the swirling, muddy water. By nightfall, the lower half of the casing was already embedded in silt. By the following morning, the hollow had disappeared. Just one arm of the bracelet remained, standing up out of the sand below the rippling surface. The arm bore an inscription, which, if translated, would have read: KORIEL.

The End

Conclusion

It was a good fun story. Right?

Is it really too difficult to believe that there are intelligence’s older than the human race? Or, that they mastered space travel long, long before our ancestors even considered to climb down from the tree? Are these concepts so alien as to be automatically discounted and considered to be “tin foil hat” conspiracy nonsense?

We need to consider everything when look at the world through the eyeglasses of modern life. No matter how outrageous it appears, the truth is something that should not elude us.

Do you want more?

I have more most excellent science fiction stories in my Fictional Story Index, here…

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“He Who Shrank” (Full Text) by Henry Hasse

This is a fine short science fiction story that I have never forgotten. I must have read it when I was in my middle teenage years. When I ran across it the other day, I felt that I just had to include it in my internet collection here. There’s nothing really special or noteworthy about this story, except that it is unique and a fun read.

Please enjoy.

The greatest scientist the world has ever had has invented a  extraordinary new means of exploring the world of the infinitely small,  and sends his devoted assistant - notwithstanding his objections to the  scheme - on a mind-boggling series of adventures exploring the infinite  series of concentric universes contained within the most minute particle  (!!), thus providing the scope and scale of one of the most ambitious  and wide-ranging and thought-provoking science-fiction stories ever.

This powerful saga was first published in the August 1936 issue of  Amazing Stories.

He Who Shrank

YEARS, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!

That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.

"They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time."

I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:

"Only a half year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of  utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I  turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the  worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost complete  rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary  life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of  discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race."

He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new peculiar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.

"And for these things they call me great! For these puny discoveries  they heap honors on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They  disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I  care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it  lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were  but accidental discoveries on my part—to which I gave hardly a thought.  Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten  years, ever suspected that all my labors and experiments were pointed  toward one end, and one end alone."

He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.

"And at last I have attained the end," he almost whispered, holding the  tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial  light in the ceiling. "Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless  experimenting, and now, here in my hand—success!"

The Professor’s manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the submerged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.

"Immense!" he exclaimed. "Immense! Why—why it’s so immense that—. But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself."

At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.

Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.

"Look!" he gestured toward the night sky. "The unknown! Does it not  fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day travelling out there  among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret  of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a  sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind.  Within a month I could solve the puny difficulty that confronts them;  could, but I won’t. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste  their lives away, what do I care about them?"

I wondered what he was driving at, but realized that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:

"And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the  planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit  them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own  life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point  away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: ’We  can now realize as never before the truly staggering expanse of the  universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have traveled  a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.’

 "Thus they would believe. Only I would know how wrong they were, for I  can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are  fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed.  Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor  deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!"

“But, Professor,” I interposed, “just think—”

"Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the universe, to  determine what it is, the manner and the purpose and the secret of its  creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For  thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing,  you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I  assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial,  and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me."

Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.

"Wait!" he said. "Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked  to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of  my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations.  And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had theretofore been only a  theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other  planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which  the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others,  each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just  as our own is in reality.

"And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in  one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless numbers of  these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space  between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend  through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having  penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.

"All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a  whole, form—what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great,  ultramacrocosmic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of  sand, or wisp of smoke, or—good God!—an eyelash of some creature living  on that world!"

I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be—yet what did I or anyone know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?

“It can’t be!” I burst out. “It’s incredible, it’s—monstrous!”

"Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an  electron whirling around the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one  of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions  forming—"

“For God’s sake, stop!” I cried. “I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on—forever! And besides,” I added lamely, “what has all this to do with—your discovery, the fluid you showed me?”

"Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the  infinitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not  follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it  must exist identically in the atoms below us?"

I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorizing. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:

"If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would  pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are everywhere. In  every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute,  and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they  are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause  every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and  proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to  my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an  atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!"

When he had stopped speaking I said calmly: “You are mad.”

He was imperturbed.

"I expected you to say that," he answered. "It is  only natural that that should be your reaction to all that I have said.  But no, I am not mad, it is merely that you are unacquainted with the  marvelous propensities of `Shrinx.’ But I promised that you should see  for yourself, and that you shall. You shall be the first to go down into  the atomic universe."

My original opinion in regard to his state of mind remained unshaken.

“I am sure you mean well, Professor,” I said, “but I must decline your offer.”

He went on as though I hadn’t spoken:

"There are several reasons why I want to send you before I myself make  the trip. In the first place, once you make the trip there can be no  returning, and there are a number of points I want to be quite clear on.  You will serve as my advance guard, so to speak."

“Professor, listen. I do not doubt that the stuff you call ’Shrinx’ has very remarkable properties. I will even admit that it will do all you say it will do. But for the past month you have worked day and night, with scarcely enough time out for food and hardly any sleep at all. You should take a rest, get away from the laboratory for awhile.”

"I shall keep in contact with your consciousness," he said, "through a  very ingenious device I have perfected. I will explain it to you later.  The `Shrinx’ is introduced directly into the blood stream. Shortly  thereafter your shrinkage should begin, and continue at moderate speed,  never diminishing in the least degree so long as the blood continues to  flow in your body. At least, I hope it never diminishes. Should it, I  shall have to make the necessary alterations in the formula. All this is  theoretical of course, but I am sure it will all work according to  schedule, and quite without harm."

I had now lost all patience. “See here, Professor,” I said crossly, “I refuse to be the object of any of your wild-sounding experiments. You should realize that what you propose to do is scientifically impossible. Go home and rest—or go away for a while—”

Without the slightest warning he leaped at me, snatching an object from the table. Before I could take a backward step I felt a needle plunge deep into my arm, and cried out with the pain of it. Things became hazy, distorted. A wave of vertigo swept over me. Then it passed, and my vision cleared. The Professor stood leering before me.

"Yes, I’ve worked hard and I’m tired. I’ve worked thirty years, but I’m  not tired enough nor fool enough to quit this thing now, right on the  verge of the climax!"

His leer of triumph gave way to an expression almost of sympathy.

"I am sorry it had to come about this way," he said, "but I saw that you  would never submit otherwise. I really am ashamed of you. I didn’t  think you would doubt the truth of my statements to the extent of really  believing me insane. But to be safe I prepared your allotment of the  `Shrinx’ in advance, and had it ready; it is now coursing through your  veins, and it should be but a short time before we observe the effects.  What you saw in the vial is for myself when I am ready to make the trip.  Forgive me for having to administer yours in such an undignified  manner."

So angered was I at the utter disregard he had shown for my personal feelings, that I hardly heard his words. My arm throbbed fiercely where the needle had plunged in. I tried to take a step toward him, but not a muscle would move. I struggled hard to break the paralysis that was upon me, but could not move a fraction of an inch from where I stood.

The professor seemed surprised too, and alarmed.

"What, paralysis? That is an unforeseen circumstance! You see, it is  even as I said: the properties of `Shrinx’ are marvelous and many."

He came close and peered intently into my eyes, and seemed relieved.

"However, the effect is only temporary," he assured me. Then added: "But  you will likely be a bit smaller when the use of your muscles returns,  for your shrinkage should begin very shortly now. I must hurry to  prepare for the final step."

He walked past me, and I heard him open his private cupboard again. I could not speak, much less move, and I was indeed in a most uncomfortable, not to mention undignified, position. All I could do was to glare at him when he came around in front of me again. He carried a curious kind of helmet with ear-pieces and goggles attached, and a number of wires running from it. This he placed upon the table and connected the wires to a small flat box there.

All the while I watched him closely. I hadn’t the least idea what he was going to do with me, but never for a moment did I believe that I would shrink into an atomic universe; that was altogether too fantastic for my conception.

As though reading my thought the Professor turned and faced me. He looked me over casually for a moment and then said:

"I believe it has begun already. Yes, I am sure of it. Tell me, do you  not feel it? Do not things appear a trifle larger to you, a trifle  taller? Ah, I forgot that the paralyzing effect does not permit you to  answer. But look at me—do I not seem taller?"

I looked at him. Was it my imagination, or some kind of hypnosis he was asserting on me, that made me think he was growing slightly, ever so slightly, upward even as I looked?

"Ah!" he said triumphantly. "You have noticed. I can tell it by your  eyes. However, it is not I who am growing taller, but you who are  shrinking."

He grasped me by the arms and turned me about to face the wall.

"I can  see that you doubt," he said, "so look! The border on the wall. If you  remember, it used to be about even with your eyes. Now it is fully three  inches higher."

It was true! And I could now feel a tingling in my veins, and a slight dizziness.

"Your shrinkage has not quite reached the maximum speed," he went on.  "When it does, it will remain constant. I could not stop it now even if I  wanted to, for I have nothing to counteract it. Listen closely now, for  I have several things to tell you.

"When you have become small enough I am going to lift you up and place  you on this block of Rehyllium-X here on the table. You will become  smaller and smaller, and eventually should enter an alien universe  consisting of billions and billions of star groups, or galaxies, which  are only the molecules in this Rehyllium-X. When you burst through, your  size in comparison with this new universe should be gigantic. However,  you will constantly diminish, and will be enabled to alight on any one  of the spheres of your own choosing. And—after alighting—you will  continue—always down!"

At the concept I thought I would go mad. Already I had become fully a foot shorter, and still the paralysis gripped me. Could I have moved I would have torn the Professor limb from limb in my impotent rage—though if what he said was true, I was already doomed.

Again it seemed as though he read my mind.

"Do not think too harshly of me," he said. "You should be very grateful  for this opportunity, for you are going on a marvelous venture, into a  marvelous realm. 

Indeed, I am almost jealous that you should be the  first. But with this," he indicated the helmet and box on the table, "I  shall keep contact with you no matter how far you go. Ah, I see by your  eyes that you wonder how such a thing could be possible. Well, the  principle of this device is really very simple. 

Just as light is a form  of energy, so is thought. And just as light travels through an ’ether’  in the form of waves, so does thought. But the thought waves are much  more intangible—in fact, invisible. Nevertheless the waves are there,  and the coils in this box are so sensitized as to receive and amplify  them a million times, much as sound waves might be amplified. 

Through  this helmet I will receive but two of your six sensations: those of  sound,and sight. They are the two major ones, and will be sufficient for  my purpose. Every sight and sound that you encounter, no matter how  minute, reaches your brain and displaces tiny molecules there that go  out in the form of thought waves and finally reach here and are  amplified. 

Thus my brain receives every impression of sight and sound  that your brain sends out."

I did not doubt now that his marvelous “Shrinx” would do everything he said it would do. Already I was but one-third of my original size. Still the paralysis showed no sign of releasing me, and I hoped that the Professor knew whereof he spoke when he said the effect would be but temporary. My anger had subsided somewhat, and I think I began to wonder what I would find in that other universe.

Then a terrifying thought assailed me—a thought that left me cold with apprehension. If, as the Professor had said, the atomic universe was but a tiny replica of the universe we knew, would I not find myself in the vast empty spaces between the galaxies with no air to breathe? In all the vast calculations the Professor had made, could he have overlooked such an obvious point?

Now I was very close to the floor, scarcely a foot high. Everything about me—the Professor, the tables, the walls—were gigantically out of proportion to myself.

The Professor reached down then, and swung me up on the table top amidst the litter of wires and apparatus. He began speaking again, and to my tiny ears his voice sounded a deeper note.

"Here is the block of Rehyllium-X containing the universe you soon will  fathom," he said, placing on the table beside me the square piece of  metal, which was nearly half as tall as I was. 

"As you know, Rehyllium-X  is the densest of all known metals, so the universe awaiting you should  be a comparatively dense one—though you will not think so, with the  thousands of light-years of space between stars. Of course I know no  more about this universe than you do, but I would advise you to avoid  the very bright stars and approach only the dimmer ones. 

Well, this is  good-by, then. We shall never see each other again. Even should I follow  you—as I certainly shall as soon as I have learned through you what  alterations I should make in the formula—it is impossible that I could  exactly trace your course down through all the spheres that you will  have traversed. 

One thing already I have learned: the rate of shrinkage  is too rapid; you will be able to stay on a world for only a few hours.  But perhaps that is best, after all. This is good-by for all time."

He picked me up and placed me upon the smooth surface of the Rehyllium-X. I judged that I must be about four inches tall then. It was with immeasurable relief that I finally felt the paralysis going away. The power of my voice returned first, and expanding my lungs I shouted with all by might.

“Professor!” I shouted. “Professor!”

He bent down over me. To him my voice must have sounded ridiculously high pitched.

“What about the empty regions of space I will find myself in?” I asked a bit tremulously, my mouth close to his ear. “I would last but a few minutes. My life will surely be snuffed out.”

"No, that will not happen," he answered.

His voice beat upon my ear-drums like thunder, and I placed my hands over my ears.

He understood, and spoke more softly.

"You will be quite safe in airless  space," he went on. "In the thirty years I have worked on the problem, I  would not be likely to overlook that point—though I will admit it gave  me much trouble. But as I said, `Shrinx’ is all the more marvelous in  the fact that its qualities are many. After many difficulties and  failures, I managed to instill in it a certain potency by which it  supplies sufficient oxygen for your need, distributed through the blood  stream. It also irradiates a certain amount of heat; and, inasmuch as I  consider the supposed sub-zero temperature of space as being somewhat  exaggerated, I don’t think you need worry about any discomfort in open  space."

III

I was scarcely over an inch in height now. I could walk about, though my limbs tingled fiercely as the paralysis left. I could beat my arms against my sides and swung them about to speed the circulation. The Professor must have thought I was waving good-by. His hand reached out and he lifted me up. Though he tried to handle me gently, the pressure of his fingers bruised. He held me in his open hand and raised me up to the level of his eyes. He looked at me for a long moment and then I saw his lips form the words “good-by.” I was terribly afraid he would drop me to the floor a dizzy distance below, and I was relieved when he lowered me again and I slid off his hand to the block of Rehyllium-X.

The Professor now appeared as a giant towering hundreds of feet into the air, and beyond him, seemingly miles away, the walls of the room extended to unimaginable heights. The ceiling above seemed as far away and expansive as the dome of the sky I had formerly known. I ran to the edge of the block and peered down. It was as though I stood at the top of a high cliff. The face of it was black and smooth, absolutely perpendicular. I stepped back apace lest I lose my footing and fall to my death. Far below extended the vast smooth plain of the table top.

I walked back to the center of the block, for I was afraid of the edge; I might be easily shaken off if the Professor were to accidentally jar the table. I had no idea of my size now, for there was nothing with which I could compare it. For all I knew I might be entirely invisible to the Professor. He was now but an indistinguishable blur, like a far-off mountain seen through a haze.

I now began to notice that the surface of the Rehyllium-X block was not as smooth as it had been. As far as I could see were shallow ravines, extending in every direction. I realized that these must be tiny surface scratches that had been invisible before.

I was standing on the edge of one of these ravines, and I clambered down the side and began to walk along it. It was as straight as though laid by a ruler. Occasionally I came to intersecting ravines, and turned to the left or right. Before long, due to my continued shrinkage, the walls of these ravines towered higher than my head, and it was as though I walked along a narrow path between two cliffs.

Then I received the shock of my life, and my adventure came near to ending right there. I approached one of the intersections. I turned the sharp corner to the right. I came face to face with the How-Shall I-Describe-It.

It was a sickly bluish white in color. Its body was disc-shaped, with a long double row of appendages—legs—on the under side. Hundreds of ugly-looking spikes rimmed the disc body on the outer and upper edges. There was no head and apparently no organ of sight, but dozens of snake-like protuberances waved in my face as I nearly crashed into it. One of them touched me and the creature backed swiftly away, the spikes springing stiffly erect in formidable array.

This impression of the creature flashed upon my mind in the merest fraction of time, for you may be sure that I didn’t linger there to take stock of its pedigree. No indeed. My heart choked me in my fright, I whirled and sped down the opposite ravine. The sound of the thing’s pursuit lent wings to my feet, and I ran as I had never run before. Up one ravine and down another I sped, doubling to right and left in my effort to lose my pursuer. The irony of being pursued by a germ occurred to me, but the matter was too serious to be funny. I ran until I was out of breath, but no matter which way I turned and doubled the germ was always a hundred paces behind me. Its organ of sound must have been highly sensitive. At last I could run no more, and I darted around the next corner and stopped, gasping for breath.

The germ rushed a short distance past me and stopped, having lost the sound of my running. Its dozens of tentacular sound organs waved in all directions. Then it came unhesitatingly toward me, and again I ran. Apparently it had caught the sound of my heavy breathing. Again I dashed around the next corner, and as I heard the germ approach I held my breath until I thought my lungs would burst. It stopped again, waved its tentacles in the air and then ambled on down the ravine. Silently I sneaked a hasty retreat.

Now the walls of these ravines (invisible scratches on a piece of metal!) towered very high above me as I continued to shrink. Now too I noticed narrow chasms and pits all around me, in both the walls at the sides and the surface on which I walked. All of these seemed very deep, and some were so wide that I had to leap across them.

At first I was unable to account for these spaces that were opening all about me, and then I realized with a sort of shock that the Rehyllium-X was becoming porous, so small was I in size! Although it was the densest of all known metals, no substance whatsoever could be so dense as to be an absolute solid.

I began to find it increasingly difficult to progress; I had to get back and make running jumps across the spaces. Finally I sat down and laughed as I realized the futility and stupidity of this. Why was I risking my life by jumping across these spaces that were becoming wider as I became smaller, when I had no particular destination anyway—except down. So I may as well stay in one spot.

No sooner had I made this decision, however, than something changed my mind.

It was the germ again.

I saw it far down the ravine, heading straight for me. It might have been the same one I had encountered before, or its twin brother. But now I had become so small that it was fully fifteen times my own size, and the very sight of the huge beast ambling toward me inspired terror into my heart. Once more I ran, praying that it wouldn’t hear the sound of my flight because of my small size.

Before I had gone a hundred yards I stopped in dismay. Before me yawned a space so wide that I couldn’t have leaped half the distance. There was escape on neither side, for the chasm extended up both the walls. I looked back. The germ had stopped. Its mass of tentacles was waving close to the ground.

Then it came on, not at an amble now but at a much faster rate. Whether it had heard me or had sensed my presence in some other manner, I did not know. Only one thing was apparent: I had but a few split seconds in which to act. I threw myself down flat, slid backward into the chasm, and hung there by my hands.

And I was just in time. A huge shape rushed overhead as I looked up. So big was the germ that the chasm which had appeared so wide to me, was inconsequential to it; it ran over the space as though it weren’t there. I saw the double row of the creature’s limbs as they flashed overhead. Each one was twice the size of my body.

Then happened what I had feared. One of the huge claw-like limbs came down hard on my hand, and a sharp spur raked across it. I could feel the pain all through my arm. The anguish was insufferable. I tried to get a better grip but couldn’t. My hold loosened. I dropped down—down—

IV

“This is the end.”

Such was my thought in that last awful moment as I slipped away into space. Involuntarily I shut my eyes, and I expected at any moment to crash into oblivion.

But nothing happened.

There was not even the usual sickening sensation that accompanies acceleration. I opened my eyes to a Stygian darkness, and put out an exploring hand. It encountered a rough wall which was flashing upward past my face. I was falling, then; but at no such speed as would have been the case under ordinary circumstances. This was rather as if I were floating downward. Or was it downward? I had lost all sense of up or down or sideways. I doubled my limbs under me and kicked out hard against the wall, shoving myself far away from it.

How long I remained falling—or drifting—there in that darkness I have no way of knowing. But it must have been minutes, and every minute I was necessarily growing smaller.

For some time I had been aware of immense masses all around me. They pressed upon me from every side, and from them came a very faint radiance. They were of all sizes, some no larger than myself and some looming up large as mountains. I tried to steer clear of the large ones, for I had no desire to be crushed between two of them. But there was little chance of that. Although we all drifted slowly along through space together, I soon observed that none of these masses ever approached each other or deviated the least bit from their paths.

As I continued to shrink, these masses seemed to spread out, away from me; and as they spread, the light which they exuded became brighter. They ceased to be masses, and became swirling, expanding, individual stretches of mist, milky white.

They were nebulae! Millions of miles of space must stretch between each of them! The gigantic mass I had clung to, drawn there by its gravity, also underwent this nebulosity, and now I was floating in the midst of an individual nebula. It spread out as I became smaller, and as it thinned and expanded, what had seemed mist now appeared as trillions and trillions of tiny spheres in intricate patterns.

I was in the very midst of these spheres! They were all around my feet, my arms, my head! They extended farther than I could reach, farther than I could see. I could have reached out and gathered thousands of them in my hand. I could have stirred and kicked my feet and scattered them in chaotic confusion about me. But I did not indulge in such reckless and unnecessary destruction of worlds. Doubtless my presence here had already done damage enough, displacing millions of them.

I scarcely dared to move a muscle for fear of disrupting the orbits of some of the spheres or wreaking havoc among some solar systems or star groups. I seemed to be hanging motionless among them; or if I were moving in any direction, the motion was too slight to be noticeable. I didn’t even know if I were horizontal or vertical, as those two terms had lost all meaning.

As I became smaller, of course the spheres became larger and the space between them expanded, so that the bewildering maze thinned somewhat and gave me more freedom of movement.
I took more cognizance now of the beauty around me. I remembered what the Professor had said about receiving my thought waves, and I hoped he was tuned in now, for I wouldn’t have had him miss it for anything.

Every hue I had ever known was represented there among the suns and encircling planets: dazzling whites, reds, yellows, blues, greens, violets, and every intermediate shade. I glimpsed also the barren blackness of suns that had burnt out; but these were infrequent, as this seemed to be a very young universe.

There were single suns with the orbital planets varying in number from two to twenty. There were double suns that revolved slowly about each other as on an invisible axis. There were triple suns that revolved slowly about one another—strange as it may seem—in perfect trihedral symmetry. I saw one quadruple sun: a dazzling white, a blue, a green, and a deep orange. The white and the blue circled each other on the horizontal plane while the green and the orange circled on the vertical plane, thus forming a perfect interlocking system. Around these four suns, in circular orbits, sped sixteen planets of varying size, the smallest on the inner orbits and the largest on the outer. The effect was a spinning, concave disc with the white-blue-green-orange rotating hub in the center. The rays from these four suns, as they bathed the rolling planets and were reflected back into space in many-hued magnificence, presented a sight both beautiful and weird.
I determined to alight on one of the planets of this quadruple sun as soon as my size permitted. I did not find it hard to maneuver to a certain extent; and eventually, when I had become much smaller, I stretched alongside this solar system, my length being as great as the diameter of the orbit of the outermost planet! Still I dared not come too close, for fear the gravity of my bulk would cause some tension in the orbital field.

I caught glimpses of the surface of the outer, or sixteenth planet, as it swung past me. Through rifts in the great billowing clouds I saw vast expanses of water, but no land; and then the planet was moving away from me, on its long journey around to the other side of the suns. I did not doubt that by the time it returned to my side I would be very much smaller, so I decided to move in a little closer and try to get a look at the fifteenth planet which was then on the opposite side but swinging around in my direction.

I had discovered that if I doubled up my limbs and thrust out violently in a direction opposite that in which I wished to move, I could make fairly good progress, though the effort was somewhat strenuous. In this manner I moved inward toward the sun-cluster, and by the time I had reached the approximate orbit of the fifteenth planet I had become much smaller—was scarcely one-third as long as the diameter of its orbit! The distance between the orbits of the sixteenth and fifteenth planets must have been about 2,500,000,000 miles, according to the old standards I had known; but to me the distance had seemed but a few hundred yards.

I waited there, and finally the planet hove into view from out of the glorious aurora of the suns. Nearer and nearer it swung in its circle, and as it approached I saw that its atmosphere was very clear, a deep saffron-color. It passed me a scant few yards away, turning lazily on its axis opposite the direction of flight. Here, too, as on planet sixteen, I saw a vast world of water. There was only one fairly large island and many scattered small ones, but I judged that fully nine-tenths of the surface area was ocean.
I moved on in to planet fourteen, which I had noticed was a beautiful golden-green color.

By the time I had maneuvered to the approximate fourteenth orbit I had become so small that the light of the central suns pained my eyes. When the planet came in sight I could easily see several large continents on the lighted side; and as the dark side turned to the suns, several more continents became visible. As it swung past me I made comparisons and observed that I was now about five times as large as the planet. When it came around again I would try to effect a landing. To attempt a contact with it now would likely prove disastrous to both it and myself.

As I waited there and became smaller my thoughts turned to the Professor. If his amazing theory of an infinite number of sub-universes was true, then my adventure had hardly begun; wouldn’t begin until I alighted on the planet. “What would I find there? I did not doubt that the Professor, receiving my thought waves, was just as curious as I. Suppose there was life on this world—hostile life? I would face the dangers while the Professor sat in his laboratory far away. This was the first time that aspect of it occurred to me; it had probably never occurred to the Professor. Strange, too, how I thought of him as “far away.” Why, he could merely have reached out his hand and moved me, universe and all, on his laboratory table!

Another curious thought struck me: here I was waiting for a planet to complete its circle around the suns. To any beings who might exist on it, the elapsed time would represent a year; but to me it would only be a number of minutes.

At that, it returned sooner than I expected it, curving around to meet me. Its orbit, of course, was much smaller than those of the two outer planets. More minutes passed as it came closer and larger. As nearly as I could judge I was about one-fifth its size now. It skimmed past me, so closely that I could have reached out and brushed its atmosphere. And as it moved away I could feel its steady tugging, much as if I were a piece of metal being attracted to a magnet. Its speed did not decelerate in the least, but now I was moving along close behind it. It had “captured” me, just as I had hoped it would. I shoved in closer, and the gravity became a steady and stronger pull. I was “falling” toward it. I swung around so that my feet were closest to it, and they entered the atmosphere, where the golden-green touched the blackness of space. They swung down in a long arc and touched something solid. My “fall” toward the planet ceased. I was standing on one of the continents of this world.

V

So tall was I that the greatest part of my body still extended out into the blackness of space. In spite of the fact that the four suns were the distance of thirteen orbits away, they were of such intense brilliance now that to look directly at them would surely have blinded me. I looked far down my tapering length at the continent on which I stood. Even the multi-colored light reflected from the surface was dazzling to the eye. Too late I remembered the Professor’s warning to avoid the brighter suns. Close to the surface a few fleeting wisps of cloud drifted about my limbs.

As the planet turned slowly on its axis I of course moved with it, and shortly I found myself on the side away from the suns, in the planet’s shadow. I was thankful for this relief—but it was only temporary. Soon I swung around into the blinding light again. Then into the shadow, and again into the light. How many times this happened I do not know, but at last I was entirely within the planet’s atmosphere; here the rays of the sun were diffused, and the light less intense.

Miles below I could see but a vast expanse of yellow surface, stretching unbroken in every direction. As I looked far behind the curving horizon it seemed that I caught a momentary glimpse of tall, silvery towers of some far-off city; but I could not be sure, and when I looked again it had vanished.

I kept my eyes on that horizon, however, and soon two tiny red specks became visible against the yellow of the plain. Evidently they were moving toward me very rapidly, for even as I looked they became larger, and soon took shape as two blood-red spheres. Immediately I visioned them as some terrible weapons of warfare or destruction.

But as they came close to me and swerved up to where I towered high in the thin atmosphere, I could see that they were not solid at all, as I had supposed, but were gaseous, and translucent to a certain extent. Furthermore, they behaved in a manner that hinted strongly of intelligence. Without visible means of propulsion they swooped and circled about my head, to my utter discomfiture. When they came dangerously close to my eyes I raised my hand to sweep them away, but they darted quickly out of reach.

They did not approach me again, but remained there close together, pulsating in mid air. This queer pulsating of their tenuous substance gave me the impression that they were conferring together; and of course I was the object of their conference. Then they darted away in the direction whence they had come.

My curiosity was as great as theirs had seemed to be, and without hesitation I set out in the same direction. I must have covered nearly a mile at each step, but even so, these gaseous entities easily out-distanced me and were soon out of sight. I had no doubt that their destination was the city—if indeed it were a city I had glimpsed. The horizon was closer now and less curved, due to my decrease in height: I judged that I was barely five or six hundred feet tall now.

I had taken but a few hundred steps in the direction the two spheres had gone, when to my great surprise I saw them coming toward me again, this time accompanied by a score of—companions. I stopped in my tracks, and soon they came close and circled about my head. They were all about five feet in diameter, and of the same dark red color. For a minute they darted about as though studying me from every angle; then they systematically arranged themselves in a perfect circle around me. Thin streamers emanated from them, and merged, linking them together and closing the circle. Then other streamers reached slowly out toward me, wavering, cautious.

This, their manner of investigation, did not appeal to me in the least, and I swept my arms around furiously. Instantly all was wild confusion. The circle broke and scattered, the streamers snapped back and they were spheres again. They gathered in a group a short distance away and seemed to consider.

One, whose color had changed to a bright orange, darted apart from them and pulsated rapidly. As clearly as though words had been spoken, I comprehended. The bright orange color signified anger, and he was rebuking the others for their cowardice.

Led by the orange sphere they again moved closer to me, this time they had a surprise for me. A score of streamers flashed out quick as lightning, and cold blue flames spluttered where they touched me. Electric shocks ran through my arms, rendering them numb and helpless. Again they formed their circle around me, again the streamers emerged and completed the circle, and other streamers reached out caressingly. For a moment they flickered about my head, then merged, enveloping it in a cold red radiance. I felt no sensation at all at the touch, except that of cold.

The spheres began to pulsate again in the manner I had observed before, and immediately this pulsating began I felt tiny needlepoints of ice pierce my brain. A question became impinged upon my consciousness more clearly than would have been possible by spoken word:

 "Where do you come from?"

I was familiar with thought transference, had even practiced it to a certain extent, very often with astonishing success. When I heard —or received—that question, I tried hard to bring every atom of my consciousness to bear upon the circumstances that were the cause of my being there. When I had finished my mental narration and my mind relaxed from the tension I had put upon it, I received, the following impressions:

"We receive no answer; your mind remains blank. You are alien, we have  never encountered another of your organism here. A most peculiar  organism indeed is one that becomes steadily smaller without apparent  reason. Why are you here, and where do you come from?"

The icy fingers probed deeper and deeper into my brain, seeming to tear it tissue from tissue.

Again I tried, my mind focusing with the utmost clearness upon every detail, picturing my course from the very minute I entered the Professor’s laboratory to the present time. When I finished I was exhausted from the effort.

Again I received the impression: "You cannot bring your mind sufficiently into focus; we receive only fleeting shadows."

One of the spheres again changed to a bright color, and broke from the circle. I could almost imagine an angry shrug. The streamers relaxed their hold on my brain and began to withdraw—but not before I caught the fleeting impression from the orange one, who was apparently addressing the others:

"—very low mentality."

“You’re not so much yourself!” I said aloud. But of course such a crude method as speech did not register upon them. I wondered at my inability to establish thought communication with these beings. Either my brain was of such a size as to prevent them from receiving the impression (remember I was still a four or five hundred foot giant on this world), or their state of mentality was indeed so much higher than mine, that I was, to them, lower than the lowest savage. Possibly both, more probably the latter.

But they were determined to solve the mystery of my presence before I passed from their world, as I would surely do in a few hours at my rate of shrinkage. Their next move was to place themselves on each side of me in vertical rows extending from far down near the ground up to my shoulders. Again the luminous ribbons reached out and touched me at the various points. Then as at a given signal they rose high into the air, lifting me lightly as a feather! In perfect unison they sped towards their city beyond the horizon, carrying me perpendicularly with them! I marveled at the manner in which such gaseous entities as these could lift and propel such a material giant as myself. Their speed must have exceeded by far that of sound—though on all this planet there was no sound except the sound of my body swishing through the air.

In a very few minutes I sighted the city, which must have covered an area of a hundred miles square near the edge of a rolling green ocean. I was placed lightly on my feet at the very edge of the city, and once more the circle of spheres formed around my head and once more the cold tendrils of light probed my brain.

"You may walk at will about the city," came the thought, "accompanied  by a few of us. You are to touch nothing whatever, or the penalty will  be extreme; your tremendous size makes your presence here among us  somewhat hazardous. When you have become much smaller we shall again  explore your mind, with somewhat different method, and learn your origin  and purpose. We realize that the great size of your brain was somewhat  of a handicap to us in our first attempt. We go now to prepare. We have  awaited your coming for years."

Leaving only a few there as my escort—or guard—the rest of the spheres sped toward a great domed building that rose from a vast plaza in the center of the city.

I was very much puzzled as to their last statement. For a moment I stood there wondering what they could have meant—”we have awaited your coming for years.” Then trusting that this and other things would be answered in the due course of their investigation, I entered the city.

It was not a strange city in so far as architecture was concerned, but it was a beautiful one. I marveled that it could have been conceived and constructed by these confluent globules of gas who at first glance seemed anything but intelligent, reasoning beings.

Tall as I was, the buildings towered up to four and five times my height, invariably ending in domed roofs. There was no sign of a spire or angle as far as my eye could see; apparently they grated harshly on the senses of these beings. The entire plan of the city was of vast sweeping curves and circular patterns, and the effect was striking. There were no preconceived streets or highways, nor connecting spans between buildings, for there was no need of them. The air was the natural habitable element of this race, and I did not see a one of them ever touch the ground or any surface.

They even came to rest in mid air, with a slow spinning motion. Everywhere I passed among them they paused, spinning, to observe me in apparent curiosity, then went on about their business, whatever it was. None ever approached me except my guards.

For several hours I wandered about in this manner, and finally when I was much smaller I was bade to walk towards the central plaza.

In the circular domed building the others awaited my coming, gathered about a dais surmounted by a huge oval transparent screen of glass or some similar substance. This time only one of the spheres made contact with my brain, and I received the following thought:

"Watch."

The screen became opaque, and a vast field of white came into view.

"The great nebula in which this planet is but an infinitesimal speck," came the thought.

The mass drifted almost imperceptibly across the screen, and the thought continued:

"As you see it now, so it appeared to us through our telescopes  centuries ago. Of course the drifting motion of the nebula as a whole  was not perceptible, and what you see is a chemically recorded  reproduction of the view, which has been speeded up to make the motion  visible on the screen. Watch closely now."

The great mass of the nebula had been quiescent, but as I watched, it began to stir and swirl in a huge spiral motion, and a vast dark shadow was thrown across the whole scene. The shadow seemed to recede—no, grew smaller—and I could see that it was not a shadow but a huge bulk. This bulk was entering the nebula, causing it to swirl and expand as millions of stars were displaced and shoved outward.

The thought came again: "The scene has been speeded up a million-fold.  The things you see taking place actually transpired over a great number  of years; our scientists watched the phenomenon in great wonder, and  many were the theories as to the cause of it. You are viewing yourself  as you entered our nebula."

I watched in a few minutes the scene before me, as these sphere creatures had watched it over a period of years; saw myself grow smaller, gradually approach the system of the four suns and finally the gold-green planet itself. Abruptly the screen cleared.

"So we watched and waited your coming for years, not knowing what you  were or whence you came. We are still very much puzzled. You become  steadily smaller, and that we cannot understand. We must hurry. Relax.  Do not interfere with our process by trying to think back to the  beginning, as you did before; it is all laid bare to us in the recesses  of your brain. Simply relax, think of nothing at all, watch the screen."

I tried to do as he said, again I felt the cold probing tendrils in my brain, and a lethargy came over my mind. Shadows flashed across the screen, then suddenly a familiar scene leaped into view: the Professor’s laboratory as I had last seen it, on the night of my departure. No sooner had this scene cleared than I entered the room, exactly as I had on that night. I saw myself approach the table close behind the Professor, saw him standing as he had stood, staring out at the night sky; saw his lips move.

The spheres about me crowded close to the screen, seemed to hang intent on every motion that passed upon it, and I sensed great excitement among them. I judged that the one who was exploring my mind, if not all of them, were somehow cognizant not only of the words the Professor and I spoke in those scenes, but of their meaning as well.

I could almost read the Professor’s lips as he spoke. I saw the utter amazement, then incredulity, then disbelief, on my features as he propounded his theory of macrocosmic worlds and still greater macrocosmic worlds. I saw our parley of words, and finally his lunge toward me and felt again the plunge of the needle into my arm.

As this happened the spheres around me stirred excitedly.

I saw myself become smaller, smaller, to be finally lifted onto the block of Rehyllium-X where I became still smaller and disappeared. I saw my meeting with the germ, and my wild flight; my plunge into the abyss, and my flight down through the darkness, during which time the entire screen before me became black. The screen was slightly illuminated again as I traveled along with the great masses all around me, and then gradually across the screen spread the huge nebula, the same one these sphere creatures had seen through their telescopes centuries ago.

Again the screen cleared abruptly, became transparent.

"The rest we know," came the thought of the one who had searched my  brain. "The rest the screen has already shown. He—the one who invented  the—what he called ’Shrinx’—he is a very great man. Yours has indeed  been a marvelous experience, and one which has hardly begun. We envy  you, lucky being; and at the same time we are sorry for you. Anyway, it  is fortunate for us that you chose our planet on which to alight, but  soon you will pass away even as you came, and that we cannot, and would  not, prevent. In a very few minutes you will once more become of  infinitesimal size and pass into a still smaller universe. We have  microscopes powerful enough to permit us to barely glimpse this smaller  atomic universe, and we shall watch your further progress into the  unknown until you are gone from our sight forever."

I had been so interested in the familiar scenes on the screen that I had lost all conception of my steady shrinkage. I was now very much smaller than those spheres around me.

I was as interested in them as they were in me, and I tried to flash the following thought:

"You say that you envy me, and are sorry for me. Why should that be?"

The thought came back immediately:

"We cannot answer that. But it is  true; wonderful as are the things you will see in realms yet to come,  nevertheless you are to be pitied. You cannot understand at present, but  some day you will."

I flashed another thought:

"Your organism, which is known to me as  gaseous, seems as strange to me as mine, a solid, must seem to you. You  have mentioned both telescopes and microscopes, and I cannot conceive  how beings such as yourselves, without organs of sight, can number  astronomy and microscopy among the sciences."

"Your own organs of sight," came back the answer, "which you call  ’eyes,’ are not only superfluous, but are very crude sources of  perception. I think you will grant that loss of them would be a terrible  and permanent handicap. Our own source of perception is not confined  to any such conspicuous organs, but envelops the entire outer surface of  our bodies. We have never had organs and appendages such as those with  which you are endowed so profusely, for we are of different substance;  we merely extend any part of our bodies in any direction at will. But  from close study of your structure, we conclude that your various organs  and appendages are very crude. I predict that by slow evolution of your  own race, such frailties will disappear entirely."

"Tell me more about your own race," I went on eagerly.

 "To tell everything there is to tell," came the answer, "would take much  time; and there is little time left. We have a very high sociological  system, but one which is not without its faults, of course. We have  delved deep into the sciences and gone far along the lines of fine  arts—but all of our accomplishments along these lines would no doubt  appear very strange to you. You have seen our city. It is by no means  the largest, nor the most important, on the planet. When you alighted  comparatively near, reports were sent out and all of our important  scientists hurried here. We were not afraid because of your presence,  but rather, were cautious, for we did not know what manner of being you  were. The two whom you first saw, were sent to observe you. They had  both been guilty of a crime against the community, and were given the  choice of the punishment they deserved, or of going out to investigate  the huge creature that had dropped from the sky. They accepted the  latter course, and for their bravery—for it was bravery—they have been  exonerated."

VI

I would have liked greatly to ask more questions, for there were many phases that puzzled me; but I was becoming so very small that further communication was impossible. I was taken to a laboratory and placed upon the slide of a microscope of strange and intricate construction and my progress continued unabated down into a still smaller atomic universe.

The method was the same as before. The substance became open and porous, spread out into open space dotted with the huge masses which in turn became porous and resolved into far flung nebulae.

I entered one of the nebulae and once more star-systems swung all around me. This time I approached a single sun of bright yellow hue, around which swung eight planets. I maneuvered to the outermost one, and when my size permitted, made contact with it.

I was now standing on an electron, one of billions forming a microscopic slide that existed in a world which was in turn only an electron in a block of metal on a laboratory table!

Soon I reached the atmosphere, and miles below me I could see only wide patches of yellow and green. But as I came nearer to the surface more of the details became discernible. Almost at my feet a wide yellow river wound sluggishly over a vast plateau which fell suddenly away into a long line of steep precipices. At the foot of these precipices stretched a great green expanse of steaming jungle, and farther beyond a great ocean, smooth as green glass, curved to the horizon. A prehistoric world of jungles and great fern-like growths and sweltering swamps and cliffs. Not a breeze stirred and nowhere was there sight of any living thing.
I was standing in the jungle close to the towering cliffs, and for a half mile in every direction the trees and vegetation were trampled into the soil where my feet had swung down and contacted.

Now I could see a long row of caves just above a ledge half way up the side of the cliff. And I did not doubt that in each cave some being was peering furtively out at me. Even as I watched I saw a tiny figure emerge and walk out on the ledge. He was very cautious, ready to dash back into the cave at any sign of hostility on my part, and his eyes never left me. Seeing that nothing happened, others took heart and came out, and soon the ledge was lined with tiny figures who talked excitedly among themselves and gesticulated wildly in my direction. My coming must surely have aroused all their superstitious fears—a giant descending out of the skies to land at their very feet.

I must have been nearly a mile from the cliff, but even at that distance I could see that the figures were barbarians, squat and thick muscled, and covered with hair; they were four limbed and stood erect, and all carried crude weapons.

One of them raised a bow as tall as himself and let fly a shaft at me—evidently as an expression of contempt or bravado, for he must have known that the shaft couldn’t reach half the distance. Immediately one who seemed a leader among them felled the miscreant with a single blow. This amused me. Evidently their creed was to leave well enough alone.

Experimentally I took a step toward them, and immediately a long line of bows sprang erect and scores of tiny shafts arched high in my direction to fall into the jungle far in front of me. A warning to keep my distance.

I could have strode forward and swept the lot of them from the ledge; but wishing to show them that my intentions were quite peaceful, I raised my hands and took several backward steps. Another futile volley of arrows. I was puzzled, and stood still; and as long as I did not move neither did they.

The one who had seemed the leader threw himself down flat and, shielding his eyes from the sun, scanned the expanse of jungle below. Then they seemed to talk among themselves again, and gestured not at me, but at the jungle. Then I comprehended. Evidently a hunting party was somewhere in that jungle which spread out around my feet—probably returning to the caves, for already it was nearing dusk, the sun casting weird conflicting streaks across the horizon. These people of the caves were in fear that I would move around too freely and perhaps trample the returning party under foot.

So thinking, I stood quietly in the great barren patch I had levelled, and sought to peer into the dank growth below me. This was nearly impossible, however, for clouds of steam hung low over the tops of the trees.

But presently my ears caught a faint sound, as of shouting, far below me, and then I glimpsed a long single file of the barbarian hunters running at full speed along a well beaten game path. They burst into the very clearing in which I stood, and stopped short in surprise, evidently aware for the first time of my gigantic presence on their world. They let fall the poles upon which were strung the carcasses of the day’s hunt, cast but one fearful look up to where I towered, then as one man fell flat upon the ground in abject terror.

All except one. I doubt if the one, who burst from the tangle of trees last of all, even saw me, so intent was he in glancing back into the darkness from which he fled. At any rate he aroused his companions with a few angry, guttural syllables, and pointed back along the path.

At that moment there floated up to me a roar that lingered loud and shuddering in my ears. At quick instructions from their leader the hunters picked up their weapons and formed a wide semi-circle before the path where they had emerged. The limb of a large tree overhung the path at this point, and the leader clambered up some overhanging vines and was soon crouched upon it. One of the warriors fastened a vine to a large clumsy looking weapon, and the one in the tree drew it up to him. The weapon consisted merely of a large pointed stake some eight feet long, with two heavy stones fastened securely to it at the half way point. The one in the tree carefully balanced this weapon on the limb, directly over the path, point downward. The semicircle of hunters crouched behind stout lances set at an angle in the ground.

Another shuddering roar floated up to me, and then the beast appeared. As I caught sight of it I marvelled all the more at the courage of these puny barbarians. From ground to shoulder the beast must have measured seven feet tall, and was fully twenty feet long. Each of its six legs ended in a wide, horny claw that could have ripped any of the hunters from top to bottom. Its long tapering tail was horny too, giving me the impression that the thing was at least partly reptilian; curved fangs fully two feet long, in a decidedly animal head, offset that impression, however.

For a long moment the monstrosity stood there, tail switching ceaselessly, glaring in puzzlement out upon the circle of puny beings who dared to confront it. Then, as its tail ceased switching and it tensed for the spring, the warrior on the limb above launched his weapon—launched it and came hurtling down with it, feet pressed hard against the heavy stone balance!

Whether the beast below heard some sound or whether a sixth sense warned it, I do not know; but just in time it leaped to one side with an agility belied by its great bulk, and the pointed stake drove deep into the ground, leaving the one who had ridden it lying there stunned.

The beast uttered a snarl of rage; its six legs sprawled outward, its great belly touched the ground. Then it sprang out upon the circle of crouching hunters. Lances snapped at the impact, and the circle broke and fled for the trees. But two of them never rose from the ground, and the lashing homed tail flattened another before he had taken four steps.

The scene took place in a matter of seconds as I towered there looking down upon it, fascinated. The beast whirled toward the fleeing ones and in another moment the destruction would have been terrible, for they could not possibly have reached safety..

Breaking the spell that was on me I swung my hand down in a huge arc even as the beast sprang for a second time. I slapped it in mid air, flattening it against the ground as I would have flattened a bothersome insect. It did not twitch a muscle, and a dark red stain seeped outward from where it lay.

The natives stopped in their flight, for the sound of my hand when I slapped the huge animal had been loud. They jabbered noisily among themselves, but fearfully kept their distance, when they saw me crouched there over the flattened enemy who had been about to wreak destruction among them.

Only one had seen the entire happening. He who had plunged downward from the tree was only momentarily stunned; he had risen dizzily to his feet as the animal charged out among his companions, and had been witness to the whole thing.

Glancing half contemptuously at the others, he now approached me. It must have taken a great deal of courage on his part, for, crouched down as I was, I still towered above the tallest trees. He looked for a moment at the dead beast, then gazed up at me in reverent awe. Falling prone, he beat his head upon the ground several times, and the others followed his example.

Then they all came forward to look at the huge animal.

From their talk and gestures, I gathered that they wanted to take it to the caves; but it would take ten of the strongest of them to even lift it, and there was still a mile stretch of jungle between them and the cliffs.

I decided that I would take it there for them if that was their want. Reaching out, I picked up the leader, the brave one, very gently. Placing him in the cupped hollow of my hand, I swung him far up to the level of my eyes. I pointed at the animal I had slain, then pointed toward the cliffs. But his eyes were closed tightly as if his last moment had come, and he trembled in every limb. He was a brave hunter, but this experience was too much. I lowered him to the ground unharmed, and the others crowded around him excitedly. He would soon recover from his fright, and no doubt some night around the camp fires he would relate this wonderful experience to a bunch of skeptical grandchildren.

Picking the animal up by its tapering tail I strode through the jungle with it, flattening trees at every step and leaving a wide path behind me. I neared the cliffs in a few steps, and those upon the ledge fled into the caves. I placed the huge carcass on the ledge, which was scarcely as high as my shoulders, then turned and strode away to the right, intending to explore the terrain beyond.

For an hour, I walked, passing other tribes of cliff dwellers who fled at my approach. Then the jungle ended in a point by the sea and the line of cliffs melted down into a rocky coast.

It had become quite dark now, there were no moons and the stars seemed dim and far away. Strange night cries came from the jungle, and to my left stretched wide, tangled marshes through which floated vague phosphorescent shapes. Behind me tiny fires sprang up on the face of the cliffs, a welcome sight, and I turned back toward them. I was now so much smaller that I felt extremely uneasy at being alone and unarmed at night on a strange planet abounding in monstrosities.

I had taken only a few steps when I felt, rather than heard, a rush of wings above and behind me. I threw myself flat upon the ground, and just in time, for the great shadowy shape of some huge night-creature swept down and sharp talons raked my back. I arose with apprehension after a few moments, and saw the creature winging its way back low over the marshes. Its wing spread must have been forty feet. I reached the shelter of the cliffs and stayed close to them thereafter.

I came to the first of the shelving ledges where the fires burned, but it was far above me now. I was a tiny being crouched at the base of the cliffs. I, an alien on this world, yet a million years ahead of these barbarians in evolution, peered furtively out into the darkness where glowing eyes and half-seen shapes moved on the edge of the encroaching jungle; and safe in their caves high above me were those so low in the state of evolution that had only the rudiments of a spoken language and were only beginning to learn the value of fire. In another million years perhaps a great civilization would cover this entire globe: a civilization rising by slow degrees from the mire and the mistakes and the myths of the dawn of time. And doubtlessly one of the myths would concern a great god-like figure that descended from the skies, leveled great trees in its stride, saved a famous tribe from destruction by slaying huge enemy beasts, and then disappeared forever during the night. And great men, great thinkers, of that future civilization would say:

"Fie! Preposterous! A stupid myth."

But at the present time the godlike figure which slew enemy beasts by a slap of the hand was scarcely a foot high, and sought a place where he might be safe from a possible attack by those same beasts. At last I found a small crevice, which I squeezed into and felt much safer than I had out in the open.

And very soon I was so small that I would have been unnoticed by any of the huge animals that might venture my way.

VII

At last I stood on a single grain of sand, and other grains towered up like smooth mountains all around me. And in the next few minutes I experienced the change for the third time—the change from microscopic being on a gigantic world to a gigantic being floating amid an endless universe of galaxies. I became smaller, the distance between galaxies widened, solar systems approached and neared the orbit of the outermost planet, I received a very unexpected, but very pleasant, surprise. Instead of myself landing upon one of the planets —and while I was yet far too large to do so—the inhabitants of this system were coming out to land on me!
There was no doubt about it. From the direction of the inner planets a tapering silvery projectile moved toward me with the speed of light. This was indeed interesting, and I halted my inward progress to await developments.

In a few minutes the space rocketship was very close. It circled about me once, then with a great rush of flame and gases from the prow to break the fall, it swooped in a long curve and landed gracefully on my chest! I felt no more jar than if a fly had alighted on me. As I watched it, a square section swung outward from the hull and a number of things emerged. I say “things” because they were in no manner human, although they were so tiny that I could barely distinguish them as minute dots of gold. A dozen of them gathered in a group a short distance away from the space-ship.

After a few moments, to my surprise, they spread huge golden wings, and I gasped at the glistening beauty of them. They scattered in various directions, flying low over the surface of my body. From this I reasoned that I must be enveloped in a thin layer of atmosphere, as were the planets. These bird creatures were an exploring party sent out from one of the inner planets to investigate the new large world which had entered their system and was approaching dangerously close to their own planet.

But, on second thought, they must have been aware—or soon would be—that I was not a world at all, but a living, sentient being. My longitudinal shape should make that apparent, besides the movements of my limbs. At any rate they displayed unprecedented daring by coming out to land on me. I could have crushed their frail ship at the slightest touch or flung it far out into the void beyond their reach.

I wished I could see one of the winged creatures at closer range, but none landed on me again; having traversed and circled me in every direction they returned to the space-ship and entered it.

The section swung closed, gases roared from the stern tubes and the ship swooped out into space again and back toward the sun.

What tiding would they bear to their planet? Doubtless they would describe me as an inconceivably huge monstrosity of outer space. Their scientists would wonder whence I came; might even guess at the truth. They would observe me anxiously through their telescopes. Very likely they would be in fear that I would invade or wreck their world, and would make preparations to repulse me if I came too near.

In spite of these probabilities I continued my slow progress toward the inner planets, determined to see and if possible land upon the planet of the bird creatures. A civilization that had achieved space travel must be a marvelous civilization indeed.

As I made my way through space between the planets by means of my grotesque exertions, I reflected upon another phase. By the time I reached the inner planets I would be so much smaller that I could not determine which of the planets was the one I sought, unless I saw more of the space ships and could follow their direction. Another interesting thought was that the inner planets would have sped around the green sun innumerable times, and years would have passed before I reached there. They would have ample time to prepare for my coming, and might give me a fierce reception if they had many more of the space ships such as the one I had seen.

And they did indeed have many more of them, as I discovered after an interminable length of time during which I had moved ever closer to the sun. A red-tinged planet swung in a wide curve from behind the blazing green of the sun, and I awaited its approach. After a few minutes it was so close that I could see a moon encircling the planet, and as it came still nearer I saw the rocket ships.

This, then, was the planet I sought. But I was puzzled. They surely could not have failed to notice my approach, and I had expected to see a host of ships lined up in formidable array. I saw a host of them all right, hundreds of them, but they were not pointed in my direction at all; indeed, they seemed not to heed me in the least, although I must have loomed large as their planet came nearer.

Perhaps they had decided, after all, that I was harmless.

But what seemed more likely to me was that they were confronted with an issue of vastly more importance than my close proximity. For as I viewed the space ships they were leaving the atmosphere of their planet, and were pointing toward the single satellite. Row upon row, mass upon endless mass they moved outward, hundreds, thousands of them. It seemed as though the entire population was moving en masse to the satellite!

My curiosity was immediately aroused. ’What circumstances or condition would cause a highly civilized race to abandon their planet and flee to the satellite? Perhaps, if I learned, I would not want to alight on that planet. . . .

Impatiently I awaited its return as it moved away from me on its circuit around the sun. The minutes seemed long, but at last it approached again from the opposite direction, and I marvelled at the relativity of size and space and time. A year had passed on that planet and satellite, and many things might have transpired since I had last seen them.

The satellite swung between the planet and myself, and even from my point of disadvantage I could see that many things had indeed transpired. The bird people were building a protective shell around the satellite! Protection—from what? The shell seemed to be of dull gray metal, and already covered half the globe. On the uncovered side I saw land and rolling oceans. Surely, I thought, they must have the means of producing artificial light; but somehow it seemed blasphemous to forever bar the surface from the fresh pure light of the green sun. In a manner I felt sorry for them in their circumstances. But they had their space ships, and in time could move to the vast unexplored fields that the heavens offered.

More than ever I was consumed with curiosity, but was still too large to attempt a contact with the planet, and I let it pass me for a second time. I judged that when it came around again I would be sufficiently small for its gravity to “capture” me and sufficiently large that the “fall” to the surface would in no means be dangerous; and I was determined to alight.

Another wait of minutes, more minutes this time because I was smaller and time for me was correspondingly longer. When the two spheres hove into view again I saw that the smaller one was now entirely clad in its metal jacket, and the smooth unbroken surface shimmered boldly in the green glare of the sun. Beneath that barren metal shell were the bird people with their glorious golden wings, their space ships, their artificial light, and atmosphere, and civilization. I had but a glance for the satellite, however; my attention was for the planet rushing ever closer to me.

Everything passed smoothly and without mishap. I was becoming an experienced “planet hopper.” Its gravity caught me in an unrelenting grip, and I let my limbs rush downward first in their long curve, to land with a slight jar on solid earth far below.

Bending low, I sought to peer into the murky atmosphere and see something of the nature of this world. For a minute my sight could not pierce the half gloom, but gradually the surface became visible. First, I followed my tapering limbs to where they had contacted. As nearly as I could ascertain from my height, I was standing in the midst of what seemed to be a huge mass of crushed and twisted metal!

Now, I thought to myself, I have done it. I have let myself in for it now. I have wrecked something, some great piece of machinery it seems, and the inhabitants will not take the matter lightly. Then I thought: the inhabitants? Who? Not the bird people, for they have fled, have barricaded themselves on the satellite.

Again I sought to pierce the gloom of the atmosphere, and by slow degrees more details became visible. At first my gaze only encompassed a few miles, then more, and more, until at last the view extended from horizon to horizon and included nearly an entire hemisphere.

Slowly the view cleared and slowly comprehension came; and as full realization dawned upon me, I became momentarily panic stricken. I thought insanely of leaping outward into space again, away from the planet, breaking the gravity that held me; but the opposite force of my spring could likely send the planet careening out of its orbit and it and all the other planets and myself might go plunging toward the sun. No, I had put my feet on this planet and I was here to stay.

But I did not feel like staying, for what a sight I had glimpsed! As far as I could see in every direction were huge, grotesque metal structures and strange mechanical contrivances. The thing that terrified me was that these machines were scurrying about the surface all in apparent confusion, seemed to cover the entire globe, seemed to have a complete civilization of their own, and nowhere was there the slightest evidence of any human occupancy, no controlling force, no intelligence, nothing save the machines. And I could not bring myself to believe that they were possessed of intelligence!

Yet as I descended ever closer to the surface I could see that there was no confusion at all as it had seemed at first glance, but rather was there a simple, efficient, systematic order of things. Even as I watched, two strange mechanisms strode toward me on great jointed tripods, and stopped at my very feet. Long, jointed metal arms, with claw-like fixtures at the ends, reached out with uncanny accuracy and precision and began to clear away the twisted debris around my feet. As I watched them I admired the efficiency of their construction. No needless intricacies, no superfluous parts, only the tripods for movement and the arms for clearing. When they had finished they went away, and other machines came on wheels, the debris was lifted by means of cranes and hauled away.

I watched in stupefaction the uncanny activities below and around me. There was no hurry, no rush, but every machine from the tiniest to the largest, from the simplest to the most complicated, had a certain task to perform, and performed it directly and completely, accurately and precisely. There were machines on wheels, on treads, on tracks, on huge multi-jointed tripods, winged machines that flew clumsily through the air, and machines of a thousand other kinds and variations.

Endless chains of machines delved deep into the earth, to emerge with loads of ore which they deposited, to descend again.

Huge hauling machines came and transported the ore to roaring mills.

Inside the mills machines melted the ore, rolled and cut and fashioned the steel.

Other machines builded and assembled and adjusted intricate parts, and when the long process was completed the result was—more machines! They rolled or ambled or flew or walked or rattled away under their own power, as the case might be.

Some went to assist in the building of huge bridges across rivers and ravines.

Diggers went to level down forests and obstructing hills, or went away to the mines.

Others built adjoining mills and factories.

Still others erected strange, complicated towers thousands of feet high, and the purpose of these skeleton skyscrapers I could not determine. Even as I watched, the supporting base of one of them weakened and buckled, and the entire huge edifice careened at a perilous angle. Immediately a host of tiny machines rushed to the scene. Sharp white flames cut through the metal in a few seconds, and the tower toppled with a thunderous crash to the ground.

Again the white-flame machines went to work and cut the metal into removable sections, and hoisters and haulers came and removed them. Within fifteen minutes another building was being erected on the exact spot.

Occasionally something would go wrong—some worn-out part ceased to function and a machine would stop in the middle of its task. Then it would be hauled away to repair shops, where it would eventually emerge good as new.

I saw two of the winged machines collide in mid air, and metal rained from the sky. A half dozen of the tripod clearing machines came from a half dozen directions and the metal was raked into huge piles; then came the cranes and hauling machines.

A great vertical wheel with slanting blades on the rim spun swiftly on a shaft that was borne forward on treads. The blades cut through trees and soil and stone as it bore onward toward the near-by mountains. It slowed down, but did not stop, and at length a straight wide path connected the opposite valley. Behind the wheel came the tripods, clearing the way of all debris, and behind them came machines that laid down long strips of metal, completing the perfect road.

Everywhere small lubricating machines moved about, periodically supplying the others with the necessary oil that insured smooth movement.

Gradually the region surrounding me was being levelled and cleared, and a vast city was rising—a city of meaningless, towering, ugly metal—a city covering hundreds of miles between the mountains and sea—a city of machines—ungainly, lifeless—yet purposeful—for what? What?

In the bay, a line of towers rose from the water like fingers pointing at the sky. Beyond the bay and into the open sea they extended. Now the machines were connecting the towers with wide network and spans. A bridge! They were spanning the ocean, connecting the continents—a prodigious engineering feat. If there were not already machines on the other side, there soon would be. No, not soon. The task was gigantic, fraught with failures, almost impossible. Almost? A world of machines could know no almost. Perhaps other machines did occupy the other side, had started the bridge from there, and they would meet in the middle. And for what purpose?

A great wide river came out of the mountains and went winding toward the sea. For some reason a wall was being constructed diagonally across the river and beyond, to change its course. For some reason—or unreason.

Unreason! That was it! Why, why, why, I cried aloud in an anguish that was real; why all of this? ’What purpose, what meaning, what benefit? A city, a continent, a world, a civilization of machines!

Somewhere on this world there must be the one who caused all this, the one intelligence, human or unhuman, who controls it. My time here is limited, but I have time to seek him out, and if I find him I shall drag him out and feed him to his own machines and put a stop to this diabolism for all time!

I strode along the edge of the sea for five hundred miles, and rounding a sharp point of land, stopped abruptly. There before me stretched a city, a towering city of smooth white stone and architectural beauty. Spacious parks were dotted with winged colonnades and statues, and the buildings were so designed that everything pointed upward, seemed poised for flight.

That was one half of the city.

The other half was a ruinous heap of shattered white stone, of buildings levelled to the ground by the machines, which were even then intent on reducing the entire city to a like state.

As I watched I saw scores of the flame-machines cutting deep into the stone and steel supporting base of one of the tallest buildings. Two of the ponderous air machines, trailing a wide mesh-metal network between them, rose clumsily from the ground on the outskirts of the city. Straight at the building they flew, and passed one on each side of it. The metal netting struck, jerked the machines backward, and the tangled mass of them plunged to the ground far below. But the building, already weakened at the base, swayed far forward, then back, hung poised for a long shuddering moment and then toppled to the ground with a thunderous crash amid a cloud of dust and debris and tangled framework.

The flame-machines moved on to another building, and on a slope near the outskirts two more of the air machines waited. .

Sickened at the purposeless vandalism of it all, I turned inland; and everywhere I strode were the machines, destroying and building, leveling to the ground the deserted cities of the bird people and building up their own meaningless civilization of metal.

At last I came to a long range of mountains which towered up past the level of my eyes as I stood before them. In two steps I stood on the top of these mountains and looked out upon a vast plain dotted everywhere with the grotesque machine-made cities. The machines had made good progress. About two hundred miles to the left a great metal dome rose from the level of the plain, and I made my way toward it, striding unconcerned and recklessly amidst the machines that moved everywhere around my feet.

As I neared the domed structure a row of formidable-looking mechanisms, armed with long spikes, rose up to bar my path. I kicked out viciously at them and in a few minutes they were reduced to tangled scrap, though I received a number of minor scratches in the skirmish. Others of the spiked machines rose up to confront me with each step I took, but I strode through them, kicking them to one side, and at last I stood before an entrance-way in the side of the huge dome. Stooping, I entered, and once inside my head almost touched the roof.

I had hoped to find here what I sought, and I was not disappointed. There in the center of the single spacious room was The Machine of all Machines; the Cause of it All; the Central Force, the Ruler, the Controlling Power of all the diabolism running riot over the face of the planet. It was roughly circular, large and ponderous. It was bewilderingly complicated, a maze of gears, wheels, switchboards, lights, levers, buttons, tubing, and intricacies beyond my comprehension. There were circular tiers, and on each tier smaller separate units moved, performing various tasks, attending switchboards, pressing buttons, pulling levers. The result was a throbbing, rhythmic, purposeful unit. I could imagine invisible waves going out in every direction.

I wondered what part of this great machine was vulnerable. Silly thought. No part. Only it—itself. It was The Brain.

The Brain. The Intelligence. I had searched for it, and I had found it. There it was before me. Well, I was going to smash it. I looked around for some kind of weapon, but finding none, I strode forward bare-handed.

Immediately a square panel lighted up with a green glow, and I knew that The Brain was aware of my intent. I stopped. An odd sensation swept over me, a feeling of hate, of menace. It came from the machine, pervaded the air in invisible waves.

“Nonsense,” I thought; “it is but a machine after all. A very complicated one, yes, perhaps even possessed of intelligence; but it only has control over other machines, it cannot harm me.”

Again I took a resolute step forward.

The feeling of menace became stronger, but I fought back my apprehension and advanced recklessly. I had almost reached the machine when a wall of crackling blue flame leaped from floor to roof. If I had taken one more step I would have been caught in it.

The menace, and hate, and imagined rage at my escape, rolled out from the machine in ponderous, almost tangible waves, engulfing me, and I retreated hastily.

I walked back toward the mountains. After all, this was not my world—not my universe. I would soon be so small that my presence amid the machines would be extremely dangerous, and the tops of the mountains was the only safe place. I would have liked to smash The Brain and put an end to it all, but anyway, I thought, the bird people were now safe on the satellite, so why not leave this lifeless world to the machines?

It was twilight when I reached the mountains, and from a high grassy slope—the only peaceful place on the entire planet, I imagined—I looked out upon the plain. Tiny lights appeared as the machines moved about, carrying on their work, never resting. The clattering and clanking of them floated faintly up to me and made me glad that I was a safe distance from it all.

As I stood out toward the dome that housed The Brain, I saw what I had failed to see before. A large globe rested there on a frame-work, and there seemed to be unusual activity around it.

A vague apprehension tightened around my brain as I saw machines enter this globe, and I was half prepared for what happened next. The globe rose lightly as a feather, sped upward with increasing speed, out of the atmosphere and into space, where, as a tiny speck, it darted and maneuvered with perfect ease. Soon it reappeared, floated gracefully down upon the framework again, and the machines that had mechanically directed its flight disembarked from it.

The machines had achieved space travel! My heart sickened with sudden realization of what that meant. They would build others—were already building them. They would go to other worlds, and the nearest one was the satellite . . . . encased in its protective metal shell . . . .

But then I thought of the white-flame machines that I had seen cut through stone and metal in a few seconds . . . .

The bird people would no doubt put up a valiant fight. But as I compared their rocket projectiles against the efficiency of the globe I had just seen, I had little doubt as to the outcome. They would eventually be driven out into space again to seek a new world, and the machines would take over the satellite, running riot as they had done here. They would remain there just as long as The Brain so desired, or until there was no more land for conquest. Already this planet was over-run, so they were preparing to leave.

The Brain. An intricate, intelligent mechanical brain, glorying in its power, drunk with conquest. Where had it originated? The bird people must have been the indirect cause, and no doubt they were beginning to realize the terrible menace they had loosed on the universe.

I tried to picture their civilization as it had been long ago before this thing had come about. I pictured a civilization in which machinery played a very important part. I pictured the development of this machinery until the time when it relieved them of many tasks. I imagined how they must have designed their machines with more and more intricacy, more and more finesse, until only a few persons were needed in control. And then the great day would come, the supreme day, when mechanical parts would take the place of those few.

That must have indeed been a day of triumph. Machines supplying their every necessity, attending to their every want, obeying their every whim at the touch of a button. That must have been Utopia achieved!

But it had proven to be a bitter Utopia. They had gone forward blindly and recklessly to achieve it, and unknowingly they had gone a step too far. Somewhere, amid the machines they supposed they had under their control, they were imbued with a spark of intelligence. One of the machines added unto itself—perhaps secretly; built and evolved itself into a terribly efficient unit of inspired intelligence. And guided by that intelligence, other machines were built and came under its control. The rest must have been a matter of course. Revolt and easy victory.

So I pictured the evolution of the mechanical brain that even now was directing activities from down there under its metal dome.

And the metal shell around the satellite—did not that mean that the bird people were expecting an invasion? Perhaps, after all, this was not the original planet of the bird people; perhaps space travel was not an innovation among the machines. Perhaps it was on one of the far inner planets near the sun that the bird people had achieved the Utopia that proved to be such a terrible nemesis; perhaps they had moved to the next planet, never dreaming that the machines could follow; but the machines had followed after a number of years, the bird people being always driven outward, the machines always following at leisure in search of new spheres of conquest. And finally the bird people had fled to this planet, and from it to the satellite; and realizing that in a few years the machines would come again in all their invincibility, they had then ensconced themselves beneath the shell of metal.

At any rate: they did not flee to a far-away safe spot in the universe as they could have very easily done. Instead, they stayed; always one sphere ahead of the marauding machines, they must always be planning a means of wiping out the spreading evil they had loosed.

It might be that the shell around the satellite was in some way a clever trap! But so thinking, I remembered again the white-flame machines and the deadly efficiency of the globe I had seen, and then my hopes faded away.

Perhaps some day they would eventually find a way to check the spreading menace. But on the other extreme, the machines might spread out to other solar systems, other galaxies, until some day, a billion years hence, they would occupy every sphere in this universe . . . .

Such were my thoughts as I lay prone there upon the grassy slope and looked down into the plain, down upon the ceaseless clatter and the ceaseless moving of lights in the dark. I was very small now; soon, very soon, I would leave this world.

My last impression was of a number of the space globes, barely discernible in the dusk below; and among them towering up high and round, was one much larger than the others, and I could guess which machine would occupy that globe.

And my last thought was a regret that I hadn’t made a more determined effort to destroy that malicious mechanism, The Brain.
So I passed from this world of machines—the world that was an electron on a grain of sand that existed on a prehistoric world that was but an electron on a microscope-slide that existed on a world that was but an electron in a piece of Rehyllium-X on the Professor’s laboratory table.

VIII

It is useless to go on. I have neither the time nor the desire to relate in detail all the adventures that have befallen me, the universes I have passed into, the things I have seen and experienced and learned on all the worlds since I left the planet of the machines.

Ever smaller cycles . . . . infinite universes . . . . never ending . . . . each presenting something new . . . . some queer variation of life or intelligence . . . . Life? Intelligence? Terms I once associated with things animate, things protoplasmic and understandable. I find it hard to apply them to all the divergencies of shape and form and construction I have encountered . . . .

Worlds young . . . . warm . . . . volcanic and steaming . . . . the single cell emerging from the slime of warm oceans to propagate on primordial continents . . . . other worlds, innumerable . . . . life divergent in all branches from the single cell . . . . amorphous globules . . . . amphibian . . . . crustacean . . . . reptilian . . . . plant . . . . insect . . . . bird . . . . mammal . . . . all possible variations of combinations . . . . biological monstrosities indescribable . . . .

Other forms beyond any attempt at classification . . . . beyond all reason or comprehension of my puny mind . . . . essences of pure flame . . . . others gaseous, incandescent and quiescent alike . . . . plant forms encompassing an entire globe . . . . crystalline beings sentient and reasoning . . . great shimmering columnar forms, seemingly liquid, defying gravity by some strange power of cohesion . . . . a world of sound-vibrations, throbbing, expanding, reverberating in unbroken echoes that nearly drove me crazy . . . . globular brain-like masses utterly dissociated from any material substance . . . . intra-dimensional beings, all shapes and shapeless . . . . entities utterly incapable of registration upon any of my senses except the sixth, that of instinct . . . .

Suns dying .. . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more meager years of sustenance . . . . great cavities . . . . beds of evaporated seas . . . . small furry animals scurrying to cover at my approach . . . . desolation. . . . ruins crumbling surely into the sands of barren deserts, the last mute evidence of vanished civilizations . . . .
Other worlds . . . . a-flourished with life . . . . blessed with light and heat . . . . staggering cities . . . . vast populations . . . . ships plying the surface of oceans, and others in the air . . . . huge observatories . . . . tremendous strides in the sciences . . . .

Space flight . . . . battles for the supremacy of worlds . . . . blasting rays of super-destruction . . . . collision of planets . . . . disruption of solar systems . . . cosmic annihilation . . . .

Light space . . . . a universe with a tenuous, filmy something around it, which I burst through . . . . all around me not the customary blackness of outer space I had known, but light . . . . filled with tiny dots that were globes of darkness . . . . that were burnt-out suns and lifeless planets . . . . nowhere a shimmering planet, nowhere a flaming sun . . . . only remote specks of black amid the light-satiated emptiness . . . .

How many of the infinitely smaller atomic cycles I have passed into, I do not know. I tried to keep count of them at first, but somewhere between twenty and thirty I gave it up; and that was long ago.

Each time I would think: “This cannot go on forever—it cannot; surely this next time I must reach the end.”

But I have not reached the end.

Good God—how can there be an end? Worlds composed of atoms . . . . each atom similarly composed . . . . The end would have to be an indestructible solid, and that cannot be; all matter divisible into smaller matter . . . .

What keeps me from going insane? I want to go insane!

I am tired . . . . a strange tiredness neither of mind nor body. Death would be a welcome release from the endless fate that is mine.

But even death is denied me. I have sought it . . . . I have prayed for it and begged for it . . . . but it is not to be.

On all the countless worlds I have contacted, the inhabitants were of two distinctions: they were either so low in the state of intelligence that they fled and barricaded themselves against me in superstitious terror—or were so highly intellectual that they recognized me for what I was and welcomed me among them. On all but a few worlds the latter was the case, and it is on these types that I will dwell briefly.

These beings—or shapes or monstrosities or essences—were in every case mentally and scientifically far above me. In most cases they had observed me for years as a dark shadow looming beyond the farthest stars, blotting out certain star-fields and nebulae . . . . and always when I came to their world they welcomed me with scientific enthusiasm.

Always they were puzzled as to my steady shrinking, and always when they learned of my origin and the manner of my being there, they were surprised and excited.

In most cases gratification was apparent when they learned definitely that there were indeed great ultramacrocosmic universes. It seemed that all of them had long held the theory that such was the case.

On most of the worlds, too, the beings—or entities—or whatever the case might be—were surprised that the Professor, one of my fellow creatures, had invented such a marvelous vitalized element as “Shrinx.”

"Almost unbelievable," was the general consensus of opinion;  "scientifically he must be centuries ahead of the time on his own  planet, if we are to judge the majority of the race by this creature  here"—meaning me.

In spite of the fact that on nearly every world I was looked upon as mentally inferior, they conversed with me and I with them, by various of their methods, in most cases different variations of telepathy. They learned in minute detail and with much interest all of my past experiences in other universes. They answered all of my questions and explained many things besides, about their own universe and world and civilization and scientific achievements, most of which were completely beyond my comprehension, so alien were they in nature.

And of all the intra-universal beings I have had converse with, the strangest were those essences who dwelt in outer space as well as on various planets; identifiable to me only as vague blots of emptiness, total absences of light or color or substance; who impressed upon me the fact that they were Pure Intelligences, far above and superior to any material plane; but who professed an interest in me, bearing me with them to various planets, revealing many things and treating me very kindly. During my sojourn with them I learned from experience the total subservience of matter to influences of mind. On a giant mountainous world I stepped out upon a thin beam of light stretched between two crags, and willed with all my consciousness that I would not fall. And I did not.

I have learned many things. I know that my mind is much sharper, more penetrative, more grasping, than ever before. And vast fields of wonder and knowledge lie before me in other universes yet to come.

But in spite of this, I am ready for it all to end. This strange tiredness that is upon me—I cannot understand it. Perhaps some invisible radiation in empty space is satiating me with this tiredness.

Perhaps it is only that I am very lonely. How very far away I am from my own tiny sphere! Millions upon millions . . . . trillions upon trillions . . . . of light-years . . . . Light years! Light cannot measure the distance. And yet it is no distance: I am in a block of metal on the Professor’s laboratory table . . . .

Yet how far away into space and time I have gone! Years have passed, years far beyond my normal span of life. I am eternal.
Yes, eternal life . . . . that men have dreamed of . . . . prayed for . . . . sought after . . . . is mine—and I dream and pray and seek for death!

Death. All the strange beings I have seen and conversed with, have denied it. I have implored many of them to release me painlessly and for all time—but to no avail. Many of them were possessed of the scientific means to stop my steady shrinkage—but they would not stop it. None of them would hinder me, none of them would tamper with the things that were. Why? Always I asked them why, and they would not answer.

But I need no answer. I think I understand. These beings of science realized that such an entity as myself should never be . . . . that I am a blasphemy upon all creation and beyond all reason . . . . they realized that eternal life is a terrible thing . . . . a thing not to be desired . . . . and as punishment for delving into secrets never meant to be revealed, none of them will release me from my fate . . . .

Perhaps they are right, but oh, it is cruel! Cruel! The fault is not mine, I am here against my own will.

And so I continue ever down, alone and lonely, yearning for others of my kind. Always hopeful—and always disappointed.

So it was that I departed from a certain world of highly intelligent gaseous beings; a world that was in itself composed of a highly rarefied substance bordering on nebulosity. So it was that I became even smaller, was lifted up in a whirling, expanding vortex of the dense atmosphere, and entered the universe which it composed.

Why I was attracted by that tiny, far away speck of yellow, I do not know. It was near the center of the nebula I had entered. There were other suns far brighter, far more attractive, very much nearer. This minute yellow sun was dwarfed by other suns and sun-clusters around it—seemed insignificant and lost among them. And why I was drawn to it, so far away, I cannot explain.

But mere distance, even space distance, was nothing to me now. I had long since learned from the Pure Intelligence the secret of propulsion by mind influence, and by this means I propelled myself through space at any desired speed not exceeding that of light; as my mind was incapable of imagining speed faster than light, I of course could not cause my material body to exceed it.

So I neared the yellow sun in a few minutes, and observed that it had twelve planets. And as I was far too large to yet land on any sphere, I wandered far among other suns, observing the haphazard construction of this universe, but never losing sight of the small yellow sun that had so intrigued me. And at last, much smaller, I returned to it.

And of all the twelve planets, one was particularly attractive to me. It was a tiny blue one. It made not much difference where I landed, so why should I have picked it from among the others? Perhaps only a whim—but I think the true reason was because of its constant pale blue twinkling, as though it were beckoning to me, inviting me to come to it. It was an unexplainable phenomenon; none of the others did that. So I moved closer to the orbit of the blue planet, and landed upon it.

As usual I didn’t move from where I stood for a time, until I could view the surrounding terrain; and then I observed that I had landed in a great lake—a chain of lakes. A short distance to my left was a city miles wide, a great part of which was inundated by the flood I had caused.

Very carefully, so as not to cause further tidal waves, I stepped from the lake to solid ground, and the waters receded somewhat.
Soon I saw a group of five machines flying toward me; each of them had two wings held stiffly at right angles to the body. Looking around me I saw others of these machines winging toward me from every direction, always in groups of five, in V formation. When they had come very close they began to dart and swoop in a most peculiar manner, from them came sharp staccato sounds, and I felt the impact of many tiny pellets upon my skin! These beings were very warlike, I thought, or else very excitable.

Their bombardment continued for some time, and I began to find it most irritating; these tiny pellets could not harm me seriously, could not even pierce my skin, but the impact of them stung. I could not account for their attack upon me, unless it be that they were angry at the flood I had caused by my landing. If that were the case they were very unreasonable, I thought; any damage I had done was purely unintentional, and they should realize that.
But I was soon to learn that these creatures were very foolish in many of their actions and manners; they were to prove puzzling to me in more ways than one.

I waved my arms around, and presently they ceased their futile bombardment, but continued to fly around me.

I wished I could see what manner of beings flew these machines. They were continually landing and rising again from a wide level field below.

For several hours they buzzed all around while I became steadily smaller. Below me I could now see long ribbons of white that I guessed were roads. Along these roads crawled tiny vehicles, which soon became so numerous that all movement came to a standstill, so congested were they. In the fields a large part of the populace had gathered, and was being constantly augmented by others.

At last I was sufficiently small so that I could make out closer details, and I looked more intently at the beings who inhabited this world. My heart gave a quick leap then, for they somewhat resembled myself in structure. They were four-limbed and stood erect, their method of locomotion consisting of short jerky hops, very different from the smooth gliding movement of my own race. Their general features were somewhat different too—seemed grotesque to me—but the only main difference between them and myself was that their bodies were somewhat more columnar, roughly oval in shape and very thin, I would say almost frail.

Among the thousands gathered there were perhaps a score who seemed in authority. They rode upon the backs of clumsy looking, four-footed animals, and seemed to have difficulty in keeping the excited crowd under control. I, of course, was the center of their excitement; my presence seemed to have caused more consternation here than upon any other world.

Eventually a way was made through the crowd and one of the ponderous four-wheeled vehicles was brought along the road opposite to where I stood. I supposed they wanted me to enter the rough boxlike affair, so I did so, and was hauled with many bumps and jolts over the rough road toward the city I had seen to the left. I could have rebelled at this barbarous treatment, but I reflected that I was still very large and this was probably the only way they had of transporting me to wherever I was going.

It had become quite dark, and the city was aglow with thousands of lights. I was taken into a certain building, and at once many important looking persons came to observe me.

I have stated that my mind had become much more penetrative than ever before, so I was not surprised to learn that I could read many of the thoughts of these persons without much difficulty. I learned that these were scientists who had come here from other immediate cities as quickly as possible—most of them in the winged machines, which they called “planes”—when they had learned of my landing here. For many months they had been certain that I would land. They had observed me through their telescopes, and their period of waiting had been a speculative one. And I could now see that they were greatly puzzled, filled with much wonderment, and no more enlightenment about me than they had been possessed of before.

Though still very large, I was becoming surely smaller, and it was this aspect that puzzled them most, just as it had on all the other worlds. Secondly in their speculations was the matter of where I had come from.

Many were the theories that passed among them. Certain they were that I had come a far distance. Uranus? Neptune? Pluto? I learned that these were the names of the outmost planets of this system. No, they decided; I must have come a much farther distance than that. Perhaps from another far-away galaxy of this universe! Their minds were staggered at that thought. Yet how very far away they were from the truth.

They addressed me in their own language, and seemed to realize that it was futile. Although I understood everything they said and everything that was in their minds, they could not know that I did, for I could not answer them. Their minds seemed utterly closed to all my attempts at thought communication, so I gave it up.

They conversed then among themselves, and I could read the hopelessness in their minds. I could see, too, as they discussed me, that they looked upon me as being abhorrent, a monstrosity. And as I searched the recesses of their minds, I found many things.

I found that it was the inherent instinct of this race to look upon all unnatural occurrences and phenomena with suspicion and disbelief and prejudiced mind.

I found that they had great pride for their accomplishments in the way of scientific and inventive progress. Their astronomers had delved a short distance into outer space, but considered it a very great distance; and having failed to find signs of intelligent life upon any immediate sphere, they leaped blindly and fondly to the conclusion that their own species of life was the dominant one in this solar system and perhaps—it was a reluctant perhaps—in the entire universe.

Their conception of a universe was a puny one. True, at the present time there was extant a theory of an expanding universe, and in that theory at least they were correct, I knew, remembering the former world I had left—the swirling, expanding wisp of gaseous atmosphere of which this tiny blue sphere was an electron. Yes, their “expanding universe” theory was indeed correct. But very few of their thinkers went beyond their own immediate universe—went deeply enough to even remotely glimpse the vast truth.

They had vast cities, yes. I had seen many of them from my height as I towered above their world. A great civilization, I had thought then. But now I know that great cities do not make great civilizations. I am disappointed at what I have found here, and cannot even understand why I should be disappointed, for this blue sphere is nothing to me and soon I will be gone on my eternal journey downward . . . .

Many things I read in these scientists’ minds—things clear and concise, things dim and remote; but they would never know.

And then in the mind of one of the persons, I read an idea. He went away, and returned shortly with an apparatus consisting of wires, a headphone, and a flat revolving disc. He spoke into an instrument, a sort of amplifier. Then a few minutes later he touched a sharp pointed instrument to the rotating disc, and I heard the identical sounds reproduced which he had spoken. A very crude method, but effective in a certain way. They wanted to register my speech so that they would have at least something to work on when I had gone.

I tried to speak some of my old language into the instrument. I had thought I was beyond all surprises, but I was surprised at what happened. For nothing happened. I could not speak. Neither in the old familiar language I had known so long ago, nor in any kind of sound. I had communicated so entirely by thought transference on so many of the other worlds, that now my power of vocal utterance was gone.

They were disappointed. I was not sorry, for they could not have deciphered any language so utterly alien as mine was.

Then they resorted to the mathematics by which this universe and all universes are controlled; into which mathematical mold the eternal All was cast at the beginning and has moved errorlessly since. They produced a great chart which showed the conglomerated masses of this and other galaxies. Then upon a black panel set in the wall, was drawn a circle—understandable in any universe—and around it ten smaller circles. This was evidently their solar system, though I could not understand why they drew but ten circles when I had seen twelve planets from outer space. Then a tiny spot was designated on the chart, the position of this system in its particular galaxy. Then they handed the chart to me.

It was useless. Utterly impossible. How could I ever indicate my own universe, much less my galaxy and solar system, by such puny methods as these? How could I make them know that my own universe and planet were so infinitely large in the scheme of things that theirs were practically non-existent? How could I make them know that their universe was not outside my own, but on my planet?—superimposed in a block of metal on a laboratory table, in a grain of sand, in the atoms of glass in a microscopic slide, in a drop of water, in a blade of grass, in a bit of cold flame, in a thousand other variations of elements and substances all of which I had passed down into and beyond, and finally in a wisp of gas that was the cause of their “expanding universe.” Even could I have conversed with them in their own language I could not have made them grasp the vastness of all those substances existing on worlds each of which was but an electron of an atom in one of trillions upon trillions of molecules of an infinitely larger world! Such a conception would have shattered their minds.

It was very evident that they would never be able to establish communication with me even remotely, nor I with them; and I was becoming very impatient. I wanted to be out of the stifling building, out under the night sky, free and unhampered in the vast space which was my abode.

Upon seeing that I made no move to indicate on the chart which part of their puny universe I came from, the scientists around me again conversed among themselves; and this time I was amazed at the trend of their thoughts.

For the conclusion which they had reached was that I was some freak of outer space which had somehow wandered here, and that my place in the scale of evolution was too far below their own for them to establish ideas with me either by spoken language (of which they concluded I had none) or by signs (which I was apparently too barbaric to understand)!! This—this was their unanimous conclusion! This, because I had not uttered any language for them to record, and because the chart of their universe was utterly insignificant to me! Never did it occur to them that the opposite might be true—that I might converse with them but for the fact that their minds were too weak to register my thoughts!

Disgust was my reaction to these short-sighted conclusions of their unimaginable minds—disgust which gave way to an old emotion, that of anger.

And as that one impulsive, rising burst of anger flooded my mind, a strange thing happened:

Every one of the scientists before me dropped to the floor in a state of unconsciousness.

My mind had, indeed, become much more penetrative than ever before. No doubt my surge of anger had sent out intangible waves which had struck upon their centers of consciousness with sufficient force to render them insensible.

I was glad to be done with them. I left the four walls of the building, emerged into the glorious expansive night under the stars and set out along the street in a direction that I believed would lead me away from the city. I wanted to get away from it, away from this world and the people who inhabited it.

As I advanced along the streets all who saw me recognized me at once and most of them fled unreasonably for safety. A group of persons in one of the vehicles tried to bar my progress, but I exercised my power of anger upon them; they drooped senselessly and their vehicle crashed into a building and was demolished.

In a few minutes the city was behind me and I was striding down one of the roads, destination unknown; nor did it matter, except that now I was free and alone as it should be. I had but a few more hours on this world.

And then it was that the feeling came upon me again, the strange feeling that I had experienced twice before: once when I had selected the tiny orange sun from among the millions of others, and again when I had chosen this tiny blue planet. Now I felt it for a third time, more strongly than ever, and now I knew that this feeling had some very definite purpose for being. It was as though something, some power beyond question, drew me irresistibly to it; I could not resist, nor did I want to. This time it was very strong and very near.

Peering into the darkness along the road, I saw a light some distance ahead and to the left, and I knew that I must go to that light.

When I had come nearer I could see that it emanated from a house set far back in a grove of trees, and I approached it without hesitation. The night was warm, and a pair of double windows opened upon a well-lighted room. In this room was a man.

I stepped inside and stood motionless, not yet knowing why I should have been drawn there.

The man’s back was toward me. He was seated before a square dialed instrument, and seemed to be listening intently to some report coming from it. The sounds from the box were unintelligible to me, so I turned my attention to reading the man’s mind as he listened, and was not surprised to learn that the reports concerned myself.

“—casualties somewhat exaggerated, though the property damage has reached millions of dollars,” came the news from the box. “Cleveland was of course hardest hit, though not unexpectedly, astronomical computators having estimated with fair accuracy the radius of danger. The creature landed in Lake Erie only a few miles east of the city. At the contact the waters rose over the breakwater with a rush and inundated nearly one-third of the city before receding, and it was well that the greater part of the populace had heeded the advance warnings and fled . . . . all lake towns in the vicinity have reported heavy property damage, and cities as far east as Erie, and as far west as Toledo, have reported high flood waters . . . . all available Government combat planes were rushed to the scene in case the creature should show signs of hostility . . . . scientific men who have awaited the thing’s landing for months immediately chartered planes for Cleveland . . . . despite the elaborate cordons of police and militiamen, the crowds broke through and entered the area, and within an hour after the landing roads in every direction were congested with traffic . . . . for several hours scientists circled and examined the creature in planes, while its unbelievable shrinkage continued . . . . the only report we have from them is that, aside from the contour of its great bell-shaped torso, the creature is quite amazingly correct anatomically . . . . an unofficial statement from Dr. Hilton U. Cogsworthy of the Alleghany Biological Society, is to the effect that such a creature isn’t. That it cannot possibly exist. That the whole thing is the result of some kind of mass hypnotism on a gigantic scale. This, of course, in lieu of some reasonable explanation. . . . many persons would like to believe the ’mass hypnotism’ theory, and many always will; but those who have seen it and taken photographs of it from every angle know that it does exist and that its steady shrinking goes on . . . . Professor James L. Harvey of Miami University has suffered a stroke of temporary insanity and is under the care of physicians. The habitual curiosity seekers who flocked to the scene are apparently more hardened . . . . the latest report is that the creature, still very large, has been transported under heavy guard to the Cleveland Institute of Scientific Research, where is gathered every scientist of note east of the Mississippi . . . . stand by for further news flashes . . . . “

The voice from the box ceased, and as I continued to read the mind of the man whose back was toward me, I saw that he was deeply absorbed in the news he had heard. And the mind of this person was something of a puzzle to me. He was above the average intelligence of those on this world, and was possessed of a certain amount of fundamental scientific knowledge; but I could see immediately that his was not a scientifically trained mind. By profession he was a writer—one who recorded fictitious “happenings” in the written language, so that others might absorb and enjoy them.

And as I probed into his mind I was amazed at the depth of imagination there, a trait almost wholly lacking in those others I had encountered, the scientists. And I knew that at last here was one with whose mind I might contact . . . . here was one who was different from the others . . . . who went deeper . . . . who seemed on the very edge of the truth. Here was one who thought: “—this strange creature, which has landed here . . . . alien to anything we have ever known . . . . might it not be alien even to our universe? . . . . the strange shrinking . . . . from that phenomenon alone we might conclude that it has come an inconceivable distance . . . . its shrinking may have begun hundreds, thousands of years ago . . . . and if we could but communicate with it, before it passes from Earth forever, what strange things might it not tell us!”

The voice came from the box again, interrupting these thoughts in his mind.

“Attention! Flash! The report comes that the alien space-creature, which was taken to the Scientific Research Institute for observation by scientists, has escaped, after projecting a kind of invisible mind force which rendered unconscious all those within reach. The creature was reported seen by a number of persons, after it left the building. A police squad car was wrecked as a direct result of the creature’s “mind force,” and three policemen were injured, none seriously. It was last seen leaving the city by the north-east, and all persons are ordered to be on the lookout and to report immediately if it is sighted.”

Again the report from the box ceased, and again I probed into the man’s mind, this time deeper, hoping to establish a contact with it which would allow for thought-communication.

I must have at least aroused some hidden mind-instinct, for he whirled to face me, overturning his chair. Surprise was on his face, and something in his eyes that must have been fear.

"Do not be alarmed," I flashed. "Be seated again."

I could see that his mind had not received my thought. But he must have known from my manner that I meant no harm, for he resumed his seat. I advanced further into the room, standing before him. The fear had gone out of his eyes and he only sat tensely staring at me, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.

"I know that you would like to learn things about myself," I telepathed;  "things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know."

Reading his mind I could see that he had not received the thought, so I probed even deeper and again flashed the same thought. This time he did receive it, and there was an answering light in his eyes.

He said “Yes,” aloud.

"Those others, your scientists," I went on, "would never have believed  nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to  receive my thoughts, which they are not."

He received and comprehended that thought, too, but I could see that this was a great strain on his mind and could not go on for long.

"Yours is the only mind I have encountered here with which I could  establish thought," I continued, "but even now it is becoming weakened  under the unaccustomed strain. I wish to leave my record and story with  you, but it cannot be by this means. I can put your mind under a  hypnotic influence and impress my thoughts upon your subconscious mind,  if you have some means of recording them. But you must hurry; I have  only a few more hours here at the most, and in your entire lifetime it  would be impossible for you to record all that I could tell."

I could read doubt in his mind. But only for one instant did he hesitate. Then he rose and went to a table where there was a pile of smooth white paper and a sharp pointed instrument—pen—for recording my thoughts in words of his own language.

"I am ready," was the thought in his mind.

So I have told my story. Why? I do not know, except that I wanted to. Of all the universes I have passed into, only on this blue sphere have I found creatures even remotely resembling myself. And they are a disappointment; and now I know that I shall never find others of my kind. Never, unless—

I have a theory. Where is the beginning or the end of the eternal All I have been traversing? Suppose there is none? Suppose that, after traversing a few more atomic cycles, I should enter a universe which seemed somehow familiar to me; and that I should enter a certain familiar galaxy, and approach a certain sun, a certain planet—and find that I was back where I started from so long ago: back on my own planet, where I should find the Professor in the laboratory still receiving my sound and sight impressions!! An insane theory; an impossible one. It shall never be.

Well, then, suppose that after leaving this sphere—after descending into another atomic universe—I should choose not to alight on any planet? Suppose I should remain in empty space, my size constantly diminishing? That would be one way of ending it all, I suppose. Or would it? Is not my body matter, and is not matter infinite, limitless, eternal? How then could I ever reach a “nothingness?” It is hopeless. I am eternal. My mind too must be eternal or it would surely have snapped long ago at such concepts.

I am so very small that my mind is losing contact with the mind of him who sits here before me writing these thoughts in words of his own language, though his mind is under the hypnotic spell of my own and he is oblivious to the words he writes. I have clambered upon the top of the table beside the pile of pages he has written, to bring my mind closer to his. But why should I want to continue the thought-contact for another instant? My story is finished, there is nothing more to tell.

I shall never find others of my kind . . . I am alone . . . . I think that soon, in some manner, I shall try to put an end to it . . . .

I am very small now . . . . the hypnosis is passing from his mind . . . . I can no longer control it . . . . the thought-contact is slipping . . . .

EPILOGUE

National Press-Radio Service, Sept. 29, 1937 (through Cleveland Daily Clarion) :—Exactly one year ago today was a day never to be forgotten in the history of this planet. On that day a strange visitor arrived—and departed.

On September 29, 1936, at 3:31 P.M., that thing from outer space known henceforth only as “The Alien” landed in Lake Erie near Cleveland, causing not so much destruction and terror as great bewilderment and awe, scientists being baffled in their attempts to determine whence it came and the secret of its strange steady shrinking.

Now, on the anniversary of that memorable day, we are presenting to the public a most unusual and interesting document purported to be a true account and history of that strange being, The Alien. This document was presented to us only a few days ago by Stanton Cobb Lentz, renowned author of “The Answer to the Ages” and other serious books, as well as of scores of short stories and books of the widely popular type of literature known as science-fiction.

You have read the above document. While our opinion as to its authenticity is frankly skeptical, we shall print Mr. Lentz’s comment and let you, the reader, judge for yourself whether the story was related to Mr. Lentz by The Alien in the manner described, or whether it is only a product of Mr. Lentz’s most fertile imagination.

“On the afternoon of September 29 a year ago,” states Mr. Lentz, “I fled the city as did many others, heeding the warning of a possible tidal wave, should The Alien land in the lake. Thousands of persons had gathered five or six miles to the south, and from there we watched the huge shape overhead, so expansive that it blotted out the sunlight and plunged that section of the country into a partial eclipse. It seemed to draw nearer by slow degrees until, about 3:30 o’clock, it began its downward rush. The sound of contact as it struck the lake was audible for miles, but it was not until later that we learned the extent of the flood. After the landing all was confusion and excitement as combat planes arrived and very foolishly began to bombard the creature and crowds began to advance upon the scene. The entire countryside being in such crowded turmoil, it took me several difficult hours to return to my home. There I listened to the varied reports of the happenings of the past several hours.

“When I had that strange feeling that someone was behind me, and when I whirled to see The Alien standing there in the room, I do not presume to say that I was not scared. I was. I was very much scared. I had seen The Alien when it was five or six hundred feet tall —but that had been from afar. Now it was only ten or eleven feet tall, but was standing right before me. But my scaredness was only momentary, for something seemed to enter and calm my mind.

“Then, although there was no audible sound, I became aware of the thought: ’I know that you would like to learn things about myself, things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know.’

“This was mental telepathy! I had often used the theory in my stories, but never had I dreamed that I would experience such a medium of thought in real fact. But here it was.

” ’Those others, your scientists,’ came the next thought, ’would never have believed nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to receive my thoughts, which they are not.’ And then I began to feel a strain upon my mind, and knew that I could not stand much more of it.

“Then came the thought that he would relate his story through my sub-conscious mind if I had some means of recording it in my own language. For an instant I hesitated; and then I realized that time was fleeing and never again would I have such an opportunity as this. I went to my desk, where only that morning I had been working on a manuscript. There was paper and ink in plenty.

“My last impression was of some force seeming to spread over my mind; then a terrific dizziness, and the ceiling seemed to crash upon me.

“No time at all had seemed to elapse, when my mind regained its normal faculties; but before me on the desk was a pile of manuscript paper closely written in my own longhand. And—what many persons will find it hard to believe—standing upon that pile of written paper upon my desk top, was The Alien—now scarcely two inches in height—and steadily and surely diminishing! In utter fascination I watched the transformation that was taking place before my eyes—watched until The Alien had become entirely invisible, had descended down into the topmost sheet of paper there on my desk . . . .

“Now I realize that the foregoing document and my explanation of it will be received in many ways. I have waited a full year before making it public. Accept it now as fiction if you wish. There may be some few who will see the truth of it, or at least the possibility; but the vast majority will leap at once to the conclusion that the whole thing is a concoction of my own imagination; that, taking advantage of The Alien’s landing on this planet, I wrote the story to fit the occasion, very appropriately using The Alien as the main theme. To many this will seem all the more to be true, in face of the fact that in most of my science-fiction stories I have poked ridicule and derision and satire at mankind and all its high vaunted science and civilization and achievements—always more or less with my tongue in my cheek however, as the expression has it. And then along comes this Alien, takes a look at us and concludes that he is very disappointed, not to mention disgusted.
“However, I wish to present a few facts to help substantiate the authenticity of the script. Firstly: for some time after awakening from my hypnosis I was beset by a curious dizziness, though my mind was quite clear. Shortly after The Alien had disappeared I called my physician, Dr. C. M. Rollins. After an examination and a few mental tests he was greatly puzzled. He could not diagnose my case; my dizziness was the after effect of a hypnosis of a type he had never before encountered. I offered no explanation except to say that I had not been feeling well for the past several days.

“Secondly: the muscles of my right hand were so cramped from the long period of steady writing that I could not open my fingers. As an explanation I said that I had been writing for hours on the final chapters of my latest book, and Dr. Rollins said: ’Man, you must be crazy.’ The process of relaxing the muscles was painful.
“Upon my request Dr. Rollins will vouch for the truth of the above statements.

“Thirdly: when I read the manuscript the writing was easily recognizable as my own free, swinging longhand up to the last few paragraphs, when the writing became shaky, the last few words terminating in an almost undecipherable scrawl as the Alien’s contact with my mind slipped away.

“Fourthly: I presented the manuscript to Mr. Howard A. Byerson, fiction editor of the National Newspaper Syndicate Service, and at once he misunderstood the entire idea. ’I have read your story, Mr. Lentz,’ he said a few days later, ’and it certainly comes at an appropriate time, right on the anniversary of The Alien’s landing. A neat idea about the origin of The Alien, but a bit farfetched. Now, let’s see, about the price; of course we shall syndicate your story through our National Newspaper chain, and—’

” ’You have the wrong idea,’ I said. ’It is not a story, but a true history of The Alien as related to me by The Alien, and I wish that fact emphasized; if necessary I will write a letter of explanation to be published with the manuscript. And I am not selling you the publication rights, I am merely giving you the document as the quickest and surest way of presenting it to the public.’

” ’But surely you are not serious? An appropriate story by Stanton Cobb Lentz, on the eve of the anniversary of The Alien’s landing, is a scoop; and you—’

” ’I do not ask and will not take a cent for the document,’ I said;

‘you have it now, it is yours, so do with it as you see fit.’

“A memory that will live with me always is the sight of The Alien as last seen by me—as last seen on this earth—as it disappeared into infinite smallness there upon my desk—waving two arms upward as if in farewell . .

“And whether the above true account and history of The Alien be received as such, or as fiction, there can be no doubt that on a not far off September, a thing from some infinite sphere above landed on this earth—and departed.”

The End

Fictional Story Related Index

This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes, you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.

The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson

Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov

Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

My Poetry

Art that Moves Me

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.

Articles & Links

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

“Correspondence Course” (Full Text) by Raymond F. Jones

I like this story. It’s a story that I read years ago, and it contains elements that I really like. (If you care.) It’s just a story, but it’s a fun story, and I hope that you (the reader) will appreciate it.

THE OLD lane from the farmhouse to the letter box down by the road was the same dusty trail that he remembered from eons before. The deep summer dust stirred as his feet moved slowly and haltingly. The marks of his left foot were deep and firm as when he had last walked the lane, but where his right foot moved there was a ragged, continuous line with irregular depressions and there was the sharp imprint of a cane beside the dragging footprints.

He looked up to the sky a moment as an echelon of planes from the advanced trainer base fifty miles away wheeled overhead. A nostalgia seized him, an overwhelming longing for the men he had known —and for Ruth.

He was home; he had come back alive, but with so many gone who would never come back, what good was it?

With Ruth gone it was no good at all. For an instant his mind burned with pain and his eyes ached as if a bomb-burst had blinded him as he remembered that day in the little field hospital where he had watched her die and heard the enemy planes overhead.

Afterwards, he had gone up alone, against orders, determined to die with her, but take along as many Nazis as he could.

But he hadn’t died. He had come out of it with a bullet-shattered leg and sent home to rust and die slowly over many years.

He shook his head and tried to fling the thoughts out of his mind. It was wrong. The doctors had warned him—

He resumed his slow march, half dragging the all but useless leg behind him. This was the same lane down which he had run so fast those summer days so long ago. There was a swimming hole and a fishing pond a quarter of a mile away. He tried to dim his vision with half-shut eyes and remember those pleasant days and wipe out all fear and bitterness from his mind.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mr. McAfee, the rural postman, was late, but Jim Ward could see his struggling, antique Ford raising a low cloud of dust a mile down the road.

Jim leaned heavily upon the stout cedar post that supported the mailbox and when Mr. McAfee rattled up he managed to wave and smile cheerily.

Mr. McAfee adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose with a rapid trombone manipulation.

“Bless me, Jim, it’s good to see you up and around!”

“Pretty good to be up.” Jim managed to force enthusiasm into his voice. But he knew he couldn’t stand talking very long to old Charles McAfee as if everything had not changed since the last time.

“Any mail for the Wards, today?”

The postman shuffled the fistful of mail. “Only one.”

Jim glanced at the return address block and shrugged. “I’m on the sucker lists already. They don’t lose any time when they find out there’s still bones left to pick on. You keep it.”

He turned painfully and faced toward the house. “I’ve got to be getting back. Glad to have seen you, Mr. McAfee.”

“Yeah, sure, Jim. Glad to have seen you. But I . . . er . . . got to deliver the mail—” He held the letter out hopefully.

“O.K.” Jim laughed sharply and grasped the circular.

He went only as far as the giant oak whose branches extended far enough to overshadow the mailbox. He sat down in the shade with his back against the great bole and tried to watch the echelon still soaring above the valley through the rifts in the leaf coverage above him. After a time he glanced down at the circular letter from which his fingers were peeling little fragments of paper. Idly, he ripped open the envelope and glanced at the contents. In cheap, garish typograph with splatterings of red and purple ink the words seemed to be trying to jump at him.

SERVICEMAN—WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

You have come back from the wars. You have found life different than you knew it before, and much that was familiar is gone. But new things have come, new things that are here to stay and are a part of the world you are going to live in.

Have you thought of the place you will occupy? Are you prepared to resume life in the ways of peace?

WE CAN HELP YOU

Have you heard of the POWER CO-ORDINATOR? No, of course you haven’t because it has been a hush-hush secret source of power that has been turning the wheels of war industries for many months. But now the secret of this vast source of new power can be told, and the need for hundreds, yes, thousands of trained technicians—such as you, yourself, may become—will be tremendous in the next decade.

LET US PROVE TO YOU

Let us prove to you that we know what we are talking about. We are so certain that you, as a soldier trained in intricate operations of the machines of war, will be interested in this almost miraculous new source of power and the technique of handling it that we are willing to send you absolutely FREE the first three lessons of our twenty-five lesson course that will train you to be a POWER CO-ORDINATOR technician.

Let us prove it to you. Fill out the inclosed coupon and mail it today!

Don’t just shrug and throw this circular away as just another advertisement. MAIL THE COUPON NOW!

Jim Ward smiled reminiscently at the style of the circular. It reminded him of Billy Hensley and the time when they were thirteen. They sent in all the clipped and filled-out coupons they could find in magazines. They had samples of soap and magic tricks and catalogues and even a live bird came as the result of one. They kept all the stuff in Hensley’s attic until Billy’s dad finally threw it all out.

Impulsively, in whimsical tribute to the gone-forever happiness of those days, Jim Ward scratched his name and address in pencil and told the power co-ordinators to send him their three free lessons.

Mr. McAfee had only another mile to go up the road before he came to the end and returned past the Ward farm to Kramer’s Forks. Jim waited and hailed him.

“Want to take another letter?”

The postman halted the clattering Ford and jumped down. “What’s that?”

Jim repeated his request and held up the stamped reply card.

“Take this with you?”

Mr. McAfee turned it over and read every word on the back of the card. “Good thing,” he grunted. “So you’re going to take a correspondence course in this new power what-is-it? I think that’s mighty fine, Jim. Give you new interests—sort of take your mind off things.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jim struggled up with the aid of his cane and the bole of the oak tree. “Better see if I can make it back to the house now.”

All the whimsy and humor had suddenly gone out of the situation.

It was a fantastically short time—three days later—that Mr. McAfee stopped again at the Ward farm. He glanced at the thick envelope in his pack and the return address block it bore. He could see Jim Ward on the farmhouse porch and turned the Ford up the lane. Its rattle made Jim turn his head and open his eyes from the thoughtless blankness into which he had been trying to sink. He removed the pipe from his mouth and watched the car approach.

“Here’s your course,” shouted Mr. McAfee. “Here’s your first lesson!”

“What lesson?”

“The correspondence course you sent for. The power what-is-it? Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Jim. “I’d forgotten all about it. Take the thing away. I don’t want it. It was just a silly joke.”

“You hadn’t ought to feel that way, Jim. After all, your leg is going to be all right. I heard the Doc say so down in the drugstore last night. And everything is going to be all right. There’s no use of letting it get you down. Besides—I got to deliver the mail.”

He tossed the brown envelope on the porch beside Jim. “Brought it up special because I thought you’d be in a hurry to get it.”

Jim smiled in apology. “I’m sorry, Mac. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll study it good and hard this morning right here on the porch.”

Mr. McAfee beamed and nodded and rattled away. Jim closed his eyes again, but he couldn’t find the pleasing blankness he’d found before. Now the screen of his mind showed only the sky with thundering, plummeting engines—and the face of a girl lying still and white with closed eyes.

Jim opened his eyes and his hands slipped to his sides and touched the envelope. He ripped it open and scanned the pages. It was the sort of stuff he had collected as a boy, all right. He glanced at the paragraph headings and tossed the first lesson aside. A lot of obvious stuff about comparisons between steam power and waterfalls and electricity. It seemed all jumbled up like a high school student’s essay on the development of power from the time of Archimedes.

The mimeographed pages were poorly done. They looked as if the stencils had been cut on a typewriter that had been hit on the type faces with a hammer.

He tossed the second lesson aside and glanced at the top sheet of the third. His hand arrested itself midway in the act of tossing this lesson beside the other two. He caught a glimpse of the calculations on an inside page and opened up the booklet.

There was no high school stuff there. His brain struggled to remember the long unused methods of the integral calculus and the manipulation of partial differential equations.

There were pages of the stuff. It was like a sort of beacon light, dim and far off, but pointing a sure pathway to his mind and getting brighter as he progressed. One by one, he followed the intricate steps of the math and the short paragraphs of description between. When at last he reached the final page and turned the book over and scowled heavily the sun was halfway down the afternoon sky.

He looked away over the fields and pondered. This was no elementary stuff. Such math as this didn’t belong in a home study correspondence course. He picked up the envelope and concentrated on the return address block.

All it said was: M. H. Quilcon Schools, Henderson, Iowa. The lessons were signed at the bottom with the mimeographed reproductions of M. H. Quilcon’s ponderous signature.

Jim picked up lesson one again and began reading slowly and carefully, as if hidden between the lines he might find some mystic message.

By the end of July his leg was strong enough for him to walk without the cane. He walked slowly and with a limp and once in a while the leg gave way as if he had a trick knee. But he learned quickly to catch himself before he fell and he reveled in the thrill of walking again.

By the end of July the tenth lesson of the correspondence course had arrived and Jim knew that he had gone as far as he could alone. He was lost in amazement as he moved in the new scientific wonderland that opened up before him. He had known that great strides had been made in techniques and production, but it seemed incredible that such a basic discovery as power co-ordination had been producing war machines these many months. He wondered why the principle had not been applied more directly as a weapon itself—but he didn’t understand enough about it to know whether it could or not. He didn’t even understand yet from where the basic energy of the system was derived.

The tenth lesson was as poorly produced as the rest of them had been, but it was practically a book in its thickness. When he had finished it Jim knew that he had to know more of the background of the new science. He had to talk to someone who knew something about it. But he knew of no one who had ever heard of it. He had seen no advertisements of the M. H. Quilcon Schools.

Only that first circular and these lessons.

As soon as he had finished the homework on lesson ten and had given it into Mr. McAfee’s care Jim Ward made up his mind to go down to Henderson, Iowa, and visit the Quilcon School.

He wished he had retained the lesson material because he could have taken it there faster than it would arrive via the local mail channels.

The streamliner barely stopped at Henderson, Iowa, long enough to allow him to disembark. Then it was gone and Jim Ward stared about him.

The sleepy looking ticket seller, dispatcher, and janitor eyed him wonderingly and spat a huge amber stream across his desk and out the window.

“Looking for somebody, mister?”

“I’m looking for Henderson, Iowa. Is this it?” Jim asked dubiously.

“You’re here, mister. But don’t walk too fast or you’ll be out of it. The city limits only go a block past Smith’s Drugstore.”

Jim noticed the sign over the door and glanced at the inscription that he had not seen before: Henderson, Iowa, Pop. 8o6.

“I’m looking for a Mr. M. H. Quilcon. He runs a correspondence school here somewhere. Do you know of him?”

The depot staff shifted its cud again and spat thoughtfully. “Been here twenty-nine years next October. Never heard a name like that around here, and I know ’em all.”

“Are there any correspondence schools here?”

“Miss Marybell Anne Simmons gives beauty operator lessons once in a while, but that’s all the school of that kind that I know of.”

Disconcerted, Jim Ward murmured his thanks and moved slowly out of the station. The sight before him was dismaying. He wondered if the population hadn’t declined since the estimate on the sign in the station was made.

A small mercantile store that sagged in the middle faced him from across the street. Farther along was a tiny frame building labeled Sheriff’s Office. On his side Jim saw Smith’s Drugstore a couple of hundred feet down from the station with a riding saddle and a patented fertilizer displayed in the window. In the other direction was the combined postoffice, bank and what was advertised as a newspaper and printing office.

Jim strode toward this last building while curious watchers on the porch of the mercantile store stared at him trudging through the dust.
The postmistress glanced up from the armful of mail that she was sorting into boxes as Jim entered. She offered a cheery hello that seemed to tinkle from the buxom figure.

“I’m looking for a man named Quilcon. I thought you might be able to give me some information concerning him.”

“Kweelcon?” She furrowed her brow. “There’s no one here by that name. How do you spell it?”

Before he could answer, the woman dropped a handful of letters on the floor. Jim was certain that he saw the one he had mailed to the school before he left.

As the woman stooped to recover the letters a dark brown shadow streaked across the floor. Jim got the momentary impression of an enormous brown slug moving with lightning speed.

The postmistress gave a scream of anger and scuffled her feet to the door. She returned in a moment.

“Armadillo,” she explained. “Darn thing’s been hanging around here for months and nobody seems to be able to kill it.” She resumed putting the mail in the boxes.

“I think you missed one,” said Jim. She did not have the one that he recognized as the one he’d mailed.

The woman looked about her on the floor. “I got them all, thank you. Now what did you say this man’s name was?”

Jim leaned over the counter and looked at the floor. He was sure—But there was obviously no other letter in sight and there was no place it could have gone.

“Quilcon,” said Jim slowly. “I’m not sure of the pronunciation myself, but that’s the way it seemed it should be.”

“There’s no one in Henderson by that name. Wait a minute now. That’s a funny thing—you know it was about a month ago that I saw an envelope going out of here with a name something like that in the upper left corner. I thought at the time it was a funny name and wondered who put it in, but I never did find out and I thought I’d been dreaming. How’d you know to come here looking for him?”

“I guess I must have received the mail you saw.”

“Well, you might ask Mr. Herald. He’s in the newspaper office next door. But I’m sure there’s no one in this town by that name.”

“You publish a newspaper here?”

The woman laughed. “We call it that. Mr. Herald owns the bank and a big farm and puts this out free as a hobby. It’s not much, but everybody in town reads it. On Saturday he puts out a regular printed edition. This is the daily.”

She held up a small mimeographed sheet that was moderately legible. Jim glanced at it and moved towards the door. “Thanks, anyway.”

As he went out into the summer sun there was something gnawing at his brain, an intense you-forgot-something-in-there sort of feeling. He couldn’t place it and tried to ignore it.

Then as he stepped across the threshold of the printing office he got it. That mimeographed newssheet he had seen—it bore a startling resemblance to the lessons he had received from M. H. Quilcon. The same purple ink. Slightly crooked sheets. But that was foolish to try to make a connection there. All mimeographed jobs looked about alike.

Mr. Herald was a portly little man with a fringe around his baldness. Jim repeated his inquiry.

“Quilcon?” Mr. Herald pinched his lips thoughtfully. “No, can’t say as I ever heard the name. Odd name—I’m sure I’d know it if I’d ever heard it.”

Jim Ward knew that further investigation here would be a waste of time. There was something wrong somewhere. The information in his correspondence course could not be coming out of this half dead little town.

He glanced at a copy of the newssheet lying on the man’s littered desk beside an ancient Woodstock. “Nice little sheet you put out there,” said Jim.

Mr. Herald laughed. “Well, it’s not much, but I get a kick out of it, and the people enjoy reading about Mrs. Kelly’s lost hogs and the Dorius kid’s whooping cough. It livens things up.”

“Ever do any work for anybody else—printing or mimeographing?”
“If anybody wants it, but I haven’t had an outside customer in three years.”

Jim glanced about searchingly. The old Woodstock seemed to be the only typewriter in the room.

“I might as well go on,” he said. “But I wonder if you’d mind letting me use your typewriter to write a note and leave in the post-office for Quilcon if he ever shows up.”

“Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

Jim sat down before the clanking machine and hammered out a brief paragraph while Mr. Herald wandered to the back of the shop. Then Jim rose and shoved the paper in his pocket. He wished he had brought a sheet from one of the lessons with him.

“Thanks,” he called to Mr. Herald. He picked up a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper and shoved it in his pocket with the typed sheet.

On the trip homeward he studied the mimeographed sheet until he had memorized every line, but he withheld conclusions until he reached home.

From the station he called the farm and Hank, the hired man, came to pick him up. The ten miles out to the farm seemed like a hundred. But at last in his own room Jim spread out the two sheets of paper he’d brought with him and opened up lesson one of the correspondence course.

There was no mistake. The stencils of the course manuals had been cut on Mr. Herald’s ancient machine. There was the same nick out of the side of the o, and the b was flattened on the bulge. The r was minus half its base.

Mr. Herald had prepared the course.

Mr. Herald must then be M. H. Quilcon. But why had he denied any knowledge of the name? Why had he refused to see Jim and admit his authorship of the course?

At ten o’clock that night Mr. McAfee arrived with a special delivery letter for Jim.

“I don’t ordinarily deliver these way out here this time of night,” he said. “But I thought you might like to have it. Might be something important. A job or something, maybe. It’s from Mr. Quilcon.”

“Thanks. Thanks for bringing it, Mac.”

Jim hurried into his room and ripped open the letter. It read:

Dear Mr. Ward:

Your progress in understanding the principles of power co-ordination are
 exceptional and I am very pleased to note your progress in connection 
with the tenth lesson which I have just received from you.

An unusual opportunity has arisen which I am moved to offer you. There 
is a large installation of a power co-ordination engine in need of vital
 repairs some distance from here. I believe that you are fully qualified
 to work on this machine under supervision which will be provided and 
you would gain some valuable experience. The installation is located 
some distance from the city of Henderson. It is about two miles out on 
the Balmer Road. You will find there the Hortan Machine Works at which 
the installation is located. Repairs are urgently needed and you are the
 closest qualified student able to take advantage of this opportunity 
which might lead to a valuable permanent connection. Therefore, I 
request that you come at once. I will meet you there.

Sincerely,

M. H. Quilcon

For a long time Jim Ward sat on the bed with the letter and the sheets of paper spread out before him. What had begun as a simple quest for information was rapidly becoming an intricate puzzle.

Who was M. H. Quilcon?

It seemed obvious that Mr. Herald, the banker and part-time newspaper publisher, must be Quilcon. The correspondence course manuals had certainly been produced on his typewriter. The chances of any two typewriters having exactly the same four or five disfigurements in type approached the infinitesimal.

And Herald—if he were Quilcon—must have written this letter just before or shortly after Jim’s visit. The letter was certainly a product of the ancient Woodstock.

There was a fascination in the puzzle and a sense of something sinister, Jim thought. Then he laughed aloud at his own melodrama and began repacking the suitcase. There was a midnight train he could get back to Henderson.

It was hot afternoon again when he arrived in the town for the second time. The station staff looked up in surprise as he got off the train.

“Back again? I thought you’d given up.”

“I’ve found out where Mr. Quilcon is. He’s at the Hortan Machine Works. Can you tell me exactly where that is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s supposed to be about two miles out of town on Balmer Road.”

“That’s just the main street of town going on down through the Willow Creek district. There’s no machine works out there. You must be in the wrong state, mister. Or somebody’s kidding you.”

“Do you think Mr. Herald could tell me anything about such a machine shop. I mean, does he know anything about machinery or things related to it?”

“Man, no! Old man Herald don’t care about nothing but money and that little fool paper of his. Machinery! He can’t hook up anything more complicated than his suspenders.”

Jim started down the main street toward the Willow Creek district. Balmer Road rapidly narrowed and turned, leaving the town out of sight behind a low rise. Willow Creek was a glistening thread in the midst of meadow land.

There was no more unlikely spot in the world for a machine works of any kind, Jim thought. Someone must be playing an utterly fantastic joke on him. But how or why they had picked on him was mystifying.
At the same time he knew within him that it was no joke. There was a deadly seriousness about it all. The principles of power co-ordination were right. He had slaved and dug through them enough to be sure of that. He felt that he could almost build a power co-ordinating engine now with the proper means—except that he didn’t understand from where the power was derived!

In the timelessness of the bright air about him, with the only sound coming from the brook and the leaves on the willow trees beside it, Jim found it impossible to judge time or distance.

He paced his steps and counted until he was certain that at least two miles had been covered. He halted and looked about almost determined to go back and re-examine the way he had come.

He glanced ahead, his eyes scanning every minute detail of the meadowland. And then he saw it.

The sunlight glistened as if on a metal surface. And above the bright spot in the distance was the faintly readable legend:

HORTAN MACHINE WORKS

Thrusting aside all judgment concerning the incredibility of a machine shop in such a locale, he crossed the stream and made his way over the meadow toward the small rise.

As he approached, the machine works appeared to be merely a dome-shaped structure about thirty feet in diameter and with an open door in one side. He came up to it with a mind ready for anything. The crudely painted sign above the door looked as if it had been drawn by an inexpert barn painter in a state of intoxication.

Jim entered the dimly lit interior of the shop and set his case upon the floor beside a narrow bench that extended about the room.
Tools and instruments of unfamiliar design were upon the bench and upon the walls. But no one appeared.

Then he noticed an open door and a steep, spiral ramp that led down to a basement room. He stepped through and half slid, half walked down to the next level.

There was artificial lighting by fluorescent tubes of unusual construction, Jim noticed. But still no sign of anyone. And there was not an object in the room that appeared familiar to him. Articles that vaguely resembled furniture were against the walls.

He felt uneasy amid the strangeness of the room and he was about to go back up the steep ramp when a voice came to him.

“This is Mr. Quilcon. Is that you, Mr. Ward?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“I am in the next room, unable to come out until I finish a bit of work I have started. Will you please go on down to the room below? You will find the damaged machinery there. Please go right to work on it. I’m sure that you have a complete understanding of what is necessary. I will join you in a moment.”

Hesitantly, Jim turned to the other side of the room where he saw a second ramp leading down to a brilliantly lighted room. He glanced about once more, then moved down the ramp.

The room was high-ceilinged and somewhat larger in diameter than the others he had seen and it was almost completely occupied by the machine.

A series of close-fitting towers with regular bulbous swellings on their columns formed the main structure of the engine. These were grouped in a solid circle with narrow walkways at right angles to each other passing through them.

Jim Ward stood for a long time examining their surfaces that rose twenty feet from the floor. All that he had learned from the curious correspondence course seemed to fall into place. Diagrams and drawings of such machines had seemed incomprehensible. Now he knew exactly what each part was for and how the machine operated.

He squeezed his body into the narrow walkway between the towers and wormed his way to the center of the engine. His bad leg made it difficult, but he at last came to the damaged structure.

One of the tubes had cracked open under some tremendous strain and through the slit he could see the marvelously intricate wiring with which it was filled. Wiring that was burned now and fused to a mass. It was in a control circuit that rendered the whole machine functionless, but its repair would not be difficult, Jim knew.

He went back to the periphery of the engine and found the controls of a cranelike device which he lowered and seized the cracked sleeve and drew off the damaged part.

From the drawers and bins in the walls he selected parts and tools and returned to the damaged spot.

In the cramped space he began tearing away the fused parts and wiring. He was lost and utterly unconscious of anything but the fascination of the mighty engine. Here within this room was machine capacity to power a great city.

Its basic function rested upon the principle of magnetic currents in contrast to electric currents. The discovery of magnetic currents had been announced only a few months before he came home from the war. The application of the discovery had been swift.

And he began to glimpse the fundamental source of the energy supplying the machine. It was in the great currents of gravitational and magnetic force flowing between the planets and the suns of the universe. As great as atomic energy and as boundless in its resources, this required no fantastically dangerous machinery to harness. The principle of the power co-ordinator was simple.

The pain of his cramped position forced Jim to move out to rest his leg. As he stood beside the engine he resumed his pondering on the purpose it had in this strange location. Why was it built there and what use was made of its power?

He moved about to restore the circulation in his legs and sought to trace the flow of energy through the engine, determine where and what kind of a load was placed upon it.

His search led him below into a third sub-basement of the building and there he found the thing he was searching for, the load into which the tremendous drive of the engine was coupled.

But here he was unable to comprehend fully, for the load was itself a machine of strange design, and none of its features had been covered in the correspondence course.

The machine upstairs seized upon the magnetic currents of space and selected and concentrated those flowing in a given direction.

The force of these currents was then fed into the machines in this room, but there was no point of reaction against which the energy could be applied.

Unless—

The logical, inevitable conclusion forced itself upon his mind. There was only one conceivable point of reaction.

He stood very still and a tremor went through him. He looked up at the smooth walls about him. Metal, all of them. And this room—it was narrower than the one above—as if the entire building were tapered from the dome protruding out of the earth to the basement floor.
The only possible point of reaction was the building itself. But it wasn’t a building.

It was a vessel.

Jim clawed and stumbled his way up the incline into the engine room, then beyond into the chamber above. He was halfway up the top ramp when he heard the voice again.

“Is that you, Mr. Ward? I have almost finished and will be with you in a moment. Have you completed the repairs? Was it very difficult?”

He hesitated, but didn’t answer. Something about the quality of that voice gave him a chill. He hadn’t noticed it before because of his curiosity and his interest in the place. Now he detected its unearthly, inhuman quality.

He detected the fact that it wasn’t a voice at all, but that the words had been formed in his brain as if he himself had spoken them.

He was nearly at the top of the ramp and drew himself on hands and knees to the floor level when he saw the shadow of the closing door sweep across the room and heard the metallic clang of the door. It was sealed tight. Only the small windows—or ports—admitted light.

He rose and straightened and calmed himself with the thought that the vessel could not fly. It could not rise with the remainder of the repair task unfinished—and he was not going to finish it; that much was certain.

“Quilcon!” he called. “Show yourself! Who are you and what do you want of me?”

“I want you to finish the repair job and do it quickly,” the voice replied instantly. “And quickly—it must be finished quickly.”

There was a note of desperation and despair that seemed to cut into Jim. Then he caught sight of the slight motion against the wall beside him.
In a small, transparent hemisphere that was fastened to the side of the wall lay the slug that Jim had seen at the postoffice, the thing the woman had called an “armadillo.” He had not even noticed it when he first entered the room. The thing was moving now with slow pulsations that swelled its surface and great welts like dark veins stood out upon it.
From the golden-hued hemisphere a maze of cable ran to instruments and junction boxes around the room and a hundred tiny pseudo-pods grasped terminals inside the hemisphere.

It was a vessel—and this slug within the hemisphere was its alien, incredible pilot. Jim knew it with startling cold reality that came to him in waves of thought that emanated from the slug called Quilcon and broke over Jim’s mind. It was a ship and a pilot from beyond Earth—from out of the reaches of space.

“What do you want of me? Who are you?” said Jim Ward.

“I am Quilcon. You are a good student. You learn well.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to repair the damaged engine.”

There was something wrong with the creature. Intangibly, Jim sensed it. An aura of sickness, a desperate urgency came to his mind.

But something else was in the foreground of Jim’s mind. The horror of the alien creature diminished and Jim contemplated the miracle that had come to mankind.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said quietly. “Tell me how to build a ship like this for my people and I will fix the engines for you.”

“No! No—there is no time for that. I must hurry—”

“Then I shall leave without any repairs.”

He moved toward the door and instantly a paralyzing wave took hold of him as if he had seized a pair of charged electrodes. It relaxed only as he stumbled back from the door.

“My power is weak,” said Quilcon, “but it is strong enough for many days yet—many of your days. Too many for you to live without food and water. Repair the engine and then I shall let you go.”

“Is what I ask too much to pay for my help?”

“You have had pay enough. You can teach your people to build power co-ordinator machines. Is that not enough?”

“My people want to build ships like this one and move through space.”

“I cannot teach you that. I do not know. I did not build this ship.”

There were surging waves of troubled thought that washed over his mind, but Jim Ward’s tenseness eased. The first fear of totally alien life drifted from his mind and he felt a strange affinity for the creature. It was injured and sick, he knew, but he could not believe that it did not know how the ship was built.

“Those who built this ship come often to trade upon my world,” said Quilcon. “But we have no such ships of our own. Most of us have no desire to see anything but the damp caves and sunny shores of our own world. But I longed to see the worlds from which these ships came.

“When this one landed near my cave I crept in and hid myself. The ship took off then and we traveled an endless time. Then an accident to the engine killed all three of those who manned the ship and I was left alone.

“I was injured, too, but I was not killed. Only the other of me died.” Jim did not understand the queer phrase, but he did not break into Quilcon’s story.

“I was able to arrange means to control the flight of the ship, to prevent its destruction as it landed upon this planet, but I could not repair it because of the nature of my body.”

Jim saw then that the creature’s story must be true.

It was obvious that the ship had been built to be manned by beings utterly unlike Quilcon.

“I investigated the city of yours near by and learned of your ways and customs. I needed the help of one of you to repair the ship. By force I could persuade one of you to do simple tasks, but none so complex as this requires.

“Then I discovered the peculiar customs of learning among you. I forced the man Herald to prepare the materials and send them to you. I received them before the person at the postoffice could see them. I got your name from the newspapers along with several others who were unsatisfactory.

“I had to teach you to understand the power co-ordinator because only by voluntary operation of your highest faculties will you be able to understand and repair the machine. I can assist but not force you to do that.”

The creature began pleading again. “And now will you repair the engine quickly. I am dying—but shall live longer than you—it is a long journey to my home planet, but I must get there and I need every instant of time that is left to me.”

Jim caught a glimpse of the dream vision that was the creature’s home world. It was a place of security and peace—in Quilcon’s terms. But even its alienness did not block out the sense of quiet beauty that Quilcon’s mind transmitted to Jim’s.

They were a species of high intelligence. Exceptionally developed in the laws of mathematics and theory of logic, they were handicapped in bodily development from inquiring into other fields of science whose existence was demonstrated by their logic and their mathematics. The more intellectual among them were frustrated creatures whose lives were made tolerable only by an infinite capacity for stoicism and adaptation.

But of them all, Quilcon was among the most restless and rebellious and ambitious. No one of them had ever dared such a journey as he had taken. A swelling pity and understanding came over Jim Ward.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said desperately. “I’ll repair the engine if you’ll let me have its principles. If you don’t have them, you can get them to me with little trouble. My people must have such a ship as this.”

He tried to visualize what it would mean to Earth to have space flight a century or perhaps five centuries before the slow plodding of science and research might reveal it.

But the creature was silent.

“Quilcon—” Jim repeated. He hoped it hadn’t died.

“I’ll bargain with you,” said Quilcon at last. “Let me be the other of you, and I’ll give you what you want.”

“The other of me? What are you talking about?”

“It is hard for you to understand. It is union—such as we make upon our world. When two or more of us want to be together we go together in the same brain, the same body. I am alone now, and it is an unendurable existence because I have known what it is to have another of me.

“Let me come into your brain, into your mind and live there with you. We will teach your people and mine. We will take this ship to all the universes of which living creatures can dream. It is either this or we both die together, for too much time has gone for me to return. This body dies.”

Stunned by Quilcon’s ultimatum, Jim Ward stared at the ugly slug on the wall. Its brown body was heaving with violent pulsations of pain and a sense of delirium and terror came from it to Jim.

“Hurry! Let me come!” it pleaded.

He could feel sensations as if fingers were probing his cranium looking, pleading for entrance. It turned him cold.

He looked into the years and thought of an existence with this alien mind in his. Would they battle for eventual possession of his body and he perhaps be subjected to slavery in his own living corpse?

He tried to probe Quilcon’s thoughts, but he could find no sense or intent of conquest. There were almost human amenities intermingled with a world of new science and thought.

He knew Quilcon would keep his promise to give the secrets of the ship to the men of Earth. That alone would be worth the price of his sacrifice—if it should be sacrifice.

“Come!” he said quietly.

It was as if a torrent of liquid light were flowing into his brain. It was blinding and excruciating in its flaming intensity. He thought he sensed rather than saw the brown husk of Quilcon quiver in the hemisphere and shrivel like a brown nut.

But in his mind there was union and he paused and trembled with the sudden great reality of what he knew. He knew what Quilcon was and gladness flowed into him like light. A thought soared through his brain: Is sex only in the difference of bodily function and the texture of skin and the tone of voice?

He thought of another day when there was death in the sky and on the Earth below, and in a little field hospital. A figure on a white cot had murmured, “You’ll be all right, Jim. I’m going on, I guess, but you’ll be all right. I know it. Don’t miss me too much.”

He had known there would be no peace for him ever, but now there was peace and the voice of Quilcon was like that voice from long ago, for as the creature probed into his thoughts its inherent adaptability matched its feelings and thought to his and said, “Everything is all right, isn’t it, Jim Ward?”

“Yes . . . yes it is.”

The intensity of his feelings almost blinded him. “And I want to call you Ruth, after another Ruth—”

“I like that name.” There was shyness and appreciation in the tones, and it was not strange to Jim that he could not see the speaker, there was a vision in his mind far lovelier than any Earthly vision could have been.

“We’ll have everything,” he said. “Everything that your world and mine can offer. We’ll see them all.”

But like the other Ruth who had been so practical, this one was, too.

“First we have to repair the engine. Shall we do it, now?”

The solitary figure of Jim Ward moved toward the ramp and disappeared into the depths of the ship.

The End

Movies that Inspired Me

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When Hollywood still knew how to make movies; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

I have composed a number of posts that involved special effects by Ray Harryhausen. I listed them simply because, as a boy, the visuals and the adventure that was portrayed in the movies greatly appealed to me. They influenced me. Which was something that is most certainly lacking in the latest Hollywood fare. (That is, unless you are an LGBT with an inferiority complex.)

Here, I want to discuss another of his great works. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Sinbad and his crew intercept a homunculus carrying a golden tablet. Koura, the creator of the homunculus and practitioner of evil magic, wants the tablet back and pursues Sinbad. Meanwhile Sinbad meets the Vizier who has another part of the interlocking golden map, and they mount a quest across the seas to solve the riddle of the map, accompanied by a slave girl with a mysterious tattoo of an eye on her  palm. They encounter strange beasts, tempests, and the dark interference of Koura along the way.

-AVXHM

The Movie

It all starts to unravel when Sinbad fires an arrow at a strange creature that flies over his ship.

As the creature dodges the arrow, it ends up dropping an amulet it is carrying. Let me pause here for a second. A strange creature? It’s carrying a magic (we suppose, after all what other purpose would an amulet have) amulet, which it drops, and Sinbad gathers up.

Kali is a multi-armed creature creation that Sinbad must battle with. You can well imagine the problems and issues that you must contend with when dealing with a six armed purple creature.

Sinbad makes landfall, and almost immediately meets an evil sorcerer. We know he is evil because he immediately engages Sinbad in fisticuffs. His attempts to forcibly take the amulet from Sinbad is rebuffed.

The sorcerer’s name is Koura. He’s a fellow that you don’t want to get tangled up with.

So Sinbad seeks out a safe haven, and is eventually granted refuge by the benevolent ruler of the city, known as the Grand Vizier. This fellow too has tangled up with Koura. For today he has been forced to hide his face behind a beaten gold mask. You see, his face is all terribly disfigured after Koura burnt it away with a fireball.

Golden Voyage of Sinbad. — Check out the slave girl that tags along with Sinbad. Yowsa! ( Actress Caroline Munro ) This is how she spends the majority of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1973). Yet, despite the ludicrous neckline and the constant layer of oil/sweat she still manages to draw your eyes up and away from her chest and towards her eyes. It takes a lot of presence to up-stage that bust, but Munro had it by the ton.

The Vizier shows Sinbad a companion amulet and the drawing of a third one. All three amulets form a map that leads to a fountain of youth on the island of Lemuria.

Harryhausen’s creations include the winged, miniature homunculus; an  ensorcelled figurehead that tears itself loose from Sinbad’s ship; a  one-eyed centaur; a gryphon that guards the Fountain of Destiny; and,  most impressively, a six-armed statue of Kali which performs an Indian  dance before dueling against Sinbad’s men with six swords. 

It’s really  the Kali sequence that makes this such a memorable film. 

With his  typical attention to detail, Harryhausen hired an Indian dancer (Surya  Kumari, also a noted actress and singer) to choreograph and perform as  Kali with one of her students strapped to her back. 

The dance was then  scored with Indian musicians, and the sudden switch in flavor (as our  ears have already been conditioned to an hour or so of Rózsa’s romantic  adventure music) is in synch with the charged, magical atmosphere of the  statue coming to life. 

For the swordfight, nearly as elaborate as the  celebrated skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts, stunt  choreographer Fernando Poggi tied three of his men together to rehearse  the action with the actors, then removed themselves and let the actors  shadow-box before the cameras, with Harryhausen’s Kali to be added  later. 

It’s a showstopping fight and, it must be said, far more rousing  than the typical poke-with-spears action that so many Harryhausen action  scenes become (or, in fact, the earlier scene with the ship’s  figurehead). It’s one for the highlight reels. 

 -Midnight Only

With the complete amulet, The Grand Vizier will be able to stop Koura’s ravages on the kingdom. And so Sinbad and the Vizier set sail on an expedition to Lemuria.

Listen up. After Caroline Munro was in a 007 film, she entered in one of my all time (yes my absolute all time) favorite cult movies. That’s right. Caroline’s first big role was in 1971, opposite Horror legend Vincent Price in “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” – playing the deceased Mrs. Victoria Regina Phibes. What a woman. What an actress!

However, Koura desires the amulet too. As all bad guys learn sooner or later, there is a price when using dark magic. His use of the amulet has taken it’s tool. For each time he used it, a little bit of life was stolen from him. Thus, he needs and covets that amulet in the vain hope of regaining his youth. You know, the youth and life that each spell he casts steals from him.

Koura sets sail determined to stop them. And thus, the adventure movie begins…

Some Background

It all sort of began with the movie The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). This movie was a landmark in fantasy cinema, and was often imitated over the next decade.

Most importantly, it brought to prominence the name of special effects man Ray Harryhausen and his fantastical creatures. Now, Ray Harryhausen was more than just a specialist in the process of stop-motion animation. He was a genus. Here, it is much like claymation. Created figurines are meticulously moved and photographed one frame at a time.

He was so successful at it that Harryhausen went on to build a substantial career in this field over the next two decades.

He found a nitche in the world of Greek mythology. He would revisit the Sinbad mythos twice, here and later with the movie Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is one of Ray Harryhausen’s most acclaimed works and one that shows him at the height of his art.

The golden youyage of Sinbad. — Ray Harryhausen demonstrates that special effects don’t need to be state of the art to be edge of the seat, this film sees the adventurer and his crew on a quest to defeat evil magician Koura and solve the riddle of a mysterious interlocking golden map. Sinbad must fight his way past several of Harryhausen’s ingenious stop-motion animated monsters along the way, including a one-eyed centaur, and his own ship’s wooden figurehead, magically brought to life.

Most Ray Harryhausen films tend to be set around Harryhausen’s provision of profound creature effects. Which unfortunately tended to make the real actors and their intervening action rather wooden. However, as a child watching these movies, I noticed none of that.

The same is true with the dialog. No matter how chunky or cheesy it appeared, it always appealed to me. The quest for adventure screamed at me, and the livid monsters occupied my young impressionable mind.

The golden voyage of Sinbad 3 — Seriously, just how many movies do you find a griffin doing battle with a minaraur or a cyclops – minataur hybrid? Not often. Well, this movie has this and much, much more.

When I was a child, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) were one and the same – a four-hour Sinbad miniseries, with all the islands, wizards, beautiful girls, and Ray Harryhausen monsters randomly distributed so that I wasn’t exactly sure which belonged to which.

Understand that every trip to the video store meant that I would stand there, staring at all the boxes, ruling out the R-rated films or anything that looked remotely adult (verboten when I was a child), and eventually, inevitably, I would grab a Ray Harryhausen movie and hand it to my mother or father, who would just say, “This one, again?”

Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Mysterious Island (1961), or a Sinbad movie. These films were the foundation stones upon which my imagination was built.

Even though the early 80’s belonged to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, I always held the Harryhausen films in special regard. Before I even learned his name, I knew these films were connected – I recognized the stop-motion animation and the look of the monsters. (Of course that centaur only has one eye. He’s probably related to those cyclopes in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.)

These films had special special effects. Having watched just about every non-R-rated fantasy movie on the video store shelves, I knew there was a significant difference between One Million B.C. (1940), the Victor Mature movie with lizards and armadillos posing as dinosaurs, and One Million Years B.C. (1966), the remake with Harryhausen’s pterodactyls lifting Raquel Welch off the ground.

You can’t dress a lizard up to look like a pterodactyl.

The funny thing is that I was appreciating the films from a point-of-view that was already becoming outdated. The days of stop-motion were coming to an end, with his swan song, Clash of the Titans (1981), released around the time that I was just beginning to appreciate his films.

Though both Lucas and Spielberg used stop-motion effects in Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), by the end of the decade The Abyss (1989) would announce a new direction for cinema tricks.

-Midnight Only

Both Brian Clemens and Ray Harryhausen plunder world mythology somewhat indiscriminately. Which more often than not resulted in a kind of peculiar multi-cultural polyglot. Not that it matters, of course, but it is curious.

The golden voyage of Sinbad 4 — Caroline Munro looks splendid in her costume, low cut almost everywhere. The rest of the cast support well. Tom Baker is excellent as the villain Koura. He makes him sympathetic; what drives him is common to all people. He just uses different means to gain his ends. He dominates the scenes he is in and it is a pity that more big screen roles never came his way. He was the best ‘Doctor Who’ in the BBC series, in my opinion of course. A good fantasy romp to appeal to the adventurer in all of us. Did I mention Caroline Munro’s costume? Oh, I did.

Today, as an adult, I guess that I am more of a purist. But as a kid, nah… who the heck cared? Consider their broad paintbrush. There is Kali from Hindu religion, a griffin and combination centaur/cyclops from the Greek myths, the homunculus from mediaeval alchemy, Lemuria, and of course the backdrop from the Arabian Nights cycle.

As an aside, did you know that the idea of Lemuria was first posited by biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s. It preceded the notion of continental drift. It was used with the belief of a sunken land in order to  explain how lemurs managed to get between  Africa and India. Later, this theory was bastardized and quickly appropriated by the 19th  Century Theosophist movement.

The golden voyage of Sinbad 5 — ‘Golden Voyage’ is much better than the later ‘Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger’ and equal to the earlier ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’. The Harryhausen creatures are impressive. Stop motion animation does give solidity to the image, more so than the usual CGI effect. There are some fine ones here including a one eyed centaur, a homunculus, a griffin, a six armed statue, a ship’s wooden figurehead. The story is standard but the effects, the locations and the plot weave together well. There is also a dry humor in the dialogue which is entertaining. Scenes like the sword fight with the six armed statute (with six swords!) or the final confrontation at the fountain of wisdom (or something like that) are exciting. The great Miklos Rosza’s music adds considerably to the atmosphere. John Philip Law is OK as Sinbad and does attempt an Arabian accent unlike the usual English one, but the role isn’t Shakespearean and he does well enough.

All of this trivality is far less important than the spectacular beauty of Ray Harryhausen’s various set-pieces. Which, by this time, were at the absolute peak of their form.

Harryhausen offers us [1] a six-armed statue of Kali brought to life in a sword-duel; [2] a to-the-death battle between a griffin and a cyclopean centaur; [3] a magically animated ship’s figurehead; and, best of all, [4] the homunculus that Tom Baker brings to life, teasing and prodding it, as it lies pinned to a table.

Sinbad the sailor using an early version of Google Maps. This is a fine fantasy/adventure film, and definitely one worth watching by any fans of the genre, as well as Ray Harryhausen fans. The main problem is that the film tends to meander at times. There are also a few minor problems with direction or editing, such as the less-than-convincing sword fight in the cave near the end of the film. Also, the mostly episodic nature of the script lessens the overall impact. It often feels like a string of short stories arbitrarily strung together, although in the end, the overarching goal ties the film together well enough. But what “short stories” those are!

Harryhausen, who made this film with his longtime collaborator and  co-producer Charles H. Schneer, was careful to separate this film from 7th Voyage; he seemed to dislike the label of “sequel.” (In his 2003 book An Animated Life, Harryhausen states that he and Schneer even “strenuously” tried to avoid the term regarding Eye of the Tiger, curiously enough.) 

Indeed, the viewer need not have seen the former film, though naturally it exists in its shadow. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a classic of fantasy filmmaking to stand beside its chief inspiration, The Thief of Bagdad (1940). 

Golden Voyage  is just another fun Harryhausen movie, the perfect way to pass a  Saturday afternoon. 

Law does a credible job as our new Sinbad (replacing  7th Voyage‘s Kerwin Mathews), embodying Harryhausen’s image of the Arabian Nights hero: handsome, athletic, but not a bodybuilder. 

The  story, conceived by Harryhausen and revised, polished, and scripted by  Brian Clemens (of the TV series The Avengers, as well as Captain Kronos,  which also featured Caroline Munro), sends Sinbad on a treasure hunt on  behalf of a disfigured Vizier in a golden mask (Douglas Wilmer, Jason and the Argonauts).  

Their quest involves retrieving the lost pieces of an amulet, which  will point the way to an ancient, magical source of great knowledge and  power. 

There’s always an evil magician in pursuit, of course, and in  this case it’s Baker’s Prince Koura, who controls gargoyle-like  homunculi and lusts after the same prize. 

The story might be  perfunctory, but it’s well-paced, with attractive location shooting in  Spain to stand in for both the fictionalized Middle East and Lemuria. (Plans to shoot in India – which would have provided a wonderful look to the film – were discarded after hearing horror stories about “appalling  red tape and bureaucracy” encountered by other Hollywood productions shooting there.) 

Composer Miklós Rózsa (The Thief of Bagdad, Ben-Hur) is the ideal stand-in for 7th Voyage‘s Bernard Herrmann, capturing the appropriate “Orientalist” feel. 

 -Midnight Only

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is also notable for many of the up-and-coming stars. There is Tom Baker who, the following year, would become the fourth incarnation of tv’s Doctor Who (1963-89). There is cult queen Caroline Munro; and Martin Shaw, later hunk hero of Clemens’ superior action man tv show The Professionals.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad 7 — The script, production/set design and costumes easily propel you into a captivating fantasy world, and Harryhausen’s creatures, as always, are a delight to watch. No, they’re not exactly realistic–no more realistic looking than cgi, in my opinion–but I’m not looking for realism when I watch a film like this. I’m looking for brilliant artistry, especially if it is an adventure with pretty girls, and Harryhausen’s stop-motion animated creatures fit the bill.

Conclusion

This is a great movie to introduce the kids to, to spend a lazy hazy august afternoon, or just to relax to. There are some amazing scenes, and nowhere else in movie-land will you see a six-armed statue of Kali which performs an Indian dance before dueling against Sinbad’s men with six swords. I enjoyed it and I think that maybe you the reader would enjoy it as well.

Ray Harryhausen’s other films

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the granddaddy of all atomic monster films;
the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955);
the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956);
the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957);
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958);
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960);
the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961);
the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963);
the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964);
the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966);
the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969);
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977);
and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

Stories that Inspired Me

My Poetry

Articles & Links

You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
You can find out more about the author HERE.
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When Hollywood still made good movies; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957)

Ray Harryhausen was a mainstay of my childhood. His movies were regular features on the Saturday matinees — on television, not in theaters; I’m not THAT old! — and they sucked me in every time. How could they not? No sane young boy would be anything but engrossed by giant creatures slugging it out with heroes in sandals, and Harryhausen’s creatures were AWESOME.

-Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

It’s no secret that Hollywood has gone over the deep end and into the abyss of the bland and uninteresting.

It’s a combination of things. Firstly [1] , an over reliance on CGI and computer animation has somehow replaced decent story-telling and the passions inherent in the traditional movie genre. Secondly [2], the invasion of Political Correctness and rewrites for the LGBT crowd, and the war on white males, and traditional male roles has pretty much isolated Hollywood to the Land of the Loons. Thirdly [3], an over reliance on classical superheroes… you know, suddenly by magic, a person gets super-powers… get’s dull really quick. Finally, fourthly [4], just how many sequels do you need to make before the customers stop coming to the theaters?

Here’s some examples of contemporaneous Hollywood fare…

Yup Hollywood is going the way of the Dodo Bird, and like their political leadership, haven’t a clue as to how absolutely ridiculous they look to us “normal’s” in the audience.

But, at one time, Hollywood was truly the stuff of dreams. There, the studios produced some amazing movie flicks. These were the stuff of dreams, and tales of adventure. And, for I, a young boy… Hollywood movies took me to places where my imagination could soar and explore.

Let’s talk about one such movie. The Ray Harryhausen classic “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”.

The Tale of a Lifetime

The visuals in the movie were amazing. Anyone who has seen this movie when it first came out (late 50’s) was forever a different person for the better. This dynamic even continues to this day too.

Millions saw this when they were in their teens or younger and it brought out an array of emotions the body had not experienced before. There is wonder, adventure, thrills, suspense, love, good, bad, and monsters that make you wonder how can you fight them and live? Sinbad shows you all this and more and he became a role model and hero for the multitudes.

No doubt, it is an amazing movie.

Come on! Seriously. Giant birds, crabby cyclops, dragons, skeleton warriors, and a snake woman? Just another day at the office for Sinbad the Sailor.

Throw in an evil sorcerer, a mutinous crew, and having to not only rescue his fiancee, but also find some way to un-shrink her. Talk about having too much on “your plate”. You can well understand why this particular Sinbad set about his seventh voyage with a stern and brave face, very little humor and negligible cheer.

This movie is genius.

Other films of his have very challenging special effects too. If you  have not watched any of his films, YouTube them and watch the brilliant  sequences. That'll convince you. Try the sequence where the cowboys try  to "rope" Gwangi, in which Harryhausen had to painstakingly match the  ropes on the live action footage to the ropes on his stop-motion model.  Or the tug of war in "Mighty Joe Young,"  using a similar technique. Or the sequence with the giant bird from  "Mysterious Island," which works well with Bernard Herrmann's goofy  score. Or the Washington destruction scenes in "Earth vs. Flying  Saucers." Or It from "It Came From Beneath the Seas." Or Pegasus in  "Clash of the Titans," or Medusa, from the same film. Or anything from  "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," my personal favorite film of his. 

 - Great Movies of my Childhood

This was a movie that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. I was totally and complete immersed in the story line, though as a young boy, it was kind of difficult to follow. Never the less, the visuals were amazing and absolutely drew me in.

Now the story is a classic. It’s an adventure, so of course, you pull the story out from classic adventure stories that have stood the passage of time.

Apparently this is a pretty old classic story from the 1001 Arabian Nights, of course no longer taught in schools as not progressive enough. It is the story of adventure when a ships crew makes an unexpected stop at an island.

Fortune fall upon us all

The best thing about this movie is that there Hasn’t been any remakes of it.

It’s true. Can you imagine what the remakes would be like? OMG! I just get sick trying to imagine it all…

1970s – The first sequel; Sinbad falls in love with a black single-parent woman.
1980s – “We Are the World” meets Sinbad the Sailor.
1990s – CGI animation, heavily pixelated and dark.
2000s – Matrix style fight scenes with the three headed chick.
2010s – X-men join forces with Sinbad to fight the Cyclops.
2020s – Sinbad is a woman, as are the entire crew, all females.

Storyline

Sinbad is a man of the world. A seaman who travels the known world. As this is his seventh voyage, we knew that he was well experienced in the ways of monsters, magic and pretty attractive lasses. He has a crew of trusty seamen, and ship that is pretty state-of-the-art for the time-period.

So off he goes. His ship and crew sail off towards adventure…

Dinner for the one-eyed horned cyclops. You most certainly wouldn’t want to be caught by this fella, and my goodness, who knows what fate you might be expected to endure. You know, when salt and pepper get into your eyes, it hurts!

He sails and sails.

When Sinbad finally spots land, he doesn’t yet know what island it is. (He didn’t have GPS, and Google was of absolutely no use to him.) He just doesn’t know that the island’s name is Colossa. Hum. Colossa could that have something to do with the word “colossal”? You’d think he’d take a hint.

Nor does he know that it’s the ancient world’s equivalent of Monster Island. Now, for some reason or the other, Sinbad has his old lady on board with him. She’s a real cutie, and can you blame him. After all, he’s the famous Sinbad.

Her name is Princess Parisa. She has cute dimples, a nice rack and a very curvaceous backside. You see, she and Sinbad are going to be married and help seal a peace pact between their two lands. It kind of sucks for her, but she gets a hero in the bargain, and all in all, by the standards of society at that time and place, it’s a pretty sweet deal for her.

Grant (who would go on to marry Bing Crosby) is an absolute delight as the princess, the kid playing the genie in the lamp should have been annoying but was actually quite a charming little tyke, and Torin Thatcher is wonderfully bombastic as the evil wizard Sokurah. They help carry the human element of the movie in a way Mathews’ Sinbad never does. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Once he makes landfall on the island, he demonstrates just how preoccupied he must be with the impending wedding. You can tell, because he makes some really boneheaded decisions. You know, decisions that would charitably be called “insane.”

A cyclops looking at his dinner. — This colorful adventure is the screen version of one of the classic tales from “1001 Arabian Nights.” It tells the story of Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant). When they unexpectedly stop on the island of Colossa on their way to Baghdad, they find themselves battling all types of dangers, such as evil magicians, man-eating Cyclopes, fire- breathing dragons, and sword-wielding skeletons.

So, let’s say you’re on a mysterious island in a world where terrible monsters still run amok occasionally.

Let’s also say that you notice strange footprints in the sand. These strange footprints are not only odd because of their shape (cloven hooves – eek!), but also because they are so far apart. As someone notes, this is indicative of a rather large stride and by extension, a rather large creature.

Now what could that possibly mean? I mean, what would you do, if you saw hoof prints that large?

Multi-headed multi-bird thing creature. What would you do if you confronted a strange chick the size of a fire-truck? And, by chick I mean a bird, not a cute young lass.

Okay, let’s say you know all that and still you venture forth into the unknown.

Now, you have landed on this mysterious island. You and your crew starts to walk upon the sandy beach. And now when you walk further up the beach you notice carved in the side of a mountain, a strange face with the mouth being the entrance of a cave.

Not an everyday occurrence.

What do you do? Well, in spite of it being painfully obvious that this is the front door of a cyclops house, you decide to do some pretty messed up things. I mean, haven’t you ever learned that some things say “keep out” and run for the hills. But NOOOOO!

What does Sinbad do? Well, he decides to run right the hell in there just to see if anyone is home!

The pure awesomeness of this movie is evident when you observe a one-eyed horned cyclops with goat like legs confronting a chained dragon. Now you would think that the dragon would trump a one-eyed cyclops… you know that old depth-perception angle. But the movie has a number of surprises for the viewing audience.

What do you think happens? Yup. It’s a lot of screaming, yelling, terror and blood and guts. Not to mention a chomp and gulp. Yes, it’s a story of lots of guys getting chased by a really pissed off cyclops.

Enter a sorcerer named Sokurah.

He’s a bald guy with a magic lamp that saves Sinbad and his crew by using the genie’s powers to erect a transparent barrier to keep the cyclops back. I’ll bet that you didn’t know that Genie’s had the power to erect repulse fields, did you?

Now, I have some bad news.

Unfortunately this doesn’t stop the cyclops from chucking big rocks at the departing boat. This causes everyone on the boat to fall overboard and in all the confusion Sokurah loses his magic lamp.

Now, this magic lamp is really special. Think of it like the latest iphone, or the keys to the Lamborghini. It contains a Genie. But this Genie is not just like any other Genie. Those “lower” Genies have wish-limitations. Most can only grant three wishes. Not this Genie. No. He instead grants unlimited wishes.

Obviously the loss of such a power, such a lamp, is a big disappointment.

Sinbad meets a princess. — In the scenes featuring a shrunken Princess Parisa. Now look at this mess. How are going to have sex once they are married? And what about the children? Obviously Sinbad has to do something, and thus Sinbad does his best to help her. In the process goes on an adventure of a lifetime. It is one filled with strange sights, strange and dangerous beings, and magic of all sorts and types.

Again, there is a lot of treading water, splashes and panic.

Once back on board his main boat, Sokurah demands that they return back to the island. You know, after all, it’s pretty cool having a Genie with unlimited wishes. Heck, if it was me, I’d go back.

No. Sinbad is a different person.

Sinbad refuses Sokurah’s entreaties to go back to the island and retrieve his lamp which by this time has fallen into the hands of the cyclops. Sinbad says “No time, baldy. I’m gonna get married to my most excellent girlfriend. And, you know what? I still have to hire a band and D.J. for my wedding, but you’re welcome to come to my bachelor party once we’re back in Bagdad.”

Meetup with a Genie. — Here we have a tiny miniaturized princess inside a Genie’s bottle to talk with the Genie face to face. What a movie! You know, Harryhausen spearheaded a turn from scifi monsters to mythology and adventure for the first time with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. In this movie he ended up crossbreeding special-effects-based spectacle with traditional swashbuckling heroics. For the first time, in this movie, Harryhausen got to make a feature in color, and he debuted his new technique, called Dynamation, which allowed more sophisticated, layered interaction between photographic elements.

Sokurah offers to provide some entertainment at some of the pre-wedding festivities in hopes of currying favor with the Caliph.

The Caliph of Baghdad (Alec Mango) feels the same way, even after Sokurah amazes the court by conjuring up a snake-woman. Yes, this SOB ended up turning Parisa’s maid into a snake woman. Talk about violation of a work contract!

Meanwhile, he continues to try to convince Sinbad to go back to the island.

Snake woman maid. — Now how would you like your pretty maid to be changed into a a snake woman medusa. Especially a blue one? Not exactly a nice way to curry favor. Obviously this warlock has a real lack of people skills.

He starts to look into the future. He starts by looking into the future of Sinbad and Parisa’s lands. Not surprisingly perhaps, he sees only bad things for everyone. This (unfortunately) doesn’t earn him a ship and a crew of men, but does earn him an ass kicking out of Bagdad.

It is only when the princess is shrunk by an evil spell, the breaking of which requires the shell from the egg of the giant Roc – which (what-da-ya-know) resides on Colossa – that Sokurah can get his expedition mounted, with Sinbad in command.

But it’s not that everything is perfect. With a crew made up of a handful of his bravest men and some of the most desperate convicts in the Caliph’s prison, he has to contend with potential mutiny at every turn. It’s a constant bickering, fighting and arguments. Ugh! In fact, the men are driven almost to madness before they even reach Colossa.

The Genie with Sinbad's future wife. — The Genie gets along with the future Mrs. Sinbad. She crawls into the Genie’s lair and it’s all sort of like the lair from the television show “I dream of Genie”. Together they work out and hatch a plan.

Once there, at the island, they continue to find problems and strife. Obviously, they find terrors as great as the Cyclops and the treachery of the magician, but something else happens. Future Mrs. Sinbad; Parisa – in her tiny state – also discovers the beautiful world inside the lamp, and the lonely boy Genie (Richard Eyer) who inhabits it.

They strike the bargain that, when Sinbad’s bravery is added to the equation, will bring their quest to an end. If, that is, they can all survive the dangers that Sokurah puts in their path.

Sinbad at the helm. — Sinbad at the helm of his state of the art, ocean going vessel. He is the fellow in command, and he over comes everything to achieve his goals and his dreams.

At this point for the record, I would note that when he was told this, no one specifically said that he wasn’t supposed to stop by the princess’s bedroom and use a magic potion to shrink her down to the size of a corndog. It’s a strange world we live in, and when you start mixing magical spells, potions and evil sorcerers together, you will find many surprises awaiting you in the bedroom.

Clearly, the only way to fix this is with the help of a very powerful sorcerer.

Sinbad finds Sokurah just as he’s about to leave town and pleads for his help. It turns out to be no problem for Sokurah to reverse the spell. In fact, he knows the counter-spell and only needs to procure one ingredient. It’s the shell of giant Roc’s egg.

A pensive Sinbad. — Oh, you think that you have it tought in your life. Imagine what it would be like with magic spells, monsters, evil wizards and jealous women. It is no wonder that Sinbad is so pensive.

Ah, the shell of the egg.

But that’s only available on the island of Colossa and we already know you don’t want to go there, right Sinbad? Well, right?

Still politics are politics, and if you don’t play your cards right, the result could be war! Thus, with the princess’s father immediately threatening war on Bagdad (despite Bagdad obviously having nothing to do with the incredible shrinking Parisa – but that’s an argument for another time), a shift in policy occurs and the next thing you know, a ship is being outfitted. As such, a big crossbow is being built and Sinbad is attempting to recruit a crew.

But where would you get a crew from for what is surely a suicide mission right into the heart of monster country?

Sindbad with lovely Parisa. Obviously back up to full size with all the curves in the right places, and ready to experience all that life can throw at her.

Where do most guys for suicide missions come from?

Indeed, you find them at the toughest prison in whatever location the recruiting is being done in! I was thinking that we might be in for a Dirty Dozen-style affair with off-beat characters each with a specialized skill (forger, demolitions expert, scrounger, drunk) that would come in handy for this trek.

The "Big Leagues" Arabian style. — The “Big Leagues” Arabian style. Sinbad and his lovely future bride at the club with the biggest players in the known world (at that time). They are eating fine delicious and exotic foods, and experiencing all the earthly pleasures and delights available to them. Partying on Arabian style.

However, the intention of them being so vicious and crazy that they turn out to be the best dang fighting machine ever assembled doesn’t happen. Instead, these cons are so vicious and crazy that they mutiny as soon as they set sail. Not only that, but they attempt to take over the ship!

Unsurprisingly, the movie is filled with fantastic creatures and some very impressive visuals. The cyclops is a fearsome beast with great animation (based on the critter from 20 Million Miles to Earth) and fantastic integration into most scenes. This guy ranks right up there with the best of Harryhausen. A climactic skeleton battle is also highly impressive, with stunning choreography providing some damned impressive integration with real actors. It’s a stunningly well-realized scene. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Things don’t go any more smoothly once they hit Cyclops Island. If you can imagine. Treasure, a genie, and guy getting roasted alive are among the highlights.

Sinbad promising his future wife that everything will work out fine once he takes care of shopping. First on the list; the dairy isle. He has to go ahead and get some rather large eggs.

Conclusion

This is by far the best of the three fantasy adventure movies that Kerwin Matthews (Sinbad) made during this era. If you have the time and the inclination, I would strongly recommend a rewatch of this movie. Preferably on a hazy hot dog-day afternoon in August, or a cold snowy blistery Saturday afternoon in January. I promise that it will reawaken the boyhood in you (if you are a man), the nurturing and strong lady in you (if you are a lass), or complete revulsion (if you are gender-confused).

Links

Here’s some decent links that you all might want to take a look at.

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

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Every Man Should Have a Roll-Top Desk

Here I would like to discuss a long standing dream that I have had since I was a small boy; the possession of a large roll-top desk complete with a multitude of tiny drawers, cubby-holes, and spaces for all my personal junk and treasures. I have had this dream for a long… long… long time. With that in mind, let’s discuss this work of art; this magnificent idea and concept of the roll-top desk.

During the last century, the idea of a Roll-Top desk was appealing and very popular all over America. Many American homes had these styles of desks and throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s they faded into obscurity. There was a brief revival of Roll-Top desks in the 1980’s and then they have been forgotten as overly expensive and extravagant items of furniture. This is unfortunate, because every man should have a Roll-Top desk.

Roll top desk 8 — Here’s a fine roll-top desk. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s a beautiful work of art.

The first time that I encountered a roll-top desk was a very long time ago. One of my friends had inherited it from his father. It was in his bedroom and he would work on his various projects at the desk. He had this kind of glue with a rubber top that you could use to spread glue on paper and make scrap books with .

"I believe that glue is called muslage; I don't see it for sale anymore. Really dates me, eh? if I know what *muslage* is. LOL"

-posted on 12/17/2018, 3:03:44 AM by Daffynition

Glue — During my childhood, we all used this kind of glue. My friend had it in his desk. We made posters with this. It was fun.

He also had a punching bag in his basement and we would try boxing. Ai! At such an early age! Heck! We were only in second grade, for goodness sakes. It was kinda goofy at the time, but our fathers both thought that boxing was something that all boys had to learn.

What is a Roll-Top Desk?

A roll-top desk is a large desk with drawers and a top compartment that possessed a rolling cover that could cover and lock the contents of the desk in place. This desk was made out of wood, with the vast majority of the wood being hardwood. Under the protected roll-top working area, there were all sorts of smaller drawers, and compartments for the user to store things in.

Roll-top-desk 1 — Antique roll-top desk from the 1930’s. Instead of a modern reproduction, this desk sports small handled mini-drawers, pigeon holes, top, pencil drawers, and ledger spaces. Note the four drawers on both sides of the pedestal base, and the central desk drawer.

History of a Roll-Top Desk

The roll-top desk appeared just as the industrial revolution was getting started. At that time, small armies of clerks and office workers were needed to support the various duties of the factory. This included everything from managing inventor to handling the large number of workers at the factory.

The desk was designed in such a way that the top could be pulled down and protect the work from being disturbed. At that time, the office workers would be engaged in work that involved large numbers of papers and documentation. It was impractical to put every thing away at the end of the day and pull them out at the start of a new day. So the roll-top desk was invented.

Roll top desk 2 — Here is another antique roll-top desk. Again, please pay attention to the mini drawers and pigeon hole compartments. The rolling cover and it’s path is clearly shown. What is not shown is the most excellent swivel chair that would go with the desk.

Further, there was a need for specialized compartments to hold various office stamps, pens and papers, and folders. This created the various styles that had miniature drawers, shelving, compartments and side pockets.

Drafting supplies. — A roll-top desk is the perfect place to store such things as drafting supplies. here is a nice set of drafting supplies that hadn’t made it’s way (yet) to the trash heap. With a roll-top desk, it could be stored safely and elegantly.

This item of furniture was the mainstay of the small or medium-sized office at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Roll-top desk 3 — Antique Roll Top Desk made sometime between 1900 and 1950. I personally think that there is an over abundance of drawers in the desk. They are mostly all of the same size. However, different people have different needs. Aside from that, this desk has a leather mat writing surface, and some very small mini-drawers for keys and minor items. Note that this desk has sides that are on hinges. They can be swiveled out of the way for an unobstructed work area.

In the working industry, it eventually was phased out and replaced by more durable and cheaper (mass produced) steel desks. Additionally, the idea for filing cabinets, and “flat files” came into being that would (firstly) augment the compartmentalized sections and ledgers of the roll-top desk, and secondly the determination that the roll-top desk did not fit in the modernized image of the state of the art 1930’s Art Deco decor.

These desks could often be found in various small offices, and homes throughout the 1970’s. Over time they were often left to fall apart and rot. Today they are generally rare, with some small-build reproductions floating around here and there. You can find them occasionally at antique dealers and in selected flea-markets. Aside from that, they have pretty much disappeared from the social scene.

Roll top desk 4 — This antique roll-top desk has some nice compartments and nice style. It fits the grand criteria for a roll-top desk. I especially like the “mail box” slatted chubby-holes in the center.

Features

These desks had numerous features that made these desks very special. I personally believe that these features are often overlooked in our modern society – one that has an over reliance on cloud computing and storage.

important parts of a roll-top desk — While there are world-wide variations of this desk. Most roll-top desks are strictly American in design and function. Here we can see some of the important elements labeled and identified for the reader.

These features are;

Large, deep, and wide pedestal drawers, with compartment slats.
Pull-out “bread board” panels on both the left and right sides.
Wide and deep working area.
A selection of small “square” pigeon-hole areas.
Some desks would have small cabinets or closets (some with windows).

Desk drawer. — A man needs a drawer to place his little treasures in. He can store the things that matter to him, and the papers and documents that he must maintain.

A number of horizontal pigeon-holes for papers.
A number of vertical pigeon-holes for journals and log-books.
Small mini drawers, each with a metal knob and a slot for a label.
A slat for holding rulers, drafting triangles, or cardboard folders.

Medium size mini-drawers, often with a plain knob for pens, and miscellaneous tools. Sometimes lined with green felt backing.
The roll-top top, often made out of slats that can be locked in place for privacy and security.
A grand “middle drawer” that would have a wooden carved “tray” for pencils, erasers and paperclips and the like.

Details 2 — Here are some details that can be found on various roll-top desks. I particularly like the leather mat writing surface, though many people simply would purchase a felt mat and place it on the surface. Note also the side pull-out “bread-board” feature. Often people would place lists of important phone numbers, addresses or codes on these boards, and pull them out when they needed to refer to something.

Accouterments

These desks would often be paired with this low swivel chair. Often with a cushion and wooden arm-rests. It would also be paired with a nice desk mat. Some desks had a leather writing surface, while many did not. In that case, a person would go to the hardware store and purchase their own writing mat.

Desk details 3 — Here are some interesting details that can be found on certain roll-top desks. This includes compartments inside the writing surface and pencil trays in one or more of the main desk drawers.

The writing mat was often leather with a felt surface. The most popular was green. A “banker’s” lamp, with a green shade, and a brass base was also often employed. Though, Tiffany lamps, and lamps with cast designer bases were often employed.

Swivel chair for a roll-top desk. — Here is a fine vintage oak wood office chair. It is on a swivel base and has wheels to move around in. Note that it has a small leather cushion, though many chairs did not have this feature. It’s a fine chair just about made for ta roll-top desk.

Material

Early roll-top desks were built of heavy woods such as black walnut, and small local companies might choose from a variety of local hardwoods. There are many hardwoods that were used.

Roll-top desk 6 — This roll-top desk has a working and writing surface that can be pulled out and makes for a larger working area. Notice the top of the desk as well. It can support lamps and even a shallow cabinet or bookcase.

Most popular toward the end of the 19th century, close-grained oak was often quarter-sawn, or cut to promote a particularly even grain, reducing the possibility of warping and increasing durability.

Wood for a roll-top desk. — At one time, these desks were made with care and concern for the overall appearance of the desk. Wood was selected carefully and cut with care and precision. the end result was a work of art.

Mahogany, teak and cherry also appear in old desks, but from 1900 on, most desks were oak. A desk made from cherry after 1900, for example, would have been a special order or the work of a local craftsman.

Lamp — Here is an antique “Banker’s lamp” with a Tiffany Art Deco inspired shade (instead of the traditional green glass shade). It’s certainly beautiful.

Why a Man Should Have a Roll-Top Desk

I well remember the exact moment when I fell in love with roll-top desks. My father needed to get or renew his insurance for the car. This was in the late 1960’s. At that time we had a Buick Electra. And, we were trading it in for a 1966 Lincoln Continental.

Man! I sure wish that I had this car today. I’ll tell you what. This is a 1966 Lincoln Continental. It was black with a black interior. (So hot in the Summer.) But we loved that car.

So he went over to the local insurance agent in the town. We lived in a small town at the time, and he was a friend of a friend. So dad went into his office. It was a cluttered office next to a tire dealership.

We walked in. There was centuries of dust and clutter there. Inside was this amazingly enormous man. He was built like an elephant and existed there in a state of decay and confusion. He seemed to blend in with all the clutter, piles of paper, stacks of dusty junk, dusty Venetian blinds, and the ancient Art Deco fan that was providing the much needed air flow in that tiny cramped and cluttered office.

He sat there smoking a cigar, with a largish (green plastic) AM radio playing a baseball game in the background. Next to him was a cigarette stand. You know the type, it was a metal pedestal with a handle and a large glass tray in the center. The ash tray was filed with the ashes of many a well smoked cigar.

He sat at this enormous roll-top desk, and offered me a “Orange Crush”. When I said “sure”, he flipped me a quarter and told me that there was a pop machine around the corner…

Roll top desk 5 — There is a certain beauty in a roll-top desk. It is a place where a man can put his stuff. As a boy, I enjoyed the idea of a place where I could put my stuff and collectables at. At that time, I had a a small wooden cigar box that I held my “treasures”. But an entire desk…now that would be awesome.

In his office was a roll-top desk. This was not just any roll-top desk. It was enormous. I am not at all exaggerating. I haven’t seen anything like it since. This desk was easily the size of our dining table. Not only that, but that tiny office had two of them. They dominated the room, and on them was the clutter of years.

I just sat there amazed. I just looked at the amazing array of cubby-holes and mini-drawers. I loved that desk. I just sat there and soaked it all in. I listened to the baseball game and sipped on my soda.

The meeting lasted maybe two hours. My father signed some papers and then we left. On the way out, I asked my father if we could have a desk like that. He just chucked.

Office supplies — A roll-top desk is the ideal place to store your much needed desk supplies and paperwork. Instead of all the clutter, it can be positioned within easy reach for the user of the roll-top desk.

“Why do you want such a broken down piece of junk?” he asked. I just shrugged.

We walked to the car and then went and got an ice cream. But, while I never mentioned it again to my father, secretly inside, I always wanted to have my own roll-top desk.

Much later…

I was in Ridgecrest, California. I was in training at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center for my MAJestic role. At that time, I was living on Dolphin Avenue, in a small housing development. My neighbor, who also worked on the base as a contractor, just happened to have a roll-top desk that his girlfriend bought him.

I loved that thing. Sure, it was a reproduction. And, it was not a full-size desk. But, it still was pretty darn cool.

I think that the reason why I have always liked the idea of a roll-top desk was the idea that it had spaces and compartments for all my stuff. I would, over the years collect junk, papers, writings and bits of flotsam that had meaning to me, but would eventually get lost in the detritus of the house. Probably eventually collecting in dusty boxes in remote corners of the garage. Sigh.

But, if I had a roll-top desk… well, now it’s a whole new ball-game. I could store my prized fishing lures in one place, and my precious treasures in other spaces. Of course… being much older, my desk might look a little bit like this rather than my boy-hood dream ever was…

moden man's needs — As a man get’s older his tastes change. I lost many of my boyhood treasures over time. Now my needs and passions are much simpler. So, yes, I probably don’t NEED this kind of desk. yet, wouldn’t it be grand to have it to keep some prized whiskey or smokes?

Conclusion

A personally think that having a big roll-top desk would be awesome. It would be a place for my brick-a-brack and clutter. I can well imagine a selection of pens and pencils in the various drawers, and indexed compartments full of my various treasures. I could some of my few remaining baseball cards, and my small collection of bottle openers. Not to mention a fine jewelers loupe and electricians scissors. With them I could place my small nine inch metal rule, and a few calipers.

What ever. All men need a place to keep their personal junk and a roll-top desk fits the bill quite nicely.

Free Republic Posting

This article was published on Free Republic on 16DEC18. The posting and the comments can be found HERE.

"I have one of these steelcase desks that I got from a VA hospital that was dumping them. I love this thing but my wife hates it. In a nuclear detonation or earthquake you could hide under it."

- Posted on 12/16/2018, 10:24:53 PM by outofsalt

Nuclear desk — Nuclear proof roll-top desk.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

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My publisher went out of business. So I need to set it up using other means. -MM

I want to buy one of your books but it is out of stock on Amazon. Is there a way…

Thanks for that. *sigh* Life can be so interesting sometimes. -MM

Sometimes the words in the 'narrative' need to be precise, at least in terms of 'calendar time'., or else confusion…

" Thanks for the Russian missile movement update via ol’ Panicky-Hal, Metallicman. What would life be like without him!? Meanwhile…